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Jim Crow Laws | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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Jim Crow Laws | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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Freedom Riders | Article

The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as "Jim Crow" represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. The laws affected almost every aspect of daily life, mandating segregation of schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, buses, trains, and restaurants. "Whites Only" and "Colored" signs were constant reminders of the enforced racial order.

Signs such as "Colored Waiting Room" constantly reminded travelers of the enforced racial order. Credit: Library of Congress

In legal theory, blacks received "separate but equal" treatment under the law - in actuality, public facilities for blacks were nearly always inferior to those for whites, when they existed at all. In addition, blacks were systematically denied the right to vote in most of the rural South through the selective application of literacy tests and other racially motivated criteria.

Sign at a Greyhound Bus Station in Rome, GA. Credit: Library of Congress

The Jim Crow system was upheld by local government officials and reinforced by acts of terror perpetrated by Vigilantes. In 1896, the Supreme Court established the doctrine of separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson, after a black man in New Orleans attempted to sit in a whites-only railway car.

In 1908, journalist Ray Stannard Baker observed that "no other point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among Negroes as the Jim Crow car." As bus travel became widespread in the South over the first half of the 20th century, it followed the same pattern.

"Travel in the segregated South for black people was humiliating," recalled Diane Nash in her interview for Freedom Riders. "The very fact that there were separate facilities was to say to black people and white people that blacks were so subhuman and so inferior that we could not even use the public facilities that white people used."

Transit was a core component of segregation in the South, as the 1947 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) pamphlet and Bayard Rustin song, "You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow" attests. Keeping whites and blacks from sitting together on a bus, train, or trolley car might seem insignificant, but it was one more link in a system of segregation that had to be defended at all times - lest it collapse. Thus transit was a logical point of attack for the foes of segregation, in the courtroom and on the buses themselves.

It would take several decades of legal action and months of nonviolent direct action before these efforts achieved their intended result.

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Jim Crow Laws | American Experience | PBS

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The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as "Jim Crow" represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South.

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Jim Crow Laws - Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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Jim Crow Laws - Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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From the 1880s into the 1960s, a majority of American states enforced segregation through "Jim Crow" laws (so called after a black character in minstrel shows). From Delaware to California, and from North Dakota to Texas, many states (and cities, too) could impose legal punishments on people for consorting with members of another race. The most common types of laws forbade intermarriage and ordered business owners and public institutions to keep their black and white clientele separated. Here is a sampling of laws from various states.

Amateur Baseball

Georgia - It shall be unlawful for any amateur white baseball team to play baseball on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of a playground devoted to the Negro race, and it shall be unlawful for any amateur colored baseball team to play baseball in any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of any playground devoted to the white race.

Barbers

Georgia - No colored barber shall serve as a barber [to] white women or girls.

Bathroom Facilities, Male

Alabama - Every employer of white or negro males shall provide for such white or negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities.

The Blind

Louisiana - The board of trustees shall...maintain a separate building...on separate ground for the admission, care, instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race.

Burial

Georgia - The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons.

Buses

Alabama - All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races.

Child Custody

South Carolina - It shall be unlawful for any parent, relative, or other white person in this State, having the control or custody of any white child, by right of guardianship, natural or acquired, or otherwise, to dispose of, give or surrender such white child permanently into the custody, control, maintenance, or support, of a negro.

Circus Tickets

Louisiana - All circuses, shows, and tent exhibitions, to which the attendance of...more than one race is invited or expected to attend shall provide for the convenience of its patrons not less than two ticket offices with individual ticket sellers, and not less than two entrances to the said performance, with individual ticket takers and receivers, and in the case of outside or tent performances, the said ticket offices shall not be less than twenty-five (25) feet apart.

Cohabitation

Florida - Any negro man and white woman, or any white man and negro woman, who are not married to each other, who shall habitually live in and occupy in the nighttime the same room shall each be punished by imprisonment not exceeding twelve (12) months, or by fine not exceeding five hundred ($500.00) dollars.

Education

Florida - The schools for white children and the schools for negro children shall be conducted separately.

Mississippi - Separate schools shall be maintained for the children of the white and colored races.

Missouri - Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school.

New Mexico - Separate rooms [shall] be provided for the teaching of pupils of African descent, and [when] said rooms are so provided, such pupils may not be admitted to the school rooms occupied and used by pupils of Caucasian or other descent.

Texas - [The County Board of Education] shall provide schools of two kinds; those for white children and those for colored children.

Fishing, Boating, and Bathing

Oklahoma - The [Conservation] Commission shall have the right to make segregation of the white and colored races as to the exercise of rights of fishing, boating and bathing.

Hospital Entrances

Mississippi - There shall be maintained by the governing authorities of every hospital maintained by the state for treatment of white and colored patients separate entrances for white and colored patients and visitors, and such entrances shall be used by the race only for which they are prepared.

Housing

Louisiana - Any person...who shall rent any part of any such building to a negro person or a negro family when such building is already in whole or in part in occupancy by a white person or white family, or vice versa when the building is in occupancy by a negro person or negro family, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not less than twenty-five ($25.00) nor more than one hundred ($100.00) dollars or be imprisoned not less than 10, or more than 60 days, or both such fine and imprisonment in the discretion of the court.

Intermarriage

Arizona - The marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu shall be null and void.

Florida - All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited.

Georgia - It shall be unlawful for a white person to marry anyone except a white person. Any marriage in violation of this section shall be void.

Maryland - All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, or between a white person and a member of the Malay race; or between the negro a nd a member of the Malay race; or between a person of Negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, and a member of the Malay race, are forever prohibited, and shall be void.

Mississippi - The marriage of a white person with a negro or mulatto or person who shall have one-eighth or more of negro blood, shall be unlawful and void.

Missouri - All marriages between...white persons and negroes or white persons and Mongolians...are prohibited and declared absolutely void...No person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood shall be permitted to marry any white person, nor shall any white person be permitted to marry any negro or person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood.

Wyoming - All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mulattos, Mongolians, or Malaya hereafter contracted in the State of Wyoming are and shall be illegal and void.

Juvenile Delinquents

Florida - There shall be separate buildings, not nearer than one fourth mile to each other, one for white boys and one for negro boys. White boys and negro boys shall not, in any manner, be associated together or worked together.

Libraries

North Carolina - The state librarian is directed to fit up and maintain a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the library for the purpose of reading books or periodicals.

Texas - Any white person of such county may use the county free library under the rules and regulations prescribed by the commissioners court and may be entitled to all the privileges thereof. Said court shall make proper provision for the negroes of said county to be served through a separate branch or branches of the county free library, which shall be administered by [a] custodian of the negro race under the supervision of the county librarian.

Lunch Counters

South Carolina - No persons, firms, or corporations, who or which furnish meals to passengers at station restaurants or station eating houses, in times limited by common carriers of said passengers, shall furnish said meals to white and colored passengers in the same room, or at the same table, or at the same counter.

Mental Hospitals

Georgia - The Board of Control shall see that proper and distinct apartments are arranged for said patients, so that in no case shall Negroes and white persons be together.

Militia

North Carolina - The white and colored militia shall be separately enrolled, and shall never be compelled to serve in the same organization.No organization of colored troops shall be permitted where white troops are available, and while white permitted to be organized, colored troops shall be under the command of white officers.

Mining

Oklahoma - The baths and lockers for the negroes shall be separate from the white race, but may be in the same building.

Nurses

Alabama - No person or corporation shall require any white female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed.

Parks

Georgia - It shall be unlawful for colored people to frequent any park owned or maintained by the city for the benefit, use and enjoyment of white persons...and unlawful for any white person to frequent any park owned or maintained by the city for the use and benefit of colored persons.

Pool and Billiard Rooms

Alabama - It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other at any game of pool or billiards.

Prisons

Mississippi - The warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts.

Promotion of Equality

Mississippi - Any person...who shall be guilty of printing, publishing or circulating printed, typewritten or written matter urging or presenting for public acceptance or general information, arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to fine or not exceeding five hundred (500.00) dollars or imprisonment not exceeding six (6) months or both.

Railroads

Alabama - The conductor of each passenger train is authorized and required to assign each passenger to the car or the division of the car, when it is divided by a partition, designated for the race to which such passenger belongs.

Maryland - All railroad companies and corporations, and all persons running or operating cars or coaches by steam on any railroad line or track in the State of Maryland, for the transportation of passengers, are hereby required to provide separate cars or coaches for the travel and transportation of the white and colored passengers.

Virginia - The conductors or managers on all such railroads shall have power, and are hereby required, to assign to each white or colored passenger his or her respective car, coach or compartment. If the passenger fails to disclose his race, the conductor and managers, acting in good faith, shall be the sole judges of his race.

Reform Schools

Kentucky - The children of white and colored races committed to the houses of reform shall be kept entirely separate from each other.

Restaurants

Alabama - It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.

Georgia - All persons licensed to conduct a restaurant, shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room or serve the two races anywhere under the same license.

Teaching

Oklahoma - Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of the white and colored race are received and enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined in any sum not less than ten dollars ($10.00) nor more than fifty dollars ($50.00) for each offense.

Telephone Booths

Oklahoma - The Corporation Commission is hereby vested with power and authority to require telephone companies...to maintain separate booths for white and colored patrons when there is a demand for such separate booths. That the Corporation Commission shall determine the necessity for said separate booths only upon complaint of the people in the town and vicinity to be served after due hearing as now provided by law in other complaints filed with the Corporation Commission.

Textbooks

North Carolina - Books shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them.

Theaters

Virginia - Every person...operating...any public hall, theatre, opera house, motion picture show or any place of public entertainment or public assemblage which is attended by both white and colored persons, shall separate the white race and the colored race and shall set apart and designate...certain seats therein to be occupied by white persons and a portion thereof , or certain seats therein, to be occupied by colored persons.

Transportation

North Carolina - The...Utilities Commission...is empowered and directed to require the establishment of separate waiting rooms at all stations for the white and colored races.

Wine and Beer

Georgia - All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine...shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room at any time.

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Jim Crow Laws - Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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From the 1880s into the 1960s, a majority of American states enforced segregation through "Jim Crow" laws (so called after a black character in minstrel shows). From Delaware to California, and from North Dakota to Texas, many states (and cities, too) could impose legal punishments on people for consorting with members of another race.

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The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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Klansville U.S.A. | American Experience | PBS

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In the 1960s, North Carolina’s KKK membership grew to some ten thousand members, earning the state a new nickname: “Klansville, U.S.A.”

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The Supreme Court . The First Hundred Years . Landmark Cases . Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) | PBS

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The Supreme Court . The First Hundred Years . Landmark Cases . Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) | PBS

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The Supreme Court . The First Hundred Years . Landmark Cases . Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) | PBS

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White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching.

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Lynching in America | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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Lynching in America | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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Lynching in America | American Experience | PBS

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Lynching served the broad social purpose of maintaining white supremacy in the economic, social, and political spheres.

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Lynching is now a federal hate crime after a century of blocked efforts : NPR

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Lynching is now a federal hate crime after a century of blocked efforts : NPR

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After multiple failed attempts across twelve decades, there is now a federal law that designates lynching as a hate crime. In a Tuesday ceremony at the White House, President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law.

"Racial hate isn't an old problem. It's a persistent problem," Biden said. "Hate never goes away, it only hides under the rocks. If it gets a little bit of oxygen, it comes roaring back out, screaming. What stops it? All of us."

Under the legislation, perpetrators can receive up to 30 years in prison when a conspiracy to commit a hate crime results in death or serious bodily injury.

Vice President Kamala Harris said that lynching is "not a relic of the past."

"Racial acts of terror still occur in our nation. And when they do, we must all have the courage to name them and hold the perpetrators to account," she said.

The measure is named for Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was abducted, tortured and killed in 1955 after the Black teenager was accused of whistling at and grabbing Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, while visiting relatives in Mississippi. Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant's husband, and J.W. Milam, Roy Bryant's half brother, were tried for Emmett's murder and were quickly acquitted by an all-white jury.

The men later admitted in a magazine interview to murdering Emmett. Carolyn Bryant told an historian 50 years after the crime that Emmett had never put his hands on her.

Rev. Wheeler Parker, the last living relative of Emmett's to witness his abduction, was at the signing ceremony.

"Now, people can no longer get away with things that they got away with in the past," Wheeler told NBC News. He said the law "gives power to the people who are seeking justice and trying to do the right thing."

Passage of the bill marks a career-defining achievement for Illinois Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush, a sponsor of the legislation. He announced in January that he'll retire at the end of this Congress after three decades in office and a previous career as a civil rights activist.

Rush said he vividly remembers being a young boy in the 1950s and his mother gathering him and his three siblings around the dinner table and showing them the issue of Jet magazine that covered the Emmett's lynching.

"And she pointed to that grotesque image of Emmett Till in the casket and she said 'That's why I brought my boys out of Georgia.' And I'll never forget that," he said.

There were more than 4,000 racial terror lynchings in the United States between 1877 and 1950, according to a comprehensive report by the Equal Justice Initiative. The attacks overwhelmingly targeted Black people.

The first federal legislation aimed at ending the attacks was introduced in 1900 by Rep. George Henry White of North Carolina - then the body's only Black lawmaker. His bill failed to advance out of committee.

More failures followed, including in 1922 and 1937. In 2005, the Senate passed a resolution expressing remorse for failing to pass anti-lynching legislation. Efforts stalled again in 2018 and 2020.

Then, on March 8th, more than 120 years after similar legislation was first introduced, the Senate unanimously passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.

"After more than 200 failed attempts to outlaw lynching, Congress is finally succeeding in taking the long overdue action by passing the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. Hallelujah. It's long overdue," said Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

The bill passed the House of Representatives in February. Republican representatives Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Chip Roy of Texas were the only members to vote against the legislation.

Racially motivated murders continue to occur in the United States.

In February, three white men were convicted of violating Ahmaud Arbery's civil rights in 2020 when they chased him down with a pickup truck on a residential street outside Brunswick, Ga., and murdered him.

Rush said the Arbery case would have been a textbook lynching under the new law.

"Lynching has terrorized ordinary Americans, particularly Black Americans, in the past and it's used in a present sense in order to terrorize."

Biden acknowledged other recent hate crimes against Black people, including the Arbery case.

"The law is not just about the past. It's about the present and our future, as well," he said.
NPR's Adrian Florido and Peter Granitz contributed to this report.

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Lynching is now a federal hate crime after a century of blocked efforts

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President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law, the culmination of more than a century of efforts to designate lynching as a federal hate crime.

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Stock Market Crash of 1929 | Federal Reserve History

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Stock Market Crash of 1929 | Federal Reserve History

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The Roaring Twenties roared loudest and longest on the New York Stock Exchange. Share prices rose to unprecedented heights. The Dow Jones Industrial Average increased six-fold from sixty-three in August 1921 to 381 in September 1929. After prices peaked, economist Irving Fisher proclaimed, "stock prices have reached 'what looks like a permanently high plateau.'"

The epic boom ended in a cataclysmic bust. On Black Monday, October 28, 1929, the Dow declined nearly 13 percent. On the following day, Black Tuesday, the market dropped nearly 12 percent. By mid-November, the Dow had lost almost half of its value. The slide continued through the summer of 1932, when the Dow closed at 41.22, its lowest value of the twentieth century, 89 percent below its peak. The Dow did not return to its pre-crash heights until November 1954.

Chart 1: Dow Jones Industrial Average Index daily closing price, January 2, 1920, to December 31, 1954. Data plotted as a curve. Units are index value. Minor tick marks indicate the first trading day of the year. As shown in the figure, the index peaked on September 3, 1929, closing at 381.17. The index declined until July 8, 1932, when it closed at $41.22. The index did not reach the 1929 high again until November 23, 1954. (Source: FRED, https://fred.stlouisfed.org (graph by: Sam Marshall, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond)

The financial boom occurred during an era of optimism. Families prospered. Automobiles, telephones, and other new technologies proliferated. Ordinary men and women invested growing sums in stocks and bonds. A new industry of brokerage houses, investment trusts, and margin accounts enabled ordinary people to purchase corporate equities with borrowed funds. Purchasers put down a fraction of the price, typically 10 percent, and borrowed the rest. The stocks that they bought served as collateral for the loan. Borrowed money poured into equity markets, and stock prices soared.

Skeptics existed, however. Among them was the Federal Reserve. The governors of many Federal Reserve Banks and a majority of the Federal Reserve Board believed stock-market speculation diverted resources from productive uses, like commerce and industry. The Board asserted that the "Federal Reserve Act does not ... contemplate the use of the resources of the Federal Reserve Banks for the creation or extension of speculative credit" (Chandler 1971, 56).

The Board's opinion stemmed from the text of the act. Section 13 authorized reserve banks to accept as collateral for discount loans assets that financed agricultural, commercial, and industrial activity but prohibited them from accepting as collateral "notes, drafts, or bills covering merely investments or issued or drawn for the purpose of carrying or trading in stocks, bonds or other investment securities, except bonds and notes of the Government of the United States" (Federal Reserve Act 1913).

Section 14 of the act extended those powers and prohibitions to purchases in the open market.

These provisions reflected the theory of real bills, which had many adherents among the authors of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 and leaders of the Federal Reserve System in 1929. This theory indicated that the central bank should issue money when production and commerce expanded, and contract the supply of currency and credit when economic activity contracted.

The Federal Reserve decided to act. The question was how. The Federal Reserve Board and the leaders of the reserve banks debated this question. To rein in the tide of call loans, which fueled the financial euphoria, the Board favored a policy of direct action. The Board asked reserve banks to deny requests for credit from member banks that loaned funds to stock speculators.The Board also warned the public of the dangers of speculation.

The governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, George Harrison, favored a different approach. He wanted to raise the discount lending rate. This action would directly increase the rate that banks paid to borrow funds from the Federal Reserve and indirectly raise rates paid by all borrowers, including firms and consumers. In 1929, New York repeatedly requested to raise its discount rate; the Board denied several of the requests. In August the Board finally acquiesced to New York's plan of action, and New York's discount rate reached 6 percent.

The Federal Reserve's rate increase had unintended consequences. Because of the international gold standard, the Fed's actions forced foreign central banks to raise their own interest rates. Tight-money policies tipped economies around the world into recession. International commerce contracted, and the international economy slowed (Eichengreen 1992; Friedman and Schwartz 1963; Temin 1993).

The financial boom, however, continued. The Federal Reserve watched anxiously. Commercial banks continued to loan money to speculators, and other lenders invested increasing sums in loans to brokers. In September 1929, stock prices gyrated, with sudden declines and rapid recoveries. Some financial leaders continued to encourage investors to purchase equities, including Charles E. Mitchell, the president of the National City Bank (now Citibank) and a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.In October, Mitchell and a coalition of bankers attempted to restore confidence by publicly purchasing blocks of shares at high prices. The effort failed. Investors began selling madly. Share prices plummeted.

A crowd gathers outside the New York Stock Exchange following the 1929 crash. (Photo: Bettmann/Bettmann/Getty Images)

Funds that fled the stock market flowed into New York City's commercial banks. These banks also assumed millions of dollars in stock-market loans. The sudden surges strained banks. As deposits increased, banks' reserve requirements rose; but banks' reserves fell as depositors withdrew cash, banks purchased loans, and checks (the principal method of depositing funds) cleared slowly. The counterpoised flows left many banks temporarily short of reserves.

To relieve the strain, the New York Fed sprang into action. It purchased government securities on the open market, expedited lending through its discount window, and lowered the discount rate. It assured commercial banks that it would supply the reserves they needed. These actions increased total reserves in the banking system, relaxed the reserve constraint faced by banks in New York City, and enabled financial institutions to remain open for business and satisfy their customers' demands during the crisis. The actions also kept short term interest rates from rising to disruptive levels, which frequently occurred during financial crises.

At the time, the New York Fed's actions were controversial. The Board and several reserve banks complained that New York exceeded its authority. In hindsight, however, these actions helped to contain the crisis in the short run. The stock market collapsed, but commercial banks near the center of the storm remained in operation (Friedman and Schwartz 1963).

While New York's actions protected commercial banks, the stock-market crash still harmed commerce and manufacturing. The crash frightened investors and consumers. Men and women lost their life savings, feared for their jobs, and worried whether they could pay their bills. Fear and uncertainty reduced purchases of big ticket items, like automobiles, that people bought with credit. Firms - like Ford Motors - saw demand decline, so they slowed production and furloughed workers. Unemployment rose, and the contraction that had begun in the summer of 1929 deepened (Romer 1990; Calomiris 1993).

While the crash of 1929 curtailed economic activity, its impact faded within a few months, and by the fall of 1930 economic recovery appeared imminent. Then, problems in another portion of the financial system turned what may have been a short, sharp recession into our nation's longest, deepest depression.

From the stock market crash of 1929, economists - including the leaders of the Federal Reserve - learned at least two lessons.

First, central banks - like the Federal Reserve - should be careful when acting in response to equity markets. Detecting and deflating financial bubbles is difficult. Using monetary policy to restrain investors' exuberance may have broad, unintended, and undesirable consequences.

Second, when stock market crashes occur, their damage can be contained by following the playbook developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the fall of 1929.

Economists and historians debated these issues during the decades following the Great Depression. Consensus coalesced around the time of the publication of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States in 1963. Their conclusions concerning these events are cited by many economists, including members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors such as Ben Bernanke, Donald Kohn and Frederic Mishkin.

In reaction to the financial crisis of 2008 scholars may be rethinking these conclusions. Economists have been questioning whether central banks can and should prevent asset market bubbles and how concerns about financial stability should influence monetary policy. These widespread discussions hearken back to the debates on this issue among the leaders of the Federal Reserve during the 1920s.

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Gary Richardson

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On Black Monday, October 28, 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined nearly 13 percent. Federal Reserve leaders differed on how to respond to the event and support the financial system.

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The Great Depression: Crash Course US History #33 - YouTube

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The Great Depression: Crash Course US History #33 - YouTube

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The Great Depression: Crash Course US History #33

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The Great Depression | Federal Reserve History

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The Great Depression | Federal Reserve History

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"Regarding the Great Depression, ... we did it. We're very sorry. ... We won't do it again."
-Ben Bernanke, November 8, 2002, in a speech given at "A Conference to Honor Milton Friedman ... On the Occasion of His 90th Birthday."

In 2002, Ben Bernanke, then a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, acknowledged publicly what economists have long believed. The Federal Reserve's mistakes contributed to the "worst economic disaster in American history" (Bernanke 2002).

Bernanke, like other economic historians, characterized the Great Depression as a disaster because of its length, depth, and consequences. The Depression lasted a decade, beginning in 1929 and ending during World War II. Industrial production plummeted. Unemployment soared. Families suffered. Marriage rates fell. The contraction began in the United States and spread around the globe. The Depression was the longest and deepest downturn in the history of the United States and the modern industrial economy.

The Great Depression began in August 1929, when the economic expansion of the Roaring Twenties came to an end. A series of financial crises punctuated the contraction. These crises included a stock market crash in 1929, a series of regional banking panics in 1930 and 1931, and a series of national and international financial crises from 1931 through 1933. The downturn hit bottom in March 1933, when the commercial banking system collapsed and President Roosevelt declared a national banking holiday.Sweeping reforms of the financial system accompanied the economic recovery, which was interrupted by a double-dip recession in 1937. Return to full output and employment occurred during the Second World War.

To understand Bernanke's statement, one needs to know what he meant by "we," "did it," and "won't do it again."

By "we," Bernanke meant the leaders of the Federal Reserve System. At the start of the Depression, the Federal Reserve's decision-making structure was decentralized and often ineffective. Each district had a governor who set policies for his district, although some decisions required approval of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC. The Board lacked the authority and tools to act on its own and struggled to coordinate policies across districts. The governors and the Board understood the need for coordination; frequently corresponded concerning important issues; and established procedures and programs, such as the Open Market Investment Committee, to institutionalize cooperation. When these efforts yielded consensus, monetary policy could be swift and effective. But when the governors disagreed, districts could and sometimes did pursue independent and occasionally contradictory courses of action.

The governors disagreed on many issues, because at the time and for decades thereafter, experts disagreed about the best course of action and even about the correct conceptual framework for determining optimal policy. Information about the economy became available with long and variable lags. Experts within the Federal Reserve, in the business community, and among policymakers in Washington, DC, had different perceptions of events and advocated different solutions to problems. Researchers debated these issues for decades. Consensus emerged gradually. The views in this essay reflect conclusions expressed in the writings of three recent chairmen, Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, and Ben Bernanke.

By "did it," Bernanke meant that the leaders of the Federal Reserve implemented policies that they thought were in the public interest. Unintentionally, some of their decisions hurt the economy. Other policies that would have helped were not adopted.

An example of the former is the Fed's decision to raise interest rates in 1928 and 1929. The Fed did this in an attempt to limit speculation in securities markets. This action slowed economic activity in the United States. Because the international gold standard linked interest rates and monetary policies among participating nations, the Fed's actions triggered recessions in nations around the globe. The Fed repeated this mistake when responding to the international financial crisis in the fall of 1931. This website explores these issues in greater depth in our entries on the stock market crash of 1929 and the financial crises of 1931 through 1933.

An example of the latter is the Fed's failure to act as a lender of last resort during the banking panics that began in the fall of 1930 and ended with the banking holiday in the winter of 1933. This website explores this issue in essays on the banking panics of 1930 to 1931, the banking acts of 1932, and the banking holiday of 1933.

Men study the announcement of jobs at an employment agency during the Great Depression. (Photo: Bettmann/Bettmann/Getty Images)

One reason that Congress created the Federal Reserve, of course, was to act as a lender of last resort. Why did the Federal Reserve fail in this fundamental task? The Federal Reserve's leaders disagreed about the best response to banking crises. Some governors subscribed to a doctrine similar to Bagehot's dictum, which says that during financial panics, central banks should loan funds to solvent financial institutions beset by runs. Other governors subscribed to a doctrine known as real bills. This doctrine indicated that central banks should supply more funds to commercial banks during economic expansions, when individuals and firms demanded additional credit to finance production and commerce, and less during economic contractions, when demand for credit contracted. The real bills doctrine did not definitively describe what to do during banking panics, but many of its adherents considered panics to be symptoms of contractions, when central bank lending should contract. A few governors subscribed to an extreme version of the real bills doctrine labeled "liquidationist." This doctrine indicated that during financial panics, central banks should stand aside so that troubled financial institutions would fail. This pruning of weak institutions would accelerate the evolution of a healthier economic system. Herbert Hoover's secretary of treasury, Andrew Mellon, who served on the Federal Reserve Board, advocated this approach. These intellectual tensions and the Federal Reserve's ineffective decision-making structure made it difficult, and at times impossible, for the Fed's leaders to take effective action.

Among leaders of the Federal Reserve, differences of opinion also existed about whether to help and how much assistance to extend to financial institutions that did not belong to the Federal Reserve. Some leaders thought aid should only be extended to commercial banks that were members of the Federal Reserve System. Others thought member banks should receive assistance substantial enough to enable them to help their customers, including financial institutions that did not belong to the Federal Reserve, but the advisability and legality of this pass-through assistance was the subject of debate. Only a handful of leaders thought the Federal Reserve (or federal government) should directly aid commercial banks (or other financial institutions) that did not belong to the Federal Reserve. One advocate of widespread direct assistance was Eugene Meyer, governor of the Federal Reserve Board, who was instrumental in the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

These differences of opinion contributed to the Federal Reserve's most serious sin of omission: failure to stem the decline in the supply of money. From the fall of 1930 through the winter of 1933, the money supply fell by nearly 30 percent. The declining supply of funds reduced average prices by an equivalent amount. This deflation increased debt burdens; distorted economic decision-making; reduced consumption; increased unemployment; and forced banks, firms, and individuals into bankruptcy. The deflation stemmed from the collapse of the banking system, as explained in the essay on the banking panics of 1930 and 1931.

The Federal Reserve could have prevented deflation by preventing the collapse of the banking system or by counteracting the collapse with an expansion of the monetary base, but it failed to do so for several reasons. The economic collapse was unforeseen and unprecedented. Decision makers lacked effective mechanisms for determining what went wrong and lacked the authority to take actions sufficient to cure the economy. Some decision makers misinterpreted signals about the state of the economy, such as the nominal interest rate, because of their adherence to the real bills philosophy. Others deemed defending the gold standard by raising interests and reducing the supply of money and credit to be better for the economy than aiding ailing banks with the opposite actions.

On several occasions, the Federal Reserve did implement policies that modern monetary scholars believe could have stemmed the contraction. In the spring of 1931, the Federal Reserve began to expand the monetary base, but the expansion was insufficient to offset the deflationary effects of the banking crises. In the spring of 1932, after Congress provided the Federal Reserve with the necessary authority, the Federal Reserve expanded the monetary base aggressively. The policy appeared effective initially, but after a few months the Federal Reserve changed course. A series of political and international shocks hit the economy, and the contraction resumed. Overall, the Fed's efforts to end the deflation and resuscitate the financial system, while well intentioned and based on the best available information, appear to have been too little and too late.

The flaws in the Federal Reserve's structure became apparent during the initial years of the Great Depression. Congress responded by reforming the Federal Reserve and the entire financial system. Under the Hoover administration, congressional reforms culminated in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation Act and the Banking Act of 1932. Under the Roosevelt administration, reforms culminated in the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, the Banking Act of 1933 (commonly called Glass-Steagall), the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, and the Banking Act of 1935. This legislation shifted some of the Federal Reserve's responsibilities to the Treasury Department and to new federal agencies such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. These agencies dominated monetary and banking policy until the 1950s.

The reforms of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s turned the Federal Reserve into a modern central bank. The creation of the modern intellectual framework underlying economic policy took longer and continues today. The Fed's combination of a well-designed central bank and an effective conceptual framework enabled Bernanke to state confidently that "we won't do it again."

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                      by 
Gary Richardson

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The longest and deepest downturn in the history of the United States and the modern industrial economy lasted more than a decade, beginning in 1929 and ending during World War II in 1941.

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The Great Depression | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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The Great Depression | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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Newsreel Announcer (archival): The tremendous crowds which you see gathered outside the stock exchange are due to the greatest crash in the history of the New York Stock Exchange in market prices.

Narrator: December 31st, New Year's Eve. The crash and its terrible consequences were still in the future. Financial leaders, everyone celebrated what had been a decade of prosperity and boundless optimism. They thought the party would last forever. They called it "The New Era," 1929. All the hope and promise and illusion of the 20s converged in that one year.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: The United States is afflicted with new eras. Let us not think for a moment that the illusion, the aberration of the 1920s was unique. It is intimately a part of the American character.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: The mood of the era, I think, can best be remembered by the hit song - was that 1929, Blue Skies?

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: In the 20s, yes, '28, '29.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: How did that go?

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: Smiling at me...

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Yeah. Nothing but blue skies do I see. Yes.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: ...Never saw the sun shining so bright, Never saw things going so right. Gray days, all of them gone, nothing but blue skies from now on.

That was the whole tenor of the day. I mean, people believed that everything was going to be great always, always. There was a feeling of optimism in the air that you cannot even describe today.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: And everyone seemed to have an interest in the stock market. Certainly, the boot black, the tailor, the grocer owned shares of one kind or another.

Narrator: This was the first time that many ordinary Americans had begun to invest in stocks. A stock, a share of a company, is bought and sold here on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The stocks themselves have no fixed value. As in an auction, if the stock is in demand, its price goes up. No demand and the price goes down. For almost eight straight years, stock values had been rising. By 1929, there seemed to be no upper limits in this world of paper, numbers and dreams.

Michael Nesbitt, Grandson of Michael J. Meehan: It was an arena of unbounded opportunity where somebody like my grandfather could come into it and make a fortune. So many people made so much money in the market that late in the 20s, it seemed that you just couldn't go wrong buying stocks in American companies.

Narrator: Here was a whole new way to make a fortune. Unlike the Carnegies and the Rockefellers of previous decades, who built steel mills and dug oil wells, men like Michael Meehan, Jesse Livermore and Charles Mitchell had amassed their fortunes buying and selling stocks, pieces of paper. The public was fascinated. Bankers, brokers and speculators had become celebrities and they lived like royalty.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: I can hardly believe that a family lived in this kind of house. I mean, today, it would be almost unbelievable. Six stories and these great big rooms.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Enormous. We counted it up the other day. We had 16 live-in help in this house -

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: Not counting the chauffeurs and others.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: - not counting the chauffeurs, yes, aside from all the help we had in the Tuxedo Park house and the Southampton house as well. But those days are gone forever.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: I should say.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: But we never thought of it as being grandiose because practically everybody we knew seemed to live in the same way.

Patricia Livermore, Daughter-in-Law of Jesse Livermore: Jesse Livermore had a ticker tape in every home that he owned. They had a beautiful house on 76th Street in Manhattan, on the West side of Central Park. They had a floor at the 813 Fifth Avenue because Dorothy did not like to go to the West Side to change her clothes. So they had a house in Great Neck, they had a summer house in Lake Placid, they had a house in Palm Beach. They had private railroad cars, two yachts. Oh, they lived. They really lived.

Narrator: Few Americans lived like Jesse Livermore, but there was a rising expectation that everyone could have a piece of this prosperity. During his presidential campaign of 1928, candidate Herbert Hoover would make this extraordinary promise.

Herbert Hover (archival): Given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.

Robert Sobel, Historian: There was great hope. America came out of World War I with the economy intact. We were the only strong country in the world. The dollar was king. We had a very popular president in the middle of the decade, Calvin Coolidge, and an even more popular one elected in 1928, Herbert Hoover. So things looked pretty good.

Narrator: The economy was changing in this new America. It was the dawn of the consumer revolution. New inventions, mass marketing, factories turning out amazing products like radios, rayon, air conditioners, underarm deodorant.

Robert Sobel, Historian: This is a period in which the American household gets the washing machine, gets a refrigerator, goes off gaslight and gets electricity in some cities. This is period in which people would buy little plugs to put into the outlets in the wall so the electricity wouldn't leak on the floor. "What will they think of next," was a 1920s saying, 'cause new things were continually coming out and they were new things which you could enjoy, not just for the few.

Narrator: One of the most wondrous inventions of the age was consumer credit. Before 1920, the average worker couldn't borrow money. By 1929, "buy now, pay later" had become a way of life.

Robert Sobel, Historian: So there were changes, many changes in the way people viewed the world and all of them optimistic. You extrapolate the curve and what do you have? Permanent prosperity. That was the term one heard in the late 1920s. "We're into the age of permanent prosperity."

Narrator: Wall Street got the credit for this prosperity and Wall Street was dominated by just a small group of wealthy men. Rarely in the history of this nation had so much raw power been concentrated in the hands of a few businessmen, men like William C. Durant.

Aristo Scrobogna, Secretary to William C. Durant: It's almost impossible to realize the power and the significance of the man. In Flint - when Mr. Durant came to Flint occasionally, people used to say, "Durant is in town." Just like that, you know, "Durant is in town." He was bigger than life.

Narrator: Earlier in the century, Durant had founded General Motors. Now, he made his money on Wall Street. Backed by Midwestern auto industrialists, he controlled so much money that he could singlehandedly drive up the price of a stock and then sell, reaping huge profits.

Aristo Scrobogna, Secretary to William C. Durant: He was just at the apotheosis, at the maximum of his power. He managed - according to the voices of the time, according to what was said - anywhere between two to five billion dollars, which in those days was a fabulous - the market was filled with bulls and he was the bull of the bulls.

Narrator: Durant came to Wall Street as one of the titans of industry. Jesse Livermore, whose fortune was estimated at over $100 million, never did anything in his life but play the market.

Robert Sobel, Historian: Everything Jesse Livermore touched turned to gold, it seemed. All he had to do was to press a button and a stock would go up ten points. And that meant, of course, that Jesse Livermore would make a lot of money. So the average American would look at this say, "Gee, if only I knew what he doing, I could make money, too. How do you get in on Jesse Livermore's brains?"

Narrator: Livermore was a speculator, pure and simple. He didn't study the health of a company. He didn't care whether it made a profit or paid a dividend. For him, the stock market was an abstract game of numbers.

Patricia Livermore, Daughter-in-Law of Jesse Livermore: Money was not the end for this man at all. Money was a very peripheral thing for him, but beating the odds, winning a game. That was his objective. He was a numbers man. He lived by the numbers, took an elevator by the numbers. He came into town by the numbers. Everything was done by numbers. When he left his house in the morning, he did not leave at 8:10, he left at 8:07. All of the policemen knew, because of his time schedule, that he would be going down Fifth Avenue, let's say, at 8:37. Well, of course, traffic lights were hand-operated then, had policemen on boxes. So the instant that they saw his car, the lights were green. He never stopped for a red light.

Narrator: The success of large speculators like Livermore and Durant lured smaller investors to Wall Street, but Charles Mitchell, president of National City Bank, virtually invented the idea of mass-marketing stocks and bonds to the general public. This was a totally new idea and a huge success.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: The bank, prior to father's being elected president in 1921, was geared mainly to doing business with large corporations. Father pointed the bank, for the first time, in the direction of going after the little man and

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: Don't call him the little man. It was Everyman.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Well, jedermann (everyman), all right. How old was he then? Thirty-eight years old. And the National City Company had four offices. And then, within three years, there were over 50 offices and by 1929, it was the largest distributor of securities in the world.

Narrator: Even at the height of the speculative frenzy, only a small percentage of the American public actually invested in stocks, but the market had entered popular culture. Wall Street became Main Street. Everyone was talking stocks. Watching the ticker became a national sport. Popular magazines covered financial news. Dozens of best-sellers promised investors the inside track. The characters in the popular comic strip "Gasoline Alley," were investing in a company called "Rubber Keyhole." Stock tips came from everywhere. Some investors followed the advice of Evangeline Adams, an astrologer.

Manly P. Hall, Founder, Philosophical Research Society: She was able to calculate the variations of the stock exchange so accurately that there was practically no difference to having have read it in a ledger somewhere. Among her more interesting clients were Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and J. Pierpont Morgan.

Narrator: In February, Evangeline Adams looked at the stars and predicted a dramatic upswing in stock prices for the coming months. The stock market, once considered a highly risky place to put your money, was now beginning to attract a whole new group of amateur speculators. Among the new players was one Julius Marx. Everyone knew him by his stage name, Groucho.

Arthur Marx, Son of Groucho Marx: But they were poor and it always affected my father 'cause he was always kind of thrifty and worried about his future and what would become of him when no one else wanted him as an actor anymore. So he was always saving money, turning off the lights and turning off the water around the house even after he was in Hollywood and making a lot of money.

Narrator: Of all the Marx brothers, Groucho was the most financially conservative. In 1929, he took his life's savings and put it in a sure thing, the stock market.

Arthur Marx, Son of Groucho Marx: He was always phoning a broker and getting hot tips and wanting to know what the stocks were that - how they were doing. And if he wasn't on the phone, he would take me into Great Neck, which was a little village at the time but they did have a stockbroker called Newman Brothers & Worms and all these men who were investing in the market, they'd all sit there in chairs like a little theater and watch the ticker tape go by.

Narrator: Groucho, along with record numbers of smaller investors, was borrowing money to buy stocks. It was called "buying on margin." You only needed ten percent down. Just $1,000 would get you $10,000 worth of stock. Suddenly, you were in the same league with the big players or so it seemed. But the stock market was not a level playing field.

Patricia Livermore, Daughter-in-Law of Jesse Livermore: In the 20s and 30s, one of the big features of the stock market is the fact that it wasn't controlled and that operators could do a lot of things that are not permitted today.

Narrator: One of the most common tactics was to manipulate the price of a particular stock, a stock like Radio Corporation of America.

Michael Nesbitt, Grandson of Michael J. Meehan: RCA was, in the 20s, what Xerox was in the 60s, what was a great growth stock. The stock went from - I can't remember the exact numbers, but from something like 20 to 400, split many times and made many people, including my grandfather, very wealthy. It was one of the stocks that was manipulated by a pool.

Narrator: Wealthy investors would pool their money in a secret agreement to buy a stock, inflate its price and then sell it to an unsuspecting public. Most stocks in the 1920s were regularly manipulated by insiders like RCA specialist Michael Meehan.

Michael Nesbitt, Grandson of Michael J. Meehan: In those days, that was legal and it was quite common practice for a group of Wall Streeters to take a stock in hand. And they would acquire a position in the stock early on and then, they would see to it that there was good press on the stock, a lot of publicity.

Robert Sobel, Historian: I would say that practically all the financial journals were on the take. This includes reporters for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Herald-Tribune, you name it. So if you were a pool operator, you'd call your friend at The Times and say, "Look, Charlie, there's an envelope waiting for you here and we think that perhaps you should write something nice about RCA." And Charlie would write something nice about RCA. A publicity man called A. Newton Plummer had canceled checks from practically every major journalist in New York City.

Michael Nesbitt, Grandson of Michael J. Meehan: Then, they would begin to - what was called "painting the tape" and they would make the stock look exciting. They would trade among themselves and you'd see these big prints on RCA and people will say, "Oh, it looks as though that stock is being accumulated."

Robert Sobel, Historian: Now, if they are behind it, you want to join them, so you go out and you buy stock also. Now, what's happening is the stock goes from 10 to 15 to 20 and now, it's at 20 and you start buying, other people start buying at 30, 40. The original group, the pool, they've stopped buying. They're selling you the stock. It's now 50 and they're out of it. And what happens, of course, is the stock collapses.

Narrator: On March 8, 1929, Michael Meehan began one of the most successful pools on Wall Street. From the 8th to the 17th, Meehan and the pool pushed up the value of RCA almost 50 percent. On March 18th, they sold and divided up their profits. In today's money, they had made $100 million for one week's work.

Michael Nesbitt, Grandson of Michael J. Meehan: The pools were a little like musical chairs. When the music stopped, somebody owned the stocks and those were the sufferers.

Narrator: If small investors suffered, they would soon be back for more. They knew the game was rigged, but maybe next time, they could beat the system. Wall Street had its critics, among them economist Roger Babson. He questioned the boom and was accused of lack of patriotism, of selling America short.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: Roger Babson warned of the speculation and said, "There's going to be a crash and the aftermath is going to be quite terrible." And people jumped on Babson from all around for saying such a thing, so that people who were cautious about their personal reputation, who did not want to call down on themselves a lot of calumny, kept quiet.

Narrator: Mobster Al Capone was not a cautious man. From his Chicago headquarters, he condemned the wild speculation on Wall Street. "It's a racket," he said, "Those stock market guys are crooked." Capone invested his money in a $100-million bootleg liquor business. Business was good. On Valentine's Day, 1929, he had just eliminated the competition.

March 4th, Inauguration Day. Republican President Calvin Coolidge had run his administration on the belief that business was the basis of America's prosperity. Government should not interfere. Herbert Hoover had won a landslide victory, promising to carry on the tradition.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: This was a time in our history when governments did not, as now, take responsibility for the economy. They presided over it, but the level of economic activity and the level of economic growth and the stability of prices were not yet everyday concerns of the president. And what Coolidge did was to say how wonderful times were, how happy everybody was going to be and how prosperous everyone was going to be. And Hoover's responsibility was to continue that optimism.

Narrator: Politicians came and went, but in the 20s, the businessman was king. New York City had a dapper, corrupt and vastly popular mayor, Jimmy Walker, but behind the scenes were powerful financial leaders like Charles Mitchell.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Jimmy Walker was high, wide and fancy with the city finances. One day, Father called Mayor Walker up here and he had some other bankers with him. And Mayor Walker was sort of put on the grill in the upstairs library, while these bankers read the riot act to him to try and get some fiscal responsibility instilled into him. And I know that after the meeting, somebody took me into the library and pointed me out the chair that the mayor had been sitting in and he'd been so nervous - what were those, Louis XIV chairs with all the little -

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: Louis XV.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Louis XV chairs with all the little tacks in there, the brass tacks.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: Yes.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: And he'd pulled out almost all the brass tacks - they were sitting on the floor - out of sheer nerves.

Narrator: The stock market, too, was getting a severe case of nerves. On Friday, March 22nd, all eyes were on that august government body in Washington, the Federal Reserve Board. The board distrusted the boom. They saw the speculation as reckless and dangerous because it was based more and more on the shaky foundation of borrowed money, margin. The board had the power to curb the borrowing, the market was now dependent on borrowed money. Without margin, it would collapse. The board met day after day. Would they ask for regulation of the stock market? They issued no public statements. Their silence was terrifying.

On Monday, March 21st, investors began to sell. Blue chip stocks plunged. Tuesday, another wave of selling swept the market. As it fell, people holding stock on margin were hit hard. They'd put only ten percent down, but the value of their stock dropped more than 10 percent, so their down payment was gone. To hold their stocks, they'd have to put up more money. On March 26th, millions of investors suddenly found themselves in deep trouble.

Robert Sobel, Historian: Your broker would call you and say, "We need more money. You're wiped out." Unless you could give him more money, he would then sell the stock. Now, he would sell the stock, which would cause the stock to go down to 85, 86 and now, more margin calls are triggered. So one margin call triggers another margin call, triggers another margin call and it goes all the way down.

Narrator: With everyone trying to borrow money to cover the falling value of their stocks, there was a credit crunch. Interest rates soared. At 20 percent, few people could afford to borrow more money. The boom was about to collapse like a house of cards.

Charlie Mitchell was horrified. His success, his entire career, his personal fortune had been based on a rising market. If nobody else was going to stop the crash, Charles Mitchell would.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Father, at that point, stepped in and announced that the National City Bank would provide $25 million of credit, which was all very well and very necessary, but he added the fateful words, "whatever the Federal Reserve Board thinks." And Senator Carter Glass, who had been sort of the father of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, took that as a direct slap across the face. But whatever Senator Glass thought, immediately, the credit crisis was alleviated. In fact, within the next 24 hours, call money went from 20 percent to eight percent and that stopped the panic, then, in March.

Narrator: The next day, the market rallied. The Federal Reserve Board remained silent, tacitly accepting defeat. The hero of the day was Charlie Mitchell. He had singlehandedly stopped the crash of '29. With the start of the baseball season, people quickly forgot the break in the market.

New events filled the papers. There was a crisis in Nicaragua, where the nationalist hero, Augusto Sandino, was threatening American marines; tragedy in the British Mandate of Palestine as Jews and Arabs clashed over control of holy sites in Jerusalem. And in Antarctica, Commander Byrd was at his base camp, Little America, waiting for a break in the weather. His elaborately-planned flight over the South Pole was still on ice.

The newsreels had come into their own. Now, in living sound, patrons could keep abreast of the important events of the day.

Woman (archival): The biggest news of the day is not the Naval agreement, not even Prohibition, but the return of the natural waistline.

Patricia Livermore, Daughter-in-Law of Jesse Livermore: Dorothy Livermore was a typical flapper. She has to embody the 20s. She would do almost anything on an impulse. She had some priceless pieces of 18th-century furniture, but the house had settled and the floors were not level. But Mrs. Livermore didn't like to spend money that didn't show, so instead of having the hoist put underneath, she simply solved the problem by having the legs of the furniture cut off to fit the sloping floors, so that the tops of all of the furniture were level, but of course, the legs were on different angles. And this was her typical solution. As long as the tops were level, everything was fine.

Narrator: Everything was not fine that spring with the American economy. It was showing ominous signs of trouble. Steel production was declining. The construction industry was sluggish. Car sales dropped. Customers were getting harder to find. And because of easy credit, many people were deeply in debt. Large sections of the population were poor and getting poorer.

Just as Wall Street had reflected a steady growth in the economy throughout most of the 20s, it would seem that now the market should reflect the economic slowdown. Instead, it soared to record heights. Stock prices no longer had anything to do with company profits, the economy or anything else. The speculative boom had acquired a momentum of its own.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: It was this nature of mass illusion. Prices were going up, people bought. That forced prices up further, that brought in more people. And eventually, the process becomes self-perpetuating. Every increase brings in more people convinced of their God-given right to get rich.

Narrator: The 20s was a decade of all sorts of fast money schemes. Three years earlier, everyone was buying Florida real estate. As prices of land skyrocketed, more people jumped in, hoping to make a killing. Then, overnight, the boom turned to bust and investors lost everything.

Groucho Marx (Film, The Cocoanuts): Florida, folks. Sunshine, sunshine. Perpetual sunshine all the year around. Let's get the auction started before we get a tornado. Right this way. Step forward, everybody.

Narrator: In May, the Marx Brothers were before the cameras with their first film, The Cocoanuts. Its subject? The Florida land boom. Now, in 1929, the gullibility of those naive speculators was something to laugh about.

Groucho Marx (Film, The Cocoanuts): Eight hundred wonderful residences will be built right here. Why, they're as good up, better. You can have any kind of a home you want to. You can get even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stucco. Now is the time to buy while the new boom is on. Remember that old saying, "A new boom sweeps clean." And don't forget the guarantee.

Narrator: Groucho Marx would film these scenes and then rush to his broker to put more of his savings into the booming market, on margin, of course.

Arthur Marx, Son of Groucho Marx: Max Gordon, a Broadway producer, was also heavily in the market and Gordon could never get over the fact that the market was going up and up and up all the time. And he said to my father, "How long has this been going on, Groucho?" And my father said, "I don't know, but my broker down in Great Neck tells me that it's because there's a worldwide market for American goods and it's never going to go down, that the market'll just keep going up and up and up."

Narrator: May 1929. Stock prices were going up and up. With so much money to be made, people were borrowing more money than ever before to buy stocks. Market leaders like William Durant, far from being worried, were ecstatic. Off on his annual visit to Europe, he announced that everything would be fine as long as we all continued to believe: "Confidence - not halfway confidence, but 100-percent confidence - is the real basis for our prosperity."

Astrologer Evangeline Adams was now putting out a newsletter. Her 100,000 subscribers learned how the Zodiac could influence stock prices. Her advice for the coming summer: buy.

Ben Karol, Former Newspaper Delivery Boy: They thought this was a ride that was never going to end, just goes on and on and on and every day, they got more money and they're counting up their paper profits. And they're selling and buying and buying and selling and they're doing great.

Tom McCormick, Former Stock Sales Clerk: Geez, I'd go to get a shoeshine and they'd say, "How's the market?" You'd go to the barber to get a haircut, "How is the market?" Everybody was in the market.

Robert Sobel, Historian: There were people who were looking for the one lucky break, people who were just hoping that they'd strike it right, you know. You take a rifle and you aim it at the ocean and you hope to hit a fish.

Narrator: Along with the market, temperatures soared that summer. It was a record heat wave and a record three months at the Exchange. Some stocks doubled in value. In June, The New York Times index of stocks rose 52 points. In July, another 25.

In the middle of the summer, the Graf Zeppelin was completing its first leisurely trip around the world. The Marx Brothers had finished shooting their film, The Cocoanuts. Commander Byrd was still at his base camp near the South Pole. He, too, had money in the market and radioed his broker for the latest quotes. Back in Cleveland, George Herman Ruth hit his 500th home run and on the radio, they were playing the latest hit tune, "I'm in the Market for You." On August 17th, Michael Meehan's brokerage firm launched a new service.

Michael Nesbitt, Grandson of Michael J. Meehan: One of my grandfather's innovations was putting brokerage houses on the ocean liners - the first one on the Berengaria - and that allowed you during the - whatever it was, during the six- or seven-day passage to Europe, if you were such a stock market addict that you couldn't stand the withdrawal for that period, you could walk into the office and place your order to buy or sell 100 shares of General Motors or General Electric or whatever. And they would radio that order back to New York. It was being very modern at the time. They were very wealthy people on the trans-Atlantic liners and it gave them something to do.

Narrator: At sea and on land, everyone seemed to be making money. It was a stampede of buying. And major speculators like John Jacob Rascob whipped up the frenzy. He told readers of The Ladies' Home Journal that now everyone could be rich.

September 2nd, Labor Day. It was the hottest day of the year. The markets were closed and people were at the beach. A reporter checked in with astrologer Evangeline to ask about the future of stock prices. Her answer: the Dow Jones could climb to heaven. The very next day, September 3rd, the stock market hit its all-time high.

Ben Karol, Former Newspaper Delivery Boy: My father and I had an ongoing discussion about the stock market. And I used to say, "Pop, everybody's getting rich but you. You know, you work so hard and you're never going to make a nickel. All you do is you keep delivering these newspapers and that's about it. The guy who's shining shoes is in the stock market, the grocery clerk is in the stock market, the school teacher's in the stock market. The teller at the bank is in the stock market. Everybody's in the stock market. You're the only one that's not in the stock market." And he used to sit and laugh and say, "You'll see. You'll see. You'll see."

Narrator: On September 5th, economist Roger Babson gave a speech to a group of businessmen. "Sooner or later, a crash is coming and it may be terrific." He'd been saying the same thing for two years, but now, for some reason, investors were listening. The market took a severe dip. They called it the "Babson Break." The next day, prices stabilized, but several days later, they began to drift lower. Though investors had no way of knowing it, the collapse had already begun.

In the weeks to follow, the market fluctuated wildly up and down. On September 12th, prices dropped ten percent. They dipped sharply again in the 20s. Stock markets around the world were falling, too. Then, on September 25th, the market suddenly rallied.

Reuben L. Cain, Former Stock Salesman: I remember well that I thought, "Why is this doing this?" And then I thought, "Well, I'm new here and these people" - like every day in the paper, Charlie Mitchell would have something to say, the J.P. Morgan people would have something to say about how good things were - and I thought, "Well, they know a lot more about this market than I do. I'm fairly new here and I really can't see why it's going up." But then, when they say it can't go down or if it does go down today, it'll go back tomorrow, you think, "Well, they really are like God. They know it all and it must be the way it's going because they say so."

Narrator: As the market floundered, financial leaders were as optimistic as ever, more so. Just five days before the crash, Thomas Lamont, acting head of the highly conservative Morgan Bank, wrote a letter to President Hoover. "The future appears brilliant. Our securities are the most desirable in the world." Charles Mitchell assured nervous investors that things had never been better.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Practically every business leader in America, and banker, right around the time of 1929, was saying how wonderful things were and the economy had only one way to go and that was up.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: Unfortunately, he didn't have a crystal ball to predict the future.

Robert Sobel, Historian: There's an old saying on Wall Street that the two most important emotions are fear and greed and you go from fear to greed in about a fraction of a second. So you're very, very greedy and you say to yourself, "I want to make more." And then, the market goes down ten points and you get frightened. "I want to keep what I have," so you sell everything. And that's how you have a panic. So you can panic on the upside - people rushing in to get in before the train takes off - and a panic on the downside, trying to get off the train before disaster hits.

Narrator: Monday, October 21st. Hoover, along with the political and financial leaders of the country, arrives in Dearborn, Michigan to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Edison's invention of the light bulb. The host is Henry Ford. The country is reminded that in 50 short years, men like Ford, Durant and Edison had transformed America from a third-rate power into the industrial giant of the world. And while they celebrated, their world was beginning to fall apart.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: There came a Wednesday, October 23rd, when the market was a little shaky, weak. And whether this caused some spread of pessimism, one doesn't know. It certainly led a lot of people to think they should get out. And so, Thursday, October the 24th - the first Black Thursday - the market, beginning in the morning, took a terrific tumble.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: The market opened in an absolutely free fall and some people couldn't even get any bids for their shares and it was wild panic. And an ugly crowd gathered outside the stock exchange and it was described as making weird and threatening noises. It was, indeed, one of the worst days that had ever been seen down there.

Narrator: There was a glimmer of hope on Black Thursday. Directly across from the New York Stock Exchange was a low, stately building, the House of Morgan. Twenty-two years earlier, J. Pierpont Morgan had stopped the panic of 1907. October 24th, high noon. All eyes were now on acting head, Thomas W. Lamont.

Edward Lamont, Grandson of Thomas W. Lamont: Tom Lamont called a number of the other bankers, like Charles Mitchell of the National City Bank and people from the Bankers Trust and J. Albert Wiggin of the Chase Bank and so forth - there were about a half a dozen of them there - and they were gathered together to really discuss what they could do to stem this tremendous onslaught of selling stocks on the stock exchange that was taking place.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: About 12:30, there was an announcement that this group of bankers would make available a very substantial sum to ease the credit stringency and support the market. And right after that, Dick Whitney made his famous walk across the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Narrator: Richard Whitney, vice president of the Exchange, was chosen by the bankers to be their representative. At 1:30 in the afternoon, at the height of the panic, he strolled across the floor and in a loud, clear voice, ordered 10,000 shares of U.S. Steel at a price considerably higher than the last bid. He then went from post to post, shouting buy orders for key stocks.

Horace Silverstone, Former New York Stock Exchange telephone clerk: He stood up on one of the seats at the post and he said, "I give 45 for 50,000 Standard Oil," and everybody started to applaud. "Oh, the crash is over. If Morgan's putting his money in, then maybe the crash is over."

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: And sure enough, this seemed to be evidence that the bankers had moved in to end the panic. And they did end it for that day. The market then stabilized and even went up.

Edward Lamont, Grandson of Thomas W. Lamont: The New York Times said that thanks to the formation of this bankers pool, most observers felt that the panic and the great sell-off was over. And most people did feel that way. Tom Lamont felt that way.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: But Monday was not good. Apparently, people had thought about things over the weekend, over Sunday, and decided maybe they might be safer to get out. And then came the real crash, which was on Tuesday, when the market went down and down and down, without seeming limit.

Narrator: October 29th. Morgan's bankers could no longer stem the tide. It was like trying to stop Niagara Falls. Everyone wanted to sell. AT&T down 50 percent. RCA, once $110 a share, couldn't find buyers at $26. Blue Ridge 100 plunged to $3 and still no buyers. On the floor, they had never seen anything like it.

Horace Silverstone, Former New York Stock Exchange telephone clerk: And it was just like a nightmare and I couldn't believe what was going on here. In those days, every buy order was on a black pad and every sell order was on a red pad. And all I saw was members running around with fistful of red orders.

Tom McCormick, Former Stock Sales Clerk: Just chickens with their head cut off, they didn't know which way to run. They were panicking, screaming. Everybody was bumping into everybody else.

Horace Silverstone, Former New York Stock Exchange telephone clerk: Don't remind him. Anyhow, this is what happened and I tell you - and I was supposed to answer everybody yelling at me - I said, "What am I supposed to do?" I mean, nobody knew what the hell to do.

Narrator: William Durant, the bull of the bulls, now tried singlehandedly to support the market. The further it plunged, the more of his millions he poured into it.

Aristo Scrobogna, Secretary to William C. Durant: He became truly convinced that he was omnipotent. He thought that nothing could really unseat him. It was unfortunate. The forces were too great. There was no one man that could have been so powerful to control the market.

Narrator: There were some people, however, whose investment strategies made money. On October 29th, Jesse Livermore's wife, hearing of the crash, ordered the servants to move all the furniture out of their mansion into a small cottage on the estate.

Patricia Livermore, Daughter-in-Law of Jesse Livermore: So when Mr. Livermore got home that night, he walked into a totally vacant house. When she told him that she had effected the move because she was sure that they had lost all their money, he told her that he had made more money that day than he had ever made before.

Narrator: For most others, it was all over. In brokers' offices across the country, the small investors - the tailors, the grocers, the secretaries - stared at the moving ticker in numb silence. Hope of an easy retirement, the new home, their children's education, everything was gone.

Arthur Marx, Son of Groucho Marx: My father was ready to kill himself. In the morning of the crash, he got a call and it was Max Gordon and Max Gordon says, "Groucho?" and my father said, "What?" And Gordon said, "Groucho, the jig is up."

Reuben L. Cain, Former Stock Salesman: There were all sorts of rumors and you'd see people going down the street looking up to see if they could catch somebody jumping out the window. Now, it turned out there weren't as many people who jumped out the window as they reported, but some did and others committed suicide other ways.

Narrator: Five hundred miles from Wall Street in the Atlantic, the luxury liner, the Berengaria, was heading home. From Michael Meehan's brokerage office, word spread through the ship: "The bottom's fallen out of the market." Men came running out of their Turkish baths in towels. Card games ended abruptly. Everyone tried to jam into the tiny office, yelling, "Sell at market!" They had left England wealthy men. They docked in New York without a penny.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: There's nothing unique about this. It is something which happens every 20 or 30 years because that is about the length of the financial memory. It's about the length of time that it requires for a new set of suckers, if you will, a new set of people capable of wonderful self-delusion to come in and imagine that they have a new and wonderful fix on the future.

Narrator: In the 1930s, Charles Mitchell was hounded by Senate committees and the IRS. The crash had left him $12 million in debt.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: This house was taken over, of course, and things changed. And I began to know what the real world was all about. It was about time. I was 19 years old.

Narrator: Mitchell made a remarkable comeback. He paid off his debts and died in 1955, a highly-respected figure on Wall Street. In 1936, William Durant filed for bankruptcy. His only assets, which he valued at $250, were the clothes on his back. In the late 30s, the founder of General Motors tried his hand at everything from running a bowling alley to selling a cure for dandruff. He died in 1947, still talking about making a comeback.

Herbert Hoover spent much of the early 1930s fishing. He explained in a speech that fishing is a constant reminder of humility and of human frailty, "for all men are equal before fishes."

Patricia Livermore, Daughter-in-Law of Jesse Livermore: The game on Wall Street had changed a great deal for Livermore and the SEC was becoming a powerful factor and the rules were changed. He couldn't operate freely, buy and sell the way he had in the past and he couldn't adapt to the new regulations. So, in a sense, his playing with the market was over and I think a great deal of his interest in life was over at that point. The game was gone.

Narrator: In 1940, the day before Thanksgiving, a photographer snapped this photograph of an old and very tired Jesse Livermore. Several hours later, Livermore would go into a men's washroom and put a bullet through his head.

At the end of 1929, as they celebrated New Year's Eve, all that lay in the future. Nobody knew that the Great Depression was coming - unemployment, bread lines, bank failures - this was unimaginable. But the bubble had burst. Gone was that innocent optimism, the confidence, the illusion of wealth without work. One era had ended. They toasted the coming of the 30s, but somewhere, deep down, they knew the party was over.

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The Crash of 1929 | American Experience | PBS

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The unbounded optimism of the Jazz Age and the shocking consequences when reality finally hit on October 29th, ultimately leading to the Great Depression.

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Americans React to the Great Depression  |  Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945  

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Americans React to the Great Depression  |  Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945  

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"Hooverville," Central Ohio, 1938
Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives

The Great Depression began in 1929 when, in a period of ten weeks, stocks on the New York Stock Exchange lost 50 percent of their value. As stocks continued to fall during the early 1930s, businesses failed, and unemployment rose dramatically. By 1932, one of every four workers was unemployed. Banks failed and life savings were lost, leaving many Americans destitute. With no job and no savings, thousands of Americans lost their homes. The poor congregated in cardboard shacks in so-called Hoovervilles on the edges of cities across the nation; hundreds of thousands of the unemployed roamed the country on foot and in boxcars in futile search of jobs. Although few starved, hunger and malnutrition affected many.

In a country with abundant resources, the largest force of skilled labor, and the most productive industry in the world, many found it hard to understand why the depression had occurred and why it could not be resolved. Moreover, it was difficult for many to understand why people should go hungry in a country possessing huge food surpluses. Blaming Wall Street speculators, bankers, and the Hoover administration, the rumblings of discontent grew mightily in the early 1930s. By 1932, hunger marches and small riots were common throughout the nation.

In June of 1932, nearly 20,000 World War I veterans from across the country marched on the United States Capitol to request early payment of cash bonuses for their military service that weren't due to be paid until 1945. The marchers, who the organizers called the "Bonus Expeditionary Force" but who became widely known as the Bonus Army, spent several days in Washington, D.C., pressing their case, but a Congressional bill to pay the bonus was defeated. On July 28, U.S. troops and tanks commanded by General Douglas MacArthur dispersed the marchers and destroyed their makeshift camps in the city.

However, not all citizens were caught up in the social eruptions. Many were too downtrodden or busy surviving day to day to get involved in public displays of discontent. Instead, they placed their hope and trust in the federal government, especially after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932.

To find more documents in Loc.gov related to this topic, use key words such as Great Depression, begging, unemployment, poverty, stock market crash, Bonus Army, and Hoovervilles.

Documents

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Americans React to the Great Depression | Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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The Great Depression began in 1929 when, in a period of ten weeks, stocks on the New York Stock Exchange lost 50 percent of their value.

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The Dust Bowl  |  Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945

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The Dust Bowl  |  Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945

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Results of a Dust Storm, Oklahoma, 1936.
Farm Security Administration/Office
of War Information Black-and-White Negatives

Between 1930 and 1940, the southwestern Great Plains region of the United States suffered a severe drought. Once a semi-arid grassland, the treeless plains became home to thousands of settlers when, in 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act. Most of the settlers farmed their land or grazed cattle. The farmers plowed the prairie grasses and planted dry land wheat. As the demand for wheat products grew, cattle grazing was reduced, and millions more acres were plowed and planted.

Dry land farming on the Great Plains led to the systematic destruction of the prairie grasses. In the ranching regions, overgrazing also destroyed large areas of grassland. Gradually, the land was laid bare, and significant environmental damage began to occur. Among the natural elements, the strong winds of the region were particularly devastating.

With the onset of drought in 1930, the overfarmed and overgrazed land began to blow away. Winds whipped across the plains, raising billowing clouds of dust. The sky could darken for days, and even well-sealed homes could have a thick layer of dust on the furniture. In some places, the dust drifted like snow, covering farm buildings and houses. Nineteen states in the heartland of the United States became a vast dust bowl. With no chance of making a living, farm families abandoned their homes and land, fleeing westward to become migrant laborers.

In his 1939 book The Grapes of Wrath, author John Steinbeck described the flight of families from the Dust Bowl: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west--from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless--restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do--to lift, to push, to pick, to cut--anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." In all, 400,000 people left the Great Plains, victims of the combined action of severe drought and poor soil conservation practices.

To find additional documents from Loc.gov on this topic, use such key words as migrant workers, migrant camps, farm workers, dust bowl, and drought.

Documents

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The Dust Bowl | Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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Between 1930 and 1940, the southwestern Great Plains region of the United States suffered a severe drought.

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Great Depression and the Dust Bowl | IDCA

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Great Depression and the Dust Bowl | IDCA

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How do people overcome hardships?

The United States had experienced several major economic swings before the Great Depression in the 1930s. During World War I, the U.S. government had vigorously encouraged farmers to expand crop and livestock outputs to feed the army and U.S. allies in Europe. They guaranteed high prices and appealed to the farmers' patriotism through slogans like "Food Will Win the War." Farmers borrowed to buy new machinery to replace the labor lost by sons and hired hands drafted into the military.

As Food Demand Drops, Farm Prices Collapse

In 1920, with the war over and the demand for farm goods decreasing, the U.S. government with little warning announced that it was ending price supports. The farmers, however, continued to produce at near record levels creating surplus commodities that sent prices plummeting. Until then, land prices had been rising rapidly as farmers and non-farmers saw buying farms as a good investment. With the collapse of farm prices, the land bubble burst, often dropping the market value of the land well below what the investor owed on it. The post-war depression did not start with the Stock Market Crash of 1929. For the Midwest, it started in 1921, and farmers and the small towns that depended on the land were hit hard.

In the 1920s, only slightly less than half of the U.S. population lived on farms. When farmers were not making money, they could not buy the products that factories were making. When factories couldn't sell their products, they laid off their workers. The workers could not buy the factory output either, meaning more lay-offs, and the country fell into a downward spiral.

However, not everyone saw the pattern emerging. Many thought that because the stock market had been on a sustained upswing, it was a good place to invest money. When it became obvious that the price of stocks far outpaced their productive capacity, investors lost confidence and began selling before prices dropped further. Panic ensued, and the market dropped sharply. With factories closing and banks failing, unemployment continued to rise. Without the safety nets of today like Social Security, many families found themselves without income, losing their homes and facing poverty. The situation during the 1920s was bad; it got much worse in the 1930s.

Farm Families and the Great Depression

Farm families were often better suited to weather hard times than town residents. Farmers could grow their own food in large gardens and raise livestock to provide meat. Chickens supplied both meat and eggs, while dairy cows produced milk and cream. Many women had sewing skills and began producing much of their family's clothing. Wherever they could, families cut down on expenses. A major problem was taxes, which had to be paid in cash. Families that could not pay taxes sometimes lost their homes and farms. The state and governments slashed costs wherever they could. Schools cut teachers' salaries. Many people remember that while they had little money, they didn't feel humiliated because everyone around them also was poor.

The federal government began to provide relief to offset the impact of the Depression. Iowan Henry Wallace, a corn scientist and farm journal editor, was named secretary of agriculture. He saw that low prices were brought about by surplus production. The federal government adopted a policy that would guarantee farmers a higher-than-market price for their crops and livestock if they would reduce their production. The Agricultural Adjustment Act began sending much needed checks to farmers who would sign up for the system, and the money was a great stimulant to the economy. It saved many a farm from foreclosure.

Extreme Weather and the Great Depression

The environment also seemed hostile to the farmers during the 1930s. The winters of 1934 and 1936 were especially long and cold. The summer of 1936 saw one of the worst droughts ever recorded and crops dried up in the fields. Livestock died for lack of food and water.

West of Iowa, on the Great Plains, lands that could no longer sustain the grasses that held the soil in place began to lose topsoil to the strong hot winds. So much dust was picked up that soon great dark clouds, not of rain but of soil particles, began to drift eastward. Iowa was never hit as hard by the Dust Bowl as Kansas and Oklahoma, but the clouds of dust that blocked out the sun and found their way through any cracks in the house around windows or doors left a lasting impression on those who lived through them.

Times were tough through the entire decade of the 1930s. While government programs helped, it was the start of World War II and the renewed demand for manufactured goods and farm products that lifted the United States out of the worst economic period in its history. It was, however, at a heartbreaking cost in American lives.

Supporting Questions

What factors caused the Great Depression?

How did farmers interact with and adapt to the environmental changes of the Dust Bowl?

Proposed Migrant Camps in California for Relocated Dust Bowl Families, 1935 (Map)

Dust Storm in New Mexico, April 1935 (Image)

Young Man Removing Soil that Blocks the Highways near Guymon, Oklahoma, March 1936 (Image)

Dust Bowl Farmer in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936 (Image)

Farmer Pumping Water to his Dry Fields in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936 (Image)

Dust Storm in Elkhart, Kansas, May 1937 (Image)

"FDR Hears Todd Records" Newspaper Article, between 1940 and 1941 (Document)

Interview with Imogene Chapin from Arvin Farm Security Administration (FSA) Camp in California, August 1, 1940 (Audio)

Interview with Flora Robertson about Dust Storms in Oklahoma, August 5, 1940 (Audio)

Interview with Mexican Migrant Jose Flores about Farm Security Administration (FSA) Camps, 1941 (Audio)

Ethnographer Charles Todd with Mexican Men and Boys at an FSA Camp in El Rio, California, 1941 (Image)

How did people survive the Great Depression when they do not have enough money?

Letter from Martha Fast to First Lady Lou Henry Hoover, January 2, 1931 (Document)

Response from First Lady Lou Henry Hoover's Secretary to Martha Fast, January 7, 1931 (Document)

Dispossessed Arkansas Farmer in Bakersfield, California, 1935 (Image)

Workmen at the Norris Dam in Tennessee, between 1935 and 1940 (Image)

Squatters along the Highway near Bakersfield, California, November 1935 (Image)

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in Denver, Colorado, ca. 1936 (Image)

"Migrant Mother" Florence Thompson with Her Children in Nipomo, California, February/March 1936 (Image)

Oklahoma Farm Family on Highway between Blythe and Indio, California, August 1936 (Image)

Rehabilitation Client Repays his Loan in Smithfield, North Carolina, October 1936 (Image)

Automobile Camp North of Calipatria, California, March 1937 (Image)

Swimming Pool Created by CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) Dam in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, July 1941 (Image)

IPTV's "The Great Depression: Stock Market Crash," 1979

Description

All parts of the nation were faced with the worst economic depression in history in 1929. Iowans suffered along with the rest of the nation. This video from Iowa Public Television explains causes and effects of the stock market crash of 1929.

Farmer Pumping Water to his Dry Fields in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936

Download Resource

Description

This photograph shows a farmer pumping water from a well to his parched fields in Cimarron County, Oklahoma. One possible solution to the dust problem during this time period in America is irrigation.

Response from First Lady Lou Henry Hoover's Secretary to Martha Fast, January 7, 1931

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Description

This document is the response letter from First Lady Lou Henry Hoover's secretary to Martha Fast. Fast, a young girl in California, wrote a letter to Hoover a few days earlier asking for clothes.

"Migrant Mother" Florence Thompson with Her Children in Nipomo, California, February/March 1936

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Description

This photograph by Dorothea Lange is part of a well-known collection taken of Florence Thompson with several of her children during the Dust Bowl. The photo collection, known as the "Migrant Mother" series, shows Thompson with her children in a tent shelter in Nipomo,...

Additional Resources

The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Collecting Expeditio n
This Library of Congress collection was created by Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin, both ethnographers, who provide a glimpse into the everyday life and cultural expression of people living through a particularly difficult period of American history, the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era. This collection features photos, audio and documents of their work.

Library of Congress Teacher's Guide - "The Dust Bowl"
This guide offers historical context, teaching suggestions, links to online resources and more about the Dust Bowl era in America.

Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" Photographs in the Farm Security Administration Collection
Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" photographs of Florence Thompson and her children have become an icon of the Great Depression. This resource provides additional background information about Lange's collection.

The New Deal Primary Sources
This webpage provides an overview of special collections held by the Library of Congress and links to other resources.

History Channel "Great Depression" Collection
There are over 10 videos available at history.com that focuses on different aspects of the Great Depression. Videos and additional resources include a look at such topics as the Stock Market Crash of 1929, The Roaring '20s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, among many others.

The Depths of Depression
This resource from the Library of Congress takes a look at July 8, 1932 - the day the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell to its lowest point during the Great Depression. It also provides information about the Dust Bowl and life in America after the stock market crashed.

Rudy Rides the Rails: A Depression Era Story by Dandi Mackall
This children's book takes place in 1932 Akron, Ohio, where a 13-year-old Rudy wants to help his parents during the Great Depression but doesn't know where to turn. Rudy learns of other boys are heading west to seek their fortunes, and he hops a train to live the hobo life while he "rides the rails" to California.

Leah's Pony by Elizabeth Friedrich: This picture book is set during the Dust Bowl and shows how Leah and her family overcome their impoverished situation through a penny auction.

Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp by Jerry Stanley
This book, which is full of photographs from the Dust Bowl era, tells the true story that took place at the emergency farm-labor camp immortalized in John Steinbeck'sThe Grapes of Wrath.

The Lucky Star by Judy Young
This children's book from the "Tales of Young Americans" series is set in 1933, as millions of Americans are out of work. The story is about a young girl named Ruth who is dealing with struggles that her family encounters during the Great Depression.

Iowa Core Social Studies Standards (4th Grade)

Listed below are the Iowa Core Social Studies content anchor standards that are best reflected in this source set. The content standards applied to this set are high school-age level and encompass the key disciplines that make up social studies for fourth-grade students.

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Great Depression and the Dust Bowl | State Historical Society of Iowa

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How do people overcome hardships? The United States had experienced several major economic swings before the Great Depression in the 1930s. During World War I, the U.S. government had vigorously encouraged farmers to expand crop and livestock outputs to feed the army and U.S. allies in Europe.

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The Economics of the Dust Bowl | The Dust Bowl | PBS LearningMedia

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The Economics of the Dust Bowl | The Dust Bowl | PBS LearningMedia

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The Economics of the Dust Bowl | The Dust Bowl | PBS LearningMedia

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The Dust Bowl was a decade-long catastrophe that swept up 100 million acres of topsoil in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico. Several concurrent factors caused the Dust Bowl—rising wheat prices, a series of unusually rainy years, and generous federal farm policies prompting a land boom…

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The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow . Jim Crow Stories . The Great Depression | PBS

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The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow . Jim Crow Stories . The Great Depression | PBS

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In 1929, the Great Depression devastated the United States. Hard times came to people throughout the country, especially rural blacks. Cotton prices plunged from eighteen to six cents a pound. Two thirds of some two million black farmers earned nothing or went into debt. Hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers left the land for the cities, leaving behind abandoned fields and homes. Even "Negro jobs" -- jobs traditionally held by blacks, such as busboys, elevator operators, garbage men, porters, maids, and cooks -- were sought by desperate unemployed whites. In Atlanta, Georgia, a Klan-like group called the Black Shirts paraded carrying signs that read, "No jobs for niggers until every white man has a job." In other cities, people shouted "Niggers back to the cotton fields. City jobs are for white men." And in Mississippi, where blacks traditionally held certain jobs on trains, several unemployed white men, seeking train jobs, ambushed and killed the black workers. The only group in the early years of the Depression that concerned itself with black rights of rural blacks was the Communist Party. The Party successfully fought to save the lives of the "Scottsboro Boys," nine black youths falsely charged with rape in Alabama. Eight were sentenced to death. The Communists also organized interracial unions and demonstrations for relief, jobs, and end to evictions.

Between Roosevelt's election in 1932 and throughout most of his first term, neither the president nor the Congress paid much attention to the suffering of blacks. The President did not want to antagonize the Southern Senators who controlled the Senate and who could block his efforts to end the Depression. By the end of Roosevelt's first term, the president's thinking began to change thanks, in part, to the efforts of his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt became profoundly aware of the injustices suffered by African Americans. She began to speak out publicly on behalf of blacks and against race prejudice. She became a go-between between civil rights activists and the President. As a result, Roosevelt began to publicly speak out against lynching and granted influential black leaders such as Mary McLeod Bethune access to the White House; these advisors were known as the "Black Cabinet." Federal agencies began to open their doors to blacks, providing jobs, relief, farm subsidies, education, training, and participation in a variety of federal programs. The United States Supreme Court began to hand down decisions favoring black challenges to segregation. For the first time since Reconstruction, the federal government actively supported blacks and made a concerted effort to incorporate them into the mainstream of American life. Black voters responded to the change of heart of the Roosevelt administration by switching their political allegiance from the Republican Party to the Democratic. And black civil-rights organizations began to increase their activity and demands for their rights as citizens of the United States.

-- Richard Wormser

In 1933, an estimated 24.9% of the civilian U.S. labor force was out of work or 12,830,000 Americans.

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The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow . Jim Crow Stories . The Great Depression | PBS

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In 1929, the Great Depression devastated the United States. Hard times came to people throughout the country, especially rural blacks. Cotton prices plunged from eighteen to six cents a pound. Two thirds of some two million black farmers earned nothing or went into debt.

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FDR and the Great Depression (article) | Khan Academy

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FDR and the Great Depression (article) | Khan Academy

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932. He immediately embarked on an ambitious plan to get the country out of the Great Depression.

Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the nation through the Great Depression.

His signature domestic legislation, the New Deal, expanded the role of the federal government in the nation's economy in an effort to address the challenges of the Great Depression.

He was elected to the presidency four times, serving from March 1933 until his death in office in April 1945.

Roosevelt's life and long career

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, fifth cousin of former President Teddy Roosevelt, was raised amid privilege in Hyde Park, New York. He attended Harvard University, was elected to the New York State Senate in 1910, and served as assistant secretary of the Navy during the First World War. From 1929 to 1932 he served as governor of New York.

Known as FDR, Roosevelt was elected President of the United States in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944. He served as the nation's 32nd president from March 4, 1933 to his death in 1945.

At age thirty-nine, Roosevelt contracted polio. He lost the use of his legs for the rest of his life, though the public was largely unaware of his disability. (In private, he moved around by wheelchair. In public, supported by steel leg braces and assistants, he could walk short distances.) His life experiences forged a man whose easygoing manner belied an interior toughness.

Roosevelt and the New Deal

In his 1932 run for the presidency, Roosevelt asserted that he would help "the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid," and pledged himself to "a new deal for the American people." In his First Inaugural Address, saying "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he sought to reassure the public amid the anxieties of the Great Depression.

As president he championed the series of federal legislative initiatives known as the New Deal. The New Deal was not a blueprint for action, but was instead animated by a spirit, as Roosevelt said, of "bold, persistent experimentation," in which he would "take a method and try it: if it fails, admit it frankly and try another."

On March 12, 1933, Roosevelt delivered the first of his live-radio " fireside chats." In the first chat he spoke about the banking crisis and explained the actions he and Congress had taken to address it. During his presidency he delivered thirty "fireside chats," explaining to the public in reassuring tones and plain-spoken language his New Deal policies and the Second World War through the medium of radio.

In an ill-fated move in 1937, President Roosevelt sought to pack the US Supreme Court, which had ruled against many of his programs, with justices who would be more favorable to the New Deal. His " court packing " plan called for adding an additional justice to the Court for every justice over the age of 70. The measure was widely denounced by the public and failed in Congress.

Although the New Deal did not ultimately succeed in lifting the United States out of the Great Depression, the United States' mobilization for World War II revived the economy during the late 1930s and 1940s.

What do you think?

Do you think Roosevelt's experience with polio changed his personality and politics? If so, how?

How would you characterize Roosevelt's approach to the Great Depression?

Why do you think the "fireside chats" were so effective as a tool for spreading public awareness of Roosevelt's policies?

Why did Roosevelt attempt to "pack" the Supreme Court? How might American politics be different if he had succeeded?

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FDR and the Great Depression (article) | Khan Academy

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932. He immediately embarked on an ambitious plan to get the country out of the Great Depression. Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the nation through the Great Depression. His signature domestic legislation, the New Deal, expanded the role of the federal government in the nation's economy in an effort to address the challenges of the Great Depression.

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The presidency of Herbert Hoover (article) | Khan Academy

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The presidency of Herbert Hoover (article) | Khan Academy

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When Herbert Hoover took office in 1929, he had no idea that the Great Depression was imminent.

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Assuming the Presidency at the depth of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt helped the American people regain faith in themselves. He brought hope as he promised prompt, vigorous action, and asserted in his Inaugural Address, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Born in 1882 at Hyde Park, New York-now a national historic site-he attended Harvard University and Columbia Law School. On St. Patrick's Day, 1905, he married Eleanor Roosevelt.

Following the example of his fifth cousin, President Theodore Roosevelt, whom he greatly admired, Franklin D. Roosevelt entered public service through politics, but as a Democrat. He won election to the New York Senate in 1910. President Wilson appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and he was the Democratic nominee for Vice President in 1920.

In the summer of 1921, when he was 39, disaster hit-he was stricken with poliomyelitis. Demonstrating indomitable courage, he fought to regain the use of his legs, particularly through swimming. At the 1924 Democratic Convention he dramatically appeared on crutches to nominate Alfred E. Smith as "the Happy Warrior." In 1928 Roosevelt became Governor of New York.

He was elected President in November 1932, to the first of four terms. By March there were 13,000,000 unemployed, and almost every bank was closed. In his first "hundred days," he proposed, and Congress enacted, a sweeping program to bring recovery to business and agriculture, relief to the unemployed and to those in danger of losing farms and homes, and reform, especially through the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

By 1935 the Nation had achieved some measure of recovery, but businessmen and bankers were turning more and more against Roosevelt's New Deal program. They feared his experiments, were appalled because he had taken the Nation off the gold standard and allowed deficits in the budget, and disliked the concessions to labor. Roosevelt responded with a new program of reform: Social Security, heavier taxes on the wealthy, new controls over banks and public utilities, and an enormous work relief program for the unemployed.

In 1936 he was re-elected by a top-heavy margin. Feeling he was armed with a popular mandate, he sought legislation to enlarge the Supreme Court, which had been invalidating key New Deal measures. Roosevelt lost the Supreme Court battle, but a revolution in constitutional law took place. Thereafter the Government could legally regulate the economy.

Roosevelt had pledged the United States to the "good neighbor" policy, transforming the Monroe Doctrine from a unilateral American manifesto into arrangements for mutual action against aggressors. He also sought through neutrality legislation to keep the United States out of the war in Europe, yet at the same time to strengthen nations threatened or attacked. When France fell and England came under siege in 1940, he began to send Great Britain all possible aid short of actual military involvement.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt directed organization of the Nation's manpower and resources for global war.

Feeling that the future peace of the world would depend upon relations between the United States and Russia, he devoted much thought to the planning of a United Nations, in which, he hoped, international difficulties could be settled.

As the war drew to a close, Roosevelt's health deteriorated, and on April 12, 1945, while at Warm Springs, Georgia, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

For more information about President Roosevelt, please visit Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum

Learn more about Franklin D. Roosevelt's spouse, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

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Assuming the Presidency at the depth of the Great Depression as our 32nd President (1933-1945), Franklin D. Roosevelt helped the American people regain faith in themselves.

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How American Racism Influenced Hitler | The New Yorker

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How American Racism Influenced Hitler | The New Yorker

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"History teaches, but has no pupils," the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. That line comes to mind when I browse in the history section of a bookstore. An adage in publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about Lincoln, Hitler, and dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis, and cats. In Germany, it's said that the only surefire magazine covers are ones that feature Hitler or sex. Whatever the formula, Hitler and Nazism prop up the publishing business: hundreds of titles appear each year, and the total number runs well into the tens of thousands. On store shelves, they stare out at you by the dozens, their spines steeped in the black-white-and-red of the Nazi flag, their titles barking in Gothic type, their covers studded with swastikas. The back catalogue includes "I Was Hitler's Pilot," "I Was Hitler's Chauffeur," "I Was Hitler's Doctor," "Hitler, My Neighbor," "Hitler Was My Friend," "He Was My Chief," and "Hitler Is No Fool." Books have been written about Hitler's youth, his years in Vienna and Munich, his service in the First World War, his assumption of power, his library, his taste in art, his love of film, his relations with women, and his predilections in interior design ("Hitler at Home").

Why do these books pile up in such unreadable numbers? This may seem a perverse question. The Holocaust is the greatest crime in history, one that people remain desperate to understand. Germany's plunge from the heights of civilization to the depths of barbarism is an everlasting shock. Still, these swastika covers trade all too frankly on Hitler's undeniable flair for graphic design. (The Nazi flag was apparently his creation-finalized after "innumerable attempts," according to " Mein Kampf.") Susan Sontag, in her 1975 essay " Fascinating Fascism," declared that the appeal of Nazi iconography had become erotic, not only in S & M circles but also in the wider culture. It was, Sontag wrote, a "response to an oppressive freedom of choice in sex (and, possibly, in other matters), to an unbearable degree of individuality." Neo-Nazi movements have almost certainly fed on the perpetuation of Hitler's negative mystique.

Americans have an especially insatiable appetite for Nazi-themed books, films, television shows, documentaries, video games, and comic books. Stories of the Second World War console us with memories of the days before Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, when the United States was the world's good-hearted superpower, riding to the rescue of a Europe paralyzed by totalitarianism and appeasement. Yet an eerie continuity became visible in the postwar years, as German scientists were imported to America and began working for their former enemies; the resulting technologies of mass destruction exceeded Hitler's darkest imaginings. The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May. In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had "gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand." When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for "living space" in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.

Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman's " Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law" (Princeton). On the cover, the inevitable swastika is flanked by two red stars. Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that, in "Mein Kampf," Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by "excluding certain races from naturalization." Whitman writes that the discussion of such influences is almost taboo, because the crimes of the Third Reich are commonly defined as "the nefandum, the unspeakable descent into what we often call 'radical evil.' " But the kind of genocidal hatred that erupted in Germany had been seen before and has been seen since. Only by stripping away its national regalia and comprehending its essential human form do we have any hope of vanquishing it.

The vast literature on Hitler and Nazism keeps circling around a few enduring questions. The first is biographical: How did an Austrian watercolor painter turned military orderly emerge as a far-right German rabble-rouser after the First World War? The second is sociopolitical: How did a civilized society come to embrace Hitler's extreme ideas? The third has to do with the intersection of man and regime: To what extent was Hitler in control of the apparatus of the Third Reich? All these questions point to the central enigma of the Holocaust, which has variously been interpreted as a premeditated action and as a barbaric improvisation. In our current age of unapologetic racism and resurgent authoritarianism, the mechanics of Hitler's rise are a particularly pressing matter. For dismantlers of democracy, there is no better exemplar.

Since 1945, the historiography of Nazism has undergone several broad transformations, reflecting political pressures both within Germany and abroad. In the early Cold War period, the emergence of West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet menace tended to discourage a closer interrogation of German cultural values. The first big postwar biography of Hitler, by the British historian Alan Bullock, published in 1952, depicted him as a charlatan, a manipulator, an "opportunist entirely without principle." German thinkers often skirted the issue of Hitler, preferring systemic explanations. Hannah Arendt's " The Origins of Totalitarianism " suggested that dictatorial energies draw on the loneliness of the modern subject.

In the sixties and seventies, as Cold War Realpolitik receded and the full horror of the Holocaust sank in, many historians adopted what is known as the Sonderweg thesis-the idea that Germany had followed a "special path" in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, different from that of other Western nations. In this reading, the Germany of the Wilhelmine period had failed to develop along healthy liberal-democratic lines; the inability to modernize politically prepared the ground for Nazism. In Germany, left-oriented scholars like Hans Mommsen used this concept to call for a greater sense of collective responsibility; to focus on Hitler was an evasion, the argument went, implying that Nazism was something that he did to us. Mommsen outlined a "cumulative radicalization" of the Nazi state in which Hitler functioned as a "weak dictator," ceding policy-making to competing bureaucratic agencies. Abroad, the Sonderweg theory took on a punitive edge, indicting all of German history and culture. William Manchester's 1968 book, " The Arms of Krupp," ends with a lurid image of "the first grim Aryan savage crouched in his garment of coarse skins, his crude javelin poised, tense and alert, cloaked by night and fog, ready; waiting; and waiting."

The Sonderweg argument was attacked on multiple fronts. In what became known as the Historikerstreit ("Historians' Dispute"), right-wing scholars in Germany proposed that the nation end its ritual self-flagellation: they reframed Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism and recast the Holocaust as one genocide among many. Joachim Fest, who had published the first big German-language biography of Hitler, also stood apart from the Sonderweg school. By portraying the Führer as an all-dominating, quasi-demonic figure, Fest effectively placed less blame on the Weimar Republic conservatives who put Hitler in office. More dubious readings presented Hitlerism as an experiment that modernized Germany and then went awry. Such ideas have lost ground in Germany, at least for now: in mainstream discourse there, it is axiomatic to accept responsibility for the Nazi terror.

Outside Germany, many critiques of the Sonderweg thesis came from the left. The British scholars Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, in their 1984 book " The Peculiarities of German History," questioned the "tyranny of hindsight"-the lordly perspective that reduces a complex, contingent sequence of events to an irreversible progression. In the allegedly backward Kaiserreich, Eley and Blackbourn saw various liberalizing forces in motion: housing reform, public-health initiatives, an emboldened press. It was a society riddled with anti-Semitism, yet it witnessed no upheaval on the scale of the Dreyfus Affair or the Tiszaeszlár blood-libel affair in Hungary. Eley and Blackbourn also questioned whether élitist, imperialist Britain should be held up as the modern paragon. The Sonderweg narrative could become an exculpatory fairy tale for other nations: we may make mistakes, but we will never be as bad as the Germans.

Ian Kershaw's monumental two-volume biography (1998-2000) found a plausible middle ground between "strong" and "weak" images of Hitler in power. With his nocturnal schedule, his dislike of paperwork, and his aversion to dialogue, Hitler was an eccentric executive, to say the least. To make sense of a dictatorship in which the dictator was intermittently absent, Kershaw expounded the concept of "working towards the Führer": when explicit direction from Hitler was lacking, Nazi functionaries guessed at what he wanted, and often further radicalized his policies. Even as debates about the nature of Hitler's leadership go back and forth, scholars largely agree that his ideology was more or less fixed from the mid-twenties onward. His two abiding obsessions were violent anti-Semitism and Lebensraum. As early as 1921, he spoke of confining Jews to concentration camps, and in 1923 he contemplated-and, for the moment, rejected-the idea of killing the entire Jewish population. The Holocaust was the result of a hideous syllogism: if Germany were to expand into the East, where millions of Jews lived, those Jews would have to vanish, because Germans could not coexist with them.

People have been trying to fathom Hitler's psyche for nearly a century. Ron Rosenbaum, in his 1998 book " Explaining Hitler," gives a tour of the more outré theories. It has been suggested, variously, that the key to understanding Hitler is the fact that he had an abusive father; that he was too close to his mother; that he had a Jewish grandfather; that he had encephalitis; that he contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute; that he blamed a Jewish doctor for his mother's death; that he was missing a testicle; that he underwent a wayward hypnosis treatment; that he was gay; that he harbored coprophilic fantasies about his niece; that he was addled by drugs; or-a personal favorite-that his anti-Semitism was triggered by briefly attending school with Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Linz. At the root of this speculative mania is what Rosenbaum calls the "lost safe-deposit box" mentality: with sufficient sleuthing, the mystery can be solved in one Sherlockian stroke.

Academic historians, by contrast, often portray Hitler as a cipher, a nobody. Kershaw has called him a "man without qualities." Volker Ullrich, a German author and journalist long associated with the weekly Die Zeit, felt the need for a biography that paid more heed to Hitler's private life. The first volume, " Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939," was published by Knopf in 2016, in a fluid translation by Jefferson Chase. Ullrich's Hitler is no tyrant-sorcerer who leads an innocent Germany astray; he is a chameleon, acutely conscious of the image he projects. "The putative void was part of Hitler's persona, a means of concealing his personal life and presenting himself as a politician who completely identified with his role as leader," Ullrich writes. Hitler could pose as a cultured gentleman at Munich salons, as a pistol-waving thug at the beer hall, and as a bohemian in the company of singers and actors. He had an exceptional memory that allowed him to assume an air of superficial mastery. His certitude faltered, however, in the presence of women: Ullrich depicts Hitler's love life as a series of largely unfulfilled fixations. It goes without saying that he was an extreme narcissist lacking in empathy. Much has been made of his love of dogs, but he was cruel to them.

From adolescence onward, Hitler was a dreamer and a loner. Averse to joining groups, much less leading them, he immersed himself in books, music, and art. His ambition to become a painter was hampered by a limited technique and by a telling want of feeling for human figures. When he moved to Vienna, in 1908, he slipped toward the social margins, residing briefly in a homeless shelter and then in a men's home. In Munich, where he moved in 1913, he eked out a living as an artist and otherwise spent his days in museums and his nights at the opera. He was steeped in Wagner, though he had little apparent grasp of the composer's psychological intricacies and ambiguities. A sharp portrait of the young Hitler can be found in Thomas Mann's startling essay "Bruder Hitler," the English version of which appeared in Esquire in 1939, under the title " That Man Is My Brother." Aligning Hitler's experience with his own, Mann wrote of a "basic arrogance, the basic feeling of being too good for any reasonable, honorable activity-based on what? A vague notion of being reserved for something else, something quite indeterminate, which, if it were named, would cause people to break out laughing."

The claims of "Mein Kampf" notwithstanding, there is no clear evidence that Hitler harbored strongly anti-Semitic views in his youth or in early adulthood. Indeed, he seems to have had friendly relations with several Jews in Vienna and Munich. This does not mean that he was free of commonplace anti-Jewish prejudice. Certainly, he was a fervent German nationalist. When the First World War commenced, in 1914, he volunteered for the German Army, and acquitted himself well as a soldier. For most of the war, he served as a dispatch runner for his regiment's commanders. The first trace of a swing to the right comes in a letter from 1915, in which Hitler expressed the hope that the war would bring an end to Germany's "inner internationalism."

The historian Thomas Weber, who recounted Hitler's soldier years in the 2010 book " Hitler's First War," has now written " Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi " (Basic), a study of the postwar metamorphosis. Significantly, Hitler remained in the Army after the Armistice; disgruntled nationalist soldiers tended to join paramilitary groups. Because the Social Democratic parties were dominant at the founding of the Weimar Republic, Hitler was representing a leftist government. He even served the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. It is doubtful, though, that he had active sympathies for the left; he probably stayed in the Army because, as Weber writes, it "provided a raison d'être for his existence." As late as his thirtieth birthday, in April, 1919, there was no sign of the Führer-to-be.

The unprecedented anarchy of postwar Bavaria helps explain what happened next. Street killings were routine; politicians were assassinated on an almost weekly basis. The left was blamed for the chaos, and anti-Semitism escalated for the same reason: several prominent leaders of the left were Jewish. Then came the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed in June, 1919. Robert Gerwarth, in " The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End " (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), emphasizes the whiplash effect that the treaty had on the defeated Central Powers. As Gerwarth writes, German and Austrian politicians believed that they had "broken with the autocratic traditions of the past, thus fulfilling the key criteria of Wilson's Fourteen Points for a 'just peace.' " The harshness of the terms of Versailles belied that idealistic rhetoric.

The day after Germany ratified the treaty, Hitler began attending Army propaganda classes aimed at repressing revolutionary tendencies. These infused him with hard-core anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic ideas. The officer in charge of the program was a tragic figure named Karl Mayr, who later forsook the right wing for the left; he died in Buchenwald, in 1945. Mayr described Hitler as a "tired stray dog looking for a master." Having noticed Hitler's gift for public speaking, Mayr installed him as a lecturer and sent him out to observe political activities in Munich. In September, 1919, Hitler came across the German Workers' Party, a tiny fringe faction. He spoke up at one of its meetings and joined its ranks. Within a few months, he had become the leading orator of the group, which was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

If Hitler's radicalization occurred as rapidly as this-and not all historians agree that it did-the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook. But Hitler's embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse. Peter Longerich's " Hitler: Biographie," a thirteen-hundred-page tome that appeared in Germany in 2015, gives a potent picture of Hitler's skills as a speaker, organizer, and propagandist. Even those who found his words repulsive were mesmerized by him. He would begin quietly, almost haltingly, testing out his audience and creating suspense. He amused the crowd with sardonic asides and actorly impersonations. The musical structure was one of crescendo toward triumphant rage. Longerich writes, "It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity."

Above all, Hitler knew how to project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would penetrate the white noise of politics. He fostered the production of catchy graphics, posters, and slogans; in time, he mastered radio and film. Meanwhile, squads of Brown Shirts brutalized and murdered opponents, heightening the very disorder that Hitler had proposed to cure. His most adroit feat came after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923, which should have ended his political career. At the trial that followed, Hitler polished his personal narrative, that of a simple soldier who had heard the call of destiny. In prison, he wrote the first part of "Mein Kampf," in which he completed the construction of his world view.

To many liberal-minded Germans of the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to represent a serious threat. The Weimar Republic stabilized somewhat in the middle of the decade, and the Nazi share of the vote languished in the low single-digit figures. The economic misery of the late twenties and early thirties provided another opportunity, which Hitler seized. Benjamin Carter Hett deftly summarizes this dismal period in " The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic " (Henry Holt). Conservatives made the gargantuan mistake of seeing Hitler as a useful tool for rousing the populace. They also undermined parliamentary democracy, flouted regional governments, and otherwise set the stage for the Nazi state. The left, meanwhile, was divided against itself. At Stalin's urging, many Communists viewed the Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the real enemy-the "social fascists." The media got caught up in pop-culture distractions; traditional liberal newspapers were losing circulation. Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, "the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again."

Hett refrains from poking the reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was doing when he left the word "German" out of his title. On the book's final page, he lays his cards on the table: "Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way-as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality-strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar." Yes, it does.

What set Hitler apart from most authoritarian figures in history was his conception of himself as an artist-genius who used politics as his métier. It is a mistake to call him a failed artist; for him, politics and war were a continuation of art by other means. This is the focus of Wolfram Pyta's " Hitler: Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr " ("The Artist as Politician and Commander"), one of the most striking recent additions to the literature. Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic-Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann-Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray. Goebbels's propaganda harped on this motif; his diaries imply that he believed it. "Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple," he wrote.

The true artist does not compromise. Defying skeptics and mockers, he imagines the impossible. Such is the tenor of Hitler's infamous "prophecy" of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: "I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again-if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." Scholars have long debated when the decision to carry out the Final Solution was made. Most now believe that the Holocaust was an escalating series of actions, driven by pressure both from above and from below. Yet no order was really necessary. Hitler's "prophecy" was itself an oblique command. In the summer of 1941, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was being fulfilled in an "almost uncanny" fashion. This is the language of a connoisseur admiring a masterpiece. Such intellectual atrocities led Theodor W. Adorno to declare that, after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric.

Hitler and Goebbels were the first relativizers of the Holocaust, the first purveyors of false equivalence. "Concentration camps were not invented in Germany," Hitler said in 1941. "It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations." The British had operated camps in South Africa, the Nazis pointed out. Party propagandists similarly highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin's slaughter in the Soviet Union. In 1943, Goebbels triumphantly broadcast news of the Katyn Forest massacre, in the course of which the Soviet secret police killed more than twenty thousand Poles. (Goebbels wanted to show footage of the mass graves, but generals overruled him.) Nazi sympathizers carry on this project today, alternately denying the Holocaust and explaining it away.

The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror. Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions-lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence. Hitler's "scientific anti-Semitism," as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair. The British Empire was Hitler's ideal image of a master race in dominant repose. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a Russian forgery from around 1900, fuelled the Nazis' paranoia. The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, "Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?" The Nazis found collaborators in almost every country that they invaded. In one Lithuanian town, a crowd cheered while a local man clubbed dozens of Jewish people to death. He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion. German soldiers looked on, taking photographs.

The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge. Large-scale deportations of Jews from the countries of the Third Reich followed upon Stalin's deportation of the Volga Germans. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust, thought that, once the Soviet Union had been defeated, the Jews of Europe could be left to die in the Gulag. The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable. One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side. This was the achievement of Timothy Snyder's profoundly disturbing 2010 book, " Bloodlands," which seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave of slaughter.

As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Whitman's "Hitler's American Model," with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel's " The American West and the Nazi East," a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl's " The Nazi Connection," which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to "eliminate" or "extirpate" Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, "Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property." General Philip Sheridan spoke of "annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction." To be sure, others promoted more peaceful-albeit still repressive-policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in " Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars " (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the "physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics," this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.

America's knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be "our Mississippi," he said. "Europe-and not America-will be the land of unlimited possibilities." Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands-tens of millions of them-would be starved to death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels's less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.

Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler's regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy-an "everybody does it" justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. "Race Law in the United States," a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism.

American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in " The Great Gatsby." (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard's 1920 tract " The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy," says, "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be-will be utterly submerged.") California's sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso-a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, "Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers." Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it "astounding" that other countries would decry Germany's treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans died fighting Nazi Germany. Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors. General George Patton criticized do-gooders who "believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals." Leading Nazi scientists had it better. Brian Crim's " Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State " (Johns Hopkins) reviews the shady history of Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program. When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace. He was able to reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor. Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered "demoralizing"); immigration was expedited. J. Edgar Hoover became concerned that Jewish obstructionists in the State Department were asking too many questions about the scientists' backgrounds. Senator Styles Bridges proposed that the State Department needed a "first-class cyanide fumigating job."

These chilling points of contact are little more than footnotes to the history of Nazism. But they tell us rather more about modern America. Like a colored dye coursing through the bloodstream, they expose vulnerabilities in the national consciousness. The spread of white-supremacist propaganda on the Internet is the latest chapter. As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material. She writes, "Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century." When I did a search for "Hitler" on YouTube the other day, I was first shown a video labelled "Best Hitler Documentary in color!"-the British production " Hitler in Color." A pro-Hitler remark was featured atop the comments, and soon, thanks to Autoplay, I was viewing contributions from such users as CelticAngloPress and SoldatdesReiches.

In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Donald Trump once kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed. When Trump was asked about it, he said, "If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them." Since Trump entered politics, he has repeatedly been compared to Hitler, not least by neo-Nazis. Although some resemblances can be found-at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler's strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard-the differences are obvious and stark. For one thing, Hitler had more discipline. What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler's malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy. He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher. He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

The artist-politician of the future will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche. He is more likely to take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture. The archetype of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a magic weapon might banish the spell. With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil. For most people, such stories remain fantasy, a means of embellishing everyday life. One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a "vague notion of being reserved for something else," may attempt to turn metaphor into reality. He might be out there now, cloaked by the blue light of a computer screen, ready, waiting. ♦

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“hitler’s american model: the united states and the making of nazi race laws”

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“the vanquished: why the first world war failed to end”

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“the death of democracy: hitler’s rise to power”

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“hitler: der kunstler als politiker und feldherr” (“the artist as politician and commander”)

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“our germans: project paperclip and the national security state”

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"History teaches, but has no pupils," the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. That line comes to mind when I browse in the history section of a bookstore. An adage in publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about Lincoln, Hitler, and dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis, and cats.

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What were some similarities between racism in Nazi Germany and in the United States, 1920s-1940s? | Holocaust Encyclopedia

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What were some similarities between racism in Nazi Germany and in the United States, 1920s-1940s? | Holocaust Encyclopedia

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Background

Racism developed within these two different contexts in ways specific to each country's history, political system, and culture.

Some discriminatory and segregationist practices in Germany and the United States were similar. However, the goals of the racist policies and the nature of the political systems within which they existed were different. The goal of racism in the United States was to permanently segregate and exploit African Americans in virtually every aspect of society, often through violent means. (A small minority in the United States wanted to deport Black people to Africa.) In Nazi Germany, the initial goal was a racially pure Germany free of Jews. Isolation, impoverishment, and terror were used to pressure Jews to leave. At the height of German domination of Europe during World War II, the goal became the genocide of all European Jews.

Which aspects of racism and eugenics in the United States most influenced racism in Nazi Germany?

Some US racial and eugenic laws and practices were an inspiration to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

Prior to taking power, the Nazi Party leader cited US policies in his 1925 political manifesto Mein Kampf ( My Struggle). Hitler was contemptuous of American democracy. However, he was impressed by the American notion of "Manifest Destiny." The United States used this concept to justify the brutal forced displacement of Native Americans. The Americans expanded westward and destroyed Native Americans to make room for white settlers. According to Hitler, this history served as a precedent for Germany. He believed Germany, too, should fulfill the nationalist desire to expand its territory eastward. This desire was rooted, in part, in Germany's disappointment that it had been late to the European scramble for colonies. Further, the few colonies Germany did acquire were taken away after its defeat in World War I.

Racist and eugenic practices and laws in the United States sometimes provided models for German legal experts. German lawyers and Nazi propagandists referred to precedents in the United States and elsewhere to argue that Nazi racial practices were legitimate and normal. They also used these precedents to point out the hypocrisy of American critics of Nazi racism.

German legal experts cited, for example, a 1909 California eugenic law. This law permitted the sterilization of patients in state psychiatric hospitals, institutions for people with mental disabilities (including "the feebleminded" and epileptics), and prisons. American eugenicists, meanwhile, were proud they had provided this model. For instance one of them took note of the Nazi law expanding permissible sterilization to individuals outside institutions. He even asserted, "The Nazis are beating us at our own game!"

The Nazi regime enacted the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. Then 45 German legal experts traveled to the United States to research American examples for ways to implement the laws. One law they found useful was the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924. This law set country quotas limiting immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Emigrants from these countries were primarily Catholics and Jews.

In their effort to determine how to define who was a Jew, German experts also studied US "blood fraction" laws. They looked at states that applied "blood fraction" principles to ban inter-racial marriages. None of the US "blood fraction" laws applied to Jews (who were considered "white"). However the German experts looked to the broader racist principles involved. One such example was the 1924 Racial Integrity Act of Virginia. This law defined "white persons'' as those who had no trace whatsoever of "blood" other than Caucasian, or had one-sixteenth or less American Indian "blood" and no other non-Caucasian blood.

The Nazi regime did adopt a "blood" standard to determine "racial" identity. However, it was less stringent than the Virginia law, tracing "blood heritage" of Jews back only three generations. German officials had to deal with other political and practical considerations in a society where most Jews had assimilated. These included the challenges of identifying persons with some Jewish heritage.

In what ways did racism in Nazi Germany and in the United States in the same period look alike?
Daily Life
The physical segregation of "races" characterized daily life in Nazi Germany and in the "Jim Crow" South, where local and state laws systematically suppressed Black people, as well as in many states beyond. Jews in Nazi Germany and Black people and other Americans of color in the United States, were seen as "racially inferior" and stigmatized as "the other." They endured hatred and countless humiliations and suffered deprivations as a result of discriminatory laws and practices. These policies limited freedom of movement, employment, education, housing, transportation, access to public services, leisure activities, the choice of marriage partner, among many other basic needs and rights. Communities in both countries posted signs restricting access to public spaces. Across Nazi Germany, there were park benches marked "Jews Only" or "Aryans Only," as well as public swimming pools and towns with signs reading "Jews Not Allowed." In the Jim Crow South, movie theaters, restaurants, water fountains, restrooms, or other public places were marked with signage reading "Whites Only" or "Colored."

The Military

Both the German and US military were segregated, though in tellingly different ways. In Nazi Germany, Jews were excluded from serving in the military in 1935 when conscription was reintroduced. In the United States, Black Americans served in segregated units until 1948. (In 1948, President Truman issued an Executive Order that required non-discrimination and began the long process of integration.)

The success of racial policies and segregation in both Nazi Germany and the United States relied upon the acquiescence or active support of ordinary people. Many ordinary citizens benefited financially, politically, and psychologically from these discriminatory practices. The Nazis promoted membership in a racially based "people's community" ( Volksgemeinschaft). This "community" excluded Jews and others. But to loyal "Aryans," it offered national unity and pride. Many Germans, especially young people, felt a sense of belonging. In the United States, white citizens enjoyed privileged status and opportunities. In both countries, many citizens believed in white supremacy or "Aryan" superiority. These beliefs have survived to varying degrees to the present day.

Racism and Antisemitism Endure

Racism and antisemitism persist in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, despite the fact that modern science has totally rejected 20th century notions of biologically determined distinct "races."

After World War II and the Holocaust, eugenics was discredited for several reasons. It was in part due to the genocide and other crimes committed in the name of Nazi racial ideology. Another reason eugenics was discredited was because of more advanced scientific understandings of human genetics. Research has shown that distinct genetic pools as markers of "race" do not exist. Across all humans, DNA is approximately 99.9% the same. In addition, research has shown that all human populations can trace their genetic roots to common origins in East Africa.

Today, the consensus among scientists is that "race" is not a genetic or biological concept. Rather, "race" is a cultural and social concept that has varied depending on time, place, and circumstances-a human invention.

Over the course of history, group targeted hatreds have endured, even if the rationale has sometimes changed. Regardless of the rationale, the targeting of individuals on the basis of skin color, religion, ethnicity, or nationality continues to result in discrimination, persecution, and violence, including mass atrocities and genocide.

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What were some similarities between racism in Nazi Germany and in the United States, 1920s-1940s?

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Racism developed within these two different contexts in ways specific to each country's history, political system, and culture. Some discriminatory and segregationist practices in Germany and the United States were similar. However, the goals of the racist policies and the nature of the political systems within which they existed were different.

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Before becoming a founding member of NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois was already well known as one of the foremost Black intellectuals of his era. The first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard University, Du Bois published widely before becoming NAACP's director of publicity and research and starting the organization's official journal, The Crisis, in 1910.

Leading Intellectual

Du Bois, a scholar at the historically Black Atlanta University, established himself as a leading thinker on race and the plight of Black Americans. He challenged the position held by Booker T. Washington, another contemporary prominent intellectual, that Southern Blacks should compromise their basic rights in exchange for education and legal justice. He also spoke out against the notion popularized by abolitionist Frederick Douglass that Black Americans should integrate with white society. In an essay published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1897, "Strivings of the Negro People," Du Bois wrote that Black Americans should instead embrace their African heritage even as they worked and lived in the United States.

Du Bois published his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. In this collection of essays, Du Bois described the predicament of Black Americans as one of "double consciousness": "One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." The term "double consciousness" has come to be widely used as a theoretical framework to apply to other dynamics of inequality.

Editor of The Crisis, NAACP's monthly journal

Du Bois became the editor of the organization's monthly magazine, , using his perch to draw attention to the still widespread practice of lynching, pushing for nationwide legislation that would outlaw the cruel extrajudicial killings. A 1915 article in the journal gave a year-by-year list of more than 2,700 lynchings over the previous three decades.

Du Bois, who considered himself a socialist, also published articles in favor of unionized labor, although he called out union leaders for barring Black membership. Under Du Bois's guidance, the journal attracted a wide readership, reaching 100,000 in 1920, and drew many new supporters to NAACP. With Du Bois as its mouthpiece, NAACP came to be known as the leading protest organization for Black Americans.
"One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
Du Bois served as editor of The Crisis until 1934, when he resigned following a rift with NAACP leadership over his controversial stance on segregation. He viewed the "separate but equal" status as an acceptable position for Blacks. Du Bois also resigned from the NAACP board and returned to Atlanta University.

Global citizen

After a ten-year hiatus, Du Bois came back to NAACP as the director of special research from 1944 to 1948. In this role, he attended the founding convention for the United Nations, channeling his energies toward lobbying the global body to acknowledge the suffering of Black Americans. He wrote the famous NAACP publication, "An Appeal to the World," a precursor to a report charging the United States with genocide for its ugly history of state-sanctioned lynchings. Du Bois also turned a spotlight onto the injustices of colonialism, urging the United Nations to use its influence to take a stand against such exploitative regimes.

Throughout his life, Du Bois was active in the Pan-Africanism movement, attending the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900. He later organized a series of Pan-African Congress meetings around the world in 1919, 1921, 1923, and 1927, bringing together intellectuals from Africa, the West Indies, and the United States.

At the end of his life, Du Bois embarked on an ambitious project to create a new encyclopedia on the African diaspora, funded by the government of Ghana. A citizen of the world until the end, the 93-year-old Du Bois moved to Ghana to manage the project, acquiring citizenship of the African country in 1961. Du Bois died in Ghana on Aug. 27, 1963, the day before the historic March on Washington.

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One of the premier Black scholars of his time, W.E.B. Du Bois was a founding member of the NAACP.

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W.E.B. Du Bois and the Foundation of the NAACP | The National Endowment for the Humanities

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W.E.B. Du Bois and the Foundation of the NAACP | The National Endowment for the Humanities

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As the twentieth-century began, W. E. B. Du Bois and other activists seeking more radical social change came together to form the Niagara Movement, setting the stage for the later NAACP and a truly national struggle for civil rights.

With Reconstruction in tatters after the rise of Jim Crow laws approved by a hostile Supreme Court, many African-Americans were becoming increasingly frustrated with the accommodationist advocacy of Booker T. Washington and other modest reformers, especially since the first years of the twentieth-century began with a rising number of brutal lynchings and race riots, continued unequal opportunities in education and employment, and continued denial of voting rights. A growing portion of the community sought new ways of securing equal rights and resisting regional and national discrimination, and one activist who empathized with this discontent was Professor W. E. B. Du Bois, the first African-American to receive a PhD from Harvard University and a vociferous opponent of Washington's unwritten "Atlanta Compromise" with Southern white leaders. In 1905, Du Bois, along with other dissident black intellectuals, assembled in Niagara Falls, Canada with the express purpose of establishing a national movement seeking a faster route to civil rights and racial equality. Rejecting both Washington's reformist views and white supremacy, the "Niagara Movement" set forth a strident set of policies calling for immediate and full freedom of speech and press, full suffrage, the abolition of discrimination based on race or color, and belief in universal human brotherhood. This message, however, was not well-received by the white political elite, nor the Washingtonian faction of the black community, and the Niagara Movement soon found itself embroiled in mortal difficulties despite branches spreading rapidly across the nation.

Four years after the Niagara meeting, and drawing on lessons learned from its collapse, Du Bois and other Niagara veterans took a new course and helped found the National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP subsequently offered Du Bois the position of Director of Publicity and Research, and Du Bois quickly took up the editor position at the organization's magazine, The Crisis. Through his work as editor, Du Bois highlighted and printed stories of lynchings and brutalities committed against blacks that were ignored entirely by the mainstream white or black presses. By 1920 it was shipping over 100,000 copies a month to subscribers, and the influence of the NAACP grew through a successive series of court victories overturning grandfather clauses and residential segregation. Find out more about the early history of the NAACP and how it presented a new national movement for racial equality at Edsitement, the National Endowment for the Humanities' educational website.

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W.E.B. Du Bois and the Foundation of the NAACP

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As the twentieth-century began, W. E. B. Du Bois and other activists seeking more radical social change came together to form the Niagara Movement, setting the stage for the later NAACP and a truly national struggle for civil rights.

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Booker T. Washington | Tuskegee University

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Booker T. Washington | Tuskegee University

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Booker T. Washington | Tuskegee University

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Booker T. Washington -- Tuskegee Institute

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Booker T. Washington -- Tuskegee Institute

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"I have observed that those who have accomplished the greatest results are those...who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient, and polite..."
- Booker T Washington

Booker Taliaferro Washington rose from slavery to a position of power and influence. A realist and a man of action, he became one of the most important African-American leaders of his time. He was committed to improving the lives of African-Americans after the Civil War. Washington advocated economic independence through self-help, hard work, and a practical education. His drive and vision built Tuskegee into a major African-American presence and place of learning.

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Booker T. Washington -- Tuskegee Institute

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Booker Taliaferro Washington rose from slavery to a position of power and influence. A realist and a man of action, he became one of the most important African-American leaders of his time. He was committed to improving the lives of African-Americans after the Civil War.

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1) | Oyez

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1) | Oyez

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History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment | United States Courts

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History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment | United States Courts

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The Plessy Decision

Although the Declaration of Independence stated that "All men are created equal," due to the institution of slavery, this statement was not to be grounded in law in the United States until after the Civil War (and, arguably, not completely fulfilled for many years thereafter). In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified and finally put an end to slavery. Moreover, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) strengthened the legal rights of newly freed slaves by stating, among other things, that no state shall deprive anyone of either "due process of law" or of the "equal protection of the law." Finally, the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) further strengthened the legal rights of newly freed slaves by prohibiting states from denying anyone the right to vote due to race.

Despite these Amendments, African Americans were often treated differently than whites in many parts of the country, especially in the South. In fact, many state legislatures enacted laws that led to the legally mandated segregation of the races. In other words, the laws of many states decreed that blacks and whites could not use the same public facilities, ride the same buses, attend the same schools, etc. These laws came to be known as Jim Crow laws. Although many people felt that these laws were unjust, it was not until the 1890s that they were directly challenged in court. In 1892, an African-American man named Homer Plessy refused to give up his seat to a white man on a train in New Orleans, as he was required to do by Louisiana state law. For this action he was arrested. Plessy, contending that the Louisiana law separating blacks from whites on trains violated the "equal protection clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, decided to fight his arrest in court. By 1896, his case had made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court. By a vote of 8-1, the Supreme Court ruled against Plessy. In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing the majority opinion, stated that:

"The object of the [Fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to endorse social, as distinguished from political, equality. . . If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane."

The lone dissenter, Justice John Marshal Harlan, interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment another way, stated, "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." Justice Harlan's dissent would become a rallying cry for those in later generations that wished to declare segregation unconstitutional.

Sadly, as a result of the Plessy decision, in the early twentieth century the Supreme Court continued to uphold the legality of Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination. In the case of Cumming v. Richmond (Ga.) County Board of Education (1899), for instance, the Court refused to issue an injunction preventing a school board from spending tax money on a white high school when the same school board voted to close down a black high school for financial reasons. Moreover, in Gong Lum v. Rice (1927), the Court upheld a school's decision to bar a person of Chinese descent from a "white" school.

The Road to Brown

(Note: Some of the case information is from Patterson, James T. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. Oxford University Press; New York, 2001.)

Early Cases

Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Plessy and similar cases, many people continued to press for the abolition of Jim Crow and other racially discriminatory laws. One particular organization that fought for racial equality was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded in 1909. For about the first 20 years of its existence, it tried to persuade Congress and other legislative bodies to enact laws that would protect African Americans from lynchings and other racist actions. Beginning in the 1930s, though, the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund began to turn to the courts to try to make progress in overcoming legally sanctioned discrimination. From 1935 to 1938, the legal arm of the NAACP was headed by Charles Hamilton Houston. Houston, together with Thurgood Marshall, devised a strategy to attack Jim Crow laws by striking at them where they were perhaps weakest-in the field of education. Although Marshall played a crucial role in all of the cases listed below, Houston was the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund while Murray v. Maryland and Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada were decided. After Houston returned to private practice in 1938, Marshall became head of the Fund and used it to argue the cases of Sweat v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma Board of Regents of Higher Education.

Pearson v. Murray (Md. 1936)

Disappointed that the University of Maryland School of Law was rejecting black applicants solely because of their race, beginning in 1933 Thurgood Marshall (who was himself rejected from this law school because of its racial acceptance policies) decided to challenge this practice in the Maryland court system. Before a Baltimore City Court in 1935, Marshall argued that Donald Gaines Murray was just as qualified as white applicants to attend the University of Maryland's School of Law and that it was solely due to his race that he was rejected. Furthermore, he argued that since the "black" law schools which Murray would otherwise have to attend were nowhere near the same academic caliber as the University's law school, the University was violating the principle of "separate but equal." Moreover, Marshall argued that the disparities between the "white" and "black" law schools were so great that the only remedy would be to allow students like Murray to attend the University's law school. The Baltimore City Court agreed and the University then appealed to the Maryland Court of Appeals. In 1936, the Court of Appeals also ruled in favor of Murray and ordered the law school to admit him. Two years later, Murray graduated.

Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada (1938)

Beginning in 1936, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund decided to take on the case of Lloyd Gaines, a graduate student of Lincoln University (an all-black college) who applied to the University of Missouri Law School but was denied because of his race. The State of Missouri gave Gaines the option of either attending an all-black law school that it would build (Missouri did not have any all-black law schools at this time) or having Missouri help to pay for him to attend a law school in a neighboring state. Gaines rejected both of these options, and, employing the services of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, he decided to sue the state in order to attend the University of Missouri's law school. By 1938, his case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and, in December of that year, the Court sided with him. The six-member majority stated that since a "black" law school did not currently exist in the State of Missouri, the "equal protection clause" required the state to provide, within its boundaries, a legal education for Gaines. In other words, since the state provided legal education for white students, it could not send black students, like Gaines, to school in another state.

Sweat v. Painter (1950)

Encouraged by their victory in Gaines' case, the NAACP continued to attack legally sanctioned racial discrimination in higher education. In 1946, an African American man named Heman Sweat applied to the University of Texas' "white" law school. Hoping that it would not have to admit Sweat to the "white" law school if a "black" school already existed, elsewhere on the University's campus, the state hastily set up an underfunded "black" law school. At this point, Sweat employed the services of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and sued to be admitted to the University's "white" law school. He argued that the education that he was receiving in the "black" law school was not of the same academic caliber as the education that he would be receiving if he attended the "white" law school. When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1950, the Court unanimously agreed with him, citing as its reason the blatant inequalities between the University's law school (the school for whites) and the hastily erected school for blacks. In other words, the "black" law school was "separate," but not "equal." Like the Murray case, the Court found the only appropriate remedy for this situation was to admit Sweat to the University's law school.

McLaurin v. Oklahoma Board of Regents of Higher Education (1950)

In 1949, the University of Oklahoma admitted George McLaurin, an African American, to its doctoral program. However, it required him to sit apart from the rest of his class, eat at a separate time and table from white students, etc. McLaurin, stating that these actions were both unusual and resulting in adverse effects on his academic pursuits, sued to put an end to these practices. McLaurin employed Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund to argue his case, a case which eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In an opinion delivered on the same day as the decision in Sweat, the Court stated that the University's actions concerning McLaurin were adversely affecting his ability to learn and ordered that they cease immediately.

Brown v. Board of Education (1954, 1955)

The case that came to be known as Brown v. Board of Education was actually the name given to five separate cases that were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the issue of segregation in public schools. These cases were Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Briggs v. Elliot, Davis v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County (VA.), Bolling v. Sharpe, and Gebhart v. Ethel. While the facts of each case are different, the main issue in each was the constitutionality of state-sponsored segregation in public schools. Once again, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund handled these cases.

Although it acknowledged some of the plaintiffs'/plaintiffs claims, a three-judge panel at the U.S. District Court that heard the cases ruled in favor of the school boards. The plaintiffs then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

When the cases came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court consolidated all five cases under the name of Brown v. Board of Education. Marshall personally argued the case before the Court. Although he raised a variety of legal issues on appeal, the most common one was that separate school systems for blacks and whites were inherently unequal, and thus violate the "equal protection clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Furthermore, relying on sociological tests, such as the one performed by social scientist Kenneth Clark, and other data, he also argued that segregated school systems had a tendency to make black children feel inferior to white children, and thus such a system should not be legally permissible.

Meeting to decide the case, the Justices of the Supreme Court realized that they were deeply divided over the issues raised. While most wanted to reverse Plessy and declare segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, they had various reasons for doing so. Unable to come to a solution by June 1953 (the end of the Court's 1952-1953 term), the Court decided to rehear the case in December 1953. During the intervening months, however, Chief Justice Fred Vinson died and was replaced by Gov. Earl Warren of California. After the case was reheard in 1953, Chief Justice Warren was able to do something that his predecessor had not-i.e. bring all of the Justices to agree to support a unanimous decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. On May 14, 1954, he delivered the opinion of the Court, stating that "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. . ."

Expecting opposition to its ruling, especially in the southern states, the Supreme Court did not immediately try to give direction for the implementation of its ruling. Rather, it asked the attorney generals of all states with laws permitting segregation in their public schools to submit plans for how to proceed with desegregation. After still more hearings before the Court concerning the matter of desegregation, on May 31, 1955, the Justices handed down a plan for how it was to proceed; desegregation was to proceed with "all deliberate speed." Although it would be many years before all segregated school systems were to be desegregated, Brown and Brown II (as the Courts plan for how to desegregate schools came to be called) were responsible for getting the process underway.

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History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment

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The Plessy Decision Although the Declaration of Independence stated that "All men are created equal," due to the institution of slavery, this statement was not to be grounded in law in the United States until after the Civil War (and, arguably, not completely fulfilled for many years thereafter).

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The Supreme Court . Expanding Civil Rights . Landmark Cases . Brown v. Board of Education (1954) | PBS

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The Supreme Court . Expanding Civil Rights . Landmark Cases . Brown v. Board of Education (1954) | PBS

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Mother (Nettie Hunt) and daughter (Nickie) sit on steps of the Supreme Court building on May 18, 1954, the day following the Court's historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Nettie is holding a newspaper with the headline "High Court Bans Segregation in Public Schools."

Reproduction courtesy of Corbis Images

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

Brown v. Board of Education (1954), now acknowledged as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century, unanimously held that the racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although the decision did not succeed in fully desegregating public education in the United States, it put the Constitution on the side of racial equality and galvanized the nascent civil rights movement into a full revolution.

In 1954, large portions of the United States had racially segregated schools, made legal by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that segregated public facilities were constitutional so long as the black and white facilities were equal to each other. However, by the mid-twentieth century, civil rights groups set up legal and political, challenges to racial segregation. In the early 1950s, NAACP lawyers brought class action lawsuits on behalf of black schoolchildren and their families in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, seeking court orders to compel school districts to let black students attend white public schools.

One of these class actions, Brown v. Board of Education was filed against the Topeka, Kansas school board by representative-plaintiff Oliver Brown, parent of one of the children denied access to Topeka's white schools. Brown claimed that Topeka's racial segregation violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause because the city's black and white schools were not equal to each other and never could be. The federal district court dismissed his claim, ruling that the segregated public schools were "substantially" equal enough to be constitutional under the Plessy doctrine. Brown appealed to the Supreme Court, which consolidated and then reviewed all the school segregation actions together. Thurgood Marshall, who would in 1967 be appointed the first black justice of the Court, was chief counsel for the plaintiffs.

Thanks to the astute leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court spoke in a unanimous decision written by Warren himself. The decision held that racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The Court noted that Congress, when drafting the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1860s, did not expressly intend to require integration of public schools. On the other hand, that Amendment did not prohibit integration. In any case, the Court asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal education today. Public education in the 20th century, said the Court, had become an essential component of a citizen's public life, forming the basis of democratic citizenship, normal socialization, and professional training. In this context, any child denied a good education would be unlikely to succeed in life. Where a state, therefore, has undertaken to provide universal education, such education becomes a right that must be afforded equally to both blacks and whites.

Were the black and white schools "substantially" equal to each other, as the lower courts had found? After reviewing psychological studies showing black girls in segregated schools had low racial self-esteem, the Court concluded that separating children on the basis of race creates dangerous inferiority complexes that may adversely affect black children's ability to learn. The Court concluded that, even if the tangible facilities were equal between the black and white schools, racial segregation in schools is "inherently unequal" and is thus always unconstitutional. At least in the context of public schools, Plessy v. Ferguson was overruled. In the Brown II case a decided year later, the Court ordered the states to integrate their schools "with all deliberate speed."

Opposition to Brown I and II reached an apex in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), when the Court ruled that states were constitutionally required to implement the Supreme Court's integration orders. Widespread racial integration of the South was achieved by the late 1960s and 1970s. In the meantime, the equal protection ruling in Brown spilled over into other areas of the law and into the political arena as well. Scholars now point out that Brown v. Board was not the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, but there is no doubt that it constituted a watershed moment in the struggle for racial equality in America.

AUTHOR'S BIO

Alex McBride is a third year law student at Tulane Law School in New Orleans. He is articles editor on the TULANE LAW REVIEW and the 2005 recipient of the Ray Forrester Award in Constitutional Law. In 2007, Alex will be clerking with Judge Susan Braden on the United States Court of Federal Claims in Washington.

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The Supreme Court . Expanding Civil Rights . Landmark Cases . Brown v. Board of Education (1954) | PBS

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Mother (Nettie Hunt) and daughter (Nickie) sit on steps of the Supreme Court building on May 18, 1954, the day following the Court's historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Nettie is holding a newspaper with the headline "High Court Bans Segregation in Public Schools." Reproduction courtesy of Corbis Images Brown v.

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The Five Cases - Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

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The Five Cases - Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

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The Five Cases - Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

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National Park Service Logo National Park Service

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (article) | Khan Academy

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (article) | Khan Academy

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn about the Supreme Court ruling that outlawed school segregation in the United States.

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A Century of Racial Segregation 1849–1950 - Brown v. Board at Fifty: "With an Even Hand" | Exhibitions - Library of Congress

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A Century of Racial Segregation 1849–1950 - Brown v. Board at Fifty: "With an Even Hand" | Exhibitions - Library of Congress

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After the abolition of slavery in the United States, three Constitutional amendments were passed to grant newly freed African Americans legal status: the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth provided citizenship, and the Fifteenth guaranteed the right to vote. In spite of these amendments and civil rights acts to enforce the amendments, between 1873 and 1883 the Supreme Court handed down a series of decisions that virtually nullified the work of Congress during Reconstruction. Regarded by many as second-class citizens, blacks were separated from whites by law and by private action in transportation, public accommodations, recreational facilities, prisons, armed forces, and schools in both Northern and Southern states. In 1896 the Supreme Court sanctioned legal separation of the races by its ruling in H.A. Plessy v. J.H. Ferguson, which held that separate but equal facilities did not violate the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment.

Beginning in 1909, a small group of activists organized and founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They waged a long struggle to eliminate racial discrimination and segregation from American life. By the middle of the twentieth century their focus was on legal challenges to public-school segregation. Two major victories before the Supreme Court in 1950 led the NAACP toward a direct assault on Plessy and the so-called "separate-but-equal" doctrine.

Upholding School Segregation: The Roberts Case

Five-year-old Sara Roberts was forced to walk past several white schools to reach the "colored" primary school. Her father, Benjamin Roberts, a black printer, filed a lawsuit against the city of Boston to integrate public schools. In 1849 reformer and future U.S. Senator Charles Sumner represented Roberts and challenged school segregation in the Boston court. Separate schools for African Americans, he argued, in effect branded "a whole race with the stigma of inferiority and degradation." The Massachusetts Supreme Court, however, upheld segregation in a widely cited ruling. Influential Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw noted that Boston's separate schools possessed substantially equal facilities and declared that school integration would only increase racial prejudice.

The Fourteenth Amendment

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which allowed the Federal Government to protect the civil rights of individuals, including African Americans, against state encroachment, was ratified in 1868. The amendment also defined national citizenship and extended it to former slaves freed by the Civil War. This 1866 letter to Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase is from Associate Justice Stephen J. Field, whose judicial opinions would significantly influence subsequent interpretations of the amendment. Field termed the amendment, which had recently been passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification, "just what we need" and said it showed that "the American people do not intend to give up all that they have gained by the war."

Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896

By the time Homer A. Plessy, an octoroon (one-eighth Negro blood), who lived in New Orleans, challenged that city's right to segregate public transportation by riding in a Whites Only rail car, the constitutional amendments, passed after the Civil War and written to provide protections and rights for Negro citizens, had been eroded. The Louisiana state courts ruled against Plessy, and his subsequent appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court was denied in 1896. The impact of Plessy was to relegate blacks to second-class citizenship. They were separated from whites by law and by private action in transportation, public accommodations, recreational facilities, churches, cemeteries and school in both Northern and Southern states.

Buchanan v. Warley

The NAACP sought out cases that infringed on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in order to set legal precedents and ultimately secure the constitutional rights of African Americans. An early victory was Buchanan v. Warley, a case involving residential segregation in Louisville, Kentucky. Moorfield Storey, the NAACP's first president and a constitutional attorney, argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court in April 1917. The Court reversed the decision of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, ruling that the Louisville ordinance violated the Fourteenth Amendment. As a result of the ruling, whites resorted to private restrictive covenants, in which property owners agreed to sell or rent to whites only. The Supreme Court declared this practice unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). Buchanan v. Warley was cited in the Brown decision to challenge the legality of segregated public schools.

Separate and Unequal

The 1896 court ruling in Plessy v Ferguson ushered in an era of "separate but equal" facilities and treatment for blacks and whites. In the area of education, it was felt that the children of former slaves would be better served if they attended their own schools and in their own communities. These images of schools for black students show that facilities were separate but never equal.

Chief Strategist Charles H. Houston

Charles Hamilton Houston was the chief strategist of the NAACP's legal campaign that culminated in the Brown decision. Born in Washington, D.C., he graduated from Amherst College, in 1915. In 1923 he became the first African American to earn a Doctor of Juridical Science degree at Harvard, where he studied under Felix Frankfurter. Houston intermittently practiced law as a partner in Houston & Houston, the prestigious firm his father founded in 1892. In 1924 he joined the faculty of Howard University Law School, and was appointed Vice Dean in 1929. By 1932 he had transformed the law school from a part-time evening school to a fully accredited institution that trained a cadre of civil rights attorneys. In 1935 the NAACP hired Houston as its first full-time salaried Special Counsel and created the Legal Department under his supervision. Although he returned to private practice in 1938, Houston continued to advise the NAACP until his death on April 22,1950.

Murray v. Maryland, 1936

While practicing law in Baltimore, Thurgood Marshall worked diligently to amass black teachers' salary cases for the NAACP. He also urged Houston to take on Murray v. Maryland, a stronger prospect than the Hocutt case. The plaintiff, Donald G. Murray was a highly qualified Amherst graduate who had been denied entry to the University of Maryland Law School. In 1935 Houston consented and argued the case with Marshall in Baltimore City Court before Judge Eugene O'Dunne. The Judge ruled that Murray had been rejected solely on the basis of race and ordered the University to admit him. Murray became the first black graduate of the University's law school in 1938.

Progress of the Hocutt v. Wilson case, 1933

In 1933 the NAACP undertook Hocutt v. Wilson, the first test case involving segregation in higher education. The plaintiff was Thomas R. Hocutt, a student at the North Carolina College for Negroes, who had been denied admission to the University of North Carolina's School of Pharmacy. Attorneys Conrad O. Pearson and Cecil McCoy appealed to the NAACP for assistance after filing a law suit. Charles Houston recommended William Hastie to direct the litigation. According to Pearson, "the white Bar [in attendance] was unanimous in its praise," of Hastie's and his colleagues' trial performance, but the case was undermined by the North Carolina College President's refusal to release Hocutt's transcript.

Integrating University of Missouri Law School

Charles Houston, NAACP Special Counsel, targeted law schools. He was optimistic that based on their own experience, white judges would reject the unequal training for black attorneys. After winning the Murray case, Houston worked with Marshall and Sidney Redmond on Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. In 1935 the University of Missouri Law School denied entry to Lloyd Gaines, an honor graduate of Lincoln University (Mo.), offering to build a law school at Lincoln or pay Gaines's tuition at an out-of-state school. Houston and Redmond argued the case before the U.S. Supreme court in 1938. The Court ruled that Missouri must offer Gaines an equal facility within its borders or admit him to the University's law school. In response, the State legislature tried to erect a makeshift law school inciting Houston to renew litigation. Meanwhile, Gaines disappeared, abruptly ending the case. His fate remains a mystery.

NAACP Leaders Joel and Arthur Spingarn

The favorable publicity generated by the Pink Franklin case attracted new supporters to the NAACP. Among them were Joel E. Spingarn, chairman of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and his brother, Arthur, a lawyer, shown in this photograph. In January 1911, the NAACP organized its first branch in Harlem, New York with Joel's help. The branch established a vigilance committee, which became the National Legal Committee, to deal "with injustice in the courts as it affects the Negro." Arthur worked pro bono because the NAACP could not afford to hire attorneys on a regular basis and was often able to convince other prominent attorneys to volunteer their services. Arthur served as the chairman of the National Legal Committee until 1939. The members of the Committee also included Felix Frankfurter and Charles Houston.

George W. McLaurin Segregated to the Anteroom

George W. McLaurin, a veteran school teacher living in Oklahoma applied to the all-white University of Oklahoma to pursue an advance degree in education in 1948. His application was rejected because Oklahoma statutes made it illegal for blacks and whites to attend the same school. McLaurin filed a complaint against the University on the state court level and won. He was allowed to attend classes but not with his fellow students. This photograph shows how he was segregated to the anteroom of a classroom in 1948 after his admission. In 1950, McLaurin filed suit with the and U.S. Supreme Court and won. The case paved the way for the Brown v. Board of Education cases.

Press Conference for the Sweatt Case

Thurgood Marshall hired Robert L. Carter as a legal assistant at the Legal Defense Fund in 1944 and promoted him to assistant counsel in 1945. Carter graduated from Lincoln University (Pa.), Howard Law School, and earned a Master of Laws from Columbia University. He helped to prepare briefs in the McLaurin and Sweatt cases, and argued McLaurin in Oklahoma and before the Supreme Court. Carter later became Marshall's key aide on the Brown litigation. He recommended the social science strategy that became a crucial factor in the Brown decision. He also wrote the brief for the Brown case and delivered the argument before the Supreme Court. He served as the NAACP's General Counsel from 1956 to 1968. In 1972 President Nixon appointed Carter to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where he still presides as a judge.

The Henderson, McLaurin and Sweatt Cases

The Legal Defense Fund waited twelve years to pursue two precedent-setting cases before the Supreme Court. In 1946 the University of Texas Law School denied entry to Heman Sweatt and proposed a makeshift law school for him in the basement of a building near all-black Prairie View University. In 1948 George McLaurin, a teacher, applied to the University of Oklahoma to pursue his doctorate. The University admitted McLaurin but segregated him from white students. The Court also considered another case, Henderson v. United States, which involved segregated dining cars on interstate trains. On June 5, the Court ruled in favor of all three plaintiffs. In Sweatt and McLaurin, the Court held that intangible factors could create educational inequality. These factors included the Texas Law School's superior reputation, faculty, and alumni network. The Court's decisions in these cases weakened the structure of legalized segregation.

Twentieth Annual Session of the NAACP

In 1929, the annual conference of the NAACP convened in Cleveland to mark the Association's twentieth anniversary. The NAACP had much to celebrate. It had launched a successful anti-lynching crusade; won important legal battles; and organized 325 branches. The Crisis, the Association's official organ, was the leading black periodical with a circulation of more than 100,000. Among the NAACP officials seated in the front row ( left to right) are W.E.B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis; James Weldon Johnson, NAACP Executive Secretary, 1920-1930; Robert Bagnall, Director of Branches; Daisy Lampkin, Regional Field Secretary; Walter White, Assistant Secretary, 1918-1929; William Pickens, Field Secretary; and Arthur Spingarn, Chairman of the Legal Committee.

An African American School House

This photograph shows the condition of many African American schools in the first decades of the twentieth century. Many states simply did not allocate enough funds to provide "equal" schools in the separate black schools. In South Carolina, the resulting inadequate condition for black children led to the Briggs v. Elliot case in 1954. The Briggs case would become one of the five included in the Brown decision.

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A Century of Racial Segregation 1849-1950 - Brown v. Board at Fifty: "With an Even Hand" | Exhibitions - Library of Congress

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Between 1849 and 1950, blacks were segregated from whites by law and private action in transportation, public accommodations, armed forces, recreational facilities, prisons, and schools in both northern and southern states.

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The Quest for Education - Separate Is Not Equal

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The Quest for Education - Separate Is Not Equal

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Before the 1860s most of the South had only a rudimentary public school system. After the Civil War, southern states ultimately created a dual educational system based on race. These separate schools were anything but equal.

Yet, the commitment of African American teachers and parents to education never faltered. They established a tradition of educational self-help and were among the first southerners to campaign for universal public education. They welcomed the support of the Freedmen's Bureau, white charities, and missionary societies. Black communities, many desperately poor, also dug deep into their own resources to build and maintain schools that met their needs and reflected their values.

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The Quest for Education - Separate Is Not Equal

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Before the 1860s most of the South had only a rudimentary public school system. After the Civil War, southern states ultimately created a dual educational system based on race. These separate schools were anything but equal. Yet, the commitment of African American teachers and parents to education never faltered.

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African Americans and Education During Reconstruction: The Tolson’s Chapel Schools (U.S. National Park Service)

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African Americans and Education During Reconstruction: The Tolson’s Chapel Schools (U.S. National Park Service)

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During the Reconstruction Era, African Americans in the former slave-holding states saw education as an important step towards achieving equality, independence, and prosperity. As a result, they found ways to learn despite the many obstacles that poverty and white people placed in their path. African Americans' commitment to education had lasting effects on the former slave-holding states. As voters and legislators, they played crucial roles in creating public schools for blacks and whites in the Southern and border states in the late 1800s.

In Sharpsburg, Maryland, a small church known as Tolson's Chapel was at the center of local blacks' efforts to educate themselves and their children. African American Methodists built Tolson's Chapel in 1866, just two years after the end of slavery in Maryland in 1864. For much of the period between 1868 and 1899, this modest building near the site of the Civil War Battle of Antietam served as both a church and a school. The history of the schools housed in Tolson's Chapel illustrates how African Americans across the former slave-holding states created and sustained schools during Reconstruction.

African American Education in Sharpsburg, 1864-1869

As African Americans built lives as free people in a free society during Reconstruction, they eagerly sought opportunities to learn. Before Emancipation, whites generally denied or restricted African Americans' access to education in an effort to justify and maintain slavery. Learning to read therefore became a symbol of freedom for African Americans in the former slave-holding states. African Americans had other reasons for making literacy a priority after slavery ended. Many hoped that education would improve their economic circumstances and offer some protection from fraud and exploitation. They also saw education as important preparation for participating in civic life.

African Americans faced significant challenges in their efforts to create schools during Reconstruction. One problem was a shortage of qualified teachers. In the early years of Reconstruction, local African Americans who could already read and write shared their knowledge with family, friends, and neighbors. In Sharpsburg, Maryland, for instance, David B. Simons, a literate African American and trustee of Tolson's Chapel, likely taught some children and adults in the town in the mid-1860s. However, given the small number of literate African Americans in most communities in the former slave-holding states, there were not enough local teachers to meet the demand. In addition, black communities often struggled to afford to pay a teacher's salary.

In hopes of getting financial assistance and more qualified teachers, African Americans in Sharpsburg and many other communities turned to the federal government's Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Established by Congress in March 1865 , this agency was commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau. Since the underfunded Bureau had limited money and staff to devote to building schools, it worked with Northern benevolent organizations and African American communities to place Northern teachers in freedpeople's schools in the Southern and border states. Northern benevolent organizations such as the American Missionary Society and the American Freedmen's Union Commission recruited and paid teachers. The Freedmen's Bureau then assigned the teachers to schools and provided them with transportation. The local African American community typically contributed room and board for the teacher as well as a building to house the school.

Thanks to the enthusiasm and persistence of the black community in Sharpsburg, the Freedmen's Bureau twice assigned a teacher to this small town in western Maryland. In April 1868, the Freedmen's Bureau sent Ezra Johnson, a white man from Pennsylvania, to Sharpsburg to teach. Johnson opened what he called the American Union School with limited financial assistance from Northern benefactors. John J. Carter, a black man, came to Sharpsburg to teach in the summer of 1869. The Presbyterian Home Mission paid his salary. African Americans in Sharpsburg provided room and board for both men.

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African Americans and Education During Reconstruction: The Tolson's Chapel Schools (U.S. National Park Service)

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During the Reconstruction Era, African Americans in the former slave-holding states saw education as an important step towards achieving equality, independence, and prosperity. As a result, they found ways to learn despite the many obstacles that poverty and white people placed in their path.

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State by State | Death Penalty Information Center

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State by State | Death Penalty Information Center

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The Death Penalty in the U.S.: How It Works and Which Presidents Have Used It | Teen Vogue

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The Death Penalty in the U.S.: How It Works and Which Presidents Have Used It | Teen Vogue

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Last year also marked the most civilian federal death penalties carried out in a single year since 1896, when 16 occurred under President Grover Cleveland.

Trump oversaw the federal executions of Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, and Orlando Cordia Hall in the weeks after his failed reelection campaign. His administration has scheduled three more executions - of Lisa Montgomery, Cory Johnson, and Dustin Higgs - to be carried out before he leaves office. If these executions occur, Trump will hold the record for most federal executions during a lame-duck period, surpassing Cleveland, who oversaw three.

According to Cassandra Stubbs, project director of the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project, "That President Trump has chosen to go forward with these executions even after his failed policies have been repudiated at the ballot box is indefensible."

Why do people want to abolish the death penalty?

Nearly half of U.S. states - 22 in total - have already abolished the death penalty. Krinsky says that the U.S. stands alone among Western democracies in continuing to engage in capital punishment, and a growing number of countries are abolishing the practice. According to Roger-Mark De Souza, chief movement building officer of Amnesty International USA, 142 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice, equaling about three-quarters of all nations worldwide.

Since 2007, the United Nations General Assembly has voted eight times to adopt a resolution calling for a global moratorium on the death penalty, most recently in November 2020. Though the U.S. voted against it, public sentiment against capital punishment seems to be shifting in this country. A 2019 Gallup poll found that for the first time since they began asking the question, in 1985, a majority of Americans said that life imprisonment is a better punishment than execution for the crime of murder.

Many erroneously claim that execution saves taxpayer dollars in the long run. Ngozi Ndulue, senior director of research and special projects for the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), countered that argument, telling Teen Vogue, "The death penalty costs more than life imprisonment. Period." She explained that the government spent at least $3 million on federal executions in 2020. Associated costs include extensive background checks to determine death-eligibility, segregated imprisonment of death row inmates, extra layers of jury selection, and paying to assign multiple federal attorneys to the case.

"[T]his is a life and death decision where you really can't go backward," Ndulue continued. "[W]e still see people who have been exonerated from death row after 30 years, after 40 years, after all of their processes have concluded."

COVID-19-related safety for inmates also became a widespread concern amid lockdown orders. According to De Souza, more U.S. death row inmates died of COVID-19 than were executed in the modern era of the U.S. death penalty.

According to the DPIC, approximately 100 individuals travel to a prison for each federal execution. Following Orlando Hall's killing on November 19, eight members of the Federal Bureau of Prisons execution team and Hall's spiritual advisor contracted COVID-19.

In some respects, the pandemic has emboldened calls to end the federal death penalty. According to the ACLU's Stubbs, "As the nation faces enormous fiscal challenges in light of COVID-19, ending the federal death penalty will free critical resources to work to priorities that will make us safer and our nation more just."

Critics of the death penalty, such as Krinsky, have also cited racial disproportionality as a reason to favor abolition of the practice. "I think when you look at the track record in this country, that it's wrong-headed and foolhardy to assume that we can fix this flawed process," she said, "or that we can reach a point where we no longer see the dramatic [racial] disproportionality that has resulted."

Why does this wave of federal executions matter?

Trump's spree of federal executions would be unprecedented in magnitude and circumstance alone, but the cases themselves are also novel: In recent history, Honken was the first person to be executed for a crime committed in a state where the death penalty had been abolished, and Lezmond Mitchell was the first Native American to be federally executed.

The Biden administration has promised to abolish the power of federal execution and work to abolish it on the state level as well. Stubbs, for one, expresses hope: "By working to end the federal death penalty and prohibiting federal executions, President-elect Biden can banish the racist, costly, and failed federal death penalty to the dustbin of history where it belongs."

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Republicans Like Betsy DeVos and Ted Cruz Are Cowards for Empowering Trump

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A History of the Death Penalty in the United States

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Last year also marked the most civilian federal death penalties carried out in a single year since 1896, when 16 occurred under President Grover Cleveland. Trump oversaw the federal executions of Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, and Orlando Cordia Hall in the weeks after his failed reelection campaign.

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Readings - History Of The Death Penalty | The Execution

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Readings - History Of The Death Penalty | The Execution

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[From: Society's Final Solution: A History and Discussion of the Death Penalty, Laura E. Randa, ed., University Press of America, Inc., 1997. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.]

As far back as the Ancient Laws of China, the death penalty has been established as a punishment for crimes. In the 18th Century BC, the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon codified the death penalty for twenty five different crimes, although murder was not one of them. The first death sentence historically recorded occurred in 16th Century BC Egypt where the wrongdoer, a member of nobility, was accused of magic, and ordered to take his own life. During this period non-nobility was usually killed with an ax.

In the 14th Century BC, the Hittite Code also prescribed the death penalty. The 7th Century BC Draconian Code of Athens made death the penalty for every crime committed. In the 5th Century BC, the Roman Law of the Twelve Tablets codified the death penalty. Again, the death penalty was different for nobility, freemen and slaves and was punishment for crimes such as the publication of libels and insulting songs, the cutting or grazing of crops planted by a farmer, the burning [of] a house or a stack of corn near a house, cheating by a patron of his client, perjury, making disturbances at night in the city, willful murder of a freeman or a parent, or theft by a slave. Death was often cruel and included crucifixion, drowning at sea, burial alive, beating to death, and impalement (often used by Nero). The Romans had a curious punishment for parricides (murder of a parent): the condemned was submersed in water in a sack, which also contained a dog, a rooster, a viper and an ape. The most notorious death execution in BC was about 399 BC when the Greek philosopher Socrates was required to drink poison for heresy and corruption of youth.

Mosaic Law codified many capital crimes. In fact, there is evidence that Jews used many different techniques including stoning, hanging, beheading, crucifixion (copied from the Romans), throwing the criminal from a rock, and sawing asunder. The most infamous execution of history occurred approximately 29 AD with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ outside Jerusalem. About 300 years later, the Emperor Constantine, after converting to Christianity, abolished crucifixion and other cruel death penalties in the Roman Empire. In 438, the Code of Theodosius made more than 80 crimes punishable by death.

Britain influenced the colonies more than any other country and has a long history of punishment by death. About 450 BC, the death penalty was often enforced by throwing the condemned into a quagmire. By the 10th Century, hanging from gallows was the most frequent execution method. William the Conqueror opposed taking life except in war, and ordered no person to be hanged or executed for any offense. However, he allowed criminals to be mutilated for their crimes. During the middle ages, capital punishment was accompanied by torture. Most barons had a drowning pit as well as gallows and they were used for major as well as minor crimes. For example, in 1279, two hundred and eighty nine Jews were hanged for clipping coin. Under Edward I, two gatekeepers were killed because the city gate had not been closed in time to prevent the escape of an accused murderer. Burning was the punishment for women's high treason and men were hanged, drawn and quartered. Beheading was generally accepted for the upper classes. One could be burned for marrying a Jew. Pressing became the penalty for those who would not confess to their crimes. The executioner placed heavy weights on the victim's chest. On the first day he gave the victim a small quantity of bread, on the second day a small drink of bad water, and so on until he confessed or died. Under the reign of Henry VIII, the numbers of those put to death are estimated as high as 72,000. Boiling to death was another penalty approved in 1531, and there are records to show some people boiled for up to two hours before death took them. When a woman was burned, the executioner tied a rope around her neck when she was tied to the stake. When the flames reached her she could be strangled from outside the ring of fire. However, this often failed and many were literally burnt alive.

In Britain, the number of capital offenses continually increased until the 1700's when two hundred and twenty-two crimes were punishable by death. These included stealing from a house in the amount of forty shillings, stealing from a shop the value of five shillings, robbing a rabbit warren, cutting down a tree, and counterfeiting tax stamps. However, juries tended not to convict when the penalty was great and the crime was not. Reforms began to take place. In 1823, five laws passed, exempting about a hundred crimes from the death [penalty]. Between 1832 and 1837, many capital offenses were swept away. In 1840, there was a failed attempt to abolish all capital punishment. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more and more capital punishments were abolished, not only in Britain, but also all across Europe, until today only a few European countries retain the death penalty.

The first recorded execution in the English American colonies was in 1608 when officials executed George Kendall of Virginia for supposedly plotting to betray the British to the Spanish. In 1612, Virginia's governor, Sir Thomas Dale, implemented the Divine, Moral, and Martial Laws that made death the penalty for even minor offenses such as stealing grapes, killing chickens, killing dogs or horses without permission, or trading with Indians. Seven years later these laws were softened because Virginia feared that no one would settle there.

In 1622, the first legal execution of a criminal, Daniel Frank, occurred in Virginia for the crime of theft. Some colonies were very strict in their use of the death penalty, while others were less so. In Massachusetts Bay Colony the first execution was in 1630, but the earliest capital statutes do not occur until later. Under the Capital Laws of New-England that went into effect between 1636-1647 the death penalty was meted out for pre-meditated murder, sodomy, witchcraft, adultery, idolatry, blasphemy, assault in anger, rape, statutory rape, manstealing, perjury in a capital trial, rebellion, manslaughter, poisoning and bestiality. Early laws were accompanied by a scripture from the Old Testament. By 1780, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts only recognized seven capital crimes: murder, sodomy, burglary, buggery, arson, rape, and treason.

The New York colony instituted the so-called Duke's Laws of 1665. This directed the death penalty for denial of the true God, pre-meditated murder, killing someone who had no weapon of defense, killing by lying in wait or by poisoning, sodomy, buggery, kidnapping, perjury in a capital trial, traitorous denial of the king's rights or raising arms to resist his authority, conspiracy to invade towns or forts in the colony and striking one's mother or father (upon complaint of both). The two colonies that were more lenient concerning capital punishment were South Jersey and Pennsylvania. In South Jersey there was no death penalty for any crime and there were only two crimes, murder and treason, punishable by death.

However under the direction of the Crown, harsher penal codes were execution there until 1691 [sic]. In Pennsylvania, William Penn's Great Act (1682) made passed in the colonies [sic]. By 1776, most of the colonies had roughly comparable death statutes which covered arson, piracy, treason, murder, sodomy, burglary, robbery, rape, horse-stealing, slave rebellion, and often counterfeiting. Hanging was the usual sentence. Rhode Island was probably the only colony which decreased the number of capital crimes in the late 1700's.

Some states were more severe. For example, by 1837, North Carolina required death for the crimes of murder, rape, statutory rape, slave-stealing, stealing bank notes, highway robbery, burglary, arson, castration, buggery, sodomy, bestiality, dueling where death occurs, hiding a slave with intent to free him, taking a free Negro out of state to sell him, bigamy, inciting slaves to rebel, circulating seditious literature among slaves, accessory to murder, robbery, burglary, arson, or mayhem and others. However, North Carolina did not have a state penitentiary and, many said, no suitable alternative to capital punishment.

The first reforms of the death penalty occurred between 1776-1800. Thomas Jefferson and four others, authorized to undertake a complete revision of Virginia's laws, proposed a law that recommended the death penalty for only treason and murder. After a stormy debate the legislature defeated the bill by one vote. The writing of European theorists such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Bentham had a great effect on American intellectuals, as did English Quaker prison reformers John Bellers and John Howard.

On Crimes and Punishment, published in English in 1767 by the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria, whose exposition on abolishing capital punishment was the most influential of the time, had an especially strong impact. He theorized that there was no justification for the taking of life by the state. He said that the death penalty was "a war of a whole nation against a citizen, whose destruction they consider as necessary, or useful to the general good." He asked the question what if it can be shown not to be necessary or useful? His essay conceded that the only time a death was necessary was when only one's death could insure the security of a nation - which would be rare and only in cases of absolute anarchy or when a nation was on the verge of losing its liberty. He said that the history of using punishment by death (e.g., the Romans, 20 years of Czaress Elizabeth) had not prevented determined men from injuring society and that death was only a "momentary spectacle, and therefore a less efficacious method of deterring others, than the continued example of a man deprived of his liberty...."

Organizations were formed in different colonies for the abolition of the death penalty and to relieve poor prison conditions. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a renowned Philadelphia citizen, proposed the complete abolition of capital punishment. William Bradford, Attorney General of Pennsylvania, was ordered to investigate capital punishment. In 1793 he published An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania. He strongly insisted that the death penalty be retained, but admitted it was useless in preventing certain crimes. In fact, he said the death penalty made convictions harder to obtain, because in Pennsylvania, and indeed in all states, the death penalty was mandatory and juries would often not return a guilty verdict because of this fact. In response, in 1794, the Pennsylvania legislature abolished capital punishment for all crimes except murder "in the first degree," the first time murder had been broken down into "degrees." In New York, in 1796, the legislature authorized construction of the state's first penitentiary, abolished whipping, and reduced the number of capital offenses from thirteen to two. Virginia and Kentucky passed similar reform bills. Four more states reduced its capital crimes: Vermont in 1797, to three; Maryland in 1810, to four; New Hampshire in 1812, to two and Ohio in 1815, to two. Each of these states built state penitentiaries. A few states went the opposite direction. Rhode Island restored the death penalty for rape and arson; Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut raised death crimes from six to ten, including sodomy, maiming, robbery, and forgery. Many southern states made more crimes capital, especially for slaves.

The first great reform era occurred between 1833-1853. Public executions were attacked as cruel. Sometimes tens of thousands of eager viewers would show up to view hangings; local merchants would sell souvenirs and alcohol. Fighting and pushing would often break out as people jockeyed for the best view of the hanging or the corpse! Onlookers often cursed the widow or the victim and would try to tear down the scaffold or the rope for keepsakes. Violence and drunkenness often ruled towns far into the night after "justice had been served." Many states enacted laws providing private hangings. Rhode Island (1833), Pennsylvania (1834), New York (1835), Massachusetts (1835), and New Jersey (1835) all abolished public hangings. By 1849, fifteen states were holding private hangings. This move was opposed by many death penalty abolitionists who thought public executions would eventually cause people to cry out against execution itself. For example, in 1835, Maine enacted what was in effect a moratorium on capital punishment after over ten thousand people who watched a hanging had to be restrained by police after they became unruly and began fighting. All felons sentenced to death would have to remain in prison at hard labor and could not be executed until one year had elapsed and then only on the governor's order. No governor ordered an execution under the "Maine Law" for twenty-seven years. Though many states argued the merits of the death penalty, no state went as far as Maine. The most influential reformers were the clergy. Ironically, the small but powerful group which opposed the abolitionists were also clergy. They were, almost to a person, members of the Calvinist clergy, especially the Congregationalists and Presbyterians who could be called the religious establishment of the time. They were led by George Cheever.

Finally, in 1846, Michigan became the first state to abolish the death penalty (except for treason against the state), mostly because it had no long tradition of capital punishment (there had been no hanging since 1830, before statehood) and because frontier Michigan had few established religious groups to oppose it as was the case in the east. In 1852, Rhode Island abolished the death penalty led by Unitarians, Universalists, and especially Quakers. In the same year, Massachusetts limited its death penalty to first-degree murder. In 1853, Wisconsin abolished the death penalty after a gruesome execution in which the victim struggled for five minutes at the end of the rope, and a full eighteen minutes passed before his heart finally quit.

During the last half of the century the death penalty abolition movement ground to a half, with many members moving into the slavery abolition movement. At the same time, states began to pass laws against mandatory death sentences. Legislators in eighteen states shifted from mandatory to discretionary capital punishment by 1895, not to save lives, but to try to increase convictions and executions of murderers. Still, abolitionists gained a few victories. Maine abolished the death penalty, restored it, and then abolished it again between 1876-1887. Iowa abolished the death penalty for six years. Kansas passed a "Maine Law" in 1872 which operated as de facto abolition.

Electrocution as a method of execution came onto the scene in an unlikely manner. Edison Company with its DC (direct current) electrical systems began attacking Westinghouse Company and its AC (alternating current) electrical systems as they were pressing for nationwide electrification with alternating current. To show how dangerous AC could be, Edison Company began public demonstrations by electrocuting animals. People reasoned that if electricity could kill animals, it could kill people. In 1888, New York approved the dismantling of its gallows and the building of the nation's first electric chair. It held its first victim, William Kemmler, in 1890, and even though the first electrocution was clumsy at best, other states soon followed the lead.

The Second Great Reform era was 1895-1917. In 1897, U.S. Congress passed a bill reducing the number of federal death crimes. In 1907, Kansas took the "Maine Law" a step further and abolished all death penalties. Between 1911 and 1917, eight more states abolished capital punishment (Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oregon, Arizona, Missouri and Tennessee - the latter in all cases but rape). Votes in other states came close to ending the death penalty.

However, between 1917 and 1955, the death penalty abolition movement again slowed. Washington, Arizona, and Oregon in 1919-20 reinstated the death penalty. In 1924, the first execution by cyanide gas took place in Nevada, when Tong war gang murderer Gee Jon became its first victim. The state wanted to secretly pump cyanide gas into Jon's cell at night while he was asleep as a more humanitarian way of carrying out the penalty, but, technical difficulties prohibited this and a special "gas chamber" was hastily built. Other concerns developed when less "civilized" methods of execution failed. In 1930, Mrs. Eva Dugan became the first female to be executed by Arizona. The execution was botched when the hangman misjudged the drop and Mrs. Dugan's head was ripped from her body. More states converted to electric chairs and gas chambers. During this period of time, abolitionist organizations sprang up all across the country, but they had little effect. There were a number of stormy protests against the execution of certain convicted felons (e.g., Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), but little opposition against the death penalty itself. In fact, during the anti-Communist period with all its fears and hysteria, Texas Governor Allan Shivers seriously suggested that capital punishment be the penalty for membership in the Communist Party.

The movement against capital punishment revived again between 1955 and 1972.

England and Canada completed exhaustive studies which were largely critical of the death penalty and these were widely circulated in the U.S. Death row criminals gave their own moving accounts of capital punishment in books and film. Convicted kidnapper Caryl Chessman published Cell 2455 Death Row and Trial by Ordeal. Barbara Graham's story was utilized in book and film with I Want to Live! after her execution. Television shows were broadcast on the death penalty. Hawaii and Alaska ended capital punishment in 1957, and Delaware did so the next year. Controversy over the death penalty gripped the nation, forcing politicians to take sides. Delaware restored the death penalty in 1961. Michigan abolished capital punishment for treason in 1963. Voters in 1964 abolished the death penalty in Oregon. In 1965 Iowa, New York, West Virginia, and Vermont ended the death penalty. New Mexico abolished the death penalty in 1969.

Trying to end capital punishment state-by-state was difficult at best, so death penalty abolitionists turned much of their efforts to the courts. They finally succeeded on June 29, 1972 in the case Furman v. Georgia. In nine separate opinions, but with a majority of 5-4, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the way capital punishment laws were written, including discriminatory sentencing guidelines, capital punishment was cruel and unusual and violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. This effectively ended capital punishment in the United States. Advocates of capital punishment began proposing new capital statutes which they believed would end discrimination in capital sentencing, therefore satisfying a majority of the Court. By early 1975, thirty states had again passed death penalty laws and nearly two hundred prisoners were on death row. In Gregg v. Georgia (1976), the Supreme Court upheld Georgia's newly passed death penalty and said that the death penalty was not always cruel and unusual punishment. Death row executions could again begin. Another form of execution was soon found. Oklahoma passed the first death by lethal injection law, based on economics as much as humanitarian reasons. The old electric chair that had not been used in eleven years would require expensive repairs. Estimates of over $200,000 were given to build a gas chamber, while lethal injection would cost no more than ten to fifteen dollars "per event."

The controversy over the death penalty continues today. There is a strong movement against lawlessness propelled by citizens' fears for their security. Politicians at the national and state levels are taking the floor of legislatures and calling for more frequent death penalties, death penalties penalty [sic] for more crimes, and longer prison sentences. Those opposing these moves counter by arguing that tougher sentences do not slow crime and that crime is little or no worse than in the past. In fact, FBI statistics show murders are now up. (For example 9.3 persons per 100,000 population were murdered in 1973 and 9.4 persons per 100,000 were murdered in 1992). The battle lines are still drawn and the combat will probably always be fought.

A number of important capital punishment decisions have been made by the Supreme Court. The following is a list of the more important ones along with their legal citations:

Wilkerson v. Utah 99 U.S. 130 (1878) - Court upheld execution by firing squad, but said that other types of torture such as "drawing and quartering, embowelling alive, beheading, public dissection, and burring alive and all other in the same line of...cruelty, are forbidden."

Weems v. U.S. 217 U.S. 349 (1910) - Court held that what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment had not been decided, but that it should not be confined to the "forms of evil" that framers of the Bill of Rights had experienced. Therefore, "cruel and unusual" definitions are subject to changing interpretations.

Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber 329 U.S. 459 (1947) - On May 3, 1946, convicted seventeen year old felon Willie Francis was placed in the electric chair and the switch was thrown. Due to faulty equipment, he survived (even though he was severely shocked), was removed from the chair and returned to his cell. A new death warrant was issued six days later. The Court ruled 5-4 that it was not "cruel and unusual" to finish carrying out the sentence since the state acted in good faith in the first attempt. "The cruelty against which the Constitution protects a convicted man is cruelty inherent in the method of punishment," said the Court, "not the necessary suffering involved in any method employed to extinguish life humanely." He was then executed.

Tropp v. Dulles 356 U.S. 86 (1958) - The Court Ruled that punishment would be considered "cruel and unusual" if it was one of "tormenting severity," cruel in its excessiveness or unusual in punishment "must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."

Furman v. Georgia 408 U.S. 238 (1972) - The Court looking at three cases struck down the death penalty in many states and set up the standard that punishment would be considered "cruel and unusual" if any of the following were present: 1) it was too severe for the crime; 2) it was arbitrary (some get the punishment and others do not, without guidelines); 3) it offends society's sense of justice; 4) it was not more effective than a less severe penalty.

Gregg v. Georgia 428 U.S. 153 (1976) - [The] Court upheld Georgia's newly passed death penalty and said that the death penalty was not always cruel and unusual punishment.

Tison v. Arizona 481 U.S. 137 (1987) - [The] Court upheld Arizona's death penalty for major participation in a felony with "reckless indifference to human life."

Thompson v. Oklahoma 108 S. Ct. 2687 (1987) - The Court considered the question of execution of minors under the age of 16 at the time of the murder. The victim was the brother-in-law, who he accused of beating his sister. He and three others beat the victim, shot him twice, cut his throat, chest, and abdomen, chained him to a concrete block and threw the body into a river where it remained for four weeks. Each of the four participants were tried separately and all were sentenced to death. In a 5-3 decision, four Justices ruled that Thompson's death sentence was cruel and unusual. The fifth, O'Connor, concurred but noted that a state must set a minimum age and held out the possibility that if a state lowers, by statute, the minimum death penalty age below sixteen, she might support it. She stated, "Although, I believe that a national consensus forbidding the execution of any person for a crime committed before the age of 16 very likely does exist, I am reluctant to adopt this conclusion as a matter of constitutional law without better evidence that [sic] we now possess." States with no minimum age have rushed to specify a statute age.

Penry v. Lynaugh 492 U.S. [sic] (1989) - [The] Court held that persons considered retarded, but legally sane, could receive the death penalty. It was not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment if jurors were given the opportunity to consider mitigating circumstances. In this case, the defendant had the mental age of approximately a six-year old child.

John Laurence, A History of Capital Punishment (N.Y.: The Citadel
Press, 1960), 1-3.

Michael Kronenwetter, Capital Punishment: AReference Handbook (Santa
Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 1993), 71.

Ibid., p.72; Laurence, op.cit., 4-9.

Hugo Adam Bedau, The Death Penalty in America (N.Y.: Oxford
University Press, 1982).

Phillip English Mackey, Voices Against Death: American Opposition to
Capital Punishment, 1787-1975 (N.Y.: Burt Franklin & Co., Inc., 1976),
xi-xii.

Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment, trans. Henry Paolucci
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963).

Mackey, op. cit., xvi-xvii.

FBI Uniform Crime Report 1992; The Sentencing Project.

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A History of the Death Penalty from Laura E. Randa's Society's "Final Solution: A History and Discussion of the Death Penalty."

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History of the Death Penalty | Death Penalty Information Center

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History of the Death Penalty | Death Penalty Information Center

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History of Capital Punishment | C-SPAN.org

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History of Capital Punishment | C-SPAN.org

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Rachael Penman gave a tour of the Alcatraz East Crime Museum 's capital punishment exhibit, focusing on the museum's electric chair and gas chamber. The interview was part of episode of C-SPAN's Landmark Cases series.

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Rachael Penman gave a tour of the Alcatraz East Crime Museum 's capital punishment exhibit, focusing on the museum's electric chair and gas chamber. The interview was part of episode of C-SPAN's Landmark Cases series.

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The Scottsboro Boys | National Museum of African American History and Culture

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The Scottsboro Boys | National Museum of African American History and Culture

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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The case of the Scottsboro Boys lasted more than 80 years and helped spur the Civil Rights Movement.

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The Saga of The Scottsboro Boys | American Civil Liberties Union

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The Saga of The Scottsboro Boys | American Civil Liberties Union

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The Defense Committee appealed to Gov. Bibb Graves to free their clients who remained in prison, arguing that some could not be innocent and the rest guilty. Committee members negotiated an agreement with the governor to pardon the remaining four in October 1938, but the governor reneged.

On October 25, 1976, Alabama Gov. George Wallace pardoned Clarence Norris at the request of the NAACP. Norris, then 64, had spent 15 years behind bars, five of those on death row. At an event that December, Norris was asked how he would change things if he could relive his life. "I would not come back to this life at all," he replied.

At the time of Norris's pardon, Haywood Patterson, Charles Weems, and Andy Wright were presumed dead and therefore ineligible for pardons. In 2013, after the legislature passed a law permitting posthumous pardons, they received full and unconditional pardons.

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Copyright © 2020 by Ellis Cose. This excerpt originally appeared in Democracy, If We Can Keep It by Ellis Cose. The book was published by The New Press in July and is now available. Reprinted here with permission.

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The Defense Committee appealed to Gov. Bibb Graves to free their clients who remained in prison, arguing that some could not be innocent and the rest guilty. Committee mem­bers negotiated an agreement with the governor to pardon the remaining four in October 1938, but the governor reneged. On October 25, 1976, Alabama Gov.

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The Scottsboro Trial: A Timeline | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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The Scottsboro Trial: A Timeline | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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The Scottsboro Trial: A Timeline | American Experience | PBS

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Explore the events of a trial that drew North and South into their sharpest conflict since the Civil War, and yielded two momentous Supreme Court decisions.

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The Sixth Amendment (video) | Khan Academy

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The Sixth Amendment (video) | Khan Academy

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- [Kim] Hi, this is Kim from Khan Academy. Today I'm learning about the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution. One of four amendments in the Bill of Rights that concerns the rights of the accused, the Sixth Amendment guarantees defendants in criminal cases the right to a speedy and public trial. To learn more about the Sixth Amendment, I sought out the help of two experts. Stephanos Bibas is a United States Circuit Judge for the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He's also a leading scholar of criminal procedure. Jeffrey Fisher is Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law School. So Judge Bibas, in the case of the Bill of Rights, the Framers were trying to prevent particular abuses of the government, so what was the historical background that led them to want to protect these rights in particular? - [Stephanos] In England in the late 17th and early 18th century, there was a series of treason trials, other political trials, and the king had done some things that bypassed the usual mode of trial in criminal cases. The Anglo-American system is known as the Common Law. It involves live testimony in open court before a jury of your peers, and the jury ultimately decides did you do it, were you blameworthy, do you deserve the punishment? The Crown had railroaded some of its political opponents. People like Sir Walter Raleigh, people accused in the Popish Plots during the strife between Catholics and Protestants and some of these convictions were later understood to have been wrongful ones and so the colonists in England and then in America insisted on protecting against various ways of diminishing or abridging the trial that would be speedy, that would be public, that would be before a jury, that would have an evenly matched prosecution and defense and would have an opportunity to look the witness in the eye and confront him the way it was always done in England as opposed to on continental Europe. - [Jeffrey] There's a varied history, primarily in England of certain periods of time where people were prosecuted in ways that the Founders deemed fundamentally unfair. Probably the most notorious example was the Star Chamber. That was a moniker given to a king-run tribunal decades before the Founding where people were picked up and arrested and then sentenced to criminal punishment and sometimes to death without ever having an opportunity to challenge the charges against them and sometimes not even knowing what the charges were against them. That kind of a travesty of justice and abuse of power was probably the foremost thing in the Framers' minds. - [Stephanos] This was partly for the benefit of the defendant or the accused. It also was very importantly about protecting the citizens' right to control criminal justice. That it wasn't the king who would do this, and the king couldn't just let his royal officers off. It's very important to look at the Declaration of Independence. A bunch of the complaints in the Declaration are complaints that the king is bypassing these usual modes, that he's protecting his soldiers by a mock trial from punishment for murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of the States. That he's depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury and that he has made the judges subject to his manipulation and pleasure because they don't have stable salaries. The colonists were very suspicious of the king's manipulation of criminal justice. - [Kim] So how does the Sixth Amendment inform how the US legal system works today? - [Jeffrey] The first important thing to understand is that when the Sixth Amendment was drafted, just like all the other first ten amendments, they applied primarily only to the federal government not to state governments, but in the sixties and seventies the Supreme Court applied all of these rights one-by-one to the states. Now because the rights apply to both the federal government and to state governments the Sixth Amendment applies every single time somebody is charged with a crime. That starts with knowing what you're being charged with, whether it's by what's known as a grand jury indictment or some other method of accusing somebody of committing a crime, and it continues on with the right to an attorney to represent the accused and goes all the way through the decision-making process with how the jury decides whether to convict or not - [Kim] This is fascinating, but there are a couple things that I see in the Sixth Amendment that seem like they might be a little difficult to define, particularly the idea of a speedy trial. What actually counts as speedy? - [Stephanos] The speedy trial component is not well-defined. The Supreme Court has ultimately said, "Well, we're gonna balance a bunch of factors. How long is the delay? What's the reason for the delay? Has the defendant shown any prejudice from the delay? How long did it take after the defendant requested the speedy trial?" Very rarely does the court actually throw out a case based on that. What happens more often is that the defendant makes a request and then judges really try to push the case along to be faster. The court has turned it into really focusing on the defendant's interest in something fast, and that matters a lot when a defendant doesn't make bail and is being held in jail pending trial. Those cases will go to trial in a matter of months. A case where someone is out on bail can easily take a year or two before it ultimately proceeds to trial. - [Jeffrey] What's speedy or what's reasonable in 1791 might not be speedy or reasonable in 2017. What the courts have said with respect to speedy is there's not a bright line rule, say, one year, five years, whatever it might be that somebody has to be brought to trial after being charged. Rather, what the court does is it considers how diligently the prosecution has tried to pursue the case in light of other factors such as the complexity of the case, whether the defendant himself wants the case to go to trial soon or whether the defendant himself has agreed to certain delays or said that he doesn't mind them, and whether there's prejudice that has occurred which is a legal way of saying whether somebody's been harmed or injured by the delay. Say for example a key witness has now died or fled the jurisdiction. Flexible words like speedy in essence translate some measure of discretion and flexibility to the courts. - [Kim] Why is our legal process so much slower than it was in the 18th century? - [Stephanos] That connects up to the second set of rights we've constructed around what makes something a public trial. One of the main things there is the jury right. Juries in the 18th century, we didn't have a jury selection process. The first 12 people who didn't know the plaintiff or the defendant or the victim or whoever it was would be empaneled and they would serve all day and they'd hear all the cases that came that day. You didn't have lawyers involved in most of these cases. Usually it was the victim against the defendant himself or herself, no lawyer speaking for either side, that was the norm. The defendant had a right to hire a lawyer but usually couldn't afford it and didn't. There weren't rules of evidence. There weren't complicated motions. There weren't technical jury instructions. The trials themselves took, as I said an hour, two hours. Pre-trial proceedings did not involve lots of legal motions 'cause there were no lawyers to run them. The judges themselves often didn't have legal training. There were no law schools in America. When you have a system like that, it's not that cumbersome there's very little incentive to bypass it, and you don't have professional lawyers who are looking to get this case done with and get on to the next case or who have seen enough cases that they can bargain back and forth and strike a bargain for this case that's about where the previous cases came out. You didn't have an incentive for plea bargaining, it wasn't slow enough. You didn't have the experts who it would take to run plea bargaining and you didn't have the lack of investment in your own case that makes plea bargaining possible or the technical rules. These cases actually all did go to juries and the expectation was they all would go to juries and the jury right wasn't just a right of a defendant, this happened in every case 'cause the public had a right to do justice itself as well as seeing justice done. - [Kim] I have so many questions about this. For one thing, do you think our current system is an improvement on this older system of juries and not so much plea bargaining, and also why is there so much plea bargaining today? - [Jeffrey] At the time of the Founding, there were no deals to be made short of a full trial. That's a huge contrast with today where over 90% of criminal cases in this country are not resolved by trial but rather by what's called a plea bargain which is a defendant coming in and saying, "Look, I will plead guilty to a lesser offense, or to the same offense you're charging but with a guarantee of lesser punishment as long as you don't require me to go through a full trial." The idea is, is that because the system has grown so large and there are so many cases, that it's a relief to the prosecution and the court system not to have to have a trial in every case and the benefit to the defendant is that he gets a slightly better deal or is able to plead to a lesser crime. - [Stephanos] Over the course of the 19th century prosecutors are really taking over most of these cases. It goes from a few percent to the lion's share of cases, and then defense lawyers get hired more and more to counteract that. Once you got prosecutors and defense lawyers on both sides, and the Sixth Amendment guarantees you the right to hire a defense lawyer, that's how it's understood in the 18th and 19th centuries. The prosecutors and defense lawyers develop rules of evidence and they develop procedures and jury instructions and they argue motions. They get more active and the judge gets more passive or reactive. The judge isn't pushing the case along as much and the prosecutor and defense lawyer are slowing it down. That seems like it makes it fairer, but once it gets to a certain point of being slow the prosecutors wanna get rid of the cases, they have too many of them. The judges, they have a bunch of civil cases they need to get rid of and so the prosecutors and the judges and the defense lawyers all get together and find ways to bargain the case away rather than spending, now it's days on each case for trial. From their point of view it makes sense. They have a faster system and everyone goes home happy and the prosecutor can pursue more cases and the defendant gets a lighter deal but the prosecution makes sure there's some conviction and sentence, but from the point of view of the public, the public doesn't see justice done and the public doesn't trust these plea bargains. At the end of the day, what the defense lawyer's mostly doing is not making sure there's a speedy and public trial but bargaining 95% of cases away before there's a trial. - [Kim] What happens if the defendant can't afford a legal counsel? - [Jeffrey] The history of the right to counsel is actually one of the more interesting components of the Sixth Amendment because many of the components have deep roots in the history of England and so were rights that Englishmen enjoyed for many, many years before they were brought over to the colonies and became part of our Constitution of the United States. The right to counsel is a little bit different in that respect. Criminal defendants in England and other countries around the time of our founding often did not have a right to counsel of any kind whether they could pay for it or not. This was a bit of an innovation on the part of the Framers, recognizing that all of the other rights they were identifying to defend yourself in court might not amount to much if you didn't have expert assistance or at least the right to obtain expert assistance. - [Kim] You've described a lot of changes to how our legal system works over the years. What do you think would have surprised the Framers most about how our legal system works today? - [Stephanos] I think they would have been shocked that a system that was meant to slow down and check governmental power and protect overreaching and protect the people's role, has been so subverted that the people are involved in a few percent of cases. They designed a system that's slower and less efficient by design than the criminal justice system of continental Europe because they were worried about the king and the Crown pushing around citizens and abusing their power. They wanted grand juries to authorize every criminal charge. We've largely gotten around that in most cases. They wanted petty juries to ensure that every prosecutor's charge was justified and that the legislature's criminal laws weren't being applied too broadly. Again, prosecutors now have so many threats and tools and sentences that they can make almost everybody give up their jury trial rights, but the Framers also weren't dealing with the volume of cases we're talking about, and they weren't focused primarily on the violent crimes. The federal crimes they were dealing with were seditious libel, criticizing the government, violations of the revenue laws, so it's also fair to point out that they did not expect that these rights were mainly gonna be limitations that benefited people in rape and murder cases. A lot of these protections are mainly designed to make sure that the innocent people get vindicated against unjust charges. They might be a little bit surprised that almost all the litigation is by people who may be factually guilty. - [Jeffrey] The next thing that would have surprised the Framers a great deal, I think, is the role of the jury today. The jury trial right mentioned in the Sixth Amendment is actually one of the only things mentioned twice in the Constitution. The right to a jury trial is actually mentioned in the body of the Constitution itself in Article Four, then it's mentioned again in the Sixth Amendment. The reason why is because the jury were truly the people's check on the court system and in particular on the prosecutorial power. Serving on a jury, to the Framers, was an honor. It was an act of deep political participation and meaning. In a way that we joke about jury service today as being something of a nuisance, they viewed it as almost as important as voting for the president on Election Day. - [Kim] By guaranteeing speedy public trials by jury and due process by law, the Sixth Amendment ensures that citizens, not the government, control criminal justice, but today as Professor Fisher and Judge Bibas note, the Framers might be surprised to learn that due to the rise of plea bargaining, only a small percentage of cases go to trial by jury, circumventing this process. To learn more about the Sixth Amendment, visit the National Constitution Center's interactive Constitution, and Khan Academy's resources on US government and politics.

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A deep dive into the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees citizens the right to a speedy and public trial. In this video, Kim discusses the Sixth Amendment with scholars Stephanos Bibas and Jeffrey Fisher. To read more about the Sixth Amendment, visit the National Constitution Center's Interactive Constitution.

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The Eighth Amendment (video) | Khan Academy

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The Eighth Amendment (video) | Khan Academy

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The Great Migration (1910-1970) | National Archives

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The Great Migration (1910-1970) | National Archives

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Black people who migrated during the second phase of the Great Migration were met with housing discrimination, as localities had started to implement restrictive covenants and redlining, which created segregated neighborhoods, but also served as a foundation for the existing racial disparities in wealth in the United States.

Records in this topic cover migratory information and trends captured by various branches and agencies of the government, including employment and housing. There are also records reflecting cultural and social aspects of the lives of those who participated and were impacted by the Great Migration.
Search the Catalog for Records relating to the Great Migration (1910-1970)
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Black people who migrated during the second phase of the Great Migration were met with housing discrimination, as localities had started to implement restrictive covenants and redlining, which created segregated neighborhoods, but also served as a foundation for the existing racial disparities in wealth in the United States.

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The Great Migration: Crash Course Black American History #24 - YouTube

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The Great Migration: Crash Course Black American History #24 - YouTube

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The Great Migration: Crash Course Black American History #24

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The Great Migration generally refers to the massive internal migration of Blacks from the South to urban centers in other parts of the country. Between 1910 and 1970, an estimated 6 million Blacks left the South. This graphic compares the early migration (1910-1940), sometimes referred to as the First Great Migration, and the later (1940-1970) also known as the Second Great Migration.

In the early 20th century, strict legislation limited immigration into the U.S. and brought about a shortage of labor in many industrial and manufacturing centers in the Northeast and Midwest. These cities became common destinations for Black migrants from the South. Cities that experienced substantial changes in racial composition between 1910 and 1940 include Chicago, Detroit, New York City, and Philadelphia. During and after WWII, Black migrants flooded into many of the cities that were destinations before the war, following friends and relatives that had made the journey earlier. Poor economic conditions in the Jim Crow South spurred a larger migration flow than was the case in the 1910-to-1940 period and resulted in the creation of large Black population centers in many cities across the Northeast, Midwest, and West.

NOTE: Data are from decennial censuses, 1910 through 1970. Population counts are based on unrevised numbers. Data for the Black population for cities in Alaska and Hawaii were not available in 1940 or earlier decades. Cities shown are those that were either in the top 100 cities in the country or top 3 of a state and had a Black population of at least 100 people. These criteria were placed on 1940 data for the First Great Migration and 1970 data for the Second Great Migration.

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View Accessibility Data The Great Migration generally refers to the massive internal migration of Blacks from the South to urban centers in other parts of the country. Between 1910 and 1970, an estimated 6 million Blacks left the South.

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A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance | National Museum of African American History and Culture

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A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance | National Museum of African American History and Culture

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance

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Between the end of World War I and the mid-1930s, African Americans produced one of the most significant eras of cultural expression in the nation’s history—the Harlem Renaissance.

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Arts and Letters of the Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Black American History #26 - YouTube

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Arts and Letters of the Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Black American History #26 - YouTube

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Arts and Letters of the Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Black American History #26

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How the Harlem Renaissance helped forge a new sense of Black identity

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How the Harlem Renaissance helped forge a new sense of Black identity

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In 1925, James Weldon Johnson watched a steady stream of Black migrants laden with belongings, waiting on trains that would take them northward from the deep South to better lives. He was one of them. Like many, the Florida native's destination was Harlem, a Manhattan neighborhood nicknamed "the Black mecca."

Johnson would go on to write "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," nicknamed the Black national anthem, and become the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). To him, Harlem represented a place where Black people enjoyed dignity, opportunity, and fellowship. Johnson wrote in 1925 that he believed the "advantages and opportunities are greater in Harlem than in any other place in the country."

The poet was just one of the hundreds of thousands of Black Americans drawn to Harlem in the early 20th century-and a participant in an explosion of cultural expression now called the Harlem Renaissance. The upswell wasn't limited to New York City, either; it could be felt in other northern and midwestern cities whose Black populations surged during the era.

Throughout the period, which stretched between 1917 and the 1930s, Black talent thrived, and Black artists, musicians, and thinkers helped forge a new sense of racial identity.

How the Harlem Renaissance began

Harlem's growth into a cultural center was spurred by the Great Migration-a decades-long exodus of Black Southerners to northern metropolises that began around 1915. Black people left the South for multiple reasons, including harsh Jim Crow laws that denied Black people their civil rights and economic conditions that made advancement next to impossible. They saw opportunity in northern cities, where workers were needed during labor shortages sparked by World War I. Between 1915 and about 1960, northern industrial cities absorbed five million Black people.

Many went to Harlem-a New York neighborhood that had once been a rural, wealthy white enclave. During a real estate crash at the turn of the 20th century, landlords became more willing to rent to Black tenants. Property values then plummeted as white residents attempted to offload their real estate and move away. Eventually, the area became majority Black, and Harlem turned into a magnet for migrants in search of economic opportunity and a rich cultural and social life.

These newcomers weren't just from the American South: A substantial subset came from Caribbean countries like Jamaica, Antigua, and Trinidad, escaping economic downturns caused by the decline of sugar prices throughout the West Indies. By 1930, notes historian Jason Parker, a quarter of all Harlem residents hailed from the West Indies.

(See Black America's story, told like never before.)

That cultural mixture spurred new types of expression and thought. Nurtured by Black churches and businesses, Harlem teemed with life. There, a poor Black worker could brush shoulders with educated, wealthy Black residents. They could take part in entertainment by Black people, for Black people. And they could be exposed to a vision of Black achievement and potential that was unheard of in most parts of the United States.

Luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance unfolded across multiple modes of expression, from music to fashion, from poetry to philosophy. It was alive in blues and jazz music by figures like Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, Dizzy Gillespie, and Billie Holiday. It could be found in poems by Langston Hughes and Georgia Douglas Johnson, novels by Zora Neale Hurston and Wallace Thurman, paintings by Aaron Douglas and Beauford Delaney, and the emergence of Black periodicals like The Crisis and Fire!!

The era's Black tastemakers helped mentor, promote, and encourage the renaissance. The rise of mass communication allowed Black advocacy organizations like the NAACP a national voice. Jessie Redmon Fauset, the literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis, used the platform to bring national attention to Black authors. She becameknown as the "midwife of the Harlem Renaissance." Another Harlem Renaissance-era kingmaker was the writer Alain Locke, dubbed the movement's "dean" for his mentorship of figures like Hughes and Hurston and his insistence that Black artists draw attention to, and inspiration from, their cultural heritage.

(Meet the historian who fought to make Black History Month possible.)

Activists like Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois encouraged a sense of Black excellence, pride, and shared identity widely known as the "New Negro" movement. Instead of yielding to the era's relentless racism, the movement's proponents openly protested it. They embraced ideals of education and progress and poured their energy into the struggle for civil rights through organizations like the NAACP, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and African Communities League. These institutions encouraged Black Americans to agitate for social change and civil rights, including protesting the ongoing practice of lynching throughout the U.S.

Response to the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance didn't stop in Harlem: The cultural upswell took hold across the north and in the west. In Chicago, for example, Black luminaries held public art exhibitions and gathered a groundbreaking collection of materials on Black history housed at the city's public library. Kansas City, Missouri became an influential center for jazz and blues.

(Discover the history of Tennessee's forgotten music empire-Chattanooga.)

The movement's influence spread throughout white culture, too. It turned Harlem into a popular destination for white pleasure-seekers who frequented speakeasies and "black-and-tan saloons." Known as "slumming," the Prohibition Era practice brought white patrons into contact with Black cultural expression-art and music they considered exotic, dangerous, and titillating.

Ironically, instead of participating in the Black nightlife they had come to see, notes historian Chad Heap, many curious whites never got farther than establishments like the Cotton Club, a Southern plantation-themed nightclub that catered specifically to white clientele.

For Black residents-Americans who experienced art and thought centered on the Black experience for the first time during the era-Harlem was anything but a tourist destination. For them, it celebrated cultural possibility, upholding Black people who had been so denigrated by mainstream white society as complex figures with real lives.

The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was vibrant, but eventually it burned out. With the dawn of the Great Depression and the end of Prohibition, Harlem's economic prosperity waned. By 1935, economic blight, housing and employment discrimination, and ongoing police brutality toward Black residents had created a tinderbox. That year, an erroneous rumor that police had beaten to death a Black teenager suspected of shoplifting sparked a race riot in Harlem. By World War II, the renaissance was a thing of the past.

Yet its influence lives on. The cultural upswell of the Harlem Renaissance set the stage for the modern flourishing of Black artists and thinkers and the continued struggle for civil rights for Black Americans. As historian Clement Alexander Price wrote, "The embittered past of Blacks was taken onto a much higher plane of intellectual and artistic consideration during the Harlem Renaissance....one of modern America's truly significant artistic and cultural movements."

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How the Harlem Renaissance helped forge a new sense of Black identity

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Sparked by an influx of Black Southerners seeking better lives in the north, this early 20th century explosion of Black cultural expression left its mark on generations of civil rights activists, artists, and thinkers.

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The history and importance of the Black Church – Harvard Gazette

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The history and importance of the Black Church – Harvard Gazette

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Excerpted from "The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song" by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Penguin Press)
Political activists - including Malcolm X, of course, but especially the Black Panther Party in the latter half of the 1960s - have debated whether the role of the Black embrace of Christianity under slavery was a positive or negative force. There were those who argued that the Black Church was an example of Karl Marx's famous indictment of religion as "the opium of the people" because it gave to the oppressed false comfort and hope, obscuring the causes of their oppression and reducing their urge to overturn that oppression. But I do not believe that religion functioned in this simple fashion in the history of Black people in this country.

As a matter of fact, although Marx was no fan of religion, to put it mildly, this statement, which the Panthers loved to quote, was part of a more complicated assessment of the nature and function of religion. The full quote bears repeating: "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." Marx could not imagine the complexity of the Black Church, even if the Black Church could imagine him - could imagine those who lacked the tools to see beyond its surface levels of meaning. James Weldon Johnson, in his lovely poem about the anonymous authors of the sacred vernacular tradition, "O Black and Unknown Bards," put this failure of interpretive reciprocity in this memorable way:

What merely living clod, what captive thing,
Could up toward God through all its darkness grope,
And find within its deadened heart to sing
These songs of sorrow, love and faith, and hope?
How did it catch that subtle undertone,
That note in music heard not with the ears?

The role of Black Christianity in motivating our country's largest slave rebellion, Nat Turner's rebellion, Southampton County, Va., is only the most dramatic example of the text of the King James Bible being called upon to justify the violent revolutionary overthrow of the slave regime. But we need only look at the brilliant use of the church in all of its forms - from W. E. B. Du Bois's triptych of "the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy" to the use of the building itself - to see the revolutionary potential and practice of Black Christianity in forging social change. What most intrigues me about Marx's full quote is his realization that it is at once "the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering," a crucial part of the quote that seems to have fallen away.

People, of course, pray and worship for all sorts of reasons. Despite what Marx and the Black Panthers thought, the importance of the role of the Black Church at its best cannot be gainsaid in the history of the African American people. Nor can it be underestimated. It isn't religion that keeps human beings enslaved; it is violence. Most normal human beings don't need an elaborate religious belief system to resist the temptation to sacrifice their lives in the face of overwhelming odds and the certainty that they will be brutally suppressed and killed. That would be unreasonable.

The "failure" of African Americans to overthrow their masters, as the enslaved men and women did on the island that became the Republic of Haiti, can't be traced to the role of the church per se, as Nat Turner's decision to act based on his interpretation of prophecy attests. Early on, the church and Christianity played a role both in Black rebellions and in the preparation of Black people for leadership roles. Following Denmark Vesey's alleged slave insurrection, Emanuel Church in Charleston, S.C., was burned to the ground; at the end of the Civil War, the Rev. Richard Harvey Cain left his congregation in New York to go south, to resurrect Mother Emanuel, and then, during Reconstruction, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. (Other churches would be the subject of deadly attacks and explosions carried out at the hands of white supremacists, most notably the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, in which four little girls were killed, another was blinded, and more than a dozen people were injured.)

Turner knew his Bible. Frederick Douglass, too, was thoroughly grounded in the church, having attended the Methodist church on Sharp Street in Baltimore while enslaved and then delivering his first public speeches - sermons - at the AME Zion Church ("Little Zion") on Second Street in the whaling city of New Bedford, Mass. It has long been assumed that Douglass miraculously "found his voice" at an abolition meeting on Nantucket Island in 1841, three years after he escaped from slavery in Maryland, spontaneously rising to his feet in front of a roomful of white strangers. Not so, and he was even "ordained" in a way at Little Zion when he was about 21 or 22 years old. Like his father, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., pastored at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church; unlike his father, he ran for political office and served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Powell effectively led the civil rights movement in the North until Montgomery, Ala., emerged as the epicenter of the movement and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became its most recognizable face and voice. I could provide many other examples. The Black Church has a long and noble history in relation to Black political action, dating back at least to the late 18th century. The failure of enslaved African Americans to overthrow the institution of slavery, as their Haitian sisters and brothers would do, cannot be traced to the supposed passivity inbred by Christianity; rather, it can be traced to the simple fact that, unlike the Black people enslaved on Saint-Domingue, African Americans were vastly outnumbered and outgunned. Violent insurrection would have been a form of racial suicide.

What the church did do, in the meantime, as Black people collectively awaited freedom, was to provide a liminal space brimming with subversive features. To paraphrase one of the standard phrases from the Christian tradition, one should never underestimate the power of prayer. Just ask Bull Connor or George Wallace. Without the role of the Black Church, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, with King by his side at both, and future congressman John Lewis, himself an ordained Baptist minister, present in 1965 - would never have been enacted when they were. There is no question that the Black Church is a parent of the civil rights movement, and today's Black Lives Matter movement is one of its heirs.

This is a truth made manifest in the mourning of Rep. Lewis this summer. In a season of pain marked by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, Lewis's funeral included a service at Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma and his final crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. For Lewis, voting was sacramental, and he shed his blood for us to exercise this most fundamental of rights. In revisiting these sites and reflecting on his many marches for justice, "we, the people" once again bore witness to the deeper historical reality that faith has long been the source of the courage of those toiling on the front lines of change. As Lewis once put it, "The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith."

One of the greatest achievements in the long history of civilization, as far as I am concerned, is the extraordinary resilience of the African American community under slavery, through the sheer will and determination of these men and women to live to see another day, to thrive. The number of Africans dragged to North America between 1526 and 1808, when the slave trade ended, totaled approximately 388,000 shipped directly from continent to continent, plus another 52,430 through the intra-American trade. That initial population had grown to some 4.4 million free and enslaved people by 1860. How was this possible? What sustained our ancestors under the nightmare of enslavement to build families and survive their being ripped apart and sold off in the domestic trade; to carry on despite not being able to ward off the rapacious sexual advances of their masters (a verity exposed by DNA, which shows that the average African American is more than 24 percent European); to acquire skills; to create a variety of complex cultural forms; to withstand torture, debasement, and the suffocating denial of their right to learn to read and write; and to defer the gratification of freedom from bondage - all without ever giving up the hope of liberty, as one enslaved poet, George Moses Horton, put it, if not for themselves, then for their children or grandchildren, when slavery had no end in sight? What empowered them with "hope against hope"? The writer Darryl Pinckney in a recent essay notes that "if a person cannot imagine a future, then we would say that that person is depressed." To paraphrase Pinckney's next line, if a people cannot imagine a future, then its culture will die.

"The importance of the role of the Black Church at its best cannot be gainsaid in the history of the African American people. Nor can it be underestimated."

And Black culture didn't die. The signal aspects of African American culture were planted, watered, given light, and nurtured in the Black Church, out of the reach and away from the watchful eyes of those who would choke the life out of it. We have to give the church its due as a source of our ancestors' unfathomable resiliency and perhaps the first formalized site for the collective fashioning and development of so many African American aesthetic forms. Although Black people made spaces for secular expression, only the church afforded room for all of it to be practiced at the same time. And only in the church could all of the arts emerge, be on display, practiced and perfected, and expressed at one time and in one place, including music, dance, and song; rhetoric and oratory; poetry and prose; textual exegesis and interpretation; memorization, reading, and writing; the dramatic arts and scripting; call-and-response, signifying, and indirection; philosophizing and theorizing; and, of course, mastering all of "the flowers of speech." We do the church a great disservice if we fail to recognize that it was the first formalized site within African American culture perhaps not exclusively for the fashioning of the Black aesthetic, but certainly for its performance, service to service, week by week, Sunday to Sunday.

The Black Church was the cultural cauldron that Black people created to combat a system designed to crush their spirit. Collectively and with enormous effort, they refused to allow that to happen. And the culture they created was sublime, awesome, majestic, lofty, glorious, and at all points subversive of the larger culture of enslavement that sought to destroy their humanity. The miracle of African American survival can be traced directly to the miraculous ways that our ancestors reinvented the religion that their "masters" thought would keep them subservient, Rather, that religion enabled them and their descendants to learn, to grow, to develop, to interpret and reinvent the world in which they were trapped; it enabled them to bide their time - ultimately, time for them to fight for their freedom, and for us to continue the fight for ours. It also gave them the moral authority to turn the mirror of religion back on their masters and to indict the nation for its original sin of allowing their enslavement to build up that "city upon a hill." In exposing that hypocrisy at the heart of their "Christian" country, they exhorted succeeding generations to close the yawning gap between America's founding ideals and the reality they had been forced to endure. Who were these people? As the late Rev. Joseph Lowery put it, "I don't know whether the faith produced them, or if they produced the faith. But they belonged to each other."
Published by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

National & World Affairs

National & World Affairs

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The history and importance of the Black Church

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Henry Louis Gates' new book on the Black Church traces the institution's role in history, politics, and culture.

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The Black Church | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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The Black Church | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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Marilyn Mellowes was principally responsible for the research and development of the series God in America and has served as its series producer. She produced and wrote From Jesus to Christ, the First Christians, a four-hour FRONTLINE series that premiered in 1998. Additional credits include Vietnam: A Television History, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, Castro's Challenge, The Kennedys, Nixon and Julia! America's Favorite Chef.
In the fall of 2008, newspapers, talk shows and blogs exploded with news that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the African American minister from Chicago's Trinity Church, had denounced the United States with inflammatory language: "God damn America!" Wright's most famous parishioner was the leading Democratic contender for the presidential nomination, Barack Obama. Trinity was Obama's spiritual home -- the place where he had found religion, where he was married, and where his daughters had been baptized. Rev. Wright, a former Marine with a Ph.D., had served as his spiritual mentor.

While many white voters seemed surprised, puzzled and shocked by Wright's angry rhetoric, African Americans were less so. Obama seized the moment to deliver a profound meditation on race in America, a speech titled "A More Perfect Union." Tracing the deep historical roots of racial inequality and injustice, Obama put Wright's anger into historical context. In very personal terms, he also described his experience at Trinity:

Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

Eventually Obama broke with Wright and left Trinity, but his speech illuminated the role of the black church in the African American experience. Standing apart from the dominant white society, yet engaged in a continuing dialogue with it, the church evolved with countless acts of faith and resistance, piety and protest. As historian Anthea Butler has observed, the church has been profoundly shaped by regional differences, North and South, East and West, yet in both the private and public spheres, the church was, and remains, sustained and animated by idea of freedom.

The term "the black church" evolved from the phrase "the Negro church," the title of a pioneering sociological study of African American Protestant churches at the turn of the century by W.E.B. Du Bois. In its origins, the phrase was largely an academic category. Many African Americans did not think of themselves as belonging to "the Negro church," but rather described themselves according to denominational affiliations such as Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and even "Saint" of the Sanctified tradition. African American Christians were never monolithic; they have always been diverse and their churches highly decentralized.

Today "the black church" is widely understood to include the following seven major black Protestant denominations: the National Baptist Convention, the National Baptist Convention of America, the Progressive National Convention, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and the Church of God in Christ.

ORIGINS

New historical evidence documents the arrival of slaves in the English settlement in Jamestown, Va., in 1619. They came from the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, in present-day Angola and the coastal Congo. In the 1500s, the Portuguese conquered both kingdoms and carried Catholicism to West Africa. It is likely that the slaves who arrived in Jamestown had been baptized Catholic and had Christian names. For the next 200 years, the slave trade exported slaves from Angola, Ghana, Senegal and other parts of West Africa to America's South. Here they provided the hard manual labor that supported the South's biggest crops: cotton and tobacco.

In the South, Anglican ministers sponsored by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, founded in England, made earnest attempts to teach Christianity by rote memorization; the approach had little appeal. Some white owners allowed the enslaved to worship in white churches, where they were segregated in the back of the building or in the balconies. Occasionally persons of African descent might hear a special sermon from white preachers, but these sermons tended to stress obedience and duty, and the message of the apostle Paul: "Slaves, obey your masters."

Both Methodists and Baptists made active efforts to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity; the Methodists also licensed black men to preach. During the 1770s and 1780s, black ministers began to preach to their own people, drawing on the stories, people and events depicted in the Old and New Testaments. No story spoke more powerfully to slaves than the story of Exodus, with its themes of bondage and liberation brought by a righteous and powerful God who would one day set them free.

Remarkably, a few black preachers in the South succeeded in establishing independent black churches. In the 1780s, a slave named Andrew Bryan preached to a small group of slaves in Savannah, Ga. White citizens had Bryan arrested and whipped. Despite persecution and harassment, the church grew, and by 1790 it became the First African Baptist Church of Savannah. In time, a Second and a Third African Church were formed, also led by black pastors.

In the North, blacks had more authority over their religious affairs. Many worshipped in established, predominantly white congregations, but by the late 18th century, blacks had begun to congregate in self-help and benevolent associations called African Societies. Functioning as quasi-religious organizations, these societies often gave rise to independent black churches. In 1787, for example, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones organized the Free African Society of Philadelphia, which later evolved into two congregations: the Bethel Church, the mother church of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination, and St. Thomas Episcopal Church, which remained affiliated with a white Episcopal denomination. These churches continued to grow. Historian Mary Sawyer notes that by 1810, there were 15 African churches representing four denominations in 10 cities from South Carolina to Massachusetts.

In black churches, women generally were not permitted to preach. One notable exception was Jarena Lee, who became an itinerant preacher, traveling thousands of miles and writing her own spiritual autobiography.

THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING AND "HUSH HARBORS"

In the late 18th and early 19th century, thousands of Americans, black and white, enslaved and free, were swept up in the revival known as the Second Great Awakening. In the South, the religious fervor of evangelical Christianity resonated easily with the emotive religious traditions brought from West Africa. Forging a unique synthesis, slaves gathered in "hush harbors" -- woods, gullies, ravines, thickets and swamps -- for heartfelt worship which stressed deliverance from the toil and troubles of the present world, and salvation in the heavenly life to come.

Yet most of the enslaved lay outside the institutional church. In the 1830s and 1840s, Southern churchmen undertook an active campaign to persuade plantation owners that slaves must be brought into to the Christian fold. Because plantations were located far from churches, this meant that the church had to be carried to the plantation. Aided by denominational missionary societies and associations, plantation missions became popular institutions. But missionaries recognized that Christianity would not appeal to all enslaved blacks. Novice missionaries were warned:

He who carries the Gospel to them ... discovers deism, skepticism, universalism ... all the strong objections against the truth of God; objections which he may perhaps have considered peculiar only to the cultivated minds ... of critics and philosophers!

The Methodists were the most active among missionary societies, but Baptists also had strong appeal. The Baptists' insistence that each congregation should have its own autonomy meant that blacks could exercise more control over their religious affairs. Yet the independence of black churches was curbed by law and by the white Southern response to slave uprisings and abolition.

ABOLITION

In the years leading up to the Civil War, the black church found its political and prophetic voice in the cause of abolition. Black ministers took to their pulpits to speak out against slavery and warned that any nation that condoned slavery would suffer divine punishment. Former slave and Methodist convert Frederick Douglass challenged Christians to confront an institution that violated the central tenets of the Christian faith, including the principle of equality before God. In 1829, African American abolitionist David Walker issued his famous tract, "Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World," urging slaves to resort to violence, if necessary. He, too, warned of divine punishment: "God rules in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth. ... His ears continually open to the tears and groans of His oppressed people. ..."

In the North, black ministers and members of the African American community joined white abolitionists in organizing the Underground Railroad, an informal network that helped persons escaping bondage to make their way to freedom. Prominent among these activists was Harriet Tubman, who escaped from slavery in 1849 and made her way to Philadelphia. Having secured her freedom, Tubman put herself in jeopardy by making repeated return trips to the South to assist others. Her courage and determination earned her the affectionate sobriquet "Moses."

EMANCIPATION AND RECONSTRUCTION

For those who yearned for freedom, the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln on Jan. 1, 1863, seemed to re-enact the Exodus story of the ancient Israelites: God had intervened in human history to liberate his chosen people. But the stroke of a presidential pen did not eliminate poverty and dislocation, chaos and uncertainty. In the North, black churches organized missions to the South to help newly freed persons find the skills and develop the talents that would allow them to lead independent lives. Education was paramount. African American missionaries, including AME Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne, established schools and educational institutions. White denominations, including Presbyterian, Congregational and Episcopal congregations, also sent missionaries to teach reading and math skills to a population previously denied the opportunity for education. Over time, these missionary efforts gave rise to the establishment of independent black institutions of higher education, including Morehouse College and Spelman College in Atlanta.

But there were tensions. Some Northerners, including Payne, did not approve of the emotional worship style of their Southern counterparts; he stressed that "true" Christian worship meant proper decorum and attention to reading the Bible. Many Southerners were disinterested in Payne's admonitions. They liked their emotive form of worship and saw no reason to cast it aside. Nevertheless, most black Southerners ended up joining independent black churches that had been formed in the North before the Civil War. These included the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ). In 1870, Southerners formed the Colored (now "Christian") Methodist Episcopal Church, and in 1894, black Baptists formed the National Baptist Convention.

In all these denominations, the black preacher stood as the central figure. W.E.B. Du Bois immortalized these men in his famous essay, "Of the Faith of the Fathers," that appeared in his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois described the preacher as "the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil," a man who "found his function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people."

WOMEN

Men commanded the pulpits of the black church; they also dominated church power and politics. Denied the chance to preach, growing numbers of women, mostly middle class, found ways to participate in religious life. They organized social services, missionary societies, temperance associations and reading groups. They fought for suffrage and demanded social reform. They wrote for religious periodicals, promoting Victorian ideals of respectability and womanhood. Like the crusading newspaper reporter Ida B. Wells, they protested racial injustice, lynching and violence.

Among the most influential women was Nannie Burroughs, who served as corresponding secretary of the Woman's Convention of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A. In a major address to the NBC delivered in 1920, Burroughs chastised black ministers:

We might as well be frank and face the truth. While we have hundreds of superior men in the pulpits, North and South, East and West, the majority of our religious leaders have preached too much Heaven and too little practical Christian living. In many, the spirit of greed, like the horse-leach, is ever crying, "Give me, give me, give me." Does the absorbing task of supplying their personal needs bind leaders to the moral, social and spiritual needs of our people?

Men, she argued, must welcome women into the affairs of government. Women must organize and educate. "There will be protest against politics in the Church," she predicted, but insisted, "It is better to have politics than ignorance."

THE GREAT MIGRATION

Burroughs rose to prominence during the period known as the "Great Migration." Between 1890 and 1930, 2.5 million black people, mostly poor and working class, left their homes in the South and relocated in cities of the North. This influx of Southerners transformed Northern black Protestant churches and created what historian Wallace Best calls a "new sacred order." Best's study of the impact of the Great Migration in Chicago explores the dynamics of this transformation. Accustomed to a more emotional style of worship, Southerners imbued churches with a "folk" religious sensibility. The distinctive Southern musical idiom known as "the blues" evolved into gospel music. The themes of exile and deliverance influenced the theological orientation of the churches. Women filled the pews; in Chicago, 70 percent of churchgoers were women. Responding to the immediate material and psychological needs of new congregants, black churches undertook social service programs.

Few ministers were more aware of the impact of the Great Migration than the Rev. Lacey K. Williams of Olivet Baptist Church, the oldest Baptist church in Chicago. In an essay published in the Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1929, Williams argued that black churches must respond to the practical and spiritual needs of people struggling to adjust to urban life; the churches must be "passionately human, but no less divine." Under Williams' leadership, Olivet developed a program of progressive social reform, reaching out to new migrants, providing them with social services and knitting them into the larger church community. Olivet Church became the largest African American church -- and the largest Protestant church -- in the entire nation.

In the South, rural immigrants poured into major cities such as Atlanta and Birmingham, where they contributed to established congregations and encouraged the growth of new ones. But in rural areas, churches struggled to cope with the weakening social structure that had once sustained them. Ministers were not always educated. But it was the lay members -- deacons, ushers, choirs, song leaders, Sunday school teachers and "mothers" of the congregation -- who gave the churches their vitality and strength. Church socials, Sunday picnics, Bible study and praise meetings encouraged social cohesion, heightened a sense of community and nurtured hope in the face of discrimination and violence. By the 1950s, the infrastructure of black churches and the moral resilience they encouraged had laid the foundation for the crusade that would transform the political and religious landscape of America: the civil rights movement.

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

For more than 100 years, blacks had struggled against racial inequality, racial violence and social injustice. By the mid-1950s, resistance coalesced into concrete plans for action, spurred in part by the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi. In September 1955, a photo of Till's mutilated and battered body lying in an open casket aroused anger and deep revulsion among blacks and whites, both in the North and South. Three months after his death, a seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. She was arrested and fined. Soon after, ministers and lay leaders gathered to decide on their course of action: a boycott of the Montgomery buses. They also decided to form an association, the Montgomery Improvement Association, and chose as their spokesman the newly appointed 26-year-old minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr. The son and grandson of ministers, King had grown up in his father's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. In his first speech he clearly defined the religious and moral dimensions of the movement:

We are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong ...

King continued as the principal spokesman for the boycott. Behind the scenes, Jo Ann Robinson and E.D. Nixon managed the protest and kept it going. The boycott lasted more than a year. In 1956, a federal ruling struck down the Montgomery ordinance; the Supreme Court of the United States later affirmed this decision.

Two years later, King and other black ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with the goal of organizing anti-segregation efforts in other communities in the South. Its members included Montgomery minister Ralph Abernathy; Andrew Young, a Congregationalist minister from New Orleans; James Lawson from the United Methodist Church; and Wyatt T. Walker, a Baptist. Civil rights activist Ella Baker served as the group's executive secretary; King was elected president and declared that the goal of the movement was "to save the soul of the nation." As historian Albert Robateau has observed, "The civil rights movement became a religious crusade."

As with emancipation, the civil rights crusade was sustained by the Exodus story. As congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis observes: "Slavery was our Egypt, segregation was our Egypt, discrimination was our Egypt, and so during the height of the civil rights movement it was not unusual for people to be singing, 'Go down Moses way on down in Egypt land and tell Pharaoh to let my people go.'"

Churches played a pivotal role in protests. In crowded basements and cramped offices, plans were made, strategies formulated, people assembled. Decades of providing social services now paid off in organized political protest. Marches took on the characteristics of religious services, with prayers, short sermons and songs. But not all churches joined the civil rights movement. As historian Barbara Savage has shown, most pastors and congregations were reluctant to defy the status quo. J.H. Jackson, the conservative leader of the venerable National Baptist Convention and pastor of Chicago's Olivet Baptist Church, was staunchly opposed to King's tactics as he affirmed the rule of law. Like Thurgood Marshall and the leadership of the NAACP, he believed that civil disobedience, mass protests and any other efforts that put African Americans in conflict with the powers that be would compromise their efforts toward equality via the courts. Like Booker T. Washington, he was convinced that it was the responsibility of black people to prove their economic value and social worth to the dominant society by modeling morality, entrepreneurialism and citizenship. Tensions finally split the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., the largest historic black denomination, when King and others broke off to form the Progressive Baptist Convention.

But not all those prepared to fight for civil rights subscribed to King's strategy of nonviolence. King himself seemed reluctant to risk arrest. But under pressure, he participated in a march in Birmingham that he knew would land him in jail. A group of white ministers sent a letter criticizing his actions. King replied with "Letter From Birmingham Jail," a profound reflection upon Christianity and the imperative for social justice and social change. King's letter was smuggled out of jail and widely published.

The White House advised King not to proceed with plans for a March on Washington, but on Aug. 28, 1963 -- eight years to the day after the death of Emmett Till -- 200,000 civil rights activists, including preachers, rabbis, nuns, farmers, lawyers, store clerks and students, descended on the Washington Mall to hear King deliver the most famous speech of the 20th century, "I Have a Dream." Drawing upon the language and cadence of Scripture, King linked biblical precepts to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and called upon the nation to honor the commitment of the Founding Fathers to social justice and liberty for all.

The afterglow that enveloped the march was quickly shattered when four little girls attending Sunday school were killed by a bomb that exploded in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on Sept. 15, 1963. The following year President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But King himself faced growing criticism. Malcolm X, fiery spokesman for the Nation of Islam, mocked his nonviolent approach. Stokely Carmichael and others issued calls for "Black Power." King denounced the Vietnam War and began to organize the Poor People's Campaign. His assassination on April 4, 1968, signaled the end of the apex of the civil rights movement.

THE NEXT CHAPTER

The status and role of the black church in the post-civil rights era has been the subject of lively debate among African American scholars. Some argue that "the black church" is "dead," that it has lost its prophetic and progressive voice and its capacity to mobilize for reform on the national stage. Others argue the church is very much alive, and point to the results of the 2008 Pew Religious Landscape Survey that shows that African Americans are more likely than any other ethnic or racial group to report a formal religious affiliation. Even those who count themselves "unaffiliated" describe themselves as " religiously unaffiliated."

Yet it is clear that the church, like all social organizations, is changing. It is also clear that the debate about what the church is, is highly charged by competing ideas about what it ought to be. Should it carry forward the prophetic imperative of the civil rights movement, the collective mandate for social change? Or should it focus on personal prosperity and individual economic advancement? Some influential black ministers and televangelists have promoted the prosperity gospel, sending the message that God wants you to be rich and that wealth is a sign of divine favor. The prosperity gospel is sometimes linked to a social conservatism that opposes homosexuality, gay rights and same-sex marriages. In the 2004 presidential race, Republican strategists courted these preachers with success.

By contrast, at Trinity Church in Chicago, Jeremiah Wright stressed pride in African identity and espoused a brand of black liberation theology. Trinity is "unapologetically Christian, unashamedly black." His message of affirmation and identity remains far more complex than a few sound bites can possibly express. Now under the guidance of a new pastor, Trinity continues to offer a wide range of social services, including meals for the homeless, housing for the elderly, child care programs and ministries for people with AIDS and HIV infection and prison inmates.

According to Professor Jonathan Walton, for more than 300 years, the black church in America has provided a safe haven for black Christians in a nation shadowed by the legacy of slavery and a society that remains defined by race and class. Inspired by the story of Exodus, African Americans can think out, pray out and shout out their anger and aspirations, free from the unstated yet powerful constraints that govern dialogue with the larger white society. In the pulpit and the pews, in choir lofts and Sunday schools, the black church continues to offer affirmation and dignity to people still searching for equality and justice, still willing to reach out for a more inclusive, embracing tomorrow.
Professor Anthea Butler (University of Pennsylvania) and Professor Jonathan Walton (Harvard Divinity School) served as editorial advisers on this essay.

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The Black Church | American Experience | PBS

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Marilyn Mellowes was principally responsible for the research and development of the series God in America and has served as its series producer. She produced and wrote From Jesus to Christ, the First Christians, a four-hour FRONTLINE series that premiered in 1998. Additional credits include Vietnam: A Television History, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, Castro's Challenge, The Kennedys, Nixon and Julia!

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The Civil Rights Era | The Black Church | PBS LearningMedia

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The Civil Rights Era | The Black Church | PBS LearningMedia

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The Civil Rights Era | The Black Church | PBS LearningMedia

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Despite the guarantees afforded in the 15th and 19th Amendments, the right to vote was still a distant dream for many African Americans in the post-World War II era. This was especially true in the South where Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, and violent terror tactics were used to intimidate and block African Americans' access to their right to vote.

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Celebrating Black Music Month | National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Celebrating Black Music Month | National Museum of African American History and Culture

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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June is African American Music Appreciation Month! Created by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, this month celebrates the African American musical influences that comprise an essential part of our nation's treasured cultural heritage.

Formerly called National Black Music Month, this celebration of African American musical contributions is re-established annually by presidential proclamation. Though by no means exhaustive, we've prepared a primer that will guide you through some of the different genres that African Americans have created, inspired and fostered.

Rock and Roll

Rock 'n' roll music incorporates elements from all African American music genres and combines them with American pop and country music components. The genre was born in the 1950s and appealed to the rebellious yearnings of American youth culture.

Hip-Hop and Rap

Hip-Hop and rap are musical traditions firmly embedded in African American culture. Like jazz, hip-hop has become a global phenomenon and has exerted a driving force on the development of mass media. Hip-hop music spawned an entire cultural form, while rap remains a means for artists to voice opinions and share experiences regarding social and political issues.

This list of musical styles merely scratches the surface. In addition to the genres previously detailed, African American musicians and artists have also developed and influenced classical music traditions, country and western music, pop music, and dance music such as disco, techno and house, among other genres and styles. Millions of people around the globe listen to and are touched by music that carries elements of African American musical traditions.

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June is African American Music Appreciation Month! Created by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, this month celebrates the African American musical influences that comprise an essential part of our nation's treasured cultural heritage. Formerly called National Black Music Month, this celebration of African American musical contributions is re-established annually by presidential proclamation.

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A timeline of history-making Black music

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A timeline of history-making Black music

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A selection of artists and landmarks illustrating highlights in Black music history (Getty Images)

Every February, The Current honors Black History Month. We'll be celebrating by spotlighting black musical artists whose voices and songs changed the world, throughout the decades and across genres. We're also posting a series of essays delving into a deep, enduring and ever-evolving body of work. In this entry, we trace a timeline of historic black musical events, with extended riffs on selected items.
1912

Trumpeter W.C. Handy — who earned the sobriquet "Father of the Blues" — publishes the sheet music for "Memphis Blues, " which he called a "southern rag"; two years later he penned the classic "Saint Louis Blues." In 1969, Handy was the first black performer to be honored on a United States postage stamp. Subsequent honorees include Duke Ellington (1986), Otis Redding (1993), Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, and Howlin' Wolf (1994), Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk (1995), Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, Josh White, Mahalia Jackson, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1998), "Hip-hop culture" (2000), Ella Fitzgerald (2007), Miles Davis (2012), Ray Charles (2013), and Sarah Vaughan (2016).
1925

Louis Armstrong records the first of a series of singles for Okeh Records with his Hot Five and Hot Seven combos. The trumpeter's take on the songs, including "Saint James Infirmary," "Basin Street Blues," and "Muskrat Ramble," "helped to change the course of American music," as writer Charles Hiroshi Garrett noted in a review of a 2000 collection of the complete recordings. "This music has been described as the birthplace of jazz, the musical shot heard 'round the world, the Alps of jazz — indeed, both the music's Holy Grail and its Rosetta Stone."
1934

The Apollo Theater opens and becomes a cultural and musical mecca in the heart of the Harlem neighborhood in NYC.
1935

Pianist Teddy Wilson is part of the "first known interracial jazz group" — the Benny Goodman Trio, with the namesake clarinetist and drummer Gene Krupa.
1936

On November 23 in a room at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Robert Johnson starts a three-day recording session that produces batch of songs, including "Come On In My Kitchen," "Kind Hearted Woman Blues," I Believe I'll Dust My Broom," and "Cross Road Blues," which epitomize the Delta blues style. They were reissued in 1961 on the King of the Delta Blues Singers compilation, which influenced new generations of blues acolytes, including Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Jimi Hendrix.
1938

"From Spirituals to Swing," a showcase of black performers curated by producer/talent scout John Hammond, is presented at Carnegie Hall on December 23. The bill featured the Count Basie Orchestra, Albert Ammons, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Big Bill Broonzy (a second show was staged in 1939 on Christmas Eve). The liner notes in the 1999 boxed set of the shows noted that "the musical significance of the two 'From Spirituals To Swing' concerts is difficult to deny. Equally important, however, were the social and political implications. The racial impact cannot be overlooked as African-American artists were being presented to an integrated audience at Carnegie Hall at a time when such an occurrence was, if not unheard of, extremely rare."
1944

Sister Rosetta Tharpe releases "Down by the Riverside" which highlights her pioneering electric guitar playing, which is widely-cited as an influence for countless Rock & Roll musicians. The Library of Congress added the song to the National Recording Registry in 2004, saying the song "captures her spirited guitar playing and unique vocal style, demonstrating clearly her influence on early rhythm-and-blues performers." Her originality played a pivotal role in the conception of Rock & Roll as a genre of music and earned her the honorific "the Godmother of rock and roll."
1951

The Kings of Rhythm, Ike Turner's Mississippi-based R&B group, record "Rocket 88" at Sam Phillips' Sun Records. The 78-rpm single, credited to Jackie Brenston (the group's saxophonist and vocalist) and His Delta Cats, was released on Chess Records and is often cited (and debated) as the first rock 'n' roll record. Writer Nick Tosches said it "was possessed of a sound and a fury the sheer, utter newness of which set it apart from what had come before."
1955

Marian Anderson is the first black singer to perform with the New York Metropolitan Opera.
1955

Chess Records releases Chuck Berry's debut 45, "Maybellene." It's No. 18 on Rolling Stone's ranking of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. "Rock & roll guitar starts here," the magazine said. "The pileup of hillbilly country, urban blues and hot jazz in Chuck Berry's electric twang is the primal language of pop-music guitar, and it's all perfected on his first single." And Chuck was just getting started!
1956

Nat King Cole is the first black star of a national TV show [NBC's The Nat King Cole Show].
1959

Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is released on August 17. In a 2010 list of the "100 greatest and most influential musical compilations since 1954," Time magazine enthused: "In 1959, Miles Davis had already remade jazz in his own image several times over...But when he assembled an unprecedented all-star team (featuring John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on tenor and alto saxophones, and the masterful pianist Bill Evans) for the two-day sessions that became the Kind of Blue album, Miles left his most lasting mark. The open-ended songs, barely sketched out around 'modes,' or scales, rather than chord changes, were given just one or two takes — and the glorious results, the best-selling jazz disc of all time, are simultaneously delicate and powerful, and teeming with life."
1959

Berry Gordy Jr. launches Tamla Records in Detroit with $800 loaned by family members; the label evolves into the Motown Record Corporation in 1960. In the ensuing decade, Motown's studio, dubbed Hitsville U.S.A., produces hundreds of hit songs — which the label proudly proclaims "The Sound of Young America" — by the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, the Jackson 5, and many other acts.
1963

James Brown's Live At the Apollo (recorded at the Harlem landmark on October 24, 1962) is released in May and is a crossover smash, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard album chart (and lodging on said chart for 66 weeks). In The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, RJ Smith noted that the record was "so staggeringly new it scarcely bore any connection to the music called rhythm and blues. Here was the new soul music." After the success of the album, Brown said, "I started seeing different things and my brain started to intercept new ideas. I became a big city thinker."
1967

The Jimi Hendrix Experience's debut album, Are You Experienced, is released in the UK in May and the US in August. The genre-blurring visionary was a flamboyant showman (and underrated songwriter) who is oft-cited as the greatest guitarist of all time. Hendrix's astonishingly creative (and tragically short) run at the zenith of the rock world blazed through 1970, when he died at age 27.
1971

Charley Pride is the first (and so far last) black artist to win the Country Music Association's most prestigious award, Entertainer of the Year; in 2000, he was the first black inductee at the Country Music Hall of Fame (harmonica player DeFord Bailey is the only other honoree).
1972

Isaac Hayes' "Theme from Shaft" wins the Academy Award for Best Original Song (the soundtrack was nominated for Best Original Score); Hayes is the first black artist to win an Oscar in a non-acting category and the first winner who wrote and recorded the award-winning song.
1973

Reggae begins to insinuate its alluring riddims in the US, with the release of Bob Marley and the Wailers' Catch a Fire and the soundtrack for the film The Harder They Come, featuring Jimmy Cliff, the Maytals, and the Melodians. "That was an incredible one-two punch that knocked out America for Jamaican music," historian Roger Steffens said.
1973

DJ Kool Herc, who would earn the honorific "The Father of Hip-Hop," creates the template for the groundbreaking genre at clubs and block parties in the South Bronx. Adapting the style of the Jamaican sound system DJs that Herc (nee Clive Campbell) heard during his youth, he masterfully builds breakbeats, cutting snippets of James Brown and Booker T. & the M.G.s' discs on a pair of turntables — a technique that he termed "the Merry-Go-Round." Herc also rocked the mic, hyping the crowd and his dancing b-boys and b-girls. His innovations inspired Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and everyone else who worked with two turntables and a microphone.
1974

Stevie Wonder is the first black artist to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for Innervisions; he also garners the top honor in 1975 (Fulfillingness' First Finale) and 1977 (Songs In the Key of Life).
1979

"Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang is released in October. The ebullient track, featuring Wonder Mike, Big Bank Hank and Master Gee slinging rhymes over the music from Chic's "Good Times" (Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards sued and eventually received co-writing credit), was the first crossover rap smash, reaching No. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100 (moving two million copies) and spreading the fresh sound to the 'burbs.
1982

Michael Jackson's Thriller is released. It sold 66 million copies worldwide. It topped the Billboard album chart for 37 weeks and spawned seven top 10 singles (three reached No. 1). It won eight Grammys, including Album and Record of the Year. And a few of its audacious videos became staples on MTV and helped break the channel's perceived color barrier.
1984

Prince's Purple Rain is released. It sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. It topped the Billboard album chart for 24 consecutive weeks and spawned five singles (two reached No. 1). It won two Grammys (and was nominated for Album of the Year) and grabbed the Academy Award for Best Original Song Score. And a few of its audacious videos became staples on MTV.
1986

Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, and Little Richard are five of the 10 honorees at the first annual induction ceremony at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
1986

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is celebrated as a national holiday for the first time on January 20. Legislation for a holiday was first submitted four days after his assassination in 1968; a few states enacted observances in the '70s, and a 1979 House bill fell five votes short of approval in 1979. Support for the holiday was bolstered when Stevie Wonder recorded "Happy Birthday" (the closing track on Hotter Than July) in honor of MLK in 1980, with the lines, "I just never understood / How a man who died for good / Could not have a day that would / Be set aside for his recognition Why has there never been a holiday / Where peace is celebrated / All throughout the world?" Wonder and King's widow, Coretta Scott King, lobbied Congress and helped generate a petition with six million signatures supporting their cause; in 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed the bill which created the holiday. (Hear the full story on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day episode of the Music News podcast.)
1992

The Bodyguard: Original Soundtrack Album, featuring six songs by the film's co-star, Whitney Houston, and six tracks by other artists (plus the movie's theme), is a worldwide sensation — it has sold 45 million copies. Houston's bravura cover of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 14 weeks; the collection won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year and is the all-time best-selling soundtrack.
1999

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is the first hip-hop disc to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year (the lone subsequent winner: OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below in 2004). Hill's reaction at the podium: "This is crazy 'cuz this is hop-hop music!"
2003

The October 18 issue of Billboard hailed "Black Music's Historic Week": "R&B/hip-hop's mainstream popularity was further validated last week [Oct. 11]. That was when the top 10 songs on The Billboard Hot 100 were all by black artists for the first time in the chart's history." (The artists from 1-10: Beyoncé featuring Sean Paul; Nelly, P. Diddy & Murphy Lee; Lil John & the East Side Boyz featuring Ying Yang Twins; Chingy; Pharrell featuring Jay-Z; YoungBloodZ featuring Lil Jon; 50 Cent; Fabolous featuring Tamia Or Ashanti; Ludacris featuring Swawnna; Black Eyed Peas.) Ron Fair, president of A&M Records, observed, "It means pop music has no color. We've obliterated the color line. An awful lot of folks of all colors worked on these Hot 100 records, black and white artists, producers, label execs. Call it 'hip-hop' or 'R&B,' but it's the universal language of today's music and it's pop."
2010

Beyoncé is hailed as the best-selling artist of the 2000s, with 64 gold and platinum certifications for her albums, digital songs, ringtones, and videos.
2017

Nielsen reports that hip-hop/R&B surpasses rock as the most-consumed music (sales, streaming, etc.) in the US.
2017

Nicki Minaj dethrones Aretha Franklin as the female singer with the most appearances on Billboard's Hot 100 (76, eclipsing The Queen of Soul's 73).
2018

Kendrick Lamar is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his 2017 album Damn, becoming the first non-classical/jazz artist to be honored in that category. The Pulitzer committee hailed its "affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life."
2019

"This Is America," by Childish Gambino (aka Donald Glover), is the first rap song to win Grammy Awards for Song and Record of the Year (it also grabbed the trophy for Best Music Video and Rap/Sung Performance).
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A timeline of history-making Black music

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Every February, The Current honors Black History Month. We'll be celebrating by spotlighting black musical artists whose voices and songs changed the world, throughout the decades and across genres. We're also posting a series of essays delving into a deep, enduring and ever-evolving body of work.

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African American Music Timeline | Carnegie Hall

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African American Music Timeline | Carnegie Hall

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The Measure Of Harper Lee: A Life Shaped By A Towering Text : The Two-Way : NPR

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The Measure Of Harper Lee: A Life Shaped By A Towering Text : The Two-Way : NPR

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Peering back across Harper Lee's life, it can seem impossible to distinguish the novelist from her masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee died at the age of 89 in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., on Friday morning - yet it's clear that her legacy will live on much longer than that, through her characters and the readers who have embraced them for decades.

"America and the world knew Harper Lee as one of the last century's most beloved authors," Hank Conner, Lee's nephew, announced in a statement. "We knew her as Nelle Harper Lee, a loving member of our family, a devoted friend to the many good people who touched her life, and a generous soul in our community and our state."

Conner's experience, though - and the experiences of those who knew Lee personally - are exceptional. For the most part, Lee's readers have known the author only through To Kill a Mockingbird, her debut - and, for decades, her only - novel.

The book depicts the strivings of a small-town Alabama lawyer, Atticus Finch, on behalf of Tom Robinson, a black man charged with raping a white woman, and it casts the events through the lens of Finch's precocious daughter, Scout. Despite its relative brevity, the book bears considerable weight, both in the gravity of its themes and the care with which it treats them.

Perhaps, then, it should be no surprise that Lee and her editor, Tay Hohoff, weren't exactly expecting this book to fly off store shelves.

Hohoff "cautioned her that a book with racism at its center involving a rape trial was not a thing in 1960 to make people run to the bookstores for," says Charles J. Shields, author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. "She counseled her client and said, 'If we sell 2,500 copies and break even, you should be proud.' "

You already know this twist: Turns out they were flat wrong.

The book all but immediately became a best-seller. (And it's gone on to sell more than 40 million copies, according to The Washington Post.) It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. Just a year later, it was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film.

What accounts for that kind of success? In many ways, it struck a chord for the very reasons Lee's editor was feeling cautious, says Mary Murphy, director of the documentary Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird.

"You know, there were two big revolutions in the '60s in this country when To Kill a Mockingbird came out: One was civil rights and the other was women's rights. And in a way, To Kill a Mockingbird speaks to both those things," Murphy says.

"Scout Finch at 6 enjoyed, as child growing up in the Depression, enjoyed more freedoms than most women in the '60s did. She wore pants, she swore, she played with boys, she spoke her mind," Murphy continues. "And of course the Civil Rights movement: Many people I spoke to who were active in the movement said that the fact that a white Southerner wrote that book gave them hope that justice could prevail."

And then, seemingly all at once, Lee was gone - at least, that's how the popular narrative goes. The author quietly continued to write, but she decided to step out of the spotlight. Lee did not publish another novel for more than five decades, and she refused nearly every attempt by the press to speak with her.

Naturally, there grew around her the mythology of the reclusive writer. It's a myth that Murphy says simply isn't true.

"Harper Lee was not a recluse. She was not holed up in her house like Boo Radley - unless of course, you were a reporter, and then she was not going to talk to you," Murphy says. "I think that's a big distinction."

Wayne Flynt, her friend and professor emeritus at Auburn University, says her absence had little to do with preconceived notions of her personality.

"Many people describe her as an introvert, many people explain her as being extremely shy, she was neither an introvert nor shy," Flynt says. "She was a private woman, she lived very much within herself, she was quite content within herself."

And he explains Lee's decision not to publish again - for decades - quite simply.

"I suppose what I would say is that there are some writers who have one great story to tell and they tell that one great story."

In the meantime, that singular novel was becoming a staple on high school syllabi, a beloved text read and reread even as its era passed on into the next, and new generations picked up the book.

"The people who have To Kill a Mockingbird seared in memory - their first reading experience of To Kill a Mockingbird seared in their brain - it's the biggest book club in the world," Murphy says. "I mean, for all our conversations about Facebook and social media, To Kill a Mockingbird is the biggest social media group of our time, in a way."

Lee was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work in 2007, and a National Medal of Arts in 2010.

Then, the second twist: Last year, after some 55 years of waiting, Lee decided it was time to publish a second novel, Go Set a Watchman. The book was initially billed by many as a sequel to Mockingbird, for it shared principal characters, reviving Atticus and Scout in a setting several years later than Mockingbird's main action.

Yet, in many ways, it was less a sequel than a glimpse at what would have been, had Lee gone with her first impulses as a writer rather than following her editor's advice and reworking her first drafts. For years, Hohoff had worked with Lee on radical revisions to the text, from 1957 to the book's eventual publication in 1960, according to The New York Times.

"I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told," Lee said in a 2015 statement.

Go Set a Watchman, then, let Lee's early visions of her definitive work find the light of day. In the process, though, it also invited significant skepticism that Lee, who had suffered a stroke in 2007, was fully in control of the decision.

Then, there were the decidedly mixed reviews.

"All I know for certain is that Go Set a Watchman is kind of a mess that will forever change the way we read a masterpiece," NPR's Maureen Corrigan, for one, wrote about the book when it was released in July 2015. Her assessment was by no means uncommon.

Lee's own reaction to the reviews and the controversy?

"She chortled," Flynt told AL.com at the time.

And herein, perhaps, rests a lesson: Despite our best attempts to confine Lee's life to the pages she wrote and the characters she created, her own life far exceeded the bounds of her book covers. Lee was more than Atticus, Scout and Tom; she was more than the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. And, perhaps, she often remembered that fact much better than the rest of us.

"She was a good companion," Flynt remembers. "She had lots of people she adored.

"One thing I will say about Harper Lee: If you ever met Harper Lee, you got just exactly what you saw. She never tried to be anything her entire life except who she was."

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The Measure Of Harper Lee: A Life Shaped By A Towering Text

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Peering back across Harper Lee's life, it can seem impossible to distinguish the novelist from her masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee died at the age of 89 in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., on Friday morning - yet it's clear that her legacy will live on much longer than that, through her characters and the readers who have embraced them for decades.

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Things you might not know about Harper Lee, in honor of her birthday - al.com

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Things you might not know about Harper Lee, in honor of her birthday - al.com

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Harper Lee would have been 94 years old today. The famed author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. When she died -- on Feb. 19, 2016, at a nursing home, The Meadows of Monroeville -- the literary world mourned her passing. So did just about everyone who reveres "Mockingbird," Lee's enduring novel about racial tensions, social justice and life in a small Southern town.

Lee was an intensely private person, and the things we know for sure about her have been repeated over and over. Her tomboy years in Monroeville. Her friendship with a young Truman Capote. Her years as a struggling writer in New York City. Her devotion to family, including her sister, Alice Lee, and her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, the inspiration for Atticus Finch.

No one, not even Lee scholars, are under the illusion that they know everything about the author. She was much too reticent for that, much too practiced at avoiding the spotlight. In honor of Lee's birthday, however, we'd like to highlight a few pieces of information that have been uncovered in recent years, were revealed in her letters or simply made us go "Hmm." Here, then, are some things you might not know about Harper Lee.
AL.com file photo FEAR FACTOR
Alabama historian Wayne Flynt was one of Lee's closest friends in Alabama. In his 2017 book, "Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee," Flynt offered his insights on Lee and her famously private life. Flynt also talked about the author, and her reticence for public attention, in a 2017 interview with The New York Times.

"She stopped giving interviews in the 1960s and told Mr. Flynt that she typically vomited before speaking engagements - so much so that she came up with a little pep talk, 'a mantra of great egotism,' to help alleviate the pressure," the Times story said.

Also: "She described, Mr. Flynt said, one close encounter with a stalker who followed her from Birmingham to her home in Monroeville. That only cemented her fear for her safety, he said. 'She was obsessed with the idea of stalkers and assassination,' Mr. Flynt said. 'She was really afraid of being killed for the sake of someone else's neuroses.'"
ROBYN BECK//AFP/Getty Images NO NEEDLES, PLEASE
Lee was a prolific correspondent, and kept up a steady stream of letters, thank-you notes, birthday cards and other communications to friends, family members and acquaintances. Six letters from the 1950s were donated to Emory University in Atlanta, and made public in 2018.

In one of these letters, from 1956, the author talked about being a devoted caregiver for her ailing father. Still, there were limits to her ministrations, as she told Harold Caufield, a friend in New York City.

"Sugar, I guess we all somehow rise to occasions: I've done more things for him that I never remotely thought I'd be called on to do for anybody," Lee wrote. "But I suppose there's truth in the adage that you don't mind it if they're yours. I sho' don't: you will discover that your Nelle Harper is a much less squeamish individual. But the one thing I don't think I'll get used to if I live to be 100 is a needle. They fed him through his veins for 10 days after he was stricken, and I gagged every time I saw him hooked up to that thing."
Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos PRECURSOR TO 'IN COLD BLOOD'
Lee helped Capote to conduct research and do interviews for "In Cold Blood," his "nonfiction novel" about the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Kansas. The book, published in 1966, required years of reporting and writing, and made Capote famous.

However, Lee actually wrote about the Clutter case for a magazine article that was published more than five years earlier, according to biographer Charles J. Shields. (He's the author of "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee," published in 2006 and updated in 2016.)

Shields told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that Lee wrote a 2,000-word article, "Dewey Had Important Part in Solving Brutal Murders," for Grapevine, a magazine for members of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI. The piece was published in March 1960 without a byline, Shields said.

Lee's article focused on Alvin A. Dewey Jr., a former FBI special agent who played a major role in the Clutter investigation. Dewey was a key figure in "In Cold Blood," as well.

"It's a little unctuous, that piece," Shields said during a 2016 interview with the AJC. "It was meant to curry favor with the folks on the ground there, particularly with Alvin Dewey."

The article's publication also was meant to warn off anyone who was thinking about writing a book about the Clutter killings, Shields said.

"They were putting stakes in the ground, making it clear 'This is our turf,'" Shields said.

Related content: Read ""Dewey Had Important Part in Solving Brutal Murders," which was reprinted by Smithsonian magazine in 2016.
AL.com file photo TRUE-CRIME FASCINATION
Lee worked on a true-crime project in the late 1970s, documenting a murder case in her home state. It involved a rather notorious figure in the Alexander City area, the Rev. Willie Maxwell, who was suspected of killing five people to cash in on insurance policies.

Although Lee did substantial research for a book on Maxwell, it was never published. Casey Cep, a writer from Maryland who's become something of a specialist on Lee, focuses on Lee's efforts to research and write about the Maxwell case in a 2019 book, "Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee." Along the way, Cep gained many insights into Lee's personality and writing habits.

"Writing made her miserable, but she was not a miserable person," Cep said in a 2019 interview with AL.com. "She was vivacious and witty and clever. ... I hope, by the end of the book, that you feel she was a happier person than others thought she was. She is not an entirely tragic figure. Like all of us, she was a complicated person."

Related content: Cep talks about her book in this Reckon Interview.
AL.com file photo CAPS AND GOWNS
Lee attended, but never graduated from, the University of Alabama School of Law (1945-1949). She contributed to student publications there, and was the editor of the Rammer Jammer.

Lee received an honorary doctorate from the University of Alabama College of Arts and Sciences in 1990, due to her literary renown and the long-lasting impact of "To Kill a Mockingbird." She also picked up several other honorary degrees over the years, including one from Mobile's Spring Hill College in 1997 and the University of Notre Dame in 2006.

In 2016, a petition was posted at Change.org, calling for UA's president to change the name of Morgan Hall to Lee Hall. It had 4,452 supporters when it was closed. The petition said:

"Currently, the University of Alabama's Department of English is housed in Morgan Hall, named after John Tyler Morgan. Morgan was a general in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, and post-war, a six-term senator from the state of Alabama. He was also a Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan, and used his legislative power to promote racist policies and practices. ...

"Upon the death of Harper Lee, who attended the University of Alabama from 1945-1949, the University has an amazing chance to show our support for racial equality, as well as to honor the legacy generally of a woman who promoted kindness and empathy for all. Lee was doubtless the University's greatest contribution to literature, and it would be more than fitting for our English building to bear her name, which reflects so much more accurately the values of the University of Alabama, than that of white supremacist John Tyler Morgan."

The building remains Morgan Hall.
Terry Manier AUBURN? UM, NO
Rick Bragg, an Alabama native and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is among those who visited with Lee during her later years.

"I never wanted to be one of those Southern writers who went to her doorstep and asked for an audience," Bragg said in a 2016 interview with AL.com, shortly after Lee's death. "I just didn't want to do that. I almost waited too late.

"A few years ago, I was encouraged by some really smart people to go see her in her retirement community there in Monroeville. I walked in the room, and there's this little woman, who could have been my mom or one of my aunts, sitting on the edge of the bed. The room was real, real, real warm, which is how I understand how us older folks like it. Wayne Flynt and his wife were there. They walked out as we were walking in, and Ms. Lee leaned in real close to me and motioned me over and said, 'There go the only two people from Auburn I could ever stand.' I'm not star-struck much, but this is a woman whose work means more than most. I was kind of tongue-tied. I think I sounded like Jethro there in her presence. I'm so glad that I got to see her."
Connor Sheets | csheets@AL.com 'CAN'T SEE, DRAT IT'
Lee suffered from macular degeneration during her declining years. However. she was able to write a terse note of dismissal to an AL.com reporter in 2015, after he sent her a letter asking for an interview.

Connor Sheets' letter was returned to him with a message scrawled at the bottom: "Go away!" and signed by Lee.

"It appears that Nelle, as her friends call her, is very much with it, that she is still lucid and that her acerbic, press-averse side is fully intact," Sheets wrote in a column for AL.com.

"Not only does the handwriting have the same careless curlicues and vague vowels of verified Lee signatures I've seen in the past, but it also expresses a sentiment similar to those she has directed in the direction of poky journalists for several decades."

Apparently, Lee was candid about her declining eyesight -- at least, she was with family and friends. "Can't see, drat it," she wrote in a letter dated 2006 that was auctioned in 2016. "Blind is now a no-no word, like sin," she said in another letter, according to The New York Times.
AP Photo/Kim Chandler WHERE SHE'S BURIED
Lee shooed away rank-and-file admirers during her lifetime, but fans certainly can pay tribute to her memory. The author is buried at Hillcrest Cemetery on Pineville Road in Monroeville, at the Lee family plot.

Soon after Lee's death, visitors began to leave small tributes at her gravesite, according to the Associated Press.

"More than two dozen small pebbles had been placed on the Lee family headstone," an AP story said in 2016. "A fresh carnation was tucked beside the wilting spray of red and white funeral flowers and someone had drawn hearts and messages in the sandy dirt atop her grave. 'Scout I misses you,' was written in the dirt."

Related content: "In search of Harper Lee," an article by the late Kathy Kemp, provides an insightful look at the author and details the reporter's encounter with Lee on her doorstep.

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Things you might not know about Harper Lee, in honor of her birthday

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Harper Lee would have been 94 years old today. The famed author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. When she died -- on Feb. 19, 2016, at a nursing home, The Meadows of Monroeville -- the literary world mourned her passing.

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Remembering the life and legacy of Harper Lee | PBS NewsHour

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Remembering the life and legacy of Harper Lee | PBS NewsHour

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Remembering the life and legacy of Harper Lee

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Renowned author Harper Lee, whose debut novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” has become enshrined within the American literary canon, died early Friday morning at age 89. Jeffrey Brown sits down with bestselling novelist Allan Gurganus to discuss Lee’s works and enduring legacy.

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Harper Lee, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and Civil Rights | Time

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Harper Lee, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and Civil Rights | Time

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The Civil Rights Movement and 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

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Read an excerpt from LIFE's new special edition exploring the lasting influence of the iconic novel

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Harper Lee and the Cinematic Life of To Kill a Mockingbird | Oscars.org | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

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Harper Lee and the Cinematic Life of To Kill a Mockingbird | Oscars.org | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

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Oscars.org | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

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When Philadelphia-based publisher J.B. Lippincott Company decided to publish Harper Lee's debut novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, the company requested an initial print run of just 5,000 copies. Nevertheless, upon its release in July 1960, the novel swiftly gained popularity and earned a place on the New York Times bestseller list. Unusual for a promising literary property, the motion picture rights to which were often sold before publication, To Kill a Mockingbird spent six weeks on the list before producer Alan J. Pakula and director Robert Mulligan acquired the rights to the book, which would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961.

Once they had purchased the property, the little-known filmmakers quickly realized they would need a major star in order to move the project forward in Hollywood. They approached Gregory Peck about the role of Atticus Finch and he immediately accepted. With Peck's participation assured, his company, Brentwood Productions, financed the picture and Universal signed on to distribute it. Soon thereafter, the filmmakers sought out playwright Horton Foote to write the screenplay. As pre-production proceeded, Pakula and Mulligan attracted other talented artists to the project, including cinematographer Russell Harlan, composer Elmer Bernstein and production designers Alexander Golitzen and Henry Bumstead.

In order to serve the story justly, Pakula and Mulligan were also keen to involve author Harper Lee in the project. In November 1961, the filmmakers sent Henry Bumstead on a research visit to Monroeville, Alabama. As Bumstead's letter to Pakula below indicates, Lee welcomed the art director to her hometown and accompanied him throughout his visit, offering suggestions about how the architectural and design details of the novel's fictional community of Maycomb could be most accurately portrayed in the film. Pakula also asked Lee to obtain photographs of Monroeville in the 1930s on their behalf, adding: "We could take the easy way and just stick Atticus and the family in a nice, new ranch house and give the Radleys a big, new picture window for Boo to look through, but somehow I don't see the picture quite that way." Bumstead worked closely with the craftsmen at Universal to recreate the Southern locale on the studio backlot and even replicated the Monroeville courthouse. Lee, pictured here with Bumstead, was astonished by how accurately the filmmakers had reproduced a Depression-era Southern town when she visited the studio.

Gregory Peck, whose character was based upon Harper Lee's father, also went to great lengths to ensure his portrayal did justice to Lee's creation. He visited Monroeville and was introduced to her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, from whom he drew inspiration for his role. Peck worked hard to develop his character and made extensive notes about how he envisioned playing each scene. This page from Peck's shooting script shows his notations for the dramatic courtroom scene, which is depicted below in storyboard form.

Harper Lee and Gregory Peck became lifelong friends as a result of their collaboration on the film. Lee was one of his most enthusiastic supporters when his performance was nominated for an Academy Award, and she was equally thrilled when he took home the award for Actor in a Leading Role. In turn, Peck shared the accolades for the film with Lee, declaring in a March 1963 letter to her: "Congratulations on your eight nominations for the Academy Award."

In all, the film earned three awards from the eight nominations, and has become a much-beloved classic in the American film canon. Material regarding To Kill a Mockingbird can be found among several Special Collections housed at the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library, including the papers of Henry Bumstead, Alan J. Pakula, Gregory Peck and Robert Mulligan.
See more images from the making of To Kill a Mockingbird and learn more about Gregory Peck in our Collection Highlights.

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Harper Lee and the Cinematic Life of To Kill a Mockingbird

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When Philadelphia-based publisher J.B. Lippincott Company decided to publish Harper Lee's debut novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, the company requested an initial print run of just 5,000 copies. ...

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The history of women’s work and wages and how it has created success for us all

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The history of women’s work and wages and how it has created success for us all

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As we celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, we should also celebrate the major strides women have made in the labor market. Their entry into paid work has been a major factor in America's prosperity over the past century and a quarter.

Despite this progress, evidence suggests that many women remain unable to achieve their goals. The gap in earnings between women and men, although smaller than it was years ago, is still significant; women continue to be underrepresented in certain industries and occupations; and too many women struggle to combine aspirations for work and family. Further advancement has been hampered by barriers to equal opportunity and workplace rules and norms that fail to support a reasonable work-life balance. If these obstacles persist, we will squander the potential of many of our citizens and incur a substantial loss to the productive capacity of our economy at a time when the aging of the population and weak productivity growth are already weighing on economic growth.

In the early 20th century, most women in the United States did not work outside the home, and those who did were primarily young and unmarried. In that era, just 20 percent of all women were "gainful workers," as the Census Bureau then categorized labor force participation outside the home, and only 5 percent of those married were categorized as such. Of course, these statistics somewhat understate the contributions of married women to the economy beyond housekeeping and childrearing, since women's work in the home often included work in family businesses and the home production of goods, such as agricultural products, for sale. Also, the aggregate statistics obscure the differential experience of women by race. African American women were about twice as likely to participate in the labor force as were white women at the time, largely because they were more likely to remain in the labor force after marriage.

The fact that many women left work upon marriage reflected cultural norms, the nature of the work available to them, and legal strictures. The occupational choices of those young women who did work were severely circumscribed. Most women lacked significant education-and women with little education mostly toiled as piece workers in factories or as domestic workers, jobs that were dirty and often unsafe. Educated women were scarce. Fewer than 2 percent of all 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in an institution of higher education, and just one-third of those were women. Such women did not have to perform manual labor, but their choices were likewise constrained.

Despite the widespread sentiment against women, particularly married women, working outside the home and with the limited opportunities available to them, women did enter the labor force in greater numbers over this period, with participation rates reaching nearly 50 percent for single women by 1930 and nearly 12 percent for married women. This rise suggests that while the incentive-and in many cases the imperative-remained for women to drop out of the labor market at marriage when they could rely on their husband's income, mores were changing. Indeed, these years overlapped with the so-called first wave of the women's movement, when women came together to agitate for change on a variety of social issues, including suffrage and temperance, and which culminated in the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 guaranteeing women the right to vote.

Between the 1930s and mid-1970s, women's participation in the economy continued to rise, with the gains primarily owing to an increase in work among married women. By 1970, 50 percent of single women and 40 percent of married women were participating in the labor force. Several factors contributed to this rise. First, with the advent of mass high school education, graduation rates rose substantially. At the same time, new technologies contributed to an increased demand for clerical workers, and these jobs were increasingly taken on by women. Moreover, because these jobs tended to be cleaner and safer, the stigma attached to work for a married woman diminished. And while there were still marriage bars that forced women out of the labor force, these formal barriers were gradually removed over the period following World War II.

Women working at the U.S. Capitol switchboard, Washington, D.C. (Library of Congress)

Over the decades from 1930 to 1970, increasing opportunities also arose for highly educated women. That said, early in that period, most women still expected to have short careers, and women were still largely viewed as secondary earners whose husbands' careers came first.

As time progressed, attitudes about women working and their employment prospects changed. As women gained experience in the labor force, they increasingly saw that they could balance work and family. A new model of the two-income family emerged. Some women began to attend college and graduate school with the expectation of working, whether or not they planned to marry and have families.

By the 1970s, a dramatic change in women's work lives was under way. In the period after World War II, many women had not expected that they would spend as much of their adult lives working as turned out to be the case. By contrast, in the 1970s young women more commonly expected that they would spend a substantial portion of their lives in the labor force, and they prepared for it, increasing their educational attainment and taking courses and college majors that better equipped them for careers as opposed to just jobs.

These changes in attitudes and expectations were supported by other changes under way in society. Workplace protections were enhanced through the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978 and the recognition of sexual harassment in the workplace. Access to birth control increased, which allowed married couples greater control over the size of their families and young women the ability to delay marriage and to plan children around their educational and work choices. And in 1974, women gained, for the first time, the right to apply for credit in their own name without a male co-signer.

By the early 1990s, the labor force participation rate of prime working-age women-those between the ages of 25 and 54-reached just over 74 percent, compared with roughly 93 percent for prime working-age men. By then, the share of women going into the traditional fields of teaching, nursing, social work, and clerical work declined, and more women were becoming doctors, lawyers, managers, and professors. As women increased their education and joined industries and occupations formerly dominated by men, the gap in earnings between women and men began to close significantly.

We, as a country, have reaped great benefits from the increasing role that women have played in the economy. But evidence suggests that barriers to women's continued progress remain. The participation rate for prime working-age women peaked in the late 1990s and currently stands at about 76 percent. Of course, women, particularly those with lower levels of education, have been affected by the same economic forces that have been pushing down participation among men, including technical change and globalization. However, women's participation plateaued at a level well below that of prime working-age men, which stands at about 89 percent. While some married women choose not to work, the size of this disparity should lead us to examine the extent to which structural problems, such as a lack of equal opportunity and challenges to combining work and family, are holding back women's advancement.

The gap in earnings between men and women has narrowed substantially, but progress has slowed lately, and women working full time still earn about 17 percent less than men, on average, each week. Even when we compare men and women in the same or similar occupations who appear nearly identical in background and experience, a gap of about 10 percent typically remains. As such, we cannot rule out that gender-related impediments hold back women, including outright discrimination, attitudes that reduce women's success in the workplace, and an absence of mentors.

Recent research has shown that although women now enter professional schools in numbers nearly equal to men, they are still substantially less likely to reach the highest echelons of their professions. Even in my own field of economics, women constitute only about one-third of Ph.D. recipients, a number that has barely budged in two decades. This lack of success in climbing the professional ladder would seem to explain why the wage gap actually remains largest for those at the top of the earnings distribution.

One of the primary factors contributing to the failure of these highly skilled women to reach the tops of their professions and earn equal pay is that top jobs in fields such as law and business require longer workweeks and penalize taking time off. This would have a disproportionately large effect on women who continue to bear the lion's share of domestic and child-rearing responsibilities.

But it can be difficult for women to meet the demands in these fields once they have children. The very fact that these types of jobs require such long hours likely discourages some women-as well as men-from pursuing these career tracks. Advances in technology have facilitated greater work-sharing and flexibility in scheduling, and there are further opportunities in this direction. Economic models also suggest that while it can be difficult for any one employer to move to a model with shorter hours, if many firms were to change their model, they and their workers could all be better off.

Of course, most women are not employed in fields that require such long hours or that impose such severe penalties for taking time off. But the difficulty of balancing work and family is a widespread problem. In fact, the recent trend in many occupations is to demand complete scheduling flexibility, which can result in too few hours of work for those with family demands and can make it difficult to schedule childcare. Reforms that encourage companies to provide some predictability in schedules, cross-train workers to perform different tasks, or require a minimum guaranteed number of hours in exchange for flexibility could improve the lives of workers holding such jobs. Another problem is that in most states, childcare is affordable for fewer than half of all families. And just 5 percent of workers with wages in the bottom quarter of the wage distribution have jobs that provide them with paid family leave. This circumstance puts many women in the position of having to choose between caring for a sick family member and keeping their jobs.

This possibility should inform our own thinking about policies to make it easier for women and men to combine their family and career aspirations. For instance, improving access to affordable and good quality childcare would appear to fit the bill, as it has been shown to support full-time employment. Recently, there also seems to be some momentum for providing families with paid leave at the time of childbirth. The experience in Europe suggests picking policies that do not narrowly target childbirth, but instead can be used to meet a variety of health and caregiving responsibilities.

The United States faces a number of longer-term economic challenges, including the aging of the population and the low growth rate of productivity. One recent study estimates that increasing the female participation rate to that of men would raise our gross domestic product by 5 percent. Our workplaces and families, as well as women themselves, would benefit from continued progress. However, a number of factors appear to be holding women back, including the difficulty women currently have in trying to combine their careers with other aspects of their lives, including caregiving. In looking to solutions, we should consider improvements to work environments and policies that benefit not only women, but all workers. Pursuing such a strategy would be in keeping with the story of the rise in women's involvement in the workforce, which has contributed not only to their own well-being but more broadly to the welfare and prosperity of our country.

This essay is a revised version of a speech that Janet Yellen, then chair of the Federal Reserve, delivered on May 5, 2017 at the "125 Years of Women at Brown Conference," sponsored by Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Yellen would like to thank Stephanie Aaronson, now vice president and director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, for her assistance in the preparation of the original remarks. Read the full text of the speech here "

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The history of women's work and wages and how it has created success for us all

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As we celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, we should also celebrate the major strides women have made in the labor market. Their entry into paid work has been a major factor in America's prosperity over the past century and a quarter.

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Postwar Gender Roles and Women in American Politics | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

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Postwar Gender Roles and Women in American Politics | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

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After the disruption, alienation, and insecurity of the Great Depression and the Second World War, the family became the center of American life. Couples wed early (in the late 1950s, the average age of American women at marriage was 20) and at rates that surpassed those of all previous eras and have not been equaled since. They raised large families. Many moved to sprawling, affordable tract housing developments in the suburbs, bought modern conveniences including cars and dishwashers, and enjoyed more leisure time.

Postwar prosperity made the banalities of housework less taxing but often came at a cost to women who gave up careers to maintain the domestic sphere. This lifestyle stressed the importance of a one-income household; the husband worked and the wife stayed home to raise the children. Historian Elaine Tyler May called it a kind of "domestic containment": In seeking to nurture their families in the suburbs of the 1950s, housewives and mothers often gave up their aspirations for fulfillment outside the home. ³ For instance, the decline in the number of women who pursued higher education can be attributed in large part to marital and familial priorities. In 1920, 47 percent of college students were women; by 1958 that figure stood at 38 percent despite the availability of more federal aid to pay for university education. ⁴

Social expectations for what constituted a woman's proper role outside the home constrained women Members of Congress as well. When asked if women were at a disadvantage in the rough-and-tumble of political campaigns because society held them to different standards than men, Maurine B. Neuberger, who served for years in the Oregon legislature before succeeding her late husband in the U.S. Senate, replied, "Definitely.... A woman enters into a man's world of politics, into back-fighting and grubbing. Before she puts her name on the ballot, she encounters prejudice and people saying, 'A woman's place is in the home.' She has to walk a very tight wire in conducting her campaign. She can't be too pussyfooting or mousy. Also, she can't go to the other extreme: belligerent, coarse, nasty." ⁵ Congresswoman Gracie Bowers Pfost of Idaho observed that a woman seeking political office "must be willing to have her every motive challenged, her every move criticized," and added that she "must submit to having her private life scrutinized under a microscope ... and [to being] the subject of devastating rumors every day." ⁶

Representative Coya Knutson of Minnesota, for instance, was the victim of insidious accusations made more potent by America's often uncompromising expectations for women in the 1950s. The first woman to represent Minnesota, Knutson was an early advocate for the creation of a food stamp program, funding for school lunches, and federal student loans. But after two terms, Knutson's abusive husband, Andy Knutson, sabotaged her promising career by conspiring with her opposition to publicly embarrass her. He falsely accused her of neglecting their family, which included a young son, and of having an affair with a Washington aide. The press sensationalized the story along with her husband's plea, "Coya come home." In the 1958 elections, Knutson's opposition exploited this theme-her challenger, Odin Elsford Stanley Langen, used the campaign slogan "A Big Man for a Man-Sized Job"-and her constituents voted her out of office by a narrow 1,390-vote margin. Although a House committee investigating the campaign and election agreed with Knutson that her estranged husband's accusations had contributed to her defeat, the damage had been done. Knutson's 1960 bid to take back her seat failed by an even wider margin. ⁷

Knutson's experience reinforced the widely held perception that women politicians could not manage both a career and family. In fact, well into the 1990s segments of American society doubted whether women candidates could balance domestic responsibilities and a professional life. Although male political opponents were less inclined to exploit it in latter decades, women politicians were repeatedly put on the defensive by the media and constituents who raised the issue.

Shifting social norms quickly altered staid notions of domesticity. Frustrated by their lack of professional fulfillment, many postwar wives and mothers looked for something else outside the routine of household duties. Betty Friedan memorably identified this malaise as "the problem that has no name" in her landmark 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. The book's popularity attested to Friedan's connection with a feeling of discontent. Women who came of age in the 1960s were determined to make their lives less constrained than those of their mothers. Consequently, the women's rights movement and the sexual revolution of the 1960s challenged many of the traditional notions of motherhood and marriage. ⁸ Many young women rejected the sexual conventions of their parents' generation. Open discussion of sexuality and cohabitation outside marriage grew increasingly accepted in American society. As birth control became more widely available, women exercised greater control over when or if they would have children. In the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court upheld on the grounds of privacy a woman's constitutional right to end her pregnancy.

Sexual and reproductive freedom provided more options for women, who previously chose either a career or marriage. By the 1970s, many marriages involved two careers, as both the husband and the wife worked and increasingly shared family duties, accelerating a trend already well underway in the post-World War II period. The divorce rate also rose, and single, working mothers became more commonplace. ⁹ Throughout this period, more young women pursued careers in male-dominated fields, such as law, medicine, and business, loosening their traditional bonds to home and hearth and preparing the way for a new and larger generation of women in state and national politics.

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Postwar Gender Roles and Women in American Politics | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

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After the disruption, alienation, and insecurity of the Great Depression and the Second World War, the family became the center of American life. Couples wed early (in the late 1950s, the average age of American women at marriage was 20) and at rates that surpassed those of all previous eras and have not been equaled since.

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It's Up to the Women - Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

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It's Up to the Women - Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

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Eleanor Roosevelt, Women's Politics, and Human Rights

Throughout her long career in politics, Eleanor Roosevelt (ER) championed both women's rights and women's activism. ER believed that women were entitled to equal rights. But she also believed that women's differences from men made them uniquely qualified to engage in political activism. As she put it in her 1933 call to action, It's Up to the Women, "Women are different from men. They are equals in many ways, but they cannot refuse to acknowledge the differences." ¹ To ER's way of thinking, women's differences were the basis for women's activism. As she explained in an interview with Good Housekeeping: "Women must become more conscious of themselves as women and of their ability to function as a group." ² In addition, ER believed that women's distinctive approach to politics would benefit society as a whole. As she told the New York Times: "Women are by nature progressives." ³ ER exemplified what scholars have described as the "domestication of politics," engaging in a distinctive "women's political culture" that placed women at the vanguard of progressive movements for human rights both at home and abroad. ⁴

ER was a latecomer to feminist politics. She did not participate in the woman suffrage movement - although she also did not publicly oppose woman suffrage. When a member of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage attempted to gain her support, she demurred. Until the 1920s, ER "considered any stand at that time quite outside my field of work" as the mother of young children and the wife of a rising politician. ⁵

It was not until later in life that ER described herself as a feminist. In 1935, in an interview for Equal Rights, she asserted: "The fundamental purpose of feminism is that women should have equal opportunity and equal rights with every other citizen." ⁶ But although ER did not engage in the suffrage movement and only belatedly claimed a feminist identity, her activities in the first two decades of the twentieth century laid the groundwork for a lifetime of feminist activism.

ER's activities in these years exemplified social feminism, an understanding of women's role that encouraged a broad cross-section of American women to engage in public life. In addition, ER's commitment to the settlement house movement and her participation in social reform introduced her to suffrage activists who saw the vote as a vital tool to improve American society, especially for working women and their families. In the coming decades, these associations would become stronger still, transforming the former debutante into a political powerhouse.

Like most Americans, ER and her fellow female reformers believed in innate gender distinctions; that is, they believed that women and men were inherently different. Traditionalists believed that gender differences dictated that women should confine their activities to the home. But ER and her activist friends instead believed that women had a distinctive role to play in American society.

At the time that ER came of age, growing numbers of clubwomen, reformers, and suffragists used women's traditional role in the private sphere of the home to justify their expanding role in the public sphere of politics. Women were the housekeepers of the world, they argued; therefore, they were ideally suited to clean up corrupt politics. Women were the mothers of the world, they pointed out; who better to ensure that the government responded to the needs of its citizens?

As urbanization necessitated that cities provide essential services - such as health care, education, and recreation - previously provided by housewives and mothers in their own homes, the concepts of social housekeeping and municipal motherhood drew many women, including ER, into public life. As one clubwoman explained in 1906:

[Women] began to realize that the one calling in which they were, as a body, proficient, that of housekeeping and homemaking, had its outdoor as well as its indoor application. . . . It was this knowledge, the extension of the homemaking instinct of women and the broadening out of the mother instinct . . . that led them out into paths of civic usefulness. ⁷

"Woman's sphere," previously narrowly defined, expanded to encompass virtually all aspects of daily life - or "wherever she makes good," as a 1917 pro-suffrage drawing in Puck put it (see illustration above). Thus, while for the vast majority of nineteenth-century Americans, gender differences excluded women from the exercise of power, for a growing proportion of twentieth-century Americans, these differences necessitated women's engagement in politics. The domestication of politics empowered women to become political activists. As ER put it, modifying her earlier views of politics: "In the old days men always said that politics was too rough-and-tumble a business for women, but that idea is gradually wearing away."

For ER, the brief hiatus between school and marriage provided a powerful introduction to a distinctive women's political culture. Educated in France, ER returned home to New York to make her formal debut in 1902. At age nineteen, she was "still haunted by my upbringing," she later recalled, "and believed that what was known as New York Society was really important." ⁹

At the same time that she navigated her first social season and agreed to a secret engagement to her cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), ER also sought other outlets. Some of her fellow New York debutantes founded the Junior League for the Promotion of Settlement Movements. In 1903, ER joined this "group of girls anxious to do something helpful in the city where we lived," teaching calisthenics and dance to youngsters at the College Settlement in the Lower East Side. She confided to her fiancé that her time at the settlement was "the nicest part of the day." ¹⁰

That same year, ER joined the National Consumers' League, a women's organization dedicated to investigating and improving working conditions for wage-earning women. Assigned to investigate working conditions in garment factories and department stores, ER acquired what she called a "great deal of knowledge of some of the less attractive and less agreeable sides of life." Increasingly, she became convinced that "one must do something" meaningful, rather than spend one's time in "idleness and recreation." ¹¹ Although the demands of marriage to an aspiring politician and mothering five children would consume most of ER's time and energy for the next several years, her early involvement in social reform paved the way for her future political leadership.

Preoccupied with family demands, ER had not been actively engaged in the suffrage movement. Instead, she described 1920, the year that the 19 th Amendment was ratified, as the beginning of her education in politics. In the 1920s, New York was a vital center for women's activism, the home of the national headquarters for important social reform organizations. Among these, the National Consumers' League (NCL) and the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) were especially important for ER's development as an activist. These organizations' shared emphasis on bringing working-class women and middle-class women together to improve the lives of wage-earning women were consistent with ER's patrician upbringing. She worked with women much like herself, who would become major figures in the New Deal, including NCL president Florence Kelley and future Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. But work in these organizations also introduced her to women with very different backgrounds, such as WTUL president Margaret Dreier Robins and the fiery Jewish labor organizer Rose Schneiderman. ER also joined the New York Women's City Club, which she described as a "clearing house for civic ideals." ¹²

ER's activism in the 1920s also acquainted her with prominent pacifist feminists, such as Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Caroline O'Day. In the aftermath of the destruction of World War I, ER and her fellow pacifists urged the United States to join the fledgling League of Nations and the World Court to advance international cooperation and prevent future global conflicts.

After the ratification of the 19 th Amendment, new organizations such as the League of Women Voters (LWV) and the Women's Division of the New York State Democratic Committee also encouraged women's political engagement. Building on her understanding of women's political culture and insisting that women's political participation was a patriotic duty, ER worked with these and other groups to mobilize women voters. In 1924, she told the New York Times that "the whole point in women's suffrage is that the Government needs the point of view of all its citizens and the women have a point of view which is of value to the Government." ¹³ Although she rejected the notion of establishing a separate women's party, she insisted that women should organize politically. Only by choosing "women bosses" with "the power of unified women voters behind them," she explained, could women become "a real force" in politics. ¹⁴

ER's work with the League of Women Voters and the Democratic Party introduced her to a remarkable group of women reformers centered in Greenwich Village. Initially, her most important contacts were lawyer Elizabeth Read, who became ER's political tutor as well as her personal attorney, and her partner, journalist Esther Lape. Through Lape and Read, ER became acquainted with Mary W. Dewson and her partner, Polly Porter. In the 1930s, Dewson, a major player in the women's division of the Democratic Party, would become one of ER's most powerful political allies.

ER's immersion in New York's reform milieu also introduced her to Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook. Cook, a talented artist who was active in the Democratic party, and Dickerman, an educator with a social conscience, became ER's closest companions in the mid-1920s. Together with Caroline O'Day, they formed the Val-Kill partnership, which grew to include the Women's Democratic News, edited by ER, the Todhunter School, where Dickerman was principal and ER taught, and the Val-Kill furniture factory, managed by Cook. ER, Cook, and Dickerman also built a cottage for themselves on the Roosevelts' upstate New York estate.

In the 1930s, ER built on the foundations of her New York feminist political community to facilitate the creation of a network of female politicos who helped shape domestic policy during the New Deal. This group included Mary W. Dewson, head of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee; Frances Perkins, who became FDR's Secretary of Labor; and Grace Abbott, Chief of the U.S. Children's Bureau. For this group, the 1930s offered an unprecedented opportunity to translate women's priorities into federal policy. As ER put it in December 1933, "there is nothing more exciting than building a new social order." ¹⁵

From the beginning of FDR's first term, ER and FDR had different ideas about how to address the Great Depression. In competing columns in the Women's Democratic News, FDR supported the cost-cutting Economy Act. By contrast, ER argued that what was needed was more, not less, spending, in order to "adequately help other human beings." ¹⁶

ER rejoiced when FDR's administration began to adopt what she viewed as "constructive" programs. ¹⁷ The 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, which set standards for working conditions and wages and established workers' right to unionize, followed the lead established long before by the National Consumers' League, replacing the League's white label with the National Recovery Administration's blue eagle. ER enthusiastically supported the program, urging women to use their power as consumers to encourage merchants' compliance with standards set by the National Recovery Administration (NRA). "No matter what we can afford to buy," she pronounced, "we cannot afford to buy at the expense of the health and strength of our fellow human beings." ¹⁸

ER also rejoiced at the establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), although she regretted the program's focus on men - a problem shared by the Public Works Administration and the Civil Works Administration work-relief programs established under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). Likewise, she regretted the NRA policy of establishing differential wages for male and female workers. Disappointed in the early New Deal's neglect of women, in November 1933 she sponsored a White House Conference on the Emergency Needs of Women, a gathering of social workers, clubwomen, and representatives of women's groups such as the WTUL, the NCL, and the LWV.

Subsequently, Ellen Sullivan Woodward, the head of FERA's Women's Division, worked with ER to serve as a watchdog for women's interests in job-creation projects. These efforts provided employment for women - and services for communities - by hiring women as teachers, librarians, and nurses, but the majority of women in such programs worked as seamstresses.

Similarly, while the CCC ultimately employed 3 million men to improve camping and hiking facilities in national parks, the program ignored women. ER campaigned vigorously for a parallel program for women - ridiculed as She-She-She camps - but while ultimately 8,500 women participated, the program lagged far behind the CCC. Nonetheless, ER's commitment to this project introduced her to one of her first Black friends, Pauli Murray, who believed that Camp Jane Addams saved her life. In the years to come, ER's relationship with Murray would strengthen her commitment to African American civil rights.

Throughout the 1930s, ER relied heavily on former journalist Lorena Hickok to serve as her eyes and ears. Assigned to cover ER during FDR's presidential campaign, "Hick" became ER's closest companion for many years. Her reports on rural poverty gave ER evidence to encourage FDR to expand anti-poverty programs, such as the experimental homesteading program near Morgantown, West Virginia, known as Arthurdale. Although Arthurdale was one of ER's pet projects, it excluded African Americans, highlighting the shortcomings of the New Deal where racial equality was concerned.

ER also passionately advocated programs to support the arts, such as the Federal Theater Project, and to benefit young people, such as the National Youth Administration (NYA). The latter agency became a power base for the only Black woman in the New Deal network, educator and clubwoman Mary McLeod Bethune. Bethune's friendship with ER desegregated the White House and strengthened ER's commitment to civil rights.

The centerpiece of the New Deal was the 1935 Social Security Act, which laid the groundwork for a federal welfare state. With input from ER and other members of the women's network, FDR proposed programs for federal aid to dependent children and federal support for public health agencies. Both programs were modeled on ones long championed by female reformers: state-level financial support for single women and their children, known as mothers' pensions, and a pioneering maternal and child health care program, established under the Sheppard-Towner Act (1921-1929). The Social Security Act also included unemployment compensation and old age benefits.

FDR initially envisioned an even more comprehensive package that included universal health care and a federal public employment program, but opposition from the American Medical Association doomed the first, while the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was established separately from the Social Security Administration. ER considered the WPA a stop-gap measure. Like the programs designed for women and children under the Social Security Act, the WPA was means-tested, or based on income. This meant that rather than being universal, these benefits were limited to the desperately poor - who in turn were subject to supervision by social workers. No such limitations applied to the programs that primarily benefited men: unemployment insurance and old age pensions. Thus, while offering federal support for both women and men, the Social Security Act established a two-tier system of support in which programs intended primarily for male workers were regarded as entitlements, while programs intended primarily for women and children were stigmatized as welfare.

In addition, while unemployment insurance and old age pensions were federally administered, Aid to Dependent Children was locally administered, leading to significant racial bias. Moreover, the contributory nature of both unemployment insurance and old age pensions - and the exclusion of seasonal and part-time employees, workers in service industries, and employees of nonprofit organizations - meant that 80 percent of Black women, 60 percent of Black men, and 60 percent of white women were excluded from the Social Security Act's entitlement programs. Ultimately, only half of the American workforce was eligible for unemployment insurance and old age pensions.

ER told reporters that the Social Security Act was merely a start. She hoped for "a permanent ban on child labor, better unemployment insurance, better health care for the country as a whole, better care for mothers and children," and a New Deal for youth and workers. ¹⁹

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 - which replaced and strengthened the labor provisions under the NRA, which the Supreme Court invalidated in 1935 - partially addressed ER's concerns. Strongly supported by the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, the act established a federal ban on child labor and both maximum hours and minimum wages for both women and men. However, to appease white southerners, the act excluded domestic laborers, agricultural workers, and seasonal employees; thus, it benefited primarily white employees. In the decades to come, ER continued to advocate on behalf of African American welfare, as well as Black civil rights.

"We are the leading democracy of the world
and as such must prove to the world
that democracy is possible and capable
of living up to the principles upon which it was founded.
The eyes of the world are upon us."

As the New Deal waned at home and war loomed abroad, ER advocated civil rights on two fronts, domestic and international. ER believed that civil rights and international relations were closely linked. Equating American racism with European fascism, she insisted that racial equality was essential to democracy. In a 1934 speech, she explained:

To deny any part of a population the opportunities for more enjoyment in life, for higher aspirations is a menace to the nation as a whole. . . . We must wipe out any feeling . . . of intolerance, of belief that any one group can go ahead alone. We all go ahead together, or we go down together." ²⁰

In keeping with these beliefs, throughout the 1930s, ER worked on behalf of African American rights and welfare. Working closely with Aubrey Williams and Mary McLeod Bethune in the National Youth Administration (NYA), she advocated expanding New Deal programs and insisted that Black Americans be included in them. She also collaborated with civil rights leaders in the American Youth Congress, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare to combat the poll tax, support a federal anti-lynching bill, and promote racial equality.

Leading by example, in 1938, when the Southern Conference for Human Welfare met in Birmingham, Alabama, ER refused to comply with local authorities' insistence that she abide by local segregation statutes. When a police officer threatened to remove her from the seat she had selected alongside African American delegates, she moved her chair to the aisle between the white and Black sections. For the remainder of the four-day conference, she placed a folding chair in the middle of the room, refusing to sanction racial segregation. She also gave a stirring speech at the conference - which occurred just weeks after Kristallnacht, a night of unprecedented government-sanctioned violence against Jews in Germany - that highlighted the importance of the U.S. living up to the highest ideals of democracy at a time when human rights were endangered in Europe:

We are the leading democracy of the world and as such must prove to the world that democracy is possible and capable of living up to the principles upon which it was founded. The eyes of the world are upon us. ²¹

ER believed that a successful democracy was essential to counter the threat of fascism, and she regarded economic security as essential to national security. "If democracy is to survive," she wrote in her "My Day" column in May 1940, "it must be because it meets the needs of the people." ²² In her 1940 book, The Moral Basis of Democracy, she declared that "adequate education and adequate material security" were necessary to ensure citizens' support for democratic government. ²³

While ER advocated for African Americans at home, she also worked on behalf of European refugees. As a member of the Emergency Rescue Committee and the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children, she worked tirelessly - if often unsuccessfully - to combat both bureaucratic red tape and widespread American hostility to refugees in order to provide a safe harbor for Jewish children, antifascist activists, and political dissidents.

Until Pearl Harbor and the official U.S. entry into the war, ER was true to her pacifist principles, resisting militarism and remaining active in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. But even as the atrocities committed against Jews increasingly inclined her toward supporting military intervention, she insisted that the ultimate goal was to "aid humanity and civil populations everywhere" in order to ensure "a more permanent way of peace." ²⁴ As she confided to her daughter in 1939, "I feel sick about the war & want so much to do something that looks toward building a better peace. We can't go on with ever recurring wars in a modern world." ²⁵

As the U.S. contemplated imposing a military draft in Summer 1940, ER insisted that war was the "worst of all ways" to resolve conflicts. ²⁶ Instead of selective service, she proposed a universal draft for community service - in effect, a vast expansion of existing New Deal programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and National Youth Administration, that would provide full employment and universal education. When the nation adopted a military draft instead, she demanded an end to discrimination and segregation in the armed forces, although with limited success.

Indeed, ER's efforts on behalf of African Americans often failed to achieve their objectives. For instance, in 1942, she joined civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Pauli Murray in a last-ditch effort to prevent the execution of Odell Waller, a Black sharecropper sentenced to death for killing his white landlord in self-defense. FDR rejected her repeated appeals to pardon Waller, who died in the electric chair. But ER remained determined to extend the promises of American democracy to all and optimistic about ultimate success. She reflected:

We have to live up to the traditions of our country as expressed in the Bill of Rights, in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence even though I know in many cases we have fallen short. . . . I am far from giving up the problems of the Negro situation or any other. I am too old not to realize that lost causes usually are won in the end. ²⁷

ER insisted that the best way to challenge fascism abroad was by strengthening democracy at home. In a "My Day" column published in November 1941-shortly before Pearl Harbor-she wrote:

If we cannot meet the challenge of fairness to our citizens of every nationality, of really believing in the Bill of Rights and making it a reality for all loyal American citizens, regardless of race, creed or color; if we cannot keep in check anti-semitism, anti-racial feelings as well as anti-religious feelings, then we will have removed from the world, the one real hope for the future on which all humanity must now rely. ²⁸

After the U.S. entered the war, ER continued to press this point. "If we play our part with courage and clear-sightedness," she predicted in her 1942 book, This Is America, "we may become the hope of the world." ²⁹

At the end of the devastating war, ER's work with the new United Nations was decisive in redefining human rights for the modern era. As Chair of the Human Rights Commission, she helped ensure that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would include not only political and civil rights, but also social and economic rights. As she put it, "You cannot talk civil rights to people who are hungry." ³⁰ After eight-five meetings, on December 10, 1948, the UN General Assembly approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ER had succeeded in bringing her cherished commitment to comprehensive social welfare and universal civil rights to the international stage.

Back in the United States, ER continued to regard racial equality as an essential component of human rights. Civil rights were not merely a domestic issue, she argued, but "the question which may decide whether democracy or communism wins out in the world." In 1950, she told Congress: "Our great struggle today is to prove to the world that democracy has more to offer than communism." ³¹ In the 1950s, ER gave workshops for civil rights activists, encouraging boycotts and sit-ins and critiquing police repression of public protests.

Throughout her long career, ER insisted that women's rights were essential to a successful democracy at home and to lasting peace abroad. In 1945, she used her "My Day" column to support the Fair Employment Practices Committee, intended to combat both racial and gender discrimination. As before and during the war, she appealed to the idea that the U.S. needed to remain true to its democratic principles in order to remain viable:

If we do not see that equal opportunity, equal justice and equal treatment are [granted] to every citizen, the very basis on which this country can hope to survive with liberty and justice for all will be wiped away. ³²

ER believed not only that the U.S. should be at the forefront of global efforts to promote democracy and protect human rights, but also that American women should lead the charge. Reflecting her longstanding support for both women's rights and women's activism, in 1962, the year of her death, ER chaired the Commission on the Status of Women, which called for women's full participation in American life. Although ER was a latecomer to feminism, she fully embraced its commitment to protecting women's interests, advancing women's equality, and empowering women to promote social justice.

Anya Jabour, Ph.D.
Regents Professor of History
Director, Public History Program
Department of History
University of Montana.

This essay and web feature is made possible with funding provided by The Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Partnership, Inc.

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It's Up to the Women - Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

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Throughout her long career in politics, Eleanor Roosevelt (ER) championed both women's rights and women's activism. ER believed that women were entitled to equal rights. But she also believed that women's differences from men made them uniquely qualified to engage in political activism.

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To Kill a Mockingbird | National Endowment for the Arts

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To Kill a Mockingbird | National Endowment for the Arts

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Overview

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is the rare American novel that can be discovered with excitement in adolescence and reread into adulthood without fear of disappointment. Few novels so appealingly evoke the daily world of childhood in a way that seems convincing whether you are 16 or 66.

"Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they're quite different from people who must write." -from a 1964 interview

Overview

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is the rare American novel that can be discovered with excitement in adolescence and reread into adulthood without fear of disappointment. Few novels so appealingly evoke the daily world of childhood in a way that seems convincing whether you are 16 or 66.

Introduction to the Book

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird begins at the end. The novel opens with the adult Jean Louise "Scout" Finch writing, "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." By the time Jem finally gets around to breaking his arm more than 250 pages later most readers will have forgotten they were ever warned. This echoes the way the whole book unfolds-in no special hurry, with lifelike indirection. Nothing happens all by itself. The book's two plots inch forward along parallel tracks, only converging near the end.

The first plot revolves around Arthur "Boo" Radley, who lives in a shuttered house down the street from the Finches and is rumored to be some kind of monster. Scout, Jem, and their next-door neighbor Dill engage in pranks, trying to make Boo show himself. Unexpectedly, Boo reciprocates their interest with a series of small gifts, until he ultimately steps off his porch and into their lives when they need him most.

The second story concerns Scout and Jem's father, the attorney Atticus Finch. The local judge appoints him to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, who is falsely accused of raping a white woman. Atticus suspects he will lose the case, but he faces up to the challenge just the same, at one point heroically stepping between his client and a lynch mob.

Along with its twin plot lines, To Kill a Mockingbird has two broad themes: tolerance and justice. Lee treats the first through the children's fear of their mysterious neighbor. She illustrates the second with Atticus's courage in defending Robinson to the best of his ability, despite the racial prejudices of their small Southern town.

Tying the stories together is a simple but profound piece of advice Atticus gives Scout: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." By the end of the novel, Scout has done exactly that-guessed at the pain not only beneath Tom Robinson's skin, but also under that of her neighbor.

How the Novel Came to Be Written

Any claims for To Kill a Mockingbird as a book that changed history could not have seemed more far-fetched one winter night in 1958, as Nelle Harper Lee huddled in her outer-borough New York apartment trying to finesse her unruly, episodic manuscript into some semblance of a cohesive novel. All but drowning in multiple drafts of the same material, Lee suddenly threw open a window and scattered five years of work onto the dirty snow below.

Did Lee really intend to destroy To Kill a Mockingbird? We'll never know. Fortunately, in the next moment, she called her editor. J.B. Lippincott's formidable Tay Hohoff promptly sent her outside to gather all the pages back-thus rescuing To Kill a Mockingbird from the slush.

The novel had its origins in Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama-the small, Southern town that the fictional Maycomb is based upon. Her father's unsuccessful defense of a black man and his son accused of murder, in addition to the Scottsboro Boys trials and another notorious interracial rape case, helped to shape Lee's budding social conscience and sense of a dramatic story.

Along with his legal practice, Lee's father published and edited the town newspaper. His regard for the written word impacted Lee's sensibility as surely as his respect for the law. Lee would name her idealized vision of her father after Titus Pomponius Atticus, a friend of the Roman orator Cicero renowned as, according to Lee, "a wise, learned and humane man." For a long time, Lee called her work in progress Atticus. Once she fastened on To Kill a Mockingbird she did not look back.

An early version of the novel, titled Go Set a Watchman, featured Scout as an adult returning to Maycomb. Lee's editor, Tay Hohoff, asked her to rewrite the story from a child's perspective, which she did. Until recently, the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman was believed lost. It was discovered decades later and published by HarperCollins in July 2015.

Lippincott finally published To Kill a Mockingbird on July 11, 1960, by which time an unprecedented four national mail-order book clubs had already selected it for their readers. The first line of the Washington Post's review echoed many similar notices that praised the novel for its moral impact: "A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird."

Eighty weeks later, the novel still perched on the hardcover bestseller list. During that time, it had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the hearts of American readers. One can't help wondering how literary history might have been different had Harper Lee thrown her manuscript out the window on a slightly windier night.

Harper Lee (1926-2016)

If Nelle Harper Lee ever wanted proof that fame has its drawbacks, she didn't have to look farther than her childhood neighbor, Truman Capote. After her enormously successful first novel, she lived a life as private as Capote's was public.

Nelle-her first name was her grandmother's spelled backward-was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. Her mother, Frances Cunningham Finch Lee, was a homemaker. Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, practiced law. Before A.C. Lee became a title lawyer, he once defended two black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. Both clients, a father and son, were hanged.

As a child, Harper Lee was an unruly tomboy. She fought on the playground. She talked back to teachers. She was bored with school and resisted any sort of conformity. The character of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird would have liked her. In high school Lee was fortunate to have a gifted English teacher, Gladys Watson Burkett, who introduced her to challenging literature and the rigors of writing well. Lee loved 19th-century British authors best, and once said that her ambition was to become "the Jane Austen of south Alabama."

Unable to fit in with the sorority she joined at the University of Alabama, she found a second home on the campus newspaper. Eventually she became editor-in-chief of the Rammer Jammer, a quarterly humor magazine on campus. She entered the law school, but she "loathed" it. Despite her father's hopes that she would become a local attorney like her sister Alice, Lee went to New York to pursue her writing.

She spent eight years working odd jobs before she finally showed a manuscript to Tay Hohoff, an editor at J.B. Lippincott. At this point, it still resembled a string of stories more than the novel that Lee had intended. Under Hohoff's guidance, the perspective was changed to Scout as a child, and two and a half years of rewriting followed. When the novel was finally ready for publication, the author opted for the name "Harper Lee" on the cover, because she didn't want to be misidentified as "Nellie."

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 to highly favorable reviews and quickly climbed the bestseller lists, where it remained for 88 weeks. In 1961, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize.

Lee later researched a book, similar to Capote's In Cold Blood (1966), about a part-time minister in Alexander City, Alabama, accused of killing five people for their insurance money and later himself murdered by a victim's relative. However, she dropped the project in the 1990s. It wasn't until February of 2015 that news of a second novel surfaced, when Lee's publisher announced a newly discovered manuscript for Go Set a Watchman, the novel Lee wrote before To Kill a Mockingbird.

In the meantime, To Kill a Mockingbird has sold more than 30 million copies in forty languages. In 2011, President Obama awarded her the National Medal of Arts. According to biographer Charles J. Shields, Lee was unprepared for the amount of personal attention associated with writing a bestseller. She led a quiet and guardedly private life. As Sheriff Tate says of Boo Radley, "draggin' him with his shy ways into the limelight-to me, that's a sin." So it would be with Harper Lee.

The Friendship of Harper Lee and Truman Capote

Nelle Harper Lee and Truman Capote became friends in the early 1930s as kindergarteners in Monroeville, Alabama. They lived next door to each other: Capote with aunts and uncles, Lee with her parents and three siblings. From the start they loved reading and recognized in each other "an apartness," as Capote later expressed it. When Lee's father gave them an old Underwood typewriter, they began writing original stories. Although Capote moved to New York City in the third grade to join his mother and stepfather, he returned to Monroeville most summers, eventually providing the inspiration for Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.

In 1948 Capote published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Around that time, Lee quit law school and joined Capote in New York to work at becoming a writer, too. Years of menial jobs followed until To Kill a Mockingbird was ready for publication. Capote read the manuscript and made editorial suggestions. She, in her turn, accompanied him to Kansas to help research In Cold Blood.

After To Kill a Mockingbird was published, Capote resented Lee's success. He could have tried harder to dispel baseless rumors that the novel was as much his work as hers. Their friendship continued during the 1960s and '70s, but Capote's drug and alcohol abuse strained the relationship. Later he would stop publishing and sink into self-parody, sponging off high society and making endless rounds of the talk-show circuit. When Capote died in 1984, Lee confided to friends that she hadn't heard from him in years.

1. Why do you think Harper Lee chose as her novel's epigraph this quote from Charles Lamb: "Lawyers, I suppose, were children once"?

2. Why does the adult Scout begin her narrative with Jem's broken arm and a brief family history?

3. How does Boo Radley 's past history of violence foreshadow his method of protecting Jem and Scout? Does this aggression make him more, or less, of a sympathetic character?

4. How does the town of Maycomb function as a character with its own personality, rather than merely as a backdrop for the novel's events?

5. Atticus teaches Scout that compromise is not bending the law, but "an agreement reached by mutual consent." Does Scout apply or reject this definition of compromise? What are examples of her obedience to and defiance of this principle?

6. The novel takes place during the Great Depression. How do class divisions and family quarrels highlight racial tensions in Maycomb?

7. Atticus believes that to understand life from someone else's perspective, we must "walk in his or her shoes." From what other perspectives does Scout see her fellow townspeople?

8. How does Atticus quietly protest Jim Crow laws even before Tom Robinson's trial?

9. What does Jem learn when Atticus forces him to read to Mrs. Dubose as a punishment? Why does the lawyer regard this woman as the "bravest person" he ever knew?

10. Since their mother is dead, several women-Calpurnia, Miss Maudie, and Aunt Alexandra-function as mother figures to Scout and Jem. Discuss the ways these three women influence Scout's growing understanding of what it means to be a Southern "lady."

11. Why does Atticus Finch risk his reputation, his friendships, and his career to take Tom Robinson's case? Do you think he risks too much by putting his children in harm's way?

12. What elements of this novel did you find funny, memorable, or inspiring? Are there any characters whose beliefs or actions impressed or surprised you? Did any events lead you to revisit childhood memories or see them in a new light?

13. Adult readers may focus so much on the novel's politics that they may neglect the coming-of-age story. What does Scout learn, and how does she change in the course of her narrative?

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Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is the rare American novel that can be discovered with excitement in adolescence and reread into adulthood without fear of disappointment. Few novels so appealingly evoke the daily world of childhood in a way that seems convincing whether you are 16 or 66.

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Thurgood Marshall was one of America's foremost attorneys. As chief of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, he led the legal fight against segregation, argued the historic 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, and ultimately became the nation's first Black Supreme Court Justice.

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The hard-won advancements of civil rights were made possible by the struggle, commitment, and work of people who stood up to discrimination and white supremacy. We look to these heroes from our past for lessons and inspiration as we continue their important work into the future.

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The Civil Rights Movement: an introduction (article) | Khan Academy

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The Civil Rights Movement: an introduction (article) | Khan Academy

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The Civil Rights Movement: an introduction (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn about the origins, strategies, and unfinished business of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

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Student Civil Rights Activism: Crash Course Black American History #37 - YouTube

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Student Civil Rights Activism: Crash Course Black American History #37 - YouTube

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Student Civil Rights Activism: Crash Course Black American History #37

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Civil Rights Era (1950–1963) - The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom | Exhibitions - Library of Congress

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Civil Rights Era (1950–1963) - The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom | Exhibitions - Library of Congress

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The NAACP's legal strategy against segregated education culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. African Americans gained the formal, if not the practical, right to study alongside their white peers in primary and secondary schools. The decision fueled an intransigent, violent resistance during which Southern states used a variety of tactics to evade the law.

In the summer of 1955, a surge of anti-black violence included the kidnapping and brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a crime that provoked widespread and assertive protests from black and white Americans. By December 1955, the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr., began a protracted campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience to protest segregation that attracted national and international attention.

During 1956, a group of Southern senators and congressmen signed the "Southern Manifesto," vowing resistance to racial integration by all "lawful means." Resistance heightened in 1957-1958 during the crisis over integration at Little Rock's Central High School. At the same time, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights led a successful drive for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and continued to press for even stronger legislation. NAACP Youth Council chapters staged sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters, sparking a movement against segregation in public accommodations throughout the South in 1960. Nonviolent direct action increased during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, beginning with the 1961 Freedom Rides.

Hundreds of demonstrations erupted in cities and towns across the nation. National and international media coverage of the use of fire hoses and attack dogs against child protesters precipitated a crisis in the Kennedy administration, which it could not ignore. The bombings and riots in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 11, 1963, compelled Kennedy to call in federal troops.

On June 19, 1963, the president sent a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28 roused public support for the pending bill. After the president's assassination on November 22, the fate of Kennedy's bill was in the hands of his vice president and successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the United States Congress.
See timeline for this period
Roy Wilkins NAACP's Longest Serving Leader

Roy Wilkins (1901−1981) was born in St. Louis, the son of a minister. While attending the University of Minnesota he served as secretary of the local NAACP. After graduation he began work as the editor of the Kansas City Call, a black weekly. The headline coverage Wilkins gave the NAACP in the Call attracted the attention of Walter White, who hired him as NAACP assistant secretary in 1931.

From 1934 to 1949, Wilkins served concurrently as editor of The Crisis, the NAACP's quarterly journal. In 1950 he became NAACP administrator and cofounded the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He succeeded Walter White as executive secretary of the NAACP in 1955. Under his leadership the NAACP achieved school desegregation, major civil rights legislation, and its peak membership. Wilkins retired in 1977 as the longest serving NAACP leader.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

"I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."

Writer Ralph Waldo Ellison completed only one novel during his lifetime, the critically acclaimed Invisible Man, published in 1952. It is recognized as one of the most influential masterpieces of the twentieth century, earning honors and awards for Ellison. In the novel Ellison addresses what it means to be an African American in a world hostile to the rights of a minority, on the cusp of the emerging civil rights movement.

Supplemental Brief in the Brown Cases

Brown v. Board of Education was a watershed moment for American civil rights law. The Supreme Court of the United States held that Jim Crow laws that segregated public school students on the basis of race were unconstitutional, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Brown explicitly overturned the court's prior decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, where it had held that segregated public facilities were constitutional, provided they were separate but substantially equal. This event was the culmination of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund's campaign against segregation in schools. Despite this landmark decision, desegregation of public schools was often met with delays or outright opposition.

Attorneys for Brown v. Board of Education

The Supreme Court bundled Brown v. Board of Education with four related cases and scheduled a hearing for December 9, 1952. A rehearing was convened on December 7, 1953, and a decision rendered on May 17, 1954. Three lawyers, Thurgood Marshall ( center), chief counsel for the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund and lead attorney on the Briggs case, with George E. C. Hayes ( left) and James M. Nabrit ( right), attorneys for the Bolling case, are shown standing on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court congratulating each other after the court's decision declaring segregation unconstitutional.

Warren's Reading Copy of the Brown Opinion, 1954

Chief Justice Earl Warren's reading copy of Brown is annotated in his hand. Warren announced the opinion in the names of each justice, an unprecedented occurrence. The drama was heightened by the widespread prediction that the Court would be divided on the issue. Warren reminded himself to emphasize the decision's unanimity with a marginal notation, "unanimously," which departed from the printed reading copy to declare, "Therefore, we unanimously hold. . . ." In his memoirs, Warren recalled the moment with genuine warmth. "When the word 'unanimously' was spoken, a wave of emotion swept the room; no words or intentional movement, yet a distinct emotional manifestation that defies description." "Unanimously" was not incorporated into the published version of the opinion, and thus exists only in this manuscript.

"A Great Day for America"

Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) was a triumphant moment for Civil Rights and underscored Chief Justice Earl Warren's effectiveness in leading the Court. Chief Justice Warren recognized the importance of issuing Brown v. Board as a unanimous decision, ensuring opponents of the decision would not be emboldened by a dissenting opinion. Associate Justice Harold H. Burton sent this note to Chief Justice Warren on the day that the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board was announced. He said, "Today I believe has been a great day for America and the Court. . . . I cherish the privilege of sharing in this." In a tribute to Warren's judicial statesmanship, Burton added, "To you goes the credit for the character of the opinions which produced the all important unanimity. Congratulations."

Two Reactions to the Brown v. Board U.S. Supreme Court Decision

In this live television discussion, broadcast on May 23, 1954, Illinois Senator Paul Douglas (1892-1976) and Texas Senator Price Daniel (1910-1988) answer questions about the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision handed down six days earlier. In response to Brown v. Board, Daniel, along with 100 other lawmakers, signed the Southern Manifesto two years later, protesting the Supreme Court's "abuse of judicial power." This excerpt is from American Forum of the Air: The Supreme Court's Desegregation Decision, broadcast on NBC.

Six Years after Brown, Atlanta Citizens Discuss Their Schools

Rosa Parks Arrested and Fingerprinted

Tom Mboya of Kenya: "A World Struggle, A Human Struggle"

U.S. Representative Patsy T. Mink

Representative Patsy T. Mink (D-HI) (1927-2002) was the first woman of color to be elected to Congress. Mink, a third generation Japanese American was born and raised on Maui. She received her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1951. Returning to Hawaii, Mink served in the State Senate when Hawaii became the fiftieth state and delivered a speech during the 1960 Democratic National Convention convincing the party to maintain its stance on civil rights. Mink was elected to Congress in 1964 and served a total of six consecutive terms. While in Congress she co-authored the Title IX Amendment of the Higher Education Act extending more of the 1964 act's antidiscrimination protections to women.

"What greater weapon for peace do we have than our victory over bigotry and race hatred which for many centuries past have torn the world apart."

CORE Voter Registration in Louisiana

In July 1963, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sent a task force to Plaquemine, Louisiana, to initiate a voter registration drive, responding to the request of a local schoolteacher and activist for help. The summer drive was documented in Louisiana Diary, broadcast March 16, 1964, on National Educational Television. In these excerpts, Ronnie Moore, CORE's field secretary for Louisiana, explains that through voter registration, they hope to achieve laws to protect African Americans from violence and ensure justice and fair law enforcement. CORE executive director James Farmer (1920-1999), who speaks to activists in one excerpt, arrived in Plaquemine in August for a mass march to City Hall after demands were ignored by officials. Farmer's arrest at the march prevented him from attending the March on Washington.

Journalist and Advisor Louis Martin

Louis Martin (1912-1997), a renowned journalist and newspaper publisher, served as the principal black advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter, and as deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1961 to 1969. Martin kept this notebook to chronicle his travels and activities during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In the passage shown here, he reports on the reaction at the White House to the 1963 Birmingham campaign.

"In the last few weeks Negro demonstrations in Birmingham and the South and North have intensified the race-relations dilemma and forced the attention of everyone from the President on down. Civil Rights' items dominate all media and it the is the central theme of private and public discussion."

Civil Rights Leader Louis Martin

Louis Martin grew-up in Savannah, Georgia, the son of a Cuban-born physician. Educated at the University of Michigan, he began his career as a reporter for the Chicago Defender in 1936, and within a year became the editor and publisher of the Michigan Chronicle. In 1944 Martin took a leave of absence to work as assistant publicity director for President Franklin Roosevelt's campaign. From 1947 to 1959 he served as editor-in-chief of the Defender, and in 1949 became founding president of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Martin returned to politics in 1960 as a member of John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign team. He served as an advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter, and as deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1961 to 1969. Dubbed "the godfather of black politics," Martin helped to establish African Americans as a political power in the Democratic Party and promote them to high government posts. He aided the appointments of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, Andrew Brimmer to the Federal Reserve Board, and Robert Weaver as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. In 1970 Martin cofounded the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black think tank, serving as its first chairman for nine years.

The Cambridge Movement

The Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC) formed in 1962 to target segregation and racial inequality in the Eastern Shore of Maryland city of Cambridge. This excerpt from NBC's The American Revolution of '63, broadcast September 2, 1963, documents violent encounters that led in June 1963 to a declaration of martial law. Intervention by the Kennedy Administration to resolve the crisis with CNAC leader Gloria Richardson (b. 1922) resulted in what became known as the "Treaty of Cambridge," but that failed to last, and conflicts continued in Cambridge for many years.

Courtesy of NBC News

President Kennedy Ponders Making a Major Civil Rights Address

On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) delivered a major televised address to the nation announcing that he soon would ask Congress to enact civil rights legislation. Kennedy allowed documentary filmmaker Robert Drew unprecedented access to Oval Office discussions with his advisors, which were included in the film Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, first broadcast October 21, 1963, on ABC, and rebroadcast in this re-edited version, Kennedy v. Wallace: A Crisis Up Close, twenty-five years later on the PBS series The American Experience, which included new interviews with participants.

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom Civil Rights Era (1950-1963)

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The Brown decision fueled violent resistance during which Southern states evaded the law. The Montgomery bus boycott began a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience to protest segregation that attracted national and international attention. Media coverage of the use of fire hoses and attack dogs against protesters and bombings and riots in Birmingham compelled Kennedy to act, sending a civil rights bill to Congress.

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Be inspired by the men and women of the African American Civil Rights Movement. Each of the stories below is a window into the lives these momentous figures, including rare interviews with Martin L. King Jr and Malcolm X. Venture back into history with PBS to explore the men and women of The Civil…

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Standing up for Change: African American Women and the Civil Rights Movement — Google Arts & Culture

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Standing up for Change: African American Women and the Civil Rights Movement — Google Arts & Culture

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Hundreds of African American women organized and led grassroots efforts during the Civil Rights Era. They formed a composite image of the new black woman leader. Some were college-educated, club women, while others were grassroots organizers. Some were young adults displeased with the conditions of black, poor, and working class people, while others were middle age women whose lives were testaments of struggle and survival.

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Standing up for Change: African American Women and the Civil Rights Movement - Google Arts & Culture

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Hundreds of African American women organized and led grassroots efforts during the Civil Rights Era. They formed a composite image of the new black woman leader. Some were college-educated, club women, while others were grassroots organizers.

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Women in the Civil Rights Movement Historic Context Statement and AACRN Listing Guidance (African American Civil Rights Network) (U.S. National Park Service)

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Women in the Civil Rights Movement Historic Context Statement and AACRN Listing Guidance (African American Civil Rights Network) (U.S. National Park Service)

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"Jim Crow Must Go," Date Unknown

Introduction

Throughout the history of the United States, Black women have participated across most major social movements. They found ways to organize and lead for a more just and equal society, not just for themselves, but for all people. When discussing Black women's leadership and organizing efforts during the African American Civil Rights movement it becomes clear how often their contributions are overlooked. While countless women played important roles at various points during the Black Freedom Struggle, it is men who still receive more attention and credit for the successes of the movement, particularly in commemorative efforts and historical narratives. But the reality of the civil rights movement challenges these narratives. Many African American women operated as leaders at the local level, serving as the bridge between national and grassroots organizations. Their labor and sacrifice kept the movement going.

According to scholar Belinda Robnett, much of the labor of the modern civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was organized around gender. Men, particularly religious figures came to serve as formal leaders, which the movement then coalesced around at the national level. This meant that while Black women took on important strategic roles at the local level, they were often prevented from having a more visible role or accessing the highest levels of leadership in national organization. However, Black women's activities must also be accounted for in order to tell a more accurate and comprehensive history of the movement.

Mainstream histories of the civil rights movement tend to praise a certain type of Black womanhood. Women such as Rosa Parks, are reduced to limited images of obedient femininity, or "accidental" matriarchs. This phenomenon of rendering Black women civil rights activists as two-dimensional steals their agency, and reproduces what historian Jeanne Theoharris terms "gendered silences,' within the larger history of the movement. It also implies that Black women's activism should be passive and unassuming. This only works to further obscure the overt misogyny Black women faced both within and outside of the movement as they tried to advocate for their interests and safety. These women were organizers and leaders in their own right, but efforts to memorialize them neuters their politics, marginalizing their work and placing them in the shadows of the men who have come to dominate popular narratives. Coretta Scott King, like Rosa Parks has seen her activism erased and reduced to being Dr. King's wife and widow. However, her activism began before her marriage to King and extended beyond his death. Throughout her life she also voiced her experience with sexism and inequality with the Black freedom struggle:

Not enough attention has been focused on the roles played by women in the struggle. By and large, men have formed the leadership in the civil rights struggle but there have been many women in leading roles and many women in the background. Women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement...Women have been the ones who have made it possible for the movement to be a mass movement...

Rethinking how we frame Black women's activism during the African American Civil Rights movement necessitates interrogating the narratives that have taken hold in popular memory. The movement is more than Great Race Men, and the women who led, organized, challenged, and endured, deserve to have their experiences moved from the periphery of the movement's history to its center. It is from there where we can begin to understand how crucial Black women were and are to ongoing struggles for liberation.

The objective of this document is to provide necessary historical information and guidance for property owners and others who know of a site or sites related to women in the civil rights movement and are interested in having their resource become a member of the African American Civil Rights Network (AACRN). Due to the important contributions of women to the civil rights struggle, the AACRN has a particular interest in identifying resources connected to the many Black women who, in the face of great challenges, strove to fight for a better life for themselves and their communities.

To become a member of the AACRN, applicants must demonstrate a verifiable connection to the civil rights movement, usually done by writing a statement of significance on the application form. We are providing this context document for applicants to use in meeting that requirement. Guidance for how to do that will follow a brief historical overview of Black women's history and activism in the civil rights movement and more broadly Black Freedom Struggle. The overview is not meant to be an exhaustive history; it is intended only to establish historic significance for the purpose of meeting the AACRN criteria and simplifying the listing process for applicants. Suggestions for further reading will follow the listing guidance.

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Women in the Civil Rights Movement Historic Context Statement and AACRN Listing Guidance (African American Civil Rights Network) (U.S. National Park Service)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Throughout the history of the United States, Black women have participated across most major social movements. They found ways to organize and lead for a more just and equal society, not just for themselves, but for all people. When discussing Black women's leadership and organizing efforts during the African American Civil Rights movement it becomes clear how often their contributions are overlooked.

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How the n-word became the ‘atomic bomb of racial slurs’ | PBS NewsHour

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How the n-word became the ‘atomic bomb of racial slurs’ | PBS NewsHour

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I don't think there is a solution, other than education.

People ought to know that even if you are using the word without malevolence, even if you are attempting to use the word in an ironic way or as a term of endearment, there's always the problem of mistake.

So, I have gotten hundreds of e-mails over the years from white kids who say the following: I'm running around with my black friends, and we are listening to rap. Is it OK if I say n-- because we are shouting the lyrics of these rap songs?

And I say to people often that it may very well be that you're with your friend. It may very well be that you have no bad intentions. But if you are out in public, and especially if you are white, and you use this word, there is the problem of the person who's right next to you who doesn't know you at all, who doesn't know what your intentions are, who doesn't know about your friendship with your black buddy over here. But as soon as the word n-- comes out of your mouth, this person slaps you, or worse.

Simple prudence would dictate that you use this term very carefully, if ever.

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How the n-word became the 'atomic bomb of racial slurs'

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Its effect can be explosive and painful: Harvard University professor Randall Kennedy has traced the history of the N-word to understand the evolution of the infamous racial slur. Kennedy joins special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault to discuss this history, including reappropriations of the word and the complexities and damages of its usage today.

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Straight Talk About the N-Word | Learning for Justice

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Straight Talk About the N-Word | Learning for Justice

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Sean Price's interview with Arizona State University Professor Neal A. Lester. Lester has twice taught courses on the n-word-and found there's plenty to talk about.

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NPS Ethnography: African American Heritage & Ethnography

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NPS Ethnography: African American Heritage & Ethnography

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NPS Ethnography: African American Heritage & Ethnography

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The word "nigger" is a key term in American culture. It is a profoundly hurtful racial slur meant to stigmatize African Americans; on occasion, it also has been used against members of other racial or ethnic groups, including Chinese, other Asians, East Indians, Arabs and darker-skinned people.

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🤬 and Caricature - Anti-black Imagery - Jim Crow Museum

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🤬 and Caricature - Anti-black Imagery - Jim Crow Museum

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There is a direct and strong link between the word and anti-black caricatures. Although nigger has been used to refer to any person of known African ancestry. ² it is usually directed against blacks who supposedly have certain negative characteristics. The Coon caricature, for example, portrays black men as lazy, ignorant, and obsessively self-indulgent; these are also traits historically represented by the word . The Brute caricature depicts black men as angry, physically strong, animalistic, and prone to wanton violence. This depiction is also implied in the word . The Tom and Mammy caricatures are often portrayed as kind, loving "friends" of whites. They are also presented as intellectually childlike, physically unattractive, and neglectful of their biological families. These latter traits have been associated with blacks, generally, and are implied in the word . The word nigger was a shorthand way of saying that blacks possessed the moral, intellectual, social, and physical characteristics of the Coon, Brute, Tom, Mammy, and other racial caricatures.

The etymology of nigger is often traced to the Latin niger, meaning black. The Latin niger became the noun negro (black person) in English, and simply the color black in Spanish and Portuguese. In Early Modern French niger became negre and, later, negress (black woman) was clearly a part of lexical history. One can compare to negre the derogatory nigger - and earlier English variants such as negar, neegar, neger, and niggor - which developed into a parallel lexico-semantic reality in English. It is likely that nigger is a phonetic spelling of the white Southern mispronunciation of Negro. Whatever its origins, by the early 1800s it was firmly established as a denigrative epithet. Almost two centuries later, it remains a chief symbol of white racism.

Social scientists refer to words like nigger, kike, spic, and wetback as ethnophaulisms. Such terms are the language of prejudice - verbal pictures of negative stereotypes. Howard J. Ehrlich, a social scientist, argued that ethnophaulisms are of three types: disparaging nicknames ( chink, dago, nigger, and so forth); explicit group devaluations ("Jew him down," or "niggering the land"); and irrelevant ethnic names used as a mild disparagement ("jewbird" for cuckoos having prominent beaks or "Irish confetti" for bricks thrown in a fight)(Ehrlich, 1973, p. 22; Schaefer, 2000, p. 44). All racial and ethnic groups have been victimized by racial slurs; however, no American group has suffered as many racial epithets as have blacks: coon, tom, savage, picanniny, mammy, buck, sambo, jigaboo, and buckwheat are typical. ³ Many of these slurs became fully developed pseudo-scientific, literary, cinematic, and everyday caricatures of African Americans. These caricatures, whether spoken, written, or reproduced in material objects, reflect the extent, the vast network, of anti-black prejudice.

The word nigger carries with it much of the hatred and repulsion directed toward Africans and African Americans. Historically, nigger defined, limited, and mocked African Americans. It was a term of exclusion, a verbal justification for discrimination. Whether used as a noun, verb, or adjective, it reinforced the stereotype of the lazy, stupid, dirty, worthless parasite. No other American ethnophaulism carried so much purposeful venom, as the following representative list suggests:

Nigger has been used to describe a dark shade of color ( nigger-brown, nigger-black), the status of whites who interacted with blacks ( nigger-breaker, -dealer, -driver, -killer, -stealer, -worshipper, and -looking), and anything belonging to or associated with African Americans ( nigger-baby, -boy, -girl, -mouth, -feet, -preacher, -job, -love, -culture, -college, -music, and so forth). ⁴ Nigger is the ultimate American insult; it is used to offend other ethnic groups, as when Jews are called white-niggers; Arabs, sandniggers; or Japanese, yellow-niggers.

Americans created a racial hierarchy with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. The hierarchy was undergirded by an ideology which justified the use of deceit, manipulation, and coercion to keep blacks "in their place." Every major societal institution offered legitimacy to the racial hierarchy. Ministers preached that God had condemned blacks to be servants. Scientists measured black heads, brains, faces, and genitalia, seeking to prove that whites were genetically superior to blacks. White teachers, teaching only white students, taught that blacks were less evolved cognitively, psychologically, and socially. The entertainment media, from vaudeville to television, portrayed blacks as docile servants, happy-go-lucky idiots, and dangerous thugs. The criminal justice system sanctioned a double standard of justice, including its tacit approval of mob violence against blacks.

Both American slavery and the Jim Crow caste system which followed were undergirded by anti-black images. The negative portrayals of blacks were both reflected in and shaped by everyday material objects: toys, postcards, ashtrays, detergent boxes, fishing lures, children's books. These items, and countless others, portrayed blacks with bulging, darting eyes, fire-red and oversized lips, jet black skin, and either naked or poorly clothed. The majority of these objects did not use the word nigger; however, many did. In 1874, the McLoughlin Brothers of New York manufactured a puzzle game called "Chopped Up Niggers." Beginning in 1878, the B. Leidersdory Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, produced NiggerHair Smoking Tobacco - several decades later the name was changed to BiggerHair Smoking Tobacco. In 1917, the American Tobacco Company had a NiggerHair redemption promotion. NiggerHair coupons were redeemable for "cash, tobacco, S. & H. Green stamps, or presents."

A 1916 magazine advertisement, copyrighted by Morris & Bendien, showed a black child drinking ink. The caption read, "Nigger Milk."

The J. Millhoff Company of England produced a series of cards (circa 1930s), which were widely distributed in the United States. One of the cards shows ten small black dogs with the caption: "Ten Little Nigger Boys Went Out To Dine." This is the first line from the popular children's story "The Ten Little Niggers."

In 1939, Agatha Christie, the popular fiction writer, published a novel called Ten Little Niggers. Later editions sometimes changed the name to Ten Little Indians, or And Then There Were None, but as late as 1978, copies of the book with the original title were being produced into the 1980s. It was not rare for sheet music produced in the first half of the 20th century to use the word nigger on the cover. The Howley, Haviland Company of New York, produced sheet music for the songs "Hesitate Mr. Nigger, Hesitate," and "You'se Just A Little Nigger, Still You'se Mine, All Mine." The latter was billed as a children's lullaby.

Some small towns used nigger in their names, for example, Nigger Run Fork, Virginia. Nigger was a common name for darkly colored pets, especially dogs, cats, and horses. So-called "Jolly Nigger Banks," first made in the 1800s, were widely distributed as late as the 1960s. Another common item - with many variants, produced on posters, postcards, and prints - is a picture of a dozen black children rushing for a swimming hole. The captions read, "Last One In's A Nigger."

The racial hierarchy, which began during slavery and extended into the Jim Crow period, has been severely eroded by a civil rights movement, landmark Supreme Court decisions, a black empowerment movement, comprehensive civil rights legislation, and a general embracing of democratic principles by many American citizens. Yet, the word nigger has not died. The relationship between the word nigger and anti-black prejudice is symbiotic: that is, they are interrelated and interconnected, yet, ironically, not automatically interdependent. In other words, a racist society created nigger and continues to feed and sustain it; however, the word no longer needs racism, at least brutal and obvious forms, to exist. Nigger now has a life of its own.

One of the most interesting and perplexing phenomena in American speech is the use of nigger by African Americans. When used by blacks, nigger refers to the following: all blacks ("A nigger can't even get a break."); black men ("Sisters want niggers to work all day long."); blacks who behave in a stereotypical, and sometimes mythical, manner ("He's a lazy, good-for-nothing nigger."); things ("This piece-of-shit car is such a nigger."); foes ("I'm sick and tired of those niggers bothering me!"); and friends ("Me and my niggers are tight.").

This final usage, as a term of endearment, is especially problematic. "Sup Niggah," has become an almost universal greeting among young urban blacks. When pressed, blacks who use nigger or its variants claim the following: it has to be understood contextually; continual use of the word by blacks will make it less offensive; it is not really the same word because whites are saying nigger (and niggers) but blacks are saying niggah (and niggaz); and, it is just a word and blacks should not be prisoners of the past or the ugly words which originated in the past. These arguments are not convincing. Brother (Brotha) and Sister (Sistha or Sista) are terms of endearment. Nigger was and remains a term of derision. Moreover, the false dichotomy between blacks or African Americans (respectable and middle-class) and niggers (disrespectable and lower class) should be opposed. No blacks are niggers, irrespective of behavior, income, ambition, clothing, ability, morals, or skin color. Finally, if continued use of the word lessened its sting then nigger would by now have no sting. Blacks, beginning in slavery, have internalized the negative images that white society cultivated and propagated about black skin and black people. This is reflected in periods of self- and same-race loathing. The use of the word nigger by blacks reflects this loathing, even when the user is unaware of the psychological forces at play. Nigger is the ultimate expression of white racism and white superiority no matter how it is pronounced. It is a linguistic corruption, a corruption of civility. Nigger is the most infamous word in American culture. Some words carry more weight than others. At the risk of hyperbole, is genocide just another word? Pedophilia? Obviously, no: neither is nigger.

After a period of relative dormancy, the word nigger has been reborn in popular culture. It is hard-edged, streetwise, and it has crossed over into movies like Pulp Fiction (Bender & Tarantino, 1994) and Jackie Brown (Bender & Tarantino, 1997), where it became a symbol of "street authenticity" and hipness. Denzel Washington's character in Training Day (Newmyer, Silver & Fuqua, 2001) uses nigger frequently and harshly.

Richard Pryor long ago disavowed the use of the word in his comedy act, but Chris Rock and Chris Tucker, the new black male comedy kings, use nigger regularly - and not affectionately. Justin Driver (2001), a social critic, argued persuasively that both Rock and Tucker are modern minstrels - shucking, jiving, and grinning, in the tradition of Stepin Fetchit.

Poetry by African Americans is also instructive, as one finds nigger used in black poetry over and over again. Major and minor poets alike have used it, often with startling results: Imamu Amiri Baraka, one of the most gifted of our contemporary poets, uses nigger in one of his angriest poems, "I Don't Love You."

. . .and what was the world to the words of slick nigger fathers too depressed to explain why they could not appear to be men. (1969, p. 55)

One wonders: how are readers supposed to understand "nigger fathers"? Baraka's use of this imagery, regardless of his intention, reinforces the stereotype of the worthless, hedonistic Coon caricature. Ted Joans's use of nigger in "The Nice Colored Man" makes Baraka's comparatively harmless and innocent. Joans tells the story about how he came to write this unusual piece. He was, he says, asked to give a reading in London because he was a "nice colored man." Infuriated by the labels "nice" and "colored", Joans set down the quintessential truculent poem. While the poem should be read in its entirety, a few lines will suffice:

. . .Smart Black Nigger Smart Black Nigger Smart Black Nigger Smart Black Nigger Knife Carrying Nigger Gun Toting Nigger Military Nigger Clock Watching Nigger Poisoning Nigger Disgusting Nigger Black Ass Nigger. . . (Henderson, 1972, pp. 223-225)

This is the poem, with adjective upon adjective attached to the word nigger. The shocking reality is that many of these uses can be heard in contemporary American society. Herein lies part of the problem: the word nigger persists because it is used over and over again, even by the people it defames. Devorah Major, a poet and novelist, said, "It's hard for me to say what someone can or can't say, because I work with language all the time, and I don't want to be limited." Opal Palmer Adisa, a poet and professor, claims that the use of nigger or nigga is "the same as young people's obsession with cursing. A lot of their use of such language is an internalization of negativity about themselves" (Allen-Taylor, 1998).

Rap musicians, themselves poets, rap about niggers before mostly white audiences, some of whom see themselves as waggers (white niggers) and refer to one another as "my niggah." Snoop Doggy Dogg, in his single, "You Thought," raps, "Wanna grab a skinny nigha like Snoop Dogg/Cause you like it tall/and work it baby doll." Tupac Shakur (1991), one of the most talented and popular rap musicians, had a song called "Crooked Ass Nigga." The song's lyrics included, "Now I could be a crooked nigga too/When I'm rollin' with my crew/Watch what crooked niggers do/I got a nine millimeter Glock pistol/I'm ready to get with you at the tip of a whistle/So make your move and act like you wanna flip/I fired thirteen shots and popped another clip." Rap lyrics which debase women and glamorize violence reinforce the historical Brute caricature

Erdman Palmore (1962) researched ethnophaulisms and made the following observations: the number of ethnophaulisms used correlates positively with the amount of out-group prejudice; and ethnophaulisms express and support negative stereotypes about the most visible racial and cultural differences.

White supremacists have found the Internet an indispensable tool for spreading their message of hate. An Internet search of nigger locates many anti-black web pages: Niggers Must Die, Hang A Nigger For America, Nigger Joke Central, and literally thousands of others. Visitors to these sites know, like most blacks know experientially, that nigger is an expression of anti-black antipathy. Is it surprising that nigger is the most commonly used racist slur during hate crimes?

No American minority group has been caricatured as often, in as many ways, as have blacks. These caricatures combined distorted physical descriptions and negative cultural and behavior stereotypes. The Coon caricature, for example, was a tall, skinny, loose-jointed, dark-skinned male, often bald, with oversized, ruby-red lips. His clothing was either ragged and dirty or outlandishly gaudy. His slow, exaggerated gait suggested laziness. He was a pauper, lacking ambition and the skills necessary for upward social mobility. He was a buffoon. When frightened, the Coon's eyes bulged and darted. His speech was slurred, halted, and replete with malapropisms. His shrill, high-pitched voice made whites laugh. The Coon caricature dehumanized blacks, and served as a justification for social, economic, and political discrimination.

Nigger may be viewed as an umbrella term - a way of saying that blacks have the negative characteristics of the Coon, Buck, Tom, Mammy, Sambo, Picaninny, and other anti-black caricatures. Nigger, like the caricatures it encompasses and implies, belittles blacks, and rationalizes their mistreatment. The use of the word or its variants by blacks has not significantly lessened its sting. This is not surprising. The historical relationship between European Americans and African Americans was shaped by a racial hierarchy which spanned three centuries. Anti-black attitudes, values, and behavior were normative. Historically, nigger more than any word captured the personal antipathy and institutionalized racism directed toward blacks. It still does.

© Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology, and Dr. Phillip Middleton, Professor of Languages and Literature,
Ferris State University.
Sept., 2001
Edited 2012

¹ An earlier version of this paper, entitled "Purposeful Venom Revisited," was published in Matthews (1999, pp. 91-93). David Pilgrim is a sociologist; Phillip Middleton is a linguist.

² Dictionaries typically defined nigger as a synonym for Negro, Black, or dark-skinned people. See, for example, Wentworth (1944, p. 412). Recent dictionaries are more likely to mention that nigger is a term of contempt. Please read Williams (2001).

3 Even innocent words - boy, girl, and uncle - took on racist meanings when applied to blacks.

⁴ For a brief analysis of these terms see, Simpson (1989, pp. 401-405).

References

Allen-Taylor, J. D. (1998, April 9-15). New word order. Metro. Retrieved from http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/04.09.98/cover/nigger-9814.html.

Baraka, A. (1969). Black magic: Sabotage, Target study, Black art: Collected poetry, 1961-1967. 1969. New York, NY: Bobbs-Merrill.

Bender, L. (Producer), & Tarantino, Q. (Director). (1994). Pulp fiction [Motion picture]. United States: Miramax Films.

Bender, L. (Producer), & Tarantino, Q. (Director) (1997). Jackie Brown [Motion picture]. United States: Miramax Films.

Christie, A. (1982). Ten little niggers. Glasgow: Collins.

Driver, J. (2001, June 11). Black comedy's reactionary hipness: The mirth of a nation. The New Republic, 224, 29-33.

Ehrlich, H J. (1973). The social psychology of prejudice: A systematic theoretical review and propositional inventory of the American social psychological study of prejudice. New York, NY: Wiley.

Green, J. (1984). The dictionary of contemporary slang. New York, NY: Stein and Day.

Henderson, S. E. (1972). Understanding the new Black poetry: Black speech and Black music as poetic references. New York, NY: William Morrow and Company.

Jolly Jingles. (n.d.). Chicago, IL: M.A. Donohue & Company. Matthews, G. E. (Ed.) (1999). Journey towards nationalism: The implications of race and racism. New York, NY: Forbes.

Newmyer, R. F., & Silver, J. (Producers), & Fuqua, A. (Director). (2001). Training day [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Pictures.

Palmore, E. (1962, January). Ethnophaulisms and ethnocentrism. American Journal of Sociology 67, 442-445.

Schaefer, R. T. (2000). Racial and ethnic groups (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Shakur, T. (1991). Crooked ass nigga. Retrieved from http://lyrics.wikia.com/2Pac:Crooked_Ass_Nigga.

Simpson, J. A., & Weiner, E. S. C. (1989). The Oxford English dictionary. (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wentworth, H. (1944). American dialect dictionary. New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.

Williams, C. M. (2001). Nigger. In Kim Pearson's dictionary of slurs. Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20090223185954/http://kpearson.faculty.tcnj.edu/Dictionary/nigger.htm.

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There is a direct and strong link between the word and anti-black caricatures. Although nigger has been used to refer to any person of known African ancestry. 2 it is usually directed against blacks who supposedly have certain negative characteristics.

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washingtonpost.com: 🤬: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

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washingtonpost.com: 🤬: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

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Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

By Randall Kennedy
Pantheon. 256 pp. $22
Friday, January 11, 2001

Chapter One

The Protean N-Word

How should nigger be defined? Is it a part of the American cultural inheritance that warrants preservation? Why does nigger generate such powerful reactions? Is it a more hurtful racial epithet than insults such as kike, wop, wetback, mick, chink, and gook? Am I wrongfully offending the sensibilities of readers right now by spelling out nigger instead of using a euphemism such as N-word? Should blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should the law view nigger as a provocation that reduces the culpability of a person who responds to it violently? Under what circumstances, if any, should a person be ousted from his or her job for saying "nigger"? What methods are useful for depriving nigger of destructiveness? In the pages that follow, I will pursue these and related questions. I will put a tracer on nigger, report on its use, and assess the controversies to which it gives rise. I have invested energy in this endeavor because nigger is a key word in the lexicon of race relations and thus an important term in American politics. To be ignorant of its meanings and effects is to make oneself vulnerable to all manner of perils, including the loss of a job, a reputation, a friend, even one's life.

Let's turn first to etymology. Nigger is derived from the Latin word for the color black, niger. According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, it did not originate as a slur but took on a derogatory connotation over time. Nigger and other words related to it have been spelled in a variety of ways, including niggah, nigguh, niggur, and niggar. When John Rolfe recorded in his journal the first shipment of Africans to Virginia in 1619, he listed them as "negars." A 1689 inventory of an estate in Brooklyn, New York, made mention of an enslaved "niggor" boy. The seminal lexicographer Noah Webster referred to Negroes as "negers." (Currently some people insist upon distinguishing nigger—which they see as exclusively an insult—from nigga, which they view as a term capable of signaling friendly salutation.) In the 1700s niger appeared in what the dictionary describes as "dignified argumentation" such as Samuel Sewall's denunciation of slavery, The Selling of Joseph. No one knows precisely when or how niger turned derisively into nigger and attained a pejorative meaning. We do know, however, that by the end of the first third of the nineteenth century, nigger had already become a familiar and influential insult.

In A Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the United States: and the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them (1837), Hosea Easton wrote that nigger "is an opprobrious term, employed to impose contempt upon [blacks] as an inferior race. . . . The term in itself would be perfectly harmless were it used only to distinguish one class of society from another; but it is not used with that intent. . . . [I]t flows from the fountain of purpose to injure." Easton averred that often the earliest instruction white adults gave to white children prominently featured the word nigger. Adults reprimanded them for being "worse than niggers," for being " ignorant as niggers," for having " no more credit than niggers"; they disciplined them by telling them that unless they behaved they would be carried off by " the old nigger" or made to sit with " niggers" or consigned to the " nigger seat," which was, of course, a place of shame.

Nigger has seeped into practically every aspect of American culture, from literature to political debates, from cartoons to song. Throughout the 1800s and for much of the 1900s as well, writers of popular music generated countless lyrics that lampooned blacks, in songs such as "Philadelphia Riots; or, I Guess It Wasn't de Niggas Dis Time," "De Nigga Gal's Dream," "Who's Dat Nigga Dar A-Peepin?," "Run, Nigger, Run," "A Nigger's Reasons," "Nigger Will Be Nigger," "I Am Fighting for the Nigger," "Ten Little Niggers," "Niggas Git on de Boat," "Nigger in a Pit," "Nigger War Bride Blues," "Nigger, Nigger, Never Die," "Li'l Black Nigger," and "He's Just a Nigger." The chorus of this last begins, "He's just a nigger, when you've said dat you've said it all."

Throughout American history, nigger has cropped up in children's rhymes, perhaps the best known of which is

Eeny-meeny-miney-mo!
Catch a nigger by the toe!
If he hollers, let him go!
Eeny-meeny-miney-mo!

But there are scores of others as well, including

Nigger, nigger, never die,
Black face and shiny eye.

And then there is:

Teacher, teacher, don't whip me!
Whip that nigger behind that tree!
He stole honey and I stole money.
Teacher, teacher, wasn't that funny?

Today, on the Internet, whole sites are devoted to nigger jokes. At KKKomedy Central-Micetrap's Nigger Joke Center, for instance, the "Nigger Ghetto Gazette" contains numerous jokes such as the following:

Q. What do you call a nigger boy riding a bike?
A. Thief!

Q. Why do niggers wear high-heeled shoes?
A. So their knuckles won't scrape the ground!

Q. What did God say when he made the first nigger?
A. "Oh, shit!"

Q. What do niggers and sperm have in common?
A. Only one in two million works!

Q. Why do decent white folk shop at nigger yard sales?
A. To get all their stuff back, of course!

Q. What's the difference between a pothole and a nigger?
A. You'd swerve to avoid a pothole, wouldn't you?

Q. How do you make a nigger nervous?
A. Take him to an auction.

Q. How do you get a nigger to commit suicide?
A. Toss a bucket of KFC into traffic.

Q. How do you keep niggers out of your backyard?
A. Hang one in the front yard.

Q. How do you stop five niggers from raping a white woman?
A. Throw them a basketball.

Nigger has been a familiar part of the vocabularies of whites high and low. It has often been the calling card of so-called white trash—poor, disreputable, uneducated Euro-Americans. Partly to distance themselves from this ilk, some whites of higher standing have aggressively forsworn the use of nigger. Such was the case, for example, with senators Strom Thurmond and Richard Russell, both white supremacists who never used the N-word. For many whites in positions of authority, however, referring to blacks as niggers was once a safe indulgence. Reacting to news that Booker T. Washington had dined at the White House, Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina predicted, "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again." During his (ultimately successful) reelection campaign of 1912, the governor of South Carolina, Coleman Livingston Blease, declared with reference to his opponent, Ira Jones, the chief justice of the state supreme court, "You people who want social equality [with the Negro] vote for Jones. You men who have nigger children vote for Jones. You who have a nigger wife in your back yard vote for Jones."

During an early debate in the United States House of Representatives over a proposed federal antilynching bill, black people sitting in the galleries cheered when a representative from Wisconsin rebuked a colleague from Mississippi for blaming lynching on Negro criminality. In response, according to James Weldon Johnson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), white southern politicians shouted from the floor of the House, "Sit down, niggers." In 1938, when the majority leader of the United States Senate, Allen Barkley, placed antilynching legislation on the agenda, Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina (who would later become vice president and secretary of state) faulted the black NAACP official Walter White. Barkley, Byrnes declared, "can't do anything without talking to that nigger first."

Nigger was also a standard element in Senator Huey P. Long's vocabulary, though many blacks appreciated the Louisiana Democrat's notable reluctance to indulge in race baiting. Interviewing "The Kingfish" in 1935, Roy Wilkins (working as a journalist in the days before he became a leader of the NAACP) noted that Long used the terms "nigra," "colored," and "nigger" with no apparent awareness that that last word would or should be viewed as offensive. By contrast, for Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge, nigger was not simply a designation he had been taught; it was also a tool of demagoguery that he self-consciously deployed. Asked by a white constituent about "Negroes attending our schools," Talmadge happily replied, "Before God, friend, the niggers will never go to a school which is white while I am governor."

As in Georgia, so in Mississippi, where white judges routinely asked Negro defendants, "Whose nigger are you?" Reporting a homicide, the Hattiesburg Progress noted: "Only another dead nigger—that's all." Three decades later, the master of ceremonies at a White Citizens Council banquet would conclude the festivities by remarking, "Throughout the pages of history there is only one third-rate race which has been treated like a second-class race and complained about it—and that race is the American nigger."

Nor was nigger confined to the language of local figures of limited influence. Supreme Court Justice James Clark McReynolds referred to Howard University as the "nigger university." President Harry S Truman called Congressman Adam Clayton Powell "that damned nigger preacher." Nigger was also in the vocabulary of Senator, Vice President, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson. "I talk everything over with [my wife]," he proclaimed on one occasion early in his political career. Continuing, he quipped, "Of course . . . I have a nigger maid, and I talk my problems over with her, too."

A complete list of prominent whites who have referred at some point or other to blacks demeaningly as niggers would be lengthy indeed. It would include such otherwise disparate figures as Richard Nixon, Edmund Wilson, and Flannery O'Connor.

Given whites' use of nigger, it should come as no surprise that for many blacks the N-word has constituted a major and menacing presence that has sometimes shifted the course of their lives. Former slaves featured it in their memoirs about bondage. Recalling her lecherous master's refusal to permit her to marry a free man of color, Harriet Jacobs related the following colloquy:

"So you want to be married do you?" he said,

"and to a free nigger."

"Yes, sir."

"Well, I'll soon convince you whether I am your master, or the nigger fellow you honor so highly. If youmust have a husband, you may take up with one of my slaves."

Nigger figures noticeably, too, in Frederick Douglass's autobiography. Re-creating the scene in which his master objected to his being taught to read and write, the great abolitionist imagined that the man might have said, "If you give a nigger an inch he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master. . . . Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world."

In the years since the Civil War, no one has more searingly dramatized nigger-as-insult than Richard Wright. Anyone who wants to learn in a brief compass what lies behind African American anger and anguish when nigger is deployed as a slur by whites should read Wright's The Ethics of Living Jim Crow. In this memoir about his life in the South during the teens and twenties of the twentieth century, Wright attacked the Jim Crow regime by showing its ugly manifestations in day-to-day racial interactions. Wright's first job took him to a small optical company in Jackson, Mississippi, where things went smoothly in the beginning. Then Wright made the mistake of asking the seventeen-year-old white youth with whom he worked to tell him more about the business. The youth viewed this sign of curiosity and ambition as an unpardonable affront. Wright narrated the confrontation that followed:

"What yuh tryin' t' do, nigger, git smart?" he asked.

"Naw; I ain' tryin' t' git smart," I said.

"Well, don't, if yuh know what's good for yuh! . . . Nigger, you think you'rewhite, don't you?"

"No sir!"

"This iswhite man's work around here, and you better watch yourself."

From then on, the white youth so terrorized Wright that he ended up quitting.

At his next job, as a menial worker in a clothing store, Wright saw his boss and his son drag and kick a Negro woman into the store:

Later the woman stumbled out, bleeding, crying, and holding her stomach. . . . When I went to the rear of the store, the boss and his son were washing their hands in the sink. They were chuckling. The floor was bloody and strewn with wisps of hair and clothing. No doubt I must have appeared pretty shocked, for the boss slapped me reassuringly on the back.

"Boy, that's what we do to niggers when they don't want to pay their bills," he said, laughing.

Along with intimidation, sex figured in Wright's tales of Negro life under segregationist tyranny. Describing his job as a "hall-boy" in a hotel frequented by prostitutes, the writer remembered

a huge, snowy-skinned blonde [who] took a room on my floor. I was sent to wait upon her. She was in bed with a thick-set man; both were nude and uncovered. She said she wanted some liquor and slid out of bed and waddled across the floor to get her money from a dresser drawer. I watched her.

"Nigger, what in hell you looking at?" the white man asked me, raising himself up on his elbows.

"Nothing," I answered, looking miles deep into the black wall of the room.

"Keep your eyes where they belong if you want to be healthy!" he said.

"Yes, sir."

On a different evening at this same hotel, Wright was leaving to walk one of the Negro maids home. As they passed by him, the white night watchman wordlessly slapped the maid on her buttock. Astonished, Wright instinctively turned around. His doing so, however, triggered yet another confrontation:

Suddenly [the night watchman] pulled his gun and asked: "Nigger, don't you like it?"

I hesitated.

"I asked yuh don't yuh like it?" he asked again, stepping forward.

"Yes, sir," I mumbled.

"Talk like it then!"

"Oh, yes, sir!" I said with as much heartiness as I could muster.

Outside, I walked ahead of the girl, ashamed to face her. She caught up with me and said: "Don't be a fool! Yuh couldn't help it!"

This watchman boasted of having killed two Negroes in self-defense.

© 2002 Randall Kennedy

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washingtonpost.com: Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

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Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word By Randall Kennedy Pantheon. 256 pp. $22 Friday, January 11, 2001 Chapter One The Protean N-Word How should nigger be defined? Is it a part of the American cultural inheritance that warrants preservation? Why does nigger generate such powerful reactions?

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Hate crimes are the highest priority of the FBI's civil rights program because of the devastating impact they have on families and communities. The Bureau investigates hundreds of these cases every year, and we work to detect and prevent incidents through law enforcement training, public outreach, and partnerships with community groups.

Traditionally, FBI investigations of hate crimes were limited to crimes in which the perpetrators acted based on a bias against the victim's race, color, religion, or national origin. In addition, investigations were restricted to those wherein the victim was engaged in a federally protected activity. With the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, the Bureau became authorized to also investigate crimes committed against those based on biases of actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or gender.

History

The FBI investigated what are now called hate crimes as far back as World War I. Our role increased following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Before then, the federal government took the position that protection of civil rights was a local function, not a federal one. However, the murders of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964 provided the impetus for a visible and sustained federal effort to protect and foster civil rights for African Americans. MIBURN, as the case was called (it stood for Mississippi Burning), became the largest federal investigation ever conducted in Mississippi. On October 20, 1967, seven men were convicted of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of the slain civil rights workers. All seven were sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to 10 years.

Defining a Hate Crime

A hate crime is a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias. For the purposes of collecting statistics, the FBI has defined a hate crime as a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity." Hate itself is not a crime-and the FBI is mindful of protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties.

The FBI's Role

As part of its responsibility to uphold the civil rights of the American people, the FBI takes a number of steps to combat the problem of hate crimes.

Investigative Activities: The FBI is the lead investigative agency for criminal violations of federal civil rights statutes. The Bureau works closely with its local, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement partners around the country in many of these cases.

Law Enforcement Support: The FBI works closely with state/local/tribal authorities on investigations, even when federal charges are not brought. FBI resources, forensic expertise, and experience in identification and proof of hate-based motivations often provide an invaluable complement to local law enforcement. Many cases are also prosecuted under state statutes such as murder, arson, or more recent local ethnic intimidation laws. Once the state prosecution begins, the Department of Justice follows the proceedings to ensure that the federal interest is vindicated and the law is applied equally among the 95 U.S. Judicial Districts.

Prosecutive Decision: The FBI forwards results of completed investigations to local U.S. Attorneys Offices and the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, which decide whether a federal prosecution is warranted. Prosecution of these crimes may move forward, for example, if local authorities are unwilling or unable to prosecute a crime of bias.

Public Outreach: Outreach is a critical component of the FBI's civil rights program. The FBI engages with various local and national organizations to identify violations of federal law designed to protect the civil rights of individuals in the United States. Many FBI's field offices participate in working groups with state and local law enforcement partners, as well as community groups within their area of responsibility. These working groups combine community and law enforcement resources to develop strategies to address local hate crime problems.

Training: The FBI conducts hundreds of operational seminars, workshops, and training sessions annually for local law enforcement, minority and religious organizations, and community groups to promote cooperation and reduce civil rights abuses. Each year, the FBI also provides hate crimes training for new agents, hundreds of current agents, and thousands of police officers worldwide.

Hate Crime Statistics

The FBI has gathered and published hate crime statistics every year since 1992. Our latest reports:

For more information please visit ucr.fbi.gov.

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Hate Crimes | Federal Bureau of Investigation

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Hate crimes are the highest priority of the FBI's civil rights program because of the devastating impact they have on families and communities. The Bureau investigates hundreds of these cases every year, and we work to detect and prevent incidents through law enforcement training, public outreach, and partnerships with community groups.

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Hate Crimes Timeline - Human Rights Campaign

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Hate Crimes Timeline - Human Rights Campaign

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There were challenges and victories - both big and small - along the way. Here's a look back at some of the bigger developments in the fight for passage of federal hate crimes legislation.

1993

March 1, 1993 | 103rd Congress - The Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act is reintroduced in the House (it was also introduced in the 102nd Congress). It would allow judges to impose harsher penalties for hate crimes, including hate crimes based on gender, disability and sexual orientation that occur in national parks and on other federal property.

September 21, 1993 | House passes the Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act by a voice vote.

October 6, 1993 | The Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act is introduced in the Senate.

November 4, 1993 | The Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act is added as an amendment to the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. It is later enacted.

1997

June 7, 1997 |"Such hate crimes, committed solely because the victims have a different skin color or a different faith or are gays or lesbians, leave deep scars not only on the victims but on our larger community. They are acts of violence against America itself." - President Bill Clinton in his weekly radio address

June 7, 1997 | President Clinton devotes his weekly radio address to hate crimes, specifically citing bias crimes against LGBTQ people. He asks Attorney General Janet Reno to review the laws concerning hate crimes and help the federal government develop a plan of action.

November 10, 1997 | HRC Executive Director Elizabeth Birch participates in a White House hate crimes summit convened by Clinton. HRC asks the White House to focus also on how law enforcement officials are trained to investigate and prosecute bias crimes. Before the summit concludes, Clinton unveils a package of initiatives that includes expanding federal hate crimes laws to encompass crimes aimed at people because they are gay or disabled, or because of their sex.

November 13, 1997 | 105th Congress - The Hate Crimes Prevention Act is introduced in the House and the Senate. The bill would extend the protection of the current federal hate crimes law to include those who are victimized because of their sexual orientation, gender or disability. It would also strengthen current law regarding hate crimes based on race, religion and national origin.

1998

June 7, 1998 | James Byrd Jr., 49, of Jasper, Texas, accepts a ride from three white men. Instead of taking him home, the three men beat Byrd behind a convenience store, strip him naked, chain him by the ankles to their pickup truck and dragged him for three miles over rural roads outside Jasper. Forensic evidence suggests that Byrd had been attempting to keep his head up while being dragged, and an autopsy suggests that Byrd was alive during much of the dragging. Byrd dies after his right arm and head are severed after his body hit a culvert. His body had caught a sewage drain on the side of the road, resulting in his decapitation.

Officials quickly determined that the murderers were members of white supremacist groups, wore body tattoos from Aryan Pride, Nazi symbols and gang symbols of their affiliation with well known racist gangs. It was then documented as a hate crime.

October 6-7, 1998 | Matthew Shepard, 21, of Laramie, Wyo., meets two men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, at a bar, and they drive him to a remote area east of Laramie, where they tie him to a split-rail fence, beat him and leave him to die in the cold of the night. Almost 18 hours later, he is found by a cyclist, who initially mistakes him for a scarecrow.

October 12, 1998 | Matthew Shepard dies at a hospital in Fort Collins, Colo.

October 1998 | Vigils are held across the country following the death of Matthew Shepard. One of the largest such vigils takes place on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and was organized by HRC, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

November 1998 | A bipartisan poll conducted for HRC finds that 56 percent of Americans support the Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

1999

May 1999 | I know this measure is not a cure-all, and it won't stop all hate violence. But it will send the message that this senseless violence is unacceptable and un-American. My son Matthew was the victim of a brutal hate crime, and I believe this legislation is necessary to make sure no family again has to suffer like mine." - Judy Shepard, speaking before a U.S. Senate panel to urge the passage of federal hate crimes legislation

January 1999 | President Clinton mentions the passage of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act among his priorities in his State of the Union address.

February 1999 | A Gallup poll indicates that 75 percent of Americans believe that "homosexuals" should be covered by hate crimes laws.

March 1999 | 106th Congress - The Hate Crimes Prevention Act is reintroduced in the House and the Senate.

April 5, 1999 | Russell Henderson pleads guilty to the murder of Matthew Shepard and agrees to testify against Aaron McKinney. In exchange for his testimony, Henderson receives two consecutive life sentences with no chance for parole.

May 1999 | Judy Shepard speaks before a U.S. Senate panel to urge the passage of hate crimes legislation.

July 22, 1999 | The Senate passes the Hate Crimes Prevention Act after it is incorporated as an amendment to the Commerce, Justice and State appropriations bill.

October 1999 | HRC begins airing public service announcements featuring Judy and Dennis Shepard and aimed at curbing anti-LGBTQ violence and promoting a greater understanding of LGBTQ issues.

October 1999 | HRC National Dinner honors the memory of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. The Shepard and Byrd families attend as special guests.

October 25, 1999 | Trial of Aaron McKinney begins. Defense lawyers plan to argue that McKinney snapped when Shepard supposedly made a pass at him at a bar, triggering memories of a childhood sexual assault. The judge rejects the so-called "gay panic" defense.

November 4, 1999 | Aaron McKinney is found guilty in the murder of Matthew Shepard. In a deal that is approved by the Shepard family, McKinney avoids the death penalty and is sentenced to two consecutive life sentences with no chance for parole.

2001

January 2001 | MTV airs a movie about the murder of Matthew Shepard and shuts down programming for 17 hours to run a list of the names of hundreds of victims of hate crimes. More than 50,000 people send e-mails or signed petitions urging Congress and the Bush administration to support the hate crimes bill.

March 2001 | Judy Shepard joins the HRC Board of Directors.

Spring 2001 | 107th Congress - The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act is introduces in the House and the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act is introduced in the Senate. The legislation would provide federal assistance to states and local jurisdictions to prosecute hate crimes.

Fall/Winter 2001 | Following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, scores of hate-related incidents are directed at Muslims and people who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent. HRC works with allies to address these incidents and respond to the targeted communities. President Bush and federal law enforcement authorities speak out against these crimes and launch probes into more than 200 incidents across the country.

2003

April/May 2003 | 108th Congress - The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act is reintroduced in the House and the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act is reintroduced in the Senate.

2004

November 2004 | HRC counters ABC News' inaccurate, sensationalized broadcast on "20/20" about Matthew Shepard's murder. In the program, which includes interviews with both men convicted of murdering Shepard, Aaron McKinney says his motivation for the murder was robbery, not hatred of gay people.

2005

May 26, 2005 | 109th Congress - The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act is reintroduced in the House and the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act is reintroduced in the Senate.

2006

"Matthew's legacy is not about hate. Matthew's legacy is about understanding, compassion, acceptance and love." - Judy Shepard, in an article she wrote for HRC's Equality magazine

2006 | Harris Interactive reports that 54 percent of LGBTQ people surveyed say they are concerned about being the victim of a hate crime.

Winter 2006 | Judy Shepard writes an article in HRC's Equality magazine reflecting on her son's legacy seven years after his death. "When I think about the last seven years, I feel a great sadness for the loss of Matt. But as I look to the future, I'm filled with hope," she writes. "Matthew's legacy is not about hate. Matthew's legacy is about understanding, compassion, acceptance and love."

December 2006 | Judy Shepard joins the HRC Foundation Board.

2007

2007 | A Gallup poll shows that 68 percent of Americans favor including sexual orientation and gender identity in federal hate crimes law. More than half of conservatives (57 percent) and Republicans (60 percent) back inclusive legislation. Support is strongest among self-identified liberals (82 percent), Democrats (75 percent), those affiliated with non-Christian religious faiths (74 percent) and Catholics (72 percent).

March/April 2007 | 110th Congress - The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act is introduced in the House, and the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act is introduced in the Senate.

Spring 2007 | HRC produces a two-minute video in support of the passage of the Matthew Shepard Act. It features the stories of LGBTQ people who been injured or killed by hate violence: Evan Kittredge, Fred Martinez and Matthew Shepard. Using images from photojournalist Lynn Johnson with Cyndi Lauper's song "All Through the Night," the video is a poignant call for people to get involved in the fight to pass hate crimes legislation.

May 3, 2007 | The House passes the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act by a floor vote of 237-180.

June 2007 | The Williams Institute reports that on average, 13 out of 100,000 gay, lesbian and bisexual people report hate violence every year. The 13 compares to 8 for African-Americans, 12 for Muslim-Americans and 15 for Jewish-Americans.

July 2007 | HRC produces a video that confronts the lies from the right wing about hate crimes legislation.

Spring 2007 | Peter D. Hart Research Associates releases the results of a poll showing that support for protections against hate violence is strong - even across partisan and racial lines. The results show that three in four voters support including sexual orientation in federal hate crimes laws, including 85 percent of Democrats, 74 percent of Independents, 64 percent of Republicans, 74 percent of African-Americans, 74 percent of Latinos and 74 percent of Caucasians.

Summer 2007 | Judy Shepard is featured on the front cover of HRC's Equality magazine. By this date, she has spoken to more than 1 million youths about the damaging effects of hate and the importance of embracing diversity.

September 27, 2007 | The Senate invokes cloture on the hate crimes legislation by a vote of 60-39. A voice vote adds the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act as an amendment to the Department of Defense Authorization Act. It is the first time that a transgender-inclusive piece of legislation passes both chambers of Congress.

Fall 2007 | President Bush issues a veto threat for the Defense authorization bill if hate crimes legislation is attached, ending consideration of the hate crimes bill in the 110th Congress.

December 6, 2007 | The hate crimes amendment is stripped from the Defense Department authorization legislation.

2009

April 2009 | 111th Congress - The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act is introduced in the House, and the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act is introduced in the Senate.

April 6, 2009 | HRC launches http://www.fighthatenow.org/ to counter lies and distortions about federal hate crimes legislation. It provides supporters with the tools to directly contact their members of Congress to urge them to support the legislation.

April 21, 2009 | HRC releases a new video in conjunction with the campaign to pass federal hate crimes legislation. The video, "10 Years," features Judy Shepard. HRC also announces the #FightHateNow hashtag for Twitter users to contribute to and stay current on the status of the federal hate crimes bill.

April 27-29, 2009 | HRC holds a national call-in campaign for supporters to call their congressional representatives to urge quick passage of hate crimes legislation, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009.

April 29, 2009 | The House passes the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act by a floor vote of 249-175.

May 20, 2009 | President Obama meets with Judy Shepard and reiterates his commitment to ensuring that the Senate finalize the hate crimes bill.

July 16, 2009 | Senate cloture motion on the hate crimes bill passes by a 63-28 vote. The bill is added to the Defense Department Authorization bill.

July 23, 2009 | The Senate passes the Defense Department Authorization bill, on which the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act is attached as an amendment. The bill goes to a conference committee to work out differences between the House and Senate versions of the legislation.

October 6, 2009 | The House fails to pass a motion, by a 178-234 vote, to instruct conferees to strip the hate crimes provision (now titled "Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act") from the Defense Dept. authorization bill conference report.

October 8, 2009 | The House passes the conference report by a 281-146 vote.

October 10, 2009 | President Obama reiterates his support for hate crimes legislation at the 13th annual HRC National Dinner. Dennis and Judy Shepard are honored with the first annual Edward M. Kennedy National Leadership Award.

October 22, 2009 | October 22, 2009 - The Senate votes 68-29 to pass the Defense Department authorization bill that includes a provision for inclusive federal hate crimes legislation. HRC launches Love Conquers Hate to celebrate the victory.

October 28, 2009 | President Barack Obama signs the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law (as a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act). Before signing the legislation, President Obama says, "I promised Judy Shepard when I saw her in the Oval Office that this day would come, and I'm glad that she and her husband Dennis could join us for this event."

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Hate Crimes, Explained | Southern Poverty Law Center

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Hate Crimes, Explained | Southern Poverty Law Center

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The starting point for understanding hate crimes and their impact is to recognize that criminal activity motivated by bias is different from other criminal conduct. First, these crimes occur because of the perpetrator's bias or animus against the victim on the basis of actual or perceived status. The victim's race, religion, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability is the reason for the crime. In the vast majority of these crimes, absent the victim's personal characteristic, no crime would occur at all.

Second, because hate violence is intentionally, specifically targeted at individuals because of their personal, immutable characteristics they are very personal crimes, with very special emotional and psychological impacts on the victim - and the victim's community. Hate crimes physically wound and may effectively intimidate other members of the victim's community, leaving them feeling terrorized, isolated, vulnerable, and unprotected by the law. By making the victim's community fearful, angry, and suspicious of other groups - and of the power structure that is supposed to protect them - these incidents can damage the fabric of our society and fragment communities.

It's impossible to address our nation's hate crime problem without measuring it accurately. The FBI has been collecting hate crime data as part of its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system since 1991 and provides the best national snapshot of the issue. As will be discussed below, however, this data is still clearly incomplete. In 2020, the FBI documented 8,263 hate crimes, reported by more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. However, according to national surveys conducted by the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), almost 250,000 hate crimes occurred each year between 2005 and 2019. The BJS bases the estimate not on the UCR data collected from law enforcement agencies but rather on its annual National Crime Victimization Survey, which samples about 95,000 households. The actual number of hate crimes is likely somewhere between the BJS estimate and the number reported by the FBI.

As defined by the FBI, a hate crime is a violent or property crime - such as murder, arson, assault or vandalism - that is "motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity." In addition to the federal statutes, 46 states and the District of Columbia have hate crime laws. These laws differ in significant ways. All cover bias based on race, ethnicity, or religion, but many do not include gender, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Arkansas, Indiana, South Carolina, and Wyoming do not have hate crime laws but still report hate crime data to the FBI

The FBI releases a hate crime report each year, but it vastly understates the extent of the problem for several reasons. First, hate crime reporting by law enforcement agencies (like the entire FBI crime reporting system) is voluntary. In 2020, 85% of the 15,136 agencies that reported data to the FBI reported zero hate crimes. Those agencies included about 60 cities with populations over 100,000. Another 2,500 jurisdictions, including 10 cities over 100,000, did not report any data. Second, according the BJS, in almost half of all hate crimes, victims never report the crime to police. Reporting is a two-way street: Officers must be trained to identify, report, and respond to hate crimes - and victims will only report if they trust the police and believe officials will respond effectively.

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The starting point for understanding hate crimes and their impact is to recognize that criminal activity motivated by bias is different from other criminal conduct. First, these crimes occur because of the perpetrator's bias or animus against the victim on the basis of actual or perceived status.

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The painful history of anti-Asian hate crimes in America - CBS News

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The painful history of anti-Asian hate crimes in America - CBS News

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/ AP

As the United States struggles to open back up, Asian Americans remain anxious. Women and the elderly are taking self-defense classes; others are arming themselves for protection. Even parents are wondering if they should keep their children out of schools.

There are 23 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S., and ever since the pandemic began, a new poll suggests one out of every three fears they will be attacked, reports correspondent Weijia Jiang.

Hate crimes overall increased last year by two percent, but hate crimes against the Asian American and Pacific Islander population rose by 146 percent, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University.

For example, one man, recorded in Tustin, Calif., last December, told his victim, "Thanks for giving my country COVID."

Many blame the previous administration's use of racist rhetoric for the rise in violence, as when President Trump stated, "I would like to begin by announcing some important developments in our war against the Chinese virus."

"What comes out of the mouth of the leaders, especially the president, matters," said Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii.

She pointed out that we're witnessing history sadly repeating itself: "[Trump] didn't create this kind of discrimination and, indeed, hatred, but I think that he called to the fore the kind of thinking that some people in our country have. We have always been deemed 'the other,' the perpetual foreigners."

"It's not just the pandemic," said associate professor Lok Siu, who teaches Asian American Studies at University of California, Berkeley. "There's an economic crisis in our country. There is a political crisis in our country. Unfortunately, because of the high visibility of Asian Americans being associated with the virus, they become the targets."

She said a battered economy has always been one of the root causes for scapegoating Asian Americans.

"You can see this happening as early as 1870s, with the conclusion of the railroad construction," said Siu. "You have spikes of just outraged White workers who are claiming that Chinese are taking over jobs and therefore need to be gotten rid of."

As a result, anti-Chinese rioters burned down and even wiped out Chinatowns across the nation; and in 1882, the U.S. government made anti-Asian racism official with the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting all immigration by Chinese laborers. It was the first federal act of its kind barring a specific ethnic group from entering the United States - an act that was legal for 61 years, until it was repealed in 1943, right around the time that Japan became America's enemy.

In the 1965 CBS News documentary, "The Nisei: The Pride and the Shame," Walter Cronkite spoke of the wartime attitude against Japanese Americans, which would "unleash a deep racial hate against all things Japanese."

During the war, 120,000 people of Japanese heritage were forced to give up their homes, and put into internment camps. "Most are American citizens by birth. There is no proven guilt. Not even a proven military need," Cronkite said.

After World War II, Japanese Americans struggled to regain stability. When some eventually did, their success stories led to an enduring stereotype. "We tend to have this misconception that Asian Americans have made it, right? That we are model minorities," said Siu.

"Model minority" - two words that may sound positive together, but Siu explains the phrase is often used as a wedge.

"What it has done in the past is really pitted Asian Americans against other racial ethnic groups, on the premise that somehow, because they have so-called the 'right cultural values' - whatever they may be - that they've been able to achieve," said Siu.

The idea that Asian Americans fared better played out in the 1980s, when Michigan's auto industry was heading to the scrap heap. The scapegoat for many? Japanese imports, as in its cars and its people, sparking a new wave of anti-Asian discrimination.

Journalist and activist Helen Zia said, "If we could just imagine back in 1982, you know, a time when Japan was the enemy, everything wrong with America was being caused by Japan."

Zia was working in a Detroit auto factory the same time a 27-year-old Chinese American's name would become a rallying cry: Vincent Chin.

"He was not your 'model minority,'" said Zia. "He hadn't gone to college. He was taking night classes. He worked as a draftsman. And he worked part-time at a Chinese restaurant as a waiter. He was really your all-American, Asian American, Chinese American kid."

On June 19t, 1982, two White men, a father and his stepson - a foreman and a laid-off auto worker - beat Vincent Chin to death with a baseball bat outside a McDonald's, after an argument at the nearby bar where Chin was celebrating his bachelor party.

One of the bar workers told reporters what she heard the stepfather say to Chin: "He had made the remark about, 'Yeah, because of you, motherf****r, we're out of work!'"

Chin's death didn't make national news. The sentencing of his assailants, in April 1983, did. A charge of 2nd degree murder was reduced by plea bargain to manslaughter. The sentence: a $3,000 fine each, and three years of probation. No time in prison.

Ben Wong believed the sentence was because the victim was Chinese: "I think that is what it is. Discrimination," he told CBS News' Bernard Goldberg.

Zia said, "They were given fines of less than what a used car would've cost, that they could pay off at $120 a month. And the judge said, 'These are not the kind of men you send to jail.'"

As nationwide calls for justice grew louder, both men were indicted on federal charges for violating Chin's civil rights. They were eventually acquitted.

"Vincent was very much the American story, the American immigrant story," Zia said. "And all of that was just shattered, you know, in a climate of racism."

In 2012, the father apologized for killing Chin, but insisted it was never about race, something the Asian American and Pacific Islander community has heard again and again.

Back in March, a White gunman shot up 3 Atlanta area spas. Among the eight people killed, six were women of Asian descent. On Tuesday, the killer pleaded guilty to four of the murders, and was handed four life sentences without parole. While prosecutors in one county charged him with a hate crime, those in another one did not.

Jiang asked Hirono, "What do you say to critics who argue, 'These are not crimes motivated by hate. These are just crimes of opportunity'?"

"I say to them, they're not paying attention," she replied.

In a rare moment of bipartisanship, Congress recently passed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, introduced by Senator Hirono and Rep. Grace Meng. They hope it will make reporting a hate crime easier, and give federal oversight to expedite the review process. The law is largely seen as the first step. Journalist and activist Zia said the nation needs to go much further. "History shows that this is going to be more than a moment," she said.

There are renewed demands across the nation to teach Asian American and Pacific Islander history in schools, in the hopes that people will see beyond the perpetual foreigner, the model minority, or the scapegoat.

Zia said, "There really has to be a concerted, thoughtful effort to try to teach what America really is, so that we can build a country that everybody feels like we're part of it."

For more info:
Story produced by Young Kim. Editor: Carol Ross.

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The painful history of anti-Asian hate crimes in America

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AP As the United States struggles to open back up, Asian Americans remain anxious. Women and the elderly are taking self-defense classes; others are arming themselves for protection. Even parents are wondering if they should keep their children out of schools.

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A 'Forgotten History' Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America : NPR

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A 'Forgotten History' Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America : NPR

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A ‘Forgotten History’ Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America

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Author Richard Rothstein says the housing programs begun under the New Deal were tantamount to a “state-sponsored system of segregation,” in which people of color were purposely excluded from suburbs.

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Image Gallery
Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that white people were the Chosen people, black people were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that black people were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to white people. Pro-segregation politicians gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the mongrelization of the white race. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely referred to black people as niggers, coons, and darkies; and worse, their articles reinforced anti-black stereotypes. Even children's games portrayed black people as inferior beings (see "From Hostility to Reverence: 100 Years of African-American Imagery in Games"). All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression of black people.

The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: white people were superior to black people in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior; sexual relations between black people and white people would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating black people as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep black people at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. The following Jim Crow etiquette norms show how inclusive and pervasive these norms were:

A black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a white male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a white woman, because he risked being accused of rape.

Black and white people were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, white people were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them.

Under no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white female -- that gesture implied intimacy.

Black people were not allowed to show public affection toward one another in public, especially kissing, because it offended white people.

Jim Crow etiquette prescribed that black people were introduced to white people, never white people to black people. For example: "Mr. Peters (the white person), this is Charlie (the black person), that I spoke to you about."

White people did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to black people, for example, Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sir, or Ma'am. Instead, black people were called by their first names. Black people had to use courtesy titles when referring to white people, and were not allowed to call them by their first names.

If a black person rode in a car driven by a white person, the black person sat in the back seat, or the back of a truck.

White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections.

Stetson Kennedy, the author of Jim Crow Guide (1990), offered these simple rules that black people were supposed to observe in conversing with white people:

1. Never assert or even intimate that a white person is lying.

2. Never impute dishonorable intentions to a white person.

3. Never suggest that a white person is from an inferior class.

4. Never lay claim to, or overly demonstrate, superior knowledge or intelligence.

5. Never curse a white person.

6. Never laugh derisively at a white person.

7. Never comment upon the appearance of a white female.

Jim Crow etiquette operated in conjunction with Jim Crow laws (black codes). When most people think of Jim Crow they think of laws (not the Jim Crow etiquette) which excluded black people from public transport and facilities, juries, jobs, and neighborhoods. The passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution had granted black people the same legal protections as white people. However, after 1877, and the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, southern and border states began restricting the liberties of black people. Unfortunately for black people, the Supreme Court helped undermine the Constitutional protections of black people with the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case, which legitimized Jim Crow laws and the Jim Crow way of life.

In 1890, Louisiana passed the "Separate Car Law," which purported to aid passenger comfort by creating "equal but separate" cars for black and white people. This was a ruse. No public accommodations, including railway travel, provided black people with equal facilities. The Louisiana law made it illegal for black people to sit in coach seats reserved for white people, and white people could not sit in seats reserved for black people. In 1891, a group of black people decided to test the Jim Crow law. They had Homer A. Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black (therefore, black), sit in the white-only railroad coach. He was arrested. Plessy's lawyer argued that Louisiana did not have the right to label one citizen as white and another black for the purposes of restricting their rights and privileges. In Plessy, the Supreme Court stated that so long as state governments provided legal process and legal freedoms for black people, equal to those of white people, they could maintain separate institutions to facilitate these rights. The Court, by a 7-2 vote, upheld the Louisiana law, declaring that racial separation did not necessarily mean an abrogation of equality. In practice, Plessy represented the legitimization of two societies: one white, and advantaged; the other, black, disadvantaged and despised.

Black people were denied the right to vote by poll taxes (fees charged to poor black people), white primaries (only Democrats could vote, only white people could be Democrats), and literacy tests ("Name all the Vice Presidents and Supreme Court Justices throughout America's history"). Plessy sent this message to southern and border states: Discrimination against black people is acceptable.

Jim Crow states passed statutes severely regulating social interactions between the races. Jim Crow signs were placed above water fountains, door entrances and exits, and in front of public facilities. There were separate hospitals for black people and white people, separate prisons, separate public and private schools, separate churches, separate cemeteries, separate public restrooms, and separate public accommodations. In most instances, the black facilities were grossly inferior -- generally, older, less-well-kept. In other cases, there were no black facilities -- no Colored public restroom, no public beach, no place to sit or eat. Plessy gave Jim Crow states a legal way to ignore their constitutional obligations to their black citizens.

Jim Crow laws touched every aspect of everyday life. For example, in 1935, Oklahoma prohibited black and white people from boating together. Boating implied social equality. In 1905, Georgia established separate parks for black people and white people. In 1930, Birmingham, Alabama, made it illegal for black people and white people to play checkers or dominoes together. Here are some of the typical Jim Crow laws, as compiled by the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site Interpretive Staff:

Barbers. No colored barber shall serve as a barber (to) white girls or women (Georgia).

Blind Wards. The board of trustees shall...maintain a separate building...on separate ground for the admission, care, instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race (Louisiana).

Burial. The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons (Georgia).

Buses.All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races (Alabama).

Child Custody. It shall be unlawful for any parent, relative, or other white person in this State, having the control or custody of any white child, by right of guardianship, natural or acquired, or otherwise, to dispose of, give or surrender such white child permanently into the custody, control, maintenance, or support, of a negro (South Carolina).

Education.The schools for white children and the schools for negro children shall be conducted separately (Florida).

Libraries. The state librarian is directed to fit up and maintain a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the library for the purpose of reading books or periodicals (North Carolina).

Mental Hospitals. The Board of Control shall see that proper and distinct apartments are arranged for said patients, so that in no case shall Negroes and white persons be together (Georgia).

Militia. The white and colored militia shall be separately enrolled, and shall never be compelled to serve in the same organization. No organization of colored troops shall be permitted where white troops are available and where whites are permitted to be organized, colored troops shall be under the command of white officers (North Carolina).

Nurses. No person or corporation shall require any White female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed (Alabama).

Prisons. The warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts (Mississippi).

Reform Schools. The children of white and colored races committed to the houses of reform shall be kept entirely separate from each other (Kentucky).

Teaching. Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of the white and colored race are received and enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined... (Oklahoma).

Wine and Beer. All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine...shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room at any time (Georgia).¹

The Jim Crow laws and system of etiquette were undergirded by violence, real and threatened. Black people who violated Jim Crow norms, for example, drinking from the white water fountain or trying to vote, risked their homes, their jobs, even their lives. White people could physically beat black people with impunity. Black people had little legal recourse against these assaults because the Jim Crow criminal justice system was all-white: police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and prison officials. Violence was instrumental for Jim Crow. It was a method of social control. The most extreme forms of Jim Crow violence were lynchings.

Lynchings were public, often sadistic, murders carried out by mobs. Between 1882, when the first reliable data were collected, and 1968, when lynchings had become rare, there were 4,730 known lynchings, including 3,440 black men and women. Most of the victims of Lynch Law were hanged or shot, but some were burned at the stake, castrated, beaten with clubs, or dismembered. In the mid-1800s, white people constituted the majority of victims (and perpetrators); however, by the period of Radical Reconstruction, black people became the most frequent lynching victims. This is an early indication that lynching was used as an intimidation tool to keep black people, in this case the newly freed people, "in their places." The great majority of lynchings occurred in southern and border states, where the resentment against black people ran deepest. According to the social economist Gunnar Myrdal (1944): "The southern states account for nine-tenths of the lynchings. More than two thirds of the remaining one-tenth occurred in the six states which immediately border the South" (pp. 560-561).

Many white people claimed that although lynchings were distasteful, they were necessary supplements to the criminal justice system because black people were prone to violent crimes, especially the rapes of white women. Arthur Raper investigated nearly a century of lynchings and concluded that approximately one-third of all the victims were falsely accused (Myrdal, 1944, p. 561).

Under Jim Crow any and all sexual interactions between black men and white women was illegal, illicit, socially repugnant, and within the Jim Crow definition of rape. Although only 19.2 percent of the lynching victims between 1882 to 1951 were even accused of rape, lynch law was often supported on the popular belief that lynchings were necessary to protect white women from black rapists. Myrdal (1944) refutes this belief in this way: "There is much reason to believe that this figure (19.2) has been inflated by the fact that a mob which makes the accusation of rape is secure from any further investigation; by the broad Southern definition of rape to include all sexual relations between Negro men and white women; and by the psychopathic fears of white women in their contacts with Negro men" (pp. 561-562). Most black people were lynched for demanding civil rights, violating Jim Crow etiquette or laws, or in the aftermath of race riots.

Lynchings were most common in small and middle-sized towns where black people often were economic competitors to the local white people. These white people resented any economic and political gains made by black people. Lynchers were seldomly arrested, and if arrested, rarely convicted. Raper (1933) estimated that "at least one-half of the lynchings are carried out with police officers participating, and that in nine-tenths of the others the officers either condone or wink at the mob action" (pp. 13-14). Lynching served many purposes: it was cheap entertainment; it served as a rallying, uniting point for white people; it functioned as an ego-massage for low-income, low-status white people; it was a method of defending white domination and helped stop or retard the fledgling social equality movement.

Lynch mobs directed their hatred against one (sometimes several) victims. The victim was an example of what happened to a black man who tried to vote, or who looked at a white woman, or who tried to get a white man's job. Unfortunately for black people, sometimes the mob was not satisfied to murder a single or several victims. Instead, in the spirit of pogroms, the mobs went into black communities and destroyed additional lives and property. Their immediate goal was to drive out -- through death or expulsion -- all black people; the larger goal was to maintain, at all costs, white supremacy. These pogrom-like actions are often referred to as riots; however, Gunnar Myrdal (1944) was right when he described these "riots" as "a terrorization or massacre...a mass lynching" (p. 566). Interestingly, these mass lynchings were primarily urban phenomena, whereas the lynching of single victims was primarily a rural phenomena.

James Weldon Johnson, the famous black writer, labeled 1919 as "The Red Summer." It was red from racial tension; it was red from bloodletting. During the summer of 1919, there were race riots in Chicago, Illinois; Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina; Omaha, Nebraska; and two dozen other cities. W.E.B. DuBois (1986), the black social scientist and civil rights activist, wrote: "During that year seventy-seven Negroes were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive. That year there were race riots large and small in twenty-six American cities including thirty-eight killed in a Chicago riot of August; from twenty-five to fifty in Phillips County, Arkansas; and six killed in Washington" (p. 747).

The riots of 1919 were not the first or last "mass lynchings" of black people, as evidenced by the race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Atlanta, Georgia (1906); Springfield, Illinois (1908); East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921); and Detroit, Michigan (1943). Joseph Boskin, author of Urban Racial Violence (1976), claimed that the riots of the 1900s had the following traits:

1. In each of the race riots, with few exceptions, it was white people that sparked the incident by attacking black people.

2. In the majority of the riots, some extraordinary social condition prevailed at the time of the riot: prewar social changes, wartime mobility, post-war adjustment, or economic depression.

3. The majority of the riots occurred during the hot summer months.

4. Rumor played an extremely important role in causing many riots. Rumors of some criminal activity by blacks against whites perpetuated the actions of the white mobs.

5. The police force, more than any other institution, was invariably involved as a precipitating cause or perpetuating factor in the riots. In almost every one of the riots, the police sided with the attackers, either by actually participating in, or by failing to quell the attack.

6. In almost every instance, the fighting occurred within the black community. (pp. 14-15)

Boskin omitted the following: the mass media, especially newspapers often published inflammatory articles about "black criminals" immediately before the riots; black people were not only killed, but their homes and businesses were looted, and many who did not flee were left homeless; and, the goal of the white rioters, as was true of white lynchers of single victims, was to instill fear and terror into black people, thereby buttressing white domination. The Jim Crow hierarchy could not work without violence being used against those on the bottom rung. George Fredrickson (1971), a historian, stated it this way: "Lynching represented...a way of using fear and terror to check 'dangerous' tendencies in a black community considered to be ineffectively regimented or supervised. As such it constituted a confession that the regular institutions of a segregated society provided an inadequate measure of day-to-day control" (p. 272).

Many black people resisted the indignities of Jim Crow, and, far too often, they paid for their bravery with their lives.

© Dr. David Pilgrim
Professor of Sociology
Ferris State University
Sept., 2000
Edited 2012

Note

1 This list was derived from a larger list composed by the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site Interpretive Staff. Last Updated January 5, 1998. The web address is: http//www.nps.gov/malu/documents/jim crowlaws.htm.

References

Boskin, J. (1976). Urban racial violence in the twentieth century (2nd ed.). Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe Press.

Dubois, W. E. B. (1986). Writings. N. Huggins, (Ed.). New York NY: Literary Classics of the United States.

Kennedy, S. (1959/1990). Jim Crow guide: The way it was. Boca Raton, FL: Florida Atlantic University Press.

Myrdal, G. (1944). An American dilemma: the Negro problem and modern democracy. New York, NY: Harper.

Raper, A. F. (1933). The tragedy of lynching. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

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Image Gallery Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life.

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“I can ride in first-class cars on the railroads and in the streets,” wrote journalist T. McCants Stewart. “I can stop in and drink a glass of soda and be more politely waited upon than in some parts of New England.” Perhaps Stewart’s comments don’t seem , In 1890, in spite of its 16 black members,…

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Portrait from the New York Public Library Digital Collections

Racial discrimination, or unfair treatment based on race, is an ugly part of the history of the United States. Long after slavery ended, African Americans were still treated as less than human. Racial discrimination has existed all across the U.S., but the South had a specific set of laws. These laws had a name: Jim Crow.

Since the 1870s, Jim Crow laws kept African Americans out of whites-only spaces. Black people were not allowed in whites-only schools. They were not allowed to eat in whites-only restaurants. They couldn't sleep in whites-only hotels. They had to sit in the back of the bus and had to use different bathrooms and drinking fountains.

During the 1960s, many African Americans protested Jim Crow laws. This led U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The new law outlawed segregation. It also banned racist laws that were used to keep Black people from voting.

Today, we still use the term Jim Crow to refer to the South's system of segregation and discrimination. The real Jim Crow wasn't actually Southern, though. He came from the North.

"Jump, Jim Crow"

The original Jim Crow was Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white man. Rice was born in New York City, New York, in 1808. In his 20s, he became a theater performer. In the early 1830s, Rice began performing an act that made him famous. This was when slavery was still legal. Rice painted his face black, and did a song and dance he said were inspired by an enslaved person he saw. The act was called "Jump, Jim Crow" or "Jumping Jim Crow."

Rice would put on blackface makeup, meaning he darkened his skin. He also dressed in rags, historian Eric Lott said. In the minds of many white people, the way Rice dressed and acted was typical of black slaves in the South.

Rice's act was a big hit in New York City. At the time, New York was one of many places where white people could see blackface minstrelsy. Blackface minstrelsy was a popular form of entertainment in which actors made their skin darker. Usually, it was white actors pretending to be Black. These imitations were (and still are) cruel and deeply racist. White performers made black people seem slow-minded. They also made it look like Black people were happy to be slaves.

Rice quickly became the biggest star of blackface minstrelsy. His Jim Crow character was widely known around the country. Jim Crow soon became an insult toward African Americans. Calling someone Jim Crow wasn't just a way of saying they were black. It was a way to reduce a person's worth. It suggested they were the kind of simpleminded character Rice played on stage.

From the Theater to the Legislature

In 1865, the 13th Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution. It made slavery illegal. Yet, southern states quickly passed laws that discriminated against newly freed African Americans. As early as the 1890s, these laws were nicknamed Jim Crow laws.

How did a racist stage act in the North become the name for a set of racist laws in the South? Historians are not sure. Lott said Jim Crow may have been used because that's what some white people called Black people. It was a common insult.

However it happened, the name stuck. Over time, blackface minstrelsy became less popular, though it never died. Rice was mostly forgotten. Today, most people don't know his name. Everybody knows Jim Crow.

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Becky Little, National Geographic

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Fifty years ago, the voting Rights Act targeted the laws and practices of Jim Crow. Here's where the name came from.

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The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s - Bill of Rights Institute

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The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s - Bill of Rights Institute

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Written by: David Pietrusza, Independent Historian

By the end of this section, you will:

Explain the causes and effects of developments in popular culture in the United States over time

During the 1920s, cultural conflict and modernization helped resuscitate the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Whereas the original KKK was a violent, racist organization born in the post Civil War South, the modern Klan was driven by somewhat different concerns. Many white, lower middle-class, Protestant Americans in the North and Midwest were fearful that immigrants were changing traditional American culture, and they responded with anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism.

The revival of the Klan was inspired by Birth of a Nation, director D. W. Griffith's violently anti-black blockbuster film of 1915 that promoted the southern "Lost Cause" view of the Civil War. The movie was one of the most controversial films ever made and was based on the 1905 novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, Jr. On Thanksgiving Day, 1915, Colonel William J. Simmons and a few friends burned a cross on Stone Mountain near Atlanta to signal the revival of the Klan as one of many fraternal groups, but it harkened to an earlier Ku Klux Klan that often fought violently against rights for freed African Americans in the post-Civil War Reconstruction South.

In a scene from the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, Klansmen capture Gus, played by a white actor in blackface. The film is considered one of the most controversial of all time and is credited with igniting the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1910s and 1920s.

The new Klan retained its namesake's antipathy to blacks and its penchants for secrecy, the wearing of masks and sheet-like outfits, and vigilante-style violence. It also employed a special terminology for members, inventing words that began with the letter "K" such as "Kloran" (its handbook), "Klavern" (a local branch), and "Kludd" (a chaplain). It charged $10 to join (of which recruiters got a cut) and held a monopoly of selling Klan uniforms and regalia to members. As KKK membership grew into the millions by the early 1920s, the money poured in.

This "second" Klan could easily be as violent as its Reconstruction Era ancestor, but it was more fraternal and social, though its brand of socializing was restricted to native-born, Protestant whites. It supported the recently enacted national prohibition on alcoholic beverages and opposed labor unions, immigration, and foreign entanglements such as the League of Nations. Klan members and leadership disliked Wall Street and big business in general, and chain stores in particular. Said national Klan leader Hiram Evans, "Increasing economic inequalities threaten the very stability of society." The rise of industrialism and consumerism presented bewildering changes that the Klan blamed on stereotyped Jewish bankers on Wall Street.

Unlike the early Klan (or the Klan of the 1960s), the 1920s Klan, although founded in the South, was not exclusively southern. It boasted support nationwide, primarily in the Midwest. In 1924, more than 40 percent of all Klan membership could be found in just three states (Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois), but the Klan also secured significant support in Maine, Colorado, and Oregon (where it helped ban Catholic schools). It enjoyed a small-town base but also appealed to big-city Protestants, with large chapters in such cities as Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Dallas, and Indianapolis. In the South, most members were Democrats. In the North (such as in Indiana), most were Republicans, though Milwaukee had a fairly large Socialist membership.

In small towns, Klan membership often helped cultivate business relationships ("vocational Klannishness," as one historian of the Klan phrased it) based on members' desire for "trading, dealing with, and patronizing Klansmen in preference to all others." Some were vocal about advertising not only their businesses but also their KKK membership, giving their businesses names such as "Kwik Kar Wash," "Kars, Kars, Kars," and "Kountry Kitchen." The Klan's small-business members included Kansas City haberdasher Harry S. Truman, though Truman soon thought better of the idea and demanded his $10 back.

Of course, the Klan was much more than a social group or a business network. It was especially hostile to blacks, Catholics, and Jews. The original Klan had been specifically formed to combat freedoms for freed slaves, and the new Klan continued that trend. As one West Virginia Klan leader proclaimed, "The Klan believes in white supremacy." Or as its official national newspaper, The Searchlight, theorized: "Race forms the basis for all human actions and reactions".

In this 1926 cartoon, the Klan is chasing the Roman Catholic Church out of America, along with its "snakes" like union of church and state, control of schools, and superstition.

The Klan also opposed and disparaged Jews, painting them alternately as predatory capitalists and dangerous radicals. But its main focus was against America's rising Catholic population. Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, eastern Europe, French Canada, and southern Germany had poured into the country by the millions in the previous decades, competing with native-born American workers for jobs and driving down wages. Worse for the Klan was that immigrants voted, particularly in the big cities where they supposedly supported crooked political machines, most prominently New York City's notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall. The Klan also associated immigrants with drunkenness and saloons (in an era of Prohibition), as well as with being un-American because of their languages, foods, and customs.

The great majority of Klan members were Protestants who feared Catholics because they were convinced the average Catholic was completely under the thumb of his or her parish priest or (worse) a foreign, authoritarian Church hierarchy led by the pope. "Most Klansmen," noted historian David Chalmers, "did not believe that they were opposing the Catholic because of his religion but because hierarchical control from Rome prevented his assimilation." Or as Alabama's U.S. Senator J. Thomas Heflin put it: "God has raised up this great patriotic organization [the Klan] to unmask popery."

Although not every Klansman was violent, far too many were. Members perpetrated lynchings, arson, beatings, and whippings. In September 1921, the New York World reported the judgment of a disgusted former Klan member: "It would be impossible to imagine an attitude more essentially lawless. Ku Kluxism as conceived, incorporated, propagated, and practiced has become a menace to the peace and security of every section of the United States. Its evil and vicious possibilities are boundless. It is nothing more or less than a throwback to the centuries when terror, instead of law and justice, regulated the lives of men."

At first the Klan grew slowly after its 1915 rebirth, but the early 1920s witnessed spectacular growth. Part of this rise may be attributed to the group's enemies. The liberal New York World ran a series of articles exposing the Klan's excesses, but these only gave the organization free advertising. The House of Representatives investigated the KKK, but again its membership only grew. On July 4, 1923, an estimated 200,000 Klansmen, women, and children gathered in Kokomo, Indiana, to hold mass rallies. In August 1925, nearly 40,000 Klansmen (mostly Northerners) paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

In 1922, these Ku Klux Klan members paraded through cities in northern Virginia, right across the border from Washington, DC.

Some said Klan membership reached 8 million by the mid-1920s, but the actual number was somewhere between 2.5 and 4 million. Still, that was enough to make the Klan an organization to be feared not only when it physically threatened blacks, Catholics, Jews, bootleggers, or local adulterers but also when it burned fiery crosses on deserted hillsides or on the front lawns of its opponents (including future radio demagogue Father Charles A. Coughlin). During the decade, it even exercised great power at the ballot box, helping to elect governors in Alabama, California, Oregon, and Indiana. An estimated 75 House members took their seats with KKK assistance in the 1920s. They included Earl Mayfield, as U.S. senator from Texas in 1922, and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black from Alabama in 1926.

In 1924, Democrats gathered at New York City's Madison Square Garden for their national convention. Numerous delegates were Klan members, sympathizers, or people who were simply afraid of alienating the "Invisible Empire." Anti-KKK forces attempted to pass a condemnation of the organization, but it failed by one vote.

Just as quickly as the Klan rose in membership and influence, however, it collapsed. There were many reasons. Some members were embarrassed by the organization's bigotry, some by its silly regalia and ceremonies, or its money grubbing. Others were repulsed by its violence or its hypocrisy.

The Klan's most fatal weakness was rooted in its poor leadership. The organization claimed to stand for morality, but its leaders provided the worst possible examples. For example, Edward Y. Clarke and Mary Elizabeth Tyler, the two Atlanta-based publicists who masterminded the Klan's skyrocketing rise, were soon revealed to have been arrested in 1919 for sexual impropriety and possession of illegal alcohol. Then, with millions of dollars rolling in, infighting for control grew fierce, and Klan founder and Grand Wizard Col. William Simmons found himself ousted by Houston dentist Hiram W. Evans. Evans had allied himself with perhaps the Klan's most successful personality, Indiana Grand Dragon David C. Stephenson. Stephenson, a former Socialist and a failed Democratic congressional candidate, had quickly engineered a Klan takeover of Indiana's Republican Party. Clearly the most powerful man in Indiana, Stephenson (who said, "I am the law in Indiana") viewed himself as a future senator and perhaps even president of the United States.

In April 1925, however, the 33-year-old Stephenson forced his aide, 28-year-old Madge Oberholtzer, onto a Chicago-bound train, where he assaulted and raped her. She attempted suicide, but her death a few weeks later was ruled to have followed from infection of the wounds Stephenson had inflicted on her. A jury found Stephenson guilty of rape, kidnapping, and second-degree murder.

The Klan imploded after that. Although popular anti-Catholicism flourished in 1928 when Catholic New York Governor Al Smith unsuccessfully ran for president, the second Klan had long since declined. Its revival after World War II was related to opposition to the growing civil rights movement.

Review Questions

1. The most significant factor that helped fuel the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was

2. The immediate cause of the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was

3. Other than African Americans, the Ku Klux Klan blamed which of the following most for problems in the United States during the 1920s?

4. Compared to the original Ku Klux Klan, which existed only in the South, the 1920s Klan was centered in the

5. The political power of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s can be best described as having

Free Response Questions

1. Explain the reasons for the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

2. Compare the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s with the original Klan from the Reconstruction Era.

AP Practice Questions

"First in the Klansman's mind is patriotism America for Americans. He believes religiously that a betrayal of Americanism or the American race is treason to the most sacred trusts, a trust from his fathers and a trust from God. He believes too that Americanism can only be achieved if the pioneer stock is kept pure. . . .

Racial integrity is a very definite thing to a Klansman. It means even more than good citizenship, for a man may be in all ways a good citizen and yet a poor American, unless he has racial understanding of Americanism, and instinctive loyalty to it. . . .

Americanism, to the Klansman, is a thing of the spirit, a purpose and a point of view, that can only come through instinctive racial understanding. It has, to be sure, certain defined principles, but he does not believe that many aliens understand those principles, even when they use our words in talking about them. . . . In short, the Klansman believes in the greatest possible diversity and individualism within the limits of the American spirit. But he believes also that few aliens can understand that spirit, that fewer try to, and that there must be resistance, intolerance even, toward anything that threatens it, or the fundamental national unity based upon it."

Hiram Evans, "The Klan's Fight for Americanism," 1926

Refer to the excerpt provided.

1. The sentiments expressed in the provided excerpt are best understood as a response to the

2. One group that would disagree with the sentiments expressed about race in the excerpt is

3. Which of the following pieces of legislation would have been most influenced by the sentiments expressed in the excerpt?

Primary Sources

Gordon, Colin, ed. Major Problems in American History, 1920-1945: Documents and Essays. Boston: Cengage, 2010.

Suggested Resources

Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987.

Coben, Stanley. Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Jackson, Kenneth T. The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1967.

MacLean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Pegram, Thomas R. One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011.

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The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s - Bill of Rights Institute

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By the end of this section, you will: Explain the causes and effects of developments in popular culture in the United States over time During the 1920s, cultural conflict and modernization helped resuscitate the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

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Organisation and methods of the Ku Klux Klan - Separate but equal policy to 1939 - National 5 History Revision - BBC Bitesize

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Organisation and methods of the Ku Klux Klan - Separate but equal policy to 1939 - National 5 History Revision - BBC Bitesize

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Organisation and methods of the Ku Klux Klan - Separate but equal policy to 1939 - National 5 History Revision - BBC Bitesize

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In National 5 History learn about the prejudice black Americans continued to face after the end of the Civil War, including from the Jim Crow laws.

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Ku Klux Klan: A History of Racism | Southern Poverty Law Center

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Ku Klux Klan: A History of Racism | Southern Poverty Law Center

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This report on the history of the Ku Klux Klan, America's first terrorist organization, was prepared by the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Klanwatch was formed in 1981 to help curb Klan and racist violence through litigation, education and monitoring.
Click here for PDF.

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This report on the history of the Ku Klux Klan, America's first terrorist organization, was prepared by the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Klanwatch was formed in 1981 to help curb Klan and racist violence through litigation, education and monitoring.

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The reemergence of the KKK (article) | Khan Academy

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The reemergence of the KKK (article) | Khan Academy

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The reemergence of the KKK (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) | National Archives

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Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) | National Archives

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Transcript

(Transcription of the Judgement of the Supreme Court of the United States in Plessy v. Ferguson.)

Supreme Court of the United States,
No. 210, October Term, 1895.
Homer Adolph Plessy,
Plaintiff in Error,
vs.
J.H. Ferguson, Judge of Section "A"
Criminal District Court for the Parish of Orleans
In Error to the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana

This cause came on to be heard on the transcript of the record from the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana, and was argued by counsel.

On consideration whereof, It is now here ordered and adjudged by this Court that the judgement of the said Supreme Court, in this cause, be and the the same is hereby, affirmed with costs.

per Mr. Justice Brown,
May 18, 1896.

Dissenting:
Mr. Justice Harlan

(Transcription of Opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States in Plessy v. Ferguson.)
U.S. Supreme Court
PLESSY v. FERGUSON, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)
May 18, 1896.
This was a petition for writs of prohibition and certiorari originally filed in the supreme court of the state by Plessy, the plaintiff in error, against the Hon. John H. Ferguson, judge of the criminal district court for the parish of Orleans, and setting forth, in substance, the following facts:

That petitioner was a citizen of the United States and a resident of the state of Louisiana, of mixed descent, in the proportion of seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood; that the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him, and that he was entitled to every recognition, right, privilege, and immunity secured to the citizens of the United States of the white race by its constitution and laws; that on June 7, 1892, he engaged and paid for a first-class passage on the East Louisiana Railway, from New Orleans to Covington, in the same state, and thereupon entered a passenger train, and took possession of a vacant seat in a coach where passengers of the white race were accommodated; that such railroad company was incorporated by the laws of Louisiana as a common carrier, and was not authorized to distinguish between citizens according to their race, but, notwithstanding this, petitioner was required by the conductor, under penalty of ejection from said train and imprisonment, to vacate said coach, and occupy another seat, in a coach assigned by said company for persons not of the white race, and for no other reason than that petitioner was of the colored race; that, upon petitioner's refusal to comply with such order, he was, with the aid of a police officer, forcibly ejected from said coach, and hurried off to, and imprisoned in, the parish jail of New Orleans, and there held to answer a charge made by such officer to the effect that he was guilty of having criminally violated an act of the general assembly of the state, approved July 10, 1890, in such case made and provided.

The petitioner was subsequently brought before the recorder of the city for preliminary examination, and committed for trial to the criminal district court for the parish of Orleans, where an information was filed against him in the matter above set forth, for a violation of the above act, which act the petitioner affirmed to be null and void, because in conflict with the constitution of the United States; that petitioner interposed a plea to such information, based upon the unconstitutionality of the act of the general assembly, to which the district attorney, on behalf of the state, filed a demurrer; that, upon issue being joined upon such demurrer and plea, the court sustained the demurrer, overruled the plea, and ordered petitioner to plead over to the facts set forth in the information, and that, unless the judge of the said court be enjoined by a writ of prohibition from further proceeding in such case, the court will proceed to fine and sentence petitioner to imprisonment, and thus deprive him of his constitutional rights set forth in his said plea, notwithstanding the unconstitutionality of the act under which he was being prosecuted; that no appeal lay from such sentence, and petitioner was without relief or remedy except by writs of prohibition and certiorari. Copies of the information and other proceedings in the criminal district court were annexed to the petition as an exhibit.

Upon the filing of this petition, an order was issued upon the respondent to show cause why a writ of prohibition should not issue, and be made perpetual, and a further order that the record of the proceedings had in the criminal cause be certified and transmitted to the supreme court.

To this order the respondent made answer, transmitting a certified copy of the proceedings, asserting the constitutionality of the law, and averring that, instead of pleading or admitting that he belonged to the colored race, the said Plessy declined and refused, either by pleading or otherwise, to admit that he was in any sense or in any proportion a colored man.

The case coming on for hearing before the supreme court, that court was of opinion that the law under which the prosecution was had was constitutional and denied the relief prayed for by the petitioner (Ex parte Plessy, 45 La. Ann. 80, 11 South. 948); whereupon petitioner prayed for a writ of error from this court, which was allowed by the chief justice of the supreme court of Louisiana.

Mr. Justice Harlan dissenting.

A. W. Tourgee and S. F. Phillips, for plaintiff in error.

Alex. Porter Morse, for defendant in error.

Mr. Justice BROWN, after stating the facts in the foregoing language, delivered the opinion of the court.

This case turns upon the constitutionality of an act of the general assembly of the state of Louisiana, passed in 1890, providing for separate railway carriages for the white and colored races. Acts 1890, No. 111, p. 152.

The first section of the statute enacts 'that all railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches in this state, shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races, by providing two or more passenger coaches for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger coaches by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations: provided, that this section shall not be construed to apply to street railroads. No person or persons shall be permitted to occupy seats in coaches, other than the ones assigned to them, on account of the race they belong to.'

By the second section it was enacted 'that the officers of such passenger trains shall have power and are hereby required to assign each passenger to the coach or compartment used for the race to which such passenger belongs; any passenger insisting on going into a coach or compartment to which by race he does not belong, shall be liable to a fine of twenty-five dollars, or in lieu thereof to imprisonment for a period of not more than twenty days in the parish prison, and any officer of any railroad insisting on assigning a passenger to a coach or compartment other than the one set aside for the race to which said passenger belongs, shall be liable to a fine of twenty-five dollars, or in lieu thereof to imprisonment for a period of not more than twenty days in the parish prison; and should any passenger refuse to occupy the coach or compartment to which he or she is assigned by the officer of such railway, said officer shall have power to refuse to carry such passenger on his train, and for such refusal neither he nor the railway company which he represents shall be liable for damages in any of the courts of this state.'

The third section provides penalties for the refusal or neglect of the officers, directors, conductors, and employees of railway companies to comply with the act, with a proviso that 'nothing in this act shall be construed as applying to nurses attending children of the other race.' The fourth section is immaterial.

The information filed in the criminal district court charged, in substance, that Plessy, being a passenger between two stations within the state of Louisiana, was assigned by officers of the company to the coach used for the race to which he belonged, but he insisted upon going into a coach used by the race to which he did not belong. Neither in the information nor plea was his particular race or color averred.

The petition for the writ of prohibition averred that petitioner was seven-eights Caucasian and one-eighth African blood; that the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him; and that he was entitled to every right, privilege, and immunity secured to citizens of the United States of the white race; and that, upon such theory, he took possession of a vacant seat in a coach where passengers of the white race were accommodated, and was ordered by the conductor to vacate said coach, and take a seat in another, assigned to persons of the colored race, and, having refused to comply with such demand, he was forcibly ejected, with the aid of a police officer, and imprisoned in the parish jail to answer a charge of having violated the above act.

The constitutionality of this act is attacked upon the ground that it conflicts both with the thirteenth amendment of the constitution, abolishing slavery, and the fourteenth amendment, which prohibits certain restrictive legislation on the part of the states.

1. That it does not conflict with the thirteenth amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except a punishment for crime, is too clear for argument. Slavery implies involuntary servitude,-a state of bondage; the ownership of mankind as a chattel, or, at least, the control of the labor and services of one man for the benefit of another, and the absence of a legal right to the disposal of his own person, property, and services. This amendment was said in the Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, to have been intended primarily to abolish slavery, as it had been previously known in this country, and that it equally forbade Mexican peonage or the Chinese coolie trade, when they amounted to slavery or involuntary servitude, and that the use of the word 'servitude' was intended to prohibit the use of all forms of involuntary slavery, of whatever class or name. It was intimated, however, in that case, that this amendment was regarded by the statesmen of that day as insufficient to protect the colored race from certain laws which had been enacted in the Southern states, imposing upon the colored race onerous disabilities and burdens, and curtailing their rights in the pursuit of life, liberty, and property to such an extent that their freedom was of little value; and that the fourteenth amendment was devised to meet this exigency.

So, too, in the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 3 Sup. Ct. 18, it was said that the act of a mere individual, the owner of an inn, a public conveyance or place of amusement, refusing accommodations to colored people, cannot be justly regarded as imposing any badge of slavery or servitude upon the applicant, but only as involving an ordinary civil injury, properly cognizable by the laws of the state, and presumably subject to redress by those laws until the contrary appears. 'It would be running the slavery question into the ground,' said Mr. Justice Bradley, 'to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to the guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car, or admit to his concert or theater, or deal with in other matters of intercourse or business.'

A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races-a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color-has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or re-establish a state of involuntary servitude. Indeed, we do not understand that the thirteenth amendment is strenuously relied upon by the plaintiff in error in this connection.

2. By the fourteenth amendment, all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are made citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside; and the states are forbidden from making or enforcing any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, or shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or deny to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The proper construction of this amendment was first called to the attention of this court in the Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, which involved, however, not a question of race, but one of exclusive privileges. The case did not call for any expression of opinion as to the exact rights it was intended to secure to the colored race, but it was said generally that its main purpose was to establish the citizenship of the negro, to give definitions of citizenship of the United States and of the states, and to protect from the hostile legislation of the states the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, as distinguished from those of citizens of the states. The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguish d from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation, in places where they are liable to be brought into contact, do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which have been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of states where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced.

One of the earliest of these cases is that of Roberts v. City of Boston, 5 Cush. 198, in which the supreme judicial court of Massachusetts held that the general school committee of Boston had power to make provision for the instruction of colored children in separate schools established exclusively for them, and to prohibit their attendance upon the other schools. 'The great principle,' said Chief Justice Shaw, 'advanced by the learned and eloquent advocate for the plaintiff [Mr. Charles Sumner], is that, by the constitution and laws of Massachusetts, all persons, without distinction of age or sex, birth or color, origin or condition, are equal before the law. ... But, when this great principle comes to be applied to the actual and various conditions of persons in society, it will not warrant the assertion that men and women are legally clothed with the same civil and political powers, and that children and adults are legally to have the same functions and be subject to the same treatment; but only that the rights of all, as they are settled and regulated by law, are equally entitled to the paternal consideration and protection of the law for their maintenance and security.' It was held that the powers of the committee extended to the establish- ment of separate schools for children of different ages, sexes and colors, and that they might also establish special schools for poor and neglected children, who have become too old to attend the primary school, and yet have not acquired the rudiments of learning, to enable them to enter the ordinary schools. Similar laws have been enacted by congress under its general power of legislation over the District of Columbia (sections 281- 283, 310, 319, Rev. St. D. C.), as well as by the legislatures of many of the states, and have been generally, if not uniformly, sustained by the courts. State v. McCann, 21 Ohio St. 210; Lehew v. Brummell (Mo. Sup.) 15 S. W. 765; Ward v. Flood, 48 Cal. 36; Bertonneau v. Directors of City Schools, 3 Woods, 177, Fed. Cas. No. 1,361; People v. Gallagher, 93 N. Y. 438; Cory v. Carter, 48 Ind. 337; Dawson v. Lee, 83 Ky. 49.

Laws forbidding the intermarriage of the two races may be said in a technical sense to interfere with the freedom of contract, and yet have been universally recognized as within the police power of the state. State v. Gibson, 36 Ind. 389.

The distinction between laws interfering with the political equality of the negro and those requiring the separation of the two races in schools, theaters, and railway carriages has been frequently drawn by this court. Thus, in Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303, it was held that a law of West Virginia limiting to white male persons 21 years of age, and citizens of the state, the right to sit upon juries, was a discrimination which implied a legal inferiority in civil society, which lessened the security of the right of the colored race, and was a step towards reducing them to a condition of servility. Indeed, the right of a colored man that, in the selection of jurors to pass upon his life, liberty, and property, there shall be no exclusion of his race, and no discrimination against them because of color, has been asserted in a number of cases. Virginia v. Rivers, 100 U.S. 313 ; Neal v. Delaware, 103 U.S. 370 ; ush v. Com., 107 U.S. 110 , 1 Sup. Ct. 625; Gibson v. Mississippi, 162 U.S. 565 , 16 Sup. Ct. 904. So, where the laws of a particular locality or the charter of a particular railway corporation has provided that no person shall be excluded from the cars on account of color, we have held that this meant that persons of color should travel in the same car as white ones, and that the enactment was not satisfied by the company providing cars assigned exclusively to people of color, though they were as good as those which they assigned exclusively to white persons. Railroad Co. v. Brown, 17 Wall. 445.

Upon the other hand, where a statute of Louisiana required those engaged in the transportation of passengers among the states to give to all persons traveling within that state, upon vessels employed in that business, equal rights and privileges in all parts of the vessel, without distinction on account of race or color, and subjected to an action for damages the owner of such a vessel who excluded colored passengers on account of their color from the cabin set aside by him for the use of whites, it was held to be, so far as it applied to interstate commerce, unconstitutional and void. Hall v. De Cuir, 95 U.S. 485 . The court in this case, however, expressly disclaimed that it had anything whatever to do with the statute as a regulation of internal commerce, or affecting anything else than commerce among the states.

In the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 , 3 Sup. Ct. 18, it was held that an act of congress entitling all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances, on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement, and made applicable to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude, was unconstitutional and void, upon the ground that the fourteenth amendment was prohibitory upon the states only, and the legislation authorized to be adopted by congress for enforcing it was not direct legislation on matters respecting which the states were prohibited from making or enforcing certain laws, or doing certain acts, but was corrective legislation, such as might be necessary or proper for counter-acting and redressing the effect of such laws or acts. In delivering the opinion of the court, Mr. Justice Bradley observed that the fourteenth amendment 'does not invest congress with power to legislate upon subjects that are within the domain of state legislation, but to provide modes of relief against state legislation or state action of the kind referred to. It does not authorize congress to create a code of municipal law for the regulation of private rights, but to provide modes of redress against the operation of state laws, and the action of state officers, executive or judicial, when these are subversive of the fundamental rights specified in the amendment. Positive rights and privileges are undoubtedly secured by the fourteenth amendment; but they are secured by way of prohibition against state laws and state proceedings affecting those rights and privileges, and by power given to congress to legislate for the purpose of carrying such prohibition into effect; and such legislation must necessarily be predicated upon such supposed state laws or state proceedings, and be directed to the correction of their operation and effect.'

Much nearer, and, indeed, almost directly in point, is the case of the Louisville, N. O. & T. Ry. Co. v. State, 133 U.S. 587 , 10 Sup. Ct. 348, wherein the railway company was indicted for a violation of a statute of Mississippi, enacting that all railroads carrying passengers should provide equal, but separate, accommodations for the white and colored races, by providing two or more passenger cars for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger cars by a partition, so as to secure separate accommodations. The case was presented in a different aspe t from the one under consideration, inasmuch as it was an indictment against the railway company for failing to provide the separate accommodations, but the question considered was the constitutionality of the law. In that case, the supreme court of Mississippi (66 Miss. 662, 6 South. 203) had held that the statute applied solely to commerce within the state, and, that being the construction of the state statute by its highest court, was accepted as conclusive. 'If it be a matter,' said the court (page 591, 133 U. S., and page 348, 10 Sup. Ct.), 'respecting commerce wholly within a state, and not interfering with commerce between the states, then, obviously, there is no violation of the commerce clause of the federal constitution. ... No question arises under this section as to the power of the state to separate in different compartments interstate pas- sengers, or affect, in any manner, the privileges and rights of such passengers. All that we can consider is whether the state has the power to require that railroad trains within her limits shall have separate accommodations for the two races. That affecting only commerce within the state is no invasion of the power given to congress by the commerce clause.'

A like course of reasoning applies to the case under consideration, since the supreme court of Louisiana, in the case of State v. Judge, 44 La. Ann. 770, 11 South. 74, held that the statute in question did not apply to interstate passengers, but was confined in its application to passengers traveling exclusively within the borders of the state. The case was decided largely upon the authority of Louisville, N. O. & T. Ry. Co. v. State, 66 Miss. 662, 6 South, 203, and affirmed by this court in 133 U.S. 587 , 10 Sup. Ct. 348. In the present case no question of interference with interstate commerce can possibly arise, since the East Louisiana Railway appears to have been purely a local line, with both its termini within the state of Louisiana. Similar statutes for the separation of the two races upon public conveyances were held to be constitutional in Railroad v. Miles, 55 Pa. St. 209; Day v. Owen 5 Mich. 520; Railway Co. v. Williams, 55 Ill. 185; Railroad Co. v. Wells, 85 Tenn. 613; 4 S. W. 5; Railroad Co. v. Benson, 85 Tenn. 627, 4 S. W. 5; The Sue, 22 Fed. 843; Logwood v. Railroad Co., 23 Fed. 318; McGuinn v. Forbes, 37 Fed. 639; People v. King ( N. Y. App.) 18 N. E. 245; Houck v. Railway Co., 38 Fed. 226; Heard v. Railroad Co., 3 Inter St. Commerce Com. R. 111, 1 Inter St. Commerce Com. R. 428.

While we think the enforced separation of the races, as applied to the internal commerce of the state, neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws, within the meaning of the fourteenth amendment, we are not prepared to say that the conductor, in assigning passengers to the coaches according to their race, does not act at his peril, or that the provision of the second section of the act that denies to the passenger compensation in damages for a refusal to receive him into the coach in which he properly belongs is a valid exercise of the legislative power. Indeed, we understand it to be conceded by the state's attorney that such part of the act as exempts from liability the railway company and its officers is unconstitutional. The power to assign to a particular coach obviously implies the power to determine to which race the passenger belongs, as well as the power to determine who, under the laws of the particular state, is to be deemed a white, and who a colored, person. This question, though indicated in the brief of the plaintiff in error, does not properly arise upon the record in this case, since the only issue made is as to the unconstitutionality of the act, so far as it requires the railway to provide separate accommodations, and the conductor to assign passengers according to their race.

It is claimed by the plaintiff in error that, in an mixed community, the reputation of belonging to the dominant race, in this instance the white race, is 'property,' in the same sense that a right of action or of inheritance is property. Conceding this to be so, for the purposes of this case, we are unable to see how this statute deprives him of, or in any way affects his right to, such property. If he be a white man, and assigned to a colored coach, he may have his action for damages against the company for being deprived of his so-called 'property.' Upon the other hand, if he be a colored man, and be so assigned, he has been deprived of no property, since he is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man.

In this connection, it is also suggested by the learned counsel for the plaintiff in error that the same argument that will justify the state legislature in requiring railways to provide separate accommodations for the two races will also authorize them to require separate cars to be provided for people whose hair is of a certain color, or who are aliens, or who belong to certain nationalities, or to enact laws requiring colored people to walk upon one side of the street, and white people upon the other, or requiring white men's houses to be painted white, and colored men's black, or their vehicles or business signs to be of different colors, upon the theory that one side of the street is as good as the other, or that a house or vehicle of one color is as good as one of another color. The reply to all this is that every exercise of the police power must be reasonable, and extend only to such laws as are enacted in good faith for the promotion of the public good, and not for the annoyance or oppression of a particular class. Thus, in Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 , 6 Sup. Ct. 1064, it was held by this court that a municipal ordinance of the city of San Francisco, to regulate the carrying on of public laundries within the limits of the municipality, violated the provisions of the constitution of the United States, if it conferred upon the municipal authorities arbitrary power, at their own will, and without regard to discretion, in the legal sense of the term, to give or withhold consent as to persons or places, without regard to the competency of the persons applying or the propriety of the places selected for the carrying on of the business. It was held to be a covert attempt on the part of the municipality to make an arbitrary and unjust discrimination against the Chinese race. While this was the case of a municipal ordinance, a like principle has been held to apply to acts of a state legislature passed in the exercise of the police power. Railroad Co. v. Husen, 95 U.S. 465 ; Louisville & N. R. Co. v. Kentucky, 161 U.S. 677 , 16 Sup. Ct. 714, and cases cited on page 700, 161 U. S., and page 714, 16 Sup. Ct.; Daggett v. Hudson, 43 Ohio St. 548, 3 N. E. 538; Capen v. Foster, 12 Pick. 485; State v. Baker, 38 Wis. 71; Monroe v. Collins, 17 Ohio St. 665; Hulseman v. Rems, 41 Pa. St. 396; Osman v. Riley, 15 Cal. 48.

So far, then, as a conflict with the fourteenth amendment is concerned, the case reduces itself to the question whether the statute of Louisiana is a reasonable regulation, and with respect to this there must necessarily be a large discretion on the part of the legislature. In determining the question of reasonableness, it is at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and good order. Gauged by this standard, we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable, or more obnoxious to the fourteenth amendment than the acts of congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia, the constitutionality of which does not seem to have been questioned, or the corresponding acts of state legislatures.

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it. The argument necessarily assumes that if, as has been more than once the case, and is not unlikely to be so again, the colored race should become the dominant power in the state legislature, and should enact a law in precisely similar terms, it would thereby relegate the white race to an inferior position. We imagine that the white race, at least, would not acquiesce in this assumption. The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other's merits, and a voluntary consent of individuals. As was said by the court of appeals of New York in People v. Gallagher, 93 N. Y. 438, 448: 'This end can neither be accomplished nor promoted by laws which conflict with the general sentiment of the community upon whom they are designed to operate. When the government, therefore, has secured to each of its citizens equal rights before the law, and equal opportunities for improvement and progress, it has accomplished the end for which it was organized, and performed all of the functions respecting social advantages with which it is endowed.' Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts, or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.

It is true that the question of the proportion of colored blood necessary to constitute a colored person, as distinguished from a white person, is one upon which there is a difference of opinion in the different states; some holding that any visible admixture of black blood stamps the person as belonging to the colored race (State v. Chavers, 5 Jones [N. C.] 1); others, that it depends upon the preponderance of blood ( Gray v. State, 4 Ohio, 354; Monroe v. Collins, 17 Ohio St. 665); and still others, that the predominance of white blood must only be in the proportion of three-fourths (People v. Dean, 14 Mich. 406; Jones v. Com., 80 Va. 544). But these are questions to be determined under the laws of each state, and are not properly put in issue in this case. Under the allegations of his petition, it may undoubtedly become a question of importance whether, under the laws of Louisiana, the petitioner belongs to the white or colored race.

The judgment of the court below is therefore affirmed.

Mr. Justice BREWER did not hear the argument or participate in the decision of this case.

Mr. Justice HARLAN dissenting.

By the Louisiana statute the validity of which is here involved, all railway companies (other than street-railroad companies) carry passengers in that state are required to have separate but equal accommodations for white and colored persons, 'by providing two or more passenger coaches for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger coaches by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations.' Under this statute, no colored person is permitted to occupy a seat in a coach assigned to white persons; nor any white person to occupy a seat in a coach assigned to colored persons. The managers of the railroad are not allowed to exercise any discretion in the premises, but are required to assign each passenger to some coach or compartment set apart for the exclusive use of is race. If a passenger insists upon going into a coach or compartment not set apart for persons of his race, he is subject to be fined, or to be imprisoned in the parish jail. Penalties are prescribed for the refusal or neglect of the officers, directors, conductors, and employees of railroad companies to comply with the provisions of the act.

Only 'nurses attending children of the other race' are excepted from the operation of the statute. No exception is made of colored attendants traveling with adults. A white man is not permitted to have his colored servant with him in the same coach, even if his condition of health requires the constant personal assistance of such servant. If a colored maid insists upon riding in the same coach with a white woman whom she has been employed to serve, and who may need her personal attention while traveling, she is subject to be fined or imprisoned for such an exhibition of zeal in the discharge of duty.

While there may be in Louisiana persons of different races who are not citizens of the United States, the words in the act 'white and colored races' necessarily include all citizens of the United States of both races residing in that state. So that we have before us a state enactment that compels, under penalties, the separation of the two races in railroad passenger coaches, and makes it a crime for a citizen of either race to enter a coach that has been assigned to citizens of the other race.

Thus, the state regulates the use of a public highway by citizens of the United States solely upon the basis of race.

However apparent the injustice of such legislation may be, we have only to consider whether it is consistent with the constitution of the United States.

That a railroad is a public highway, and that the corporation which owns or operates it is in the exercise of public functions, is not, at this day, to be disputed. Mr. Justice Nelson, speaking for this court in New Jersey Steam Nav. Co. v. Merchants' Bank, 6 How. 344, 382, said that a common carrier was in the exercise 'of a sort of public office, and has public duties to perform, from which he should not be permitted to exonerate himself without the assent of the parties concerned.' Mr. Justice Strong, delivering the judgment of this court in Olcott v. Supervisors, 16 Wall. 678, 694, said: 'That railroads, though constructed by private corporations, and owned by them, are public highways, has been the doctrine of nearly all the courts ever since such conveniences for passage and transportation have had any existence. Very early the question arose whether a state's right of eminent domain could be exercised by a private corporation created for the purpose of constructing a railroad. Clearly, it could not, unless taking land for such a purpose by such an agency is taking land for public use. The right of eminent domain nowhere justifies taking property for a private use. Yet it is a doctrine universally accepted that a state legislature may authorize a private corporation to take land for the construction of such a road, making compensation to the owner. What else does this doctrine mean if not that building a railroad, though it be built by a private corporation, is an act done for a public use?' So, in Township of Pine Grove v. Talcott, 19 Wall. 666, 676: 'Though the corporation [a railroad company] was private, its work was public, as much so as if it were to be constructed by the state.' So, in Inhabitants of Worcester v. Western R. Corp., 4 Metc. (Mass.) 564: 'The establishment of that great thoroughfare is regarded as a public work, established by public authority, intended for the public use and benefit, the use of which is secured to the whole community, and constitutes, therefore, like a canal, turnpike, or highway, a public easement.' 'It is true that the real and personal property, necessary to the establishment and management of the railroad, is vested in the corporation; but it is in trust for the public.'

In respect of civil rights, common to all citizens, the constitution of the United States does not, I think, permit any public authority to know the race of those entitled to be protected in the enjoyment of such rights. Every true man has pride of race, and under appropriate circumstances, when the rights of others, his equals before the law, are not to be affected, it is his privilege to express such pride and to take such action based upon it as to him seems proper. But I deny that any legislative body or judicial tribunal may have regard to the race of citizens when the civil rights of those citizens are involved. Indeed, such legislation as that here in question is inconsistent not only with that equality of rights which pertains to citizenship, national and state, but with the personal liberty enjoyed by every one within the United States.

The thirteenth amendment does not permit the withholding or the deprivation of any right necessarily inhering in freedom. It not only struck down the institution of slavery as previously existing in the United States, but it prevents the imposition of any burdens or disabilities that constitute badges of slavery or servitude. It decreed universal civil freedom in this country. This court has so adjudged. But, that amendment having been found inadequate to the protection of the rights of those who had been in slavery, it was followed by the fourteenth amendment, which added greatly to the dignity and glory of American citizenship, and to the security of personal liberty, by declaring that 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside,' and that 'no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.' These two amendments, if enforced according to their true intent and meaning, will protect all the civil rights that pertain to freedom and citizenship. Finally, and to the end that no citizen should be denied, on account of his race, the privilege of participating in the political control of his country, it was declared by the fifteenth amendment that 'the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.'

These notable additions to the fundamental law were welcomed by the friends of liberty throughout the world. They removed the race line from our governmental systems. They had, as this court has said, a common purpose, namely, to secure 'to a race recently emancipated, a race that through many generations have been held in slavery, all the civil rights that the superior race enjoy.' They declared, in legal effect, this court has further said, 'that the law in the states shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the states; and in regard to the colored race, for whose protection the amendment was primarily designed, that no discrimination shall be made against them by law because of their color.' We also said: 'The words of the amendment, it is true, are prohibitory, but they contain a necessary implication of a positive immunity or right, most valuable to the colored race,-the right to exemption from unfriendly legislation against them distinctively as colored; exemption from legal discriminations, implying inferiority in civil society, lessening the security of their enjoyment of the rights which others enjoy; and discriminations which are steps towards reducing them to the condition of a subject race.' It was, consequently, adjudged that a state law that excluded citizens of the colored race from juries, because of their race, however well qualified in other respects to discharge the duties of jurymen, was repugnant to the fourteenth amendment. Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303, 306 , 307 S.; Virginia v. Rives, Id. 313; Ex parte Virginia, Id. 339; Neal v. Delaware, 103 U.S. 370 , 386; Bush v. Com., 107 U.S. 110, 116 , 1 S. Sup. Ct. 625. At the present term, referring to the previous adjudications, this court declared that 'underlying all of those decisions is the principle that the constitution of the United States, in its present form, forbids, so far as civil and political rights are concerned, discrimination by the general government or the states against any citizen because of his race. All citizens are equal before the law.' Gibson v. State, 162 U.S. 565 , 16 Sup. Ct. 904.

The decisions referred to show the scope of the recent amendments of the constitution. They also show that it is not within the power of a state to prohibit colored citizens, because of their race, from participating as jurors in the administration of justice.

It was said in argument that the statute of Louisiana does not discriminate against either race, but prescribes a rule applicable alike to white and colored citizens. But this argument does not meet the difficulty. Every one knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks, as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons. Railroad corporations of Louisiana did not make discrimination among whites in the matter of accommodation for travelers. The thing to accomplish was, under the guise of giving equal accommodation for whites and blacks, to compel the latter to keep to themselves while traveling in railroad passenger coaches. No one would be so wanting in candor as to assert the contrary. The fundamental objection, therefore, to the statute, is that it interferes with the personal freedom of citizens. 'Personal liberty,' it has been well said, 'consists in the power of locomotion, of changing situation, or removing one's person to whatsoever places one's own inclination may direct, without imprisonment or restraint, unless by due course of law.' 1 Bl. Comm. *134. If a white man and a black man choose to occupy the same public conveyance on a public highway, it is their right to do so; and no government, proceeding alone on grounds of race, can prevent it without infringing the personal liberty of each.

It is one thing for railroad carriers to furnish, or to be required by law to furnish, equal accommodations for all whom they are under a legal duty to carry. It is quite another thing for government to forbid citizens of the white and black races from traveling in the same public conveyance, and to punish officers of railroad companies for permitting persons of the two races to occupy the same passenger coach. If a state can prescribe, as a rule of civil conduct, that whites and blacks shall not travel as passengers in the same railroad coach, why may it not so regulate the use of the streets of its cities and towns as to compel white citizens to keep on one side of a street, and black citizens to keep on the other? Why may it not, upon like grounds, punish whites and blacks who ride together in street cars or in open vehicles on a public road or street? Why may it not require sheriffs to assign whites to one side of a court room, and blacks to the other? And why may it not also prohibit the commingling of the two races in the galleries of legislative halls or in public assemblages convened for the consideration of the political questions of the day? Further, if this statute of Louisiana is consistent with the personal liberty of citizens, why may not the state require the separation in railroad coaches of native and naturalized citizens of the United States, or of Protestants and Roman Catholics?

The answer given at the argument to these questions was that regulations of the kind they suggest would be unreasonable, and could not, therefore, stand before the la . Is it meant that the determination of questions of legislative power depends upon the inquiry whether the statute whose validity is questioned is, in the judgment of the courts, a reasonable one, taking all the circumstances into consideration? A statute may be unreasonable merely because a sound public policy forbade its enactment. But I do not understand that the courts have anything to do with the policy or expediency of legislation. A statute may be valid, and yet, upon grounds of public policy, may well be characterized as unreasonable. Mr. Sedgwick correctly states the rule when he says that, the legislative intention being clearly ascertained, 'the courts have no other duty to perform than to execute the legislative will, without any regard to their views as to the wisdom or justice of the particular enactment.' Sedg. St. & Const. Law, 324. There is a dangerous tendency in these latter days to enlarge the functions of the courts, by means of judicial interference with the will of the people as expressed by the legislature. Our institutions have the distinguishing characteristic that the three departments of government are co-ordinate and separate. Each much keep within the limits defined by the constitution. And the courts best discharge their duty by executing the will of the law-making power, constitutionally expressed, leaving the results of legislation to be dealt with by the people through their representatives. Statutes must always have a reasonable construction. Sometimes they are to be construed strictly, sometimes literally, in order to carry out the legislative will. But, however construed, the intent of the legislature is to be respected if the particular statute in question is valid, although the courts, looking at the public interests, may conceive the statute to be both unreasonable and impolitic. If the power exists to enact a statute, that ends the matter so far as the courts are concerned. The adjudged cases in which statutes have been held to be void, because unreasonable, are those in which the means employed by the legislature were not at all germane to the end to which the legislature was competent.

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage, and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guarantied by the supreme law of the land are involved. It is therefore to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a state to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race.

In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.

It was adjudged in that case that the descendants of Africans who were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, were not included nor intended to be included under the word 'citizens' in the constitution, and could not claim any of the rights and privileges which that instrument provided for and secured to citizens of the United States; that, at time of the adoption of the constitution, they were 'considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.' 17 How. 393, 404. The recent amendments of the constitution, it was supposed, had eradicated these principles from our institutions. But it seems that we have yet, in some of the states, a dominant race,-a superior class of citizens,-which assumes to regulate the enjoyment of civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race. The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the constitution, by one of which the blacks of this country were made citizens of the United States and of the states in which they respectively reside, and whose privileges and immunities, as citizens, the states are forbidden to abridge. Sixty millions of whites are in no danger from the presence here of eight millions of blacks. The destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law. What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens? That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation as was enacted in Louisiana.

The sure guaranty of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, national and state, of every right that inheres in civil freedom, and of the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States, without regard to race. State enactments regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race, and cunningly devised to defeat legitimate results of the war, under the pretense of recognizing equality of rights, can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible, and to keep alive a conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned. This question is not met by the suggestion that social equality cannot exist between the white and black races in this country. That argument, if it can be properly regarded as one, is scarcely worthy of consideration; for social equality no more exists between two races when traveling in a passenger coach or a public highway than when members of the same races sit by each other in a street car or in the jury box, or stand or sit with each other in a political assembly, or when they use in common the streets of a city or town, or when they are in the same room for the purpose of having their names placed on the registry of voters, or when they approach the ballot box in order to exercise the high privilege of voting.

There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But, by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the state and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race. It is scarcely just to say that a colored citizen should not object to occupying a public coach assigned to his own race. He does not object, nor, perhaps, would he object to separate coaches for his race if his rights under the law were recognized. But he does object, and he ought never to cease objecting, that citizens of the white and black races can be adjudged criminals because they sit, or claim the right to sit, in the same public coach on a public highway. The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.

If evils will result from the commingling of the two races upon public highways established for the benefit of all, they will be infinitely less than those that will surely come from state legislation regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race. We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens,-our equals before the law. The thin disguise of 'equal' accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done.

The result of the whole matter is that while this court has frequently adjudged, and at the present term has recognized the doctrine, that a state cannot, consistently with the constitution of the United States, prevent white and black citizens, having the required qualifications for jury service, from sitting in the same jury box, it is now solemnly held that a state may prohibit white and black citizens from sitting in the same passenger coach on a public highway, or may require that they be separated by a 'partition' when in the same passenger coach. May it not now be reasonably expected that astute men of the dominant race, who affect to be disturbed at the possibility that the integrity of the white race may be corrupted, or that its supremacy will be imperiled, by contact on public highways with black people, will endeavor to procure statutes requiring white and black jurors to be separated in the jury box by a 'partition,' and that, upon retiring from the court room to consult as to their verdict, such partition, if it be a movable one, shall be taken to their consultation room, and set up in such way as to prevent black jurors from coming too close to their brother jurors of the white race. If the 'partition' used in the court room happens to be stationary, provision could be made for screens with openings through which jurors of the two races could confer as to their verdict without coming into personal contact with each other. I cannot see but that, according to the principles this day announced, such state legislation, although conceived in hostility to, and enacted for the purpose of humiliating, citizens of the United States of a particular race, would be held to be consistent with the constitution.

I do not deem it necessary to review the decisions of state courts to which reference was made in argument. Some, and the most important, of them, are wholly inapplicable, because rendered prior to the adoption of the last amendments of the constitution, when colored people had very few rights which the dominant race felt obliged to respect. Others were made at a time when public opinion, in many localities, was dominated by the institution of slavery; when it would not have been safe to do justice to the black man; and when, so far as the rights of blacks were concerned, race prejudice was, practically, the supreme law of the land. Those decisions cannot be guides in the era introduced by the recent amendments of the supreme law, which established universal civil freedom, gave citizenship to all born or naturalized in the United States, and residing ere, obliterated the race line from our systems of governments, national and state, and placed our free institutions upon the broad and sure foundation of the equality of all men before the law.

I am of opinion that the state of Louisiana is inconsistent with the personal liberty of citizens, white and black, in that state, and hostile to both the spirit and letter of the constitution of the United States. If laws of like character should be enacted in the several states of the Union, the effect would be in the highest degree mischievous. Slavery, as an institution tolerated by law, would, it is true, have disappeared from our country; but there would remain a power in the states, by sinister legislation, to interfere with the full enjoyment of the blessings of freedom, to regulate civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race, and to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens, now constituting a part of the political community, called the 'People of the United States,' for whom, and by whom through representatives, our government is administered. Such a system is inconsistent with the guaranty given by the constitution to each state of a republican form of government, and may be stricken down by congressional action, or by the courts in the discharge of their solemn duty to maintain the supreme law of the land, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

For the reason stated, I am constrained to withhold my assent from the opinion and judgment of the majority.

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EnlargeDownload Link Citation: Plessy vs. Ferguson, Judgement, Decided May 18, 1896; Records of the Supreme Court of the United States; Record Group 267; Plessy v. Ferguson, 163, #15248, National Archives. View All Pages in the National Archives Catalog View Transcript The ruling in this Supreme Court case upheld a Louisiana state law that allowed for "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races."

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Plessy v. Ferguson | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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Plessy v. Ferguson | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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Plessy v. Ferguson | American Experience | PBS

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When the Louisiana legislature passed the Separate Car Act in 1890, mandating the racial segregation of railroad passengers, a group of black activists set out to challenge the law.

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theroadtoseparatebutequal - Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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The Road to "Separate But Equal":
The Supreme Court and the Fourteenth Amendment through Plessy v. Ferguson

By Eleanor Jones
Written for the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Park as part of an HI-397-X: Internship at Historical Agencies Course with Dr. Kim Morse at Washburn University
September-October 2022

Setting the Scene

From 1861 through 1865, one of the most important wars in American history took place. The United States of America and the Confederate States of America fought over a number of issues. The main conflict concerned slavery and states' rights. The northern states' Union armies won the war, and the former Confederate states rejoined the U.S. The now reunified states set about to continue what President Abraham Lincoln started: abolishing slavery.
In 1865, the United States approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. They added the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 and the Fifteenth in 1870. Together, these three amendments are known as the Reconstruction Amendments. On paper, they greatly expanded the civil rights enjoyed by those formerly enslaved. Such rights included the right to be free and the right to equal protection before the law. The Fourteenth Amendment contains many of the key elements of our modern understanding of civil rights. The majority of these elements are in Section 1 of the amendment.

Citizenship Clause - All people born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States. These people have every right belonging to citizens. (Naturalization is a way in which people born elsewhere can become citizens of a country.)

Privileges or Immunities Clause - States cannot make laws that take away the fundamental rights enjoyed by all people.

Due Process Clause - States cannot take away a person's fundamental rights without first following the necessary and proper legal steps.

Equal Protection Clause - States must treat all people within their legal systems the same way that they treat other individuals in the same or similar situation.

Despite what these amendments said, the government has not always followed them as intended. The rights stated in the Fourteenth Amendment have faced countless challenges in the court system. Among the most well-known of these challenges was the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. In 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that the Constitution allowed for segregation, as long as it was "separate but equal." But why did the Supreme Court make this decision? To find the answer, one must first look at who were the members of the court at the time and the court's past rulings on similar issues.
A Brief Overview of SCOTUS Rulings on the Fourteenth Amendment Prior to Plessy

This section is a quick look at a few Supreme Court cases that addressed the Fourteenth Amendment before Plessy v. Ferguson.
The Slaughterhouse Cases (1872)
Background. Louisiana passed a law making the Crescent City Live Stock Landing and Slaughter House Company a monopoly in New Orleans' slaughterhouse industry. A handful of workers sued the state.
The Issue. 1) Can a state government create a monopoly? 2) Did the creation of these monopolies violate the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Amendments?
The Ruling. 1) Yes, a state government can create monopolies. A state can do so using what is called "police power." Police power allows states have sole authority over laws regarding local health, safety, and business. 2a) No, state creation of monopolies did not violate the Thirteenth Amendment. While 'servitude' can take many forms, the Thirteenth Amendment only outlawed race-based slavery. 2b) No, state creation of monopolies did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. There is a legal difference between citizens of the United States and citizens of a particular state like Louisiana. The Fourteenth Amendment applied only to citizens of the United States. Congress lacked the authority to address the claimed violations. The Fourteenth Amendment was not applicable to this case.
Notable Dissent. Four members of the Supreme Court disagreed with the majority's ruling. They argued that several parts of Louisiana's law did not fall under police power. They also maintained that the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed any and all forms of involuntary servitude, including monopolies. Monopolies create a form of slavery by limiting workers' freedom to pick who they work for. Finally, the dissenters believed that the Fourteenth Amendment protected against violations by states as well as federal violations.
Why Does It Matter? The majority ruling took on a limited view of the Reconstruction Amendments and a broad view of police power. They ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to the actions of state governments. The majority also said that the state has broad authority under its right to exercise police power.

Hall v. DeCuir (1877)

Background. In 1869, Louisiana passed a law prohibiting racial segregation on common carriers. Common carriers are individuals or corporations that transport goods and/or people for any member of the public who can pay the fee. In 1872, Josephine DeCuir bought a ticket for the steamboat Governor Allen. She tried to enter a whites only cabin. The captain refused to let her in as she was black. DeCuir sued the captain and won in the lower courts. The captain's estate challenged the ruling.
The Issue. Did a state law banning racial segregation on common carriers violate the Constitution?
The Ruling. Yes. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution gave Congress the exclusive right to control interstate commerce. Common carriers like steamboats did business in multiple states and were regulated by national laws on interstate commerce. The state of Louisiana could not pass laws affecting interstate commerce without violating the Commerce Clause.
Notable Dissent. None. This ruling was unanimous.
Why Does It Matter? This ruling limited a state's power over public transportation that passes through its borders.

Ex Parte Virginia (1879)

Background. In 1878, Pittsylvania county judge J.D. Coles was in charge of selecting the pool of possible jurors for the year. Not a single man selected was a man of color. Coles was arrested for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1875. This federal law prohibited the exclusion of any citizen from jury duty because of his race. Coles challenged his arrest in the courts.
The Issue. Did Congress have the authority to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1875?
The Ruling. Yes. The Fourteenth Amendment added several new rights to the Constitution. One of these rights was equal protection before the law, regardless of one's race. This amendment was also intended to limit state power and expand federal power. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 fell within the congressional authority granted by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Notable Dissent. Justices Stephen J. Field and Nathan Clifford disagreed with the majority. They argued that jury duty was not a right of citizens of the United States. If it was, then women and children who are citizens should also be allowed to serve on juries. Instead, jury duty is a right of citizens of the states. Therefore, Congress lacked the authority to pass a law controlling jury duty.
Why Does It Matter? The majority ruling upheld the Congress's power to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

Strauder v. West Virginia (1880)

Background. Taylor Strauder, a black man, went on trial for a crime in 1874. There were no black men on his jury. West Virginia law stated that only white men could serve on the jury in that state. Strauder sued the state for violating his constitutional right to equal protection before the law.
The Issue. Did laws excluding black men from the jury pool violate the Fourteenth Amendment?
The Ruling. Yes. One element of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause was the right to be tried by a jury of one's peers. States could limit jury pools in some ways but race could not be the limiting factor. Otherwise, such discrimination would make the white and black races unequal before the law.
Notable Dissent. Justices Stephen Field and Nathan Clifford renewed their dissents from the case of Ex Parte Virginia (1879). Jury duty is not a right of citizens of the United States and cannot be protected by the federal government. Only states have the power to control the jury pool within their borders.
Why Does It Matter? The majority ruling reaffirmed the right of all races to be treated as equal by the law. The majority also declared jury duty as an essential right of U.S. citizens.

The Civil Rights Cases (1883)

Background. In five separate situations, a person of color was denied access to businesses. The businesses in question were two inns, two public theaters, and a train car. The individuals each sued for racial discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 also outlawed this type of discrimination. The Supreme Court grouped these cases together for its ruling.
The Issue. Did the business owners' denials of access because of one's race violate the Fourteenth Amendment?
The Ruling. No. The Fourteenth Amendment protected against racial discrimination from the government. It did not protect against the private acts of individuals. For this reason, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was actually unconstitutional. Congress could not control the actions of private individuals or businesses.
Notable Dissent. Justice John Harlan was the only one who disagreed with the majority. He believed that Congress did have the right to control the acts of individuals if their work was public in nature. If a business was said to be open to the public, then they had to accept all members of that public as customers. Or, at the very least, public businesses could not reject customers because of their race.
Why Does It Matter? The majority ruling effectively reversed the finding in Ex Parte Virginia. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 became illegal.

Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886)

Background. The city of San Francisco passed an ordinance in 1880 requiring new permits for laundry owners. Of the city's 320 laundries, 240 were run by Chinese owners and 80 were run by white American owners. The laundry owners applied for the new permit. All 80 white American launderers met the conditions and received permits. 150 Chinese launderers met the conditions but did not receive permits. Two of the Chinese launderers, Yick Wo and Wo Lee, sued the city sheriff for racial discrimination. Sheriff Hopkins denied the accusations. He claimed that he was simply exercising the city's police power.
The Issue. 1) Were non-citizens protected by the U.S. Constitution? 2) Did Hopkins' actions fall within the limits of police power? 3) Did Hopkins' actions violate the Fourteenth Amendment?
The Ruling. 1) Yes, the Constitution guaranteed some rights to non-citizens. As the Fourteenth Amendment said, "Nor shall any State deprive any person" of their equal protection under the law. 2) No, Hopkins' actions were not police power. His enforcement of the city ordinance was not based on a set of impartial rules. Both the Americans and the Chinese launderers met the conditions to receive a permit. It was only due to Hopkins' own arbitrary whims that the Chinese launderers were rejected. 3) Yes, Hopkins' actions treated Americans and Chinese as separate and unequal groups before the law. This was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
Notable Dissent. None. This ruling was unanimous.
Why Does It Matter? The majority ruling expanded the protections of the Constitution to include non-citizens. At a time when the Chinese were excluded from citizenship, the Supreme Court asserted that even foreign nationals had certain rights that no government could violate. The ruling also limited what was considered police power and affirmed the illegality of racial discrimination by the government.

Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Railway Company v. Mississippi (1890)

Background. In 1882, the state of Mississippi passed a law requiring railroad trains to have separate cars for white and colored passengers. The Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railway Company did not have segregated passenger cars while passing through the state. Mississippi sued the company, and the lower courts ruled in the state's favor. The railroad company challenged the rulings.
The Issue. Was a state law requiring racial segregation on railroad trains constitutional?
The Ruling. Yes. Although state laws affecting common carriers such as railroad trains normally violated the Commerce Clause, it was not so in this case. The Mississippi law only affected railroad transportation within the state's borders. It did not try to control interstate commerce.
Notable Dissent. Justices John Harlan and Joseph Bradley disagreed with the majority. They argued that the Mississippi law did affect interstate commerce and thus violated the Commerce Clause. Justice Harlan also asked how the Louisiana law from Hall v. DeCuir was an unconstitutional violation of the Commerce Clause while this Mississippi law was not.
Why Does It Matter? The majority ruling reversed the decision in Hall v. DeCuir. The court expanded states' powers to control business conducted within their borders. Specifically, the ruling established a set of circumstances in which state-mandated racial segregation was constitutionally permissible.

Each of these rulings contain elements that reappeared in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Slaughterhouse Cases and Yick Wo v. Hopkins addressed the limits of police power and Congress's ability to regulate police power. Strauder v. West Virginia, Ex Parte Virginia, and the Civil Rights Cases asked if the Fourteenth Amendment had unlimited reach. Hall v. DeCuir and Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Ry. Co. v. Mississippi both touched directly on the issue of racial segregation on public transport, giving different answers.

The Supreme Court Justices of 1896

The people who make up the Supreme Court change over time. Justices who ruled one way on a particular case either die or retire. They may be replaced by a Justice who will rule differently on the same issue. Previous court rulings (called precedent) are important, but they do not always guarantee which way the current court will rule. Who were the nine people on the Supreme Court that decided Plessy v. Ferguson? There is perhaps no better person to start with than the author of the majority opinion.
Henry B. Brown served on the Supreme Court from 1891 to 1906. Born in Massachusetts, he was a Republican. He supported Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. He began his career as Detroit's U.S. deputy marshal. He was later promoted to assistant U.S. attorney for Michigan's East District in 1863. Brown's first job as a judge came in 1875. President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him to the district court of East Michigan. In December 1890, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Brown to the Supreme Court. He replaced Justice Samuel Miller. As a Justice, Brown tended to vote with the majority. He positioned himself as a conservative-leaning centrist.
Melville W. Fuller served on the Supreme Court from 1888 to 1910. He was the Chief Justice for the entirety of his court term. He was born in Maine and grew up in a Jacksonian Democrat household. He was active in the literary scene as a poet. He also became a member of the Chicago Literary Club in 1878. Fuller opposed slavery and vocally supported the Union Army. But he also disliked the divisive nature of the abolitionist movement. In 1888, President Grover Cleveland appointed Fuller directly to the position of Chief Justice. As Chief Justice, Fuller actively moderated the rest of the court. For example, he began the custom of having the Justices shake hands before meetings and before entering the courtroom. It was a way to promote harmony between the court's members.
Stephen J. Field served on the Supreme Court from 1863 to 1897. He was the longest serving Justice at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson. He was born in Connecticut but headed west to California as a young adult. He was a local politician and had a heated feud with Judge William R. Turner. Field was a Democrat but strongly supported the Union. He also opposed lynching as a form of punishment. He was an elector in the Compromise of 1877 and voted for the Democrat party's presidential candidate, Samuel J. Tilden. In 1863, President Lincoln appointed Field to the Supreme Court. As a Justice, Field believed that private businesses should only be regulated if they were eligible to receive public subsidies.
John Marshall Harlan served on the Supreme Court from 1877 to 1911. He was originally a member of the Whig party but joined the Republicans in 1867. He might have been influenced by his wife Malvina Shanklin. Malvina was strongly antislavery. President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Harlan to the Supreme Court in 1877. Although he initially opposed both the Emancipation Proclamation and the Reconstruction Amendments, Justice Harlan's judicial record reflects his later firm belief in a color-blind Constitution. He also believed that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to ensure full equality under the law.
Horace Gray served on the Supreme Court from 1882 to 1902. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a wealthy merchant father. He attended law school and played a supporting role in establishing the case study method. He opposed slavery and wrote a critical review of Scott v. Sandford. This was the 1857 Supreme Court case which ruled that African Americans could not be U.S. citizens under the Constitution. In 1881, President Chester A. Arthur appointed Gray to the Supreme Court. Justice Gray viewed historical precedence as the most important factor in determining the law. He also believed that dissenting opinions weakened the court's effectiveness.
David J. Brewer served on the Supreme Court from 1890 to 1910. His uncle was Justice Field. Brewer was born in Asia Minor but his family returned to the U.S. when he was two. He grew up in Connecticut and found his way to Kansas as a young adult in 1858. Brewer served on the Kansas Supreme Court from 1870 to 1884. One of his notable rulings from this court came in 1876's Wright v. Noell. He found that women could be elected to a public office even though they could not vote. President Harrison appointed Brewer to the United States Supreme Court in 1890. Justice Brewer asserted that the rights of individuals took priority over any attempts at limiting those rights. It did not matter whether these limits came from the government, from corporations, or from other individuals. He also opposed the public interest doctrine established by the Supreme Court in 1876 with Munn v. Illinois. This doctrine granted state governments the power to regulate private industries that affect the common good. Justice Brewer did not participate in Plessy v. Ferguson.
George Shiras, Jr. served on the Supreme Court from 1892 to 1903. He was born in Pennsylvania. He also had no experience as a judge or politician before President Harrison appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1892. Justice Shiras believed that the court's decisions should be unanimous whenever possible. Though he participated in a wide range of legal subjects, he did not take the lead in any of them.
Edward Douglas White served on the Supreme Court from 1894 to 1921. He was born in Louisiana and strongly supported states' rights. He fought for the Confederate Army during the Civil War. President Cleveland appointed White to the Supreme Court in 1894. He later became the first Associate Justice promoted to Chief Justice. In 1896, however, Justice White was still relatively new to the Supreme Court.
Rufus Peckham, Jr., served on the Supreme Court from 1896 to 1909. He was born in Albany, New York. He was active in Democrat politics yet maintained a reputation for judicial nonpartisanship. His appointment to the Supreme Court in December 1895 by President Cleveland went smoothly. Justice Peckham believed that the court's role was to draw and police strict boundaries between the powers of state governments, the rights of individuals, and the authority of the federal government. He also largely withdrew from Democrat politics while on the Supreme Court.
This particular version of the Fuller Court held the bench from 1896 until the end of 1897 when the ailing Justice Field retired. Curiously, the Fuller Court ruled in a handful of Fourteenth Amendment cases beginning with Plessy v. Ferguson in May 1896.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Background. In 1890, Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act. This law required railway trains to have separate passenger cars for blacks and whites. These cars were supposed to be of equal quality. On June 8, 1892, a man named Homer Plessy bought a ticket for the East Louisiana Railway. He tried to sit in the white passenger car but the conductor refused access to him. Plessy was mixed race and therefore had to sit in the black passenger car. He did not move to his assigned seat so the police arrested him. He faced legal trial in the District Court of Orleans and was found guilty. Plessy believed that the Separate Car Act was unconstitutional so he challenged the court's ruling. His case made it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States in April 1896 as Plessy v. Ferguson. Ferguson referred to John H. Ferguson, the judge in Plessy's first trial.
The Issue. Was a state law that required racial segregation on railroad trains constitutional?
The Ruling. The Supreme Court announced its decision in May of 1896. Seven of the eight participating justices sided with Ferguson and asserted that the Separate Car Act was constitutional. Justice Henry B. Brown wrote the majority opinion. The court decided that the law did not violate the Thirteenth Amendment. The mere suggestion of a legal difference between the races did not have any real effect on the legal equality of the races. The ruling found that this was especially true for differences that could not be hidden, such as the color of one's skin. Such a legal difference in no way, shape, or form created a condition of slavery.
The Supreme Court majority also disagreed with almost all of the claimed violations of the Fourteenth Amendment. Plessy's side argued that one aspect of discrimination was the suggested inferiority of one group to another. The court responded that laws requiring the separation of races do not suggest any form of inferiority. Furthermore, Justice Brown added that the only reason segregation may imply inferiority was "solely because the colored race chooses to" believe it does. As the court made clear in Strauder v. West Virginia (1880), there was also a legal difference between political equality and other forms of equality. The court maintained that the Constitution only protected political equality. Racial segregation was not a matter of political equality so it was not protected by the Constitution.
Next, the Supreme Court argued that states do have the power to require racial separation. States had long used their right to police power to enforce segregation in many areas, especially in schools. The court's ruling in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) showed that segregation did not go against any of the rights or immunities in the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling in Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Ry. Co. v. Mississippi (1890) also showed that train car segregation did not count as interstate commerce. So it was easy for the court to see that states could pass segregation laws as long as they only affected places inside the state. The East Louisiana Railway Line did not go beyond the borders of Louisiana. Thus, the state was entirely within its right to pass the Separate Car Act.
However, the Supreme Court also wanted to limit the reach of police power. Justice Brown wrote that any state use of police power must be reasonable. By "reasonable," he meant that the overall public benefit of police power must be greater than the harm it may cause any particular group of people. He listed San Francisco's laundry law from Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886) as an example of an unreasonable use of police power. But he highlighted Louisiana's Separate Car Act as an example of a perfectly reasonable law. The public good from the law was maintaining peace between the races on trains. The law also made sure that people who did not want to share a car with members of the other race did not have to do so. The court's majority argued that the only harm of the law was limiting people's freedom to pick which car they sat in. In the court's view, this harm did not outweigh the benefits.
Notable Dissent. Justice John Marshall Harlan was the only member of the Supreme Court who agreed with Homer Plessy. His opinion was based largely upon four factors.
The Separate Car Act did try to control interstate commerce. In previous cases, the Supreme Court ruled that all railroads counted as public highways. This label meant that only the national government had the power to make laws about railroads. This was a right which the Constitution specifically gave Congress and Congress alone. The state of Louisiana lacked the power to pass this law.
The Separate Car Act interfered with the personal freedom of railroad passengers. In a free land, a white person may choose to sit next to a black person. It is their right to do so. No state or national government has the power to take away that freedom from its citizens. Laws requiring racial segregation meant that people were no longer free to choose where they want to sit.
Reasonableness is not a good standard by which to judge a law. Justice Marshall asserted that governments either had the power to pass a law or they did not. Letting courts decide what was reasonable would mean that people's personal opinions become important. However, the role of the court is to be an impartial judge and to make rulings based solely on the law.
The United States Constitution is color-blind. By this, he meant that the color of one's skin should never affect what rights and protections they have. Louisiana's Separate Car Act required that train passengers be treated separately only because of their race. In Justice Marshall's opinion, the Constitution did not allow racial discrimination like this.

The Aftermath of Plessy v. Ferguson

Why Does It Matter? The Supreme Court's ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark case in the fight for civil rights. It okayed many states' efforts to continue discriminating against people of color even after the U.S. outlawed slavery. Overt racial discrimination also become fair game as long as states followed the "separate but equal" doctrine.
Where Do We Go From Here? It was not until nearly fifty-eight years to the day later that the Supreme Court reversed the "separate but equal" doctrine. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), a different set of justices led by Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled that racial segregation in schools was not constitutional under any circumstances. Though the era of "separate but equal" may be officially over, that does not mean there are no remaining concerns.
In the area of schooling, for example, some question whether the end of racial segregation was enough. Are schools today actually equal? Do individual schools provide the same quality of education to all their students? Do schools across the country provide the same quality of education? Can schools in different places provide the same quality of education? Is equality even the right standard to use anymore?

Bibliography

Chicago Literary Club. "F." Roll of Members. Accessed September 22, 2022. https://www.chilit.org/.

Cushman, Clare, ed. The Supreme Court Justices: Illustrated Biographies, 1789-1995, 2nd ed. Foreword by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1995.

Encyclopædia Britannica. "Lynching." Britannica Kids. Accessed October 25, 2022. https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/lynching/632747.

Gray, Horace, and John Lowell. A Legal Review of the Case of Dred Scott, As Decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Company, 1857.

Hylton, J. Gordon. "The Judge Who Abstained in Plessy v. Ferguson: Justice David Brewer and the Problem of Race." Mississippi Law Journal 61 (January 1991): 315. http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/facpub/588.

Riley, Jim L. "Moderate Political Ideologies: Liberalism and Conservatism." For HIST103: World History in the Early Modern and Modern Eras (1600-Present). Denver: Regis University, 1990. http://jim-riley.org/libcons.htm.

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By Eleanor Jones Written for the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Park as part of an HI-397-X: Internship at Historical Agencies Course with Dr. Kim Morse at Washburn University September-October 2022 From 1861 through 1865, one of the most important wars in American history took place.

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The Crash of 1929 - Bill of Rights Institute

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The Crash of 1929 - Bill of Rights Institute

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Written by: Paul Dickson, Independent Historian

By the end of this section, you will:

Explain the causes of the Great Depression and its effects on the economy

In the United States during the prosperous "roaring 20s," the stock market underwent rapid and unprecedented expansion, reaching its peak value on September 3, 1929. This rise followed a period of wild speculation during which Americans ranging from millionaires to clerks and cab drivers were buying stocks (shares of ownership in a firm). Unlike wealthy investors, however, many of modest means poured their life savings into stocks using borrowed money, known as buying shares "on margin."

Buying stocks on margin brought hundreds of thousands of new investors into the market. Under the loose rules of the time, they could purchase a stock by simply laying down 10 percent of its cost and borrowing the rest from banks or stockbrokers - buying, for example, $1,000 worth of a stock and handing over just $100 in cash. If your $1,000 in stocks then rose in value to $1,075, you made $75 on your $100 investment when you sold the stock - or so it seemed. That $75 profit existed only on paper, because you still had to pay back the bank or broker who loaned you the $900 at a rate somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 to 19 percent. Investors at that time did not seem to care all that much, however, because they were making money. To many, buying stocks on margin was easy money and a way to get rich quick. But if your stock went down in value, the broker would demand more and more of the loan to be paid in cash to cover the loss.

The interior of the New York Stock Exchange, pictured here in 1920, where thousands of stocks were traded daily using telephone booths scattered throughout the trading floor.

The market high of September 3, 1929, came the day after the end of the long Labor Day weekend. It also marked the end of what later became known as the "summer of fun," when an epidemic of dance marathons, flagpole-sitting contests, and other zany fads seemed to have taken hold of the country. There was a madness in the air that seemed hard to explain. Among other things, this was the moment when Americans started drinking sauerkraut juice for no apparent reason - a fact noted by Maury Klein in his definitive narrative on the history of the Crash. He wrote: "In the summer of 1929 much of America was on an artificial high. It was a high not born of drugs but of an illusion that the prosperity and the good times then being enjoyed were made of new miracle ingredient that would last forever."

Following that peak, stock prices fell by approximately 10 percent during September but then rose again by about 8 percent by the middle of October. The fluctuations seemed relatively normal because the market often went up and down. However, on Thursday, October 24, a selling panic began and 13 million shares were traded, which far surpassed the average of four million shares per day the preceding month. The market had taken a nose dive, and investors found themselves in the dark as their paper fortunes began to dwindle or disappear. The technology of the time - telephone, telegraph, and ticker tape - was not able to keep up with the pace of trading, and many investors did not learn of their losses until late that evening. October 24 was quickly given the name "Black Thursday."

On Friday, President Herbert Hoover tried to stop the panic by assuring Americans that the business of the country was "on a sound and prosperous basis," but neither his words nor the attempts by some of the big banks and major investors to shore up the value of stocks by purchasing them at artificially higher prices had any effect on stemming the tide of stock selling.

The fall slowed on Monday, but then on Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the bottom fell out of the market. On "Black Tuesday," 16 million shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Investors lost billions of dollars as millions of shares plummeted in value and even became worthless. Those who had bought stocks with borrowed money were wiped out completely. Millions of Americans lost everything. Suddenly the "roaring 20s" ceased to roar, and it looked like the fabulous decade would end with a whimper.

After the stock market crash of 1929, thousands of American depositors flooded banks like this one in New York, hoping to withdraw their money before it was lost.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was soon viewed as the moment the nation began to realize that a terrible catastrophe was unfolding. The biggest and most productive economy on earth was falling apart, and it was bringing the other industrialized nations down with it. Then, as now, the Crash was regarded as the opening bell for the Great Depression. Although some would see it as the single or primary cause of the Great Depression, in fact it was a symptom and a powerful catalyst, but not the primary cause. Robert McElvaine explained it in human terms in The Great Depression: America 1929-1941:

When someone becomes ill after ' catching a chill,' it is not the cold itself that causes the sickness. Rather the cold reduces the body's resistance to microorganisms already present in it, which are able to cause the illness. Some such role is the proper one to assign to the crash, the cold wind that swept through lower Manhattan in October and November 1929 lowered the economy's resistance to the point where already existing defects could multiply rapidly and bring down the whole organism. The Crash is important in explaining how and when the Depression happened.

But the role of the Crash in shaping the dimensions of the economic catastrophe that followed cannot be overestimated. As T. H. Watkins put it in The Hungry Years, the Great Crash "not only loosed the virus of depression by imposing a trauma on the entire financial system so devastating it was left in a state of shock, but also accelerated the spread of economic decline."

The causes of the Crash and the causes of the Depression were interrelated and followed the same path forward. By 1932, stocks were worth only about a fifth of what they had been worth during the summer of 1929, and July 8, 1932, turned out to be the lowest point of the Crash. It is often argued that 1932 was the year the nation hit rock bottom. Exactly 2,998 banks had failed and 28,285 businesses had closed in 1931, and in 1932, they were still closing at an alarming rate. Unemployment had soared to 25 percent, leaving one family in four without a breadwinner, and millions were underemployed, taking pay cuts and reductions in hours to keep their jobs. Two million people, including many farmers, were turned into homeless migrants who wandered the country in a random and futile quest for work. Many settled in teeming communities of makeshift shacks and shanties known derisively as "Hoovervilles," mocking the president who kept trying to tell the country that things were not as bad as they seemed and that recovery was around the corner.

A Depression-era "Hooverville" shanty town in Manhattan, where huts were made of salvaged materials and most occupants, having lost their homes and jobs, were unable to find work.

Hoover was beaten in the 1932 election by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was inaugurated in March 1933. Roosevelt immediately revealed his plan to temporarily close all banks to confirm the solvency of those still standing and to stop bank runs. Legislation to enable this bold move was quickly enacted. A special session of Congress convened and responded to the crises. Congress quickly passed the bill, and banks were allowed to reopen if government officials deemed them financially secure. In the next three days, 5,000 banks reopened their doors, to the relief of many people who had deposited their life savings in them. Reforms and regulations provided certain relief to the system, which helped some areas of the economy and included the creation of federal deposit insurance, with which the federal government guaranteed most people's savings - a protection that is still in effect and that has so far prevented further banking runs in the United States.

But this and many other efforts of Roosevelt's New Deal did not end the Great Depression. Economic recovery did not occur until the nation began shifting to a wartime economy after Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. When World War II ended in 1945, the nation experienced a period of unprecedented prosperity, though the stock market did not return to its pre-Crash levels until November 23, 1954.

Some of the signs that a basically unsound economy had both caused and fueled the Depression were easier to see after the Great Crash. They included an increase in unemployment, cuts in industrial production, and an increase in consumer borrowing, especially the practice of buying stocks on margin.

Review Questions

1. Most of those who purchased stocks during the 1920s

2. "Black Tuesday" can most accurately be described as the day

3. By 1932, the Great Depression had caused

4. A major political reaction to the Great Depression was the

1. failure of any president to solve the problems

2. continuation of laissez-faire economics

3. passage of legislation to redress the causes and the effects of the Depression

4. creation of a federally funded national bank

5. Signs of an unsound economy before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 included

Free Response Questions

1. Explain why small-time investors in the stock market crash of 1929 lost their savings.

2. Explain the relationship between the Great Crash and the Great Depression.

AP Practice Questions

The graph shows the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an index of stock prices that represents the overall value of the stock market. Shown here is the average from October 1929 to October 1930. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)

Refer to the image provided.

1. Which of the following was most directly related to the events depicted in the graph?

2. Which of the following most directly contributed to the trend depicted in the graph?

3. The economic event depicted in the graph is most similar to which nineteenth-century event in U.S. history?

Primary Sources

McElvaine, Robert S., ed. Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Suggested Resources

Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Klein, Maury. Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001.

McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America 1929-1941. New York: Times Books, 1993.

Parrish, Michael E. Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920-1941. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.

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The Crash of 1929 - Bill of Rights Institute

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By the end of this section, you will: Explain the causes of the Great Depression and its effects on the economy In the United States during the prosperous "roaring 20s," the stock market underwent rapid and unprecedented expansion, reaching its peak value on September 3, 1929.

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The Great Depression (article) | Khan Academy

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The Great Depression (article) | Khan Academy

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After the stock market crash of 1929, the American economy spiraled into a depression that would plague the nation for a decade.

The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in US history. It began in 1929 and did not abate until the end of the 1930s.

The stock market crash of October 1929 signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. By 1933, unemployment was at 25 percent and more than 5,000 banks had gone out of business.

Although President Herbert Hoover attempted to spark growth in the economy through measures like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, these measures did little to solve the crisis.

Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in November 1932. Inaugurated as president in March 1933, Roosevelt's New Deal offered a new approach to the Great Depression.

The stock market crash of 1929

The value of the US stock market nearly doubled in a frenzy of speculative buying in the eighteen months before the crash began on "Black Thursday," October 24, 1929. On that day, and on " Black Tuesday," October 29, panic set in as millions of shares of stock traded at ever-falling prices.

The October 1929 downturn was only the beginning of the market collapse. By mid-November the stock market had lost a third of its September value, and by 1932-when the market hit bottom-stocks had lost ninety percent of their value. A share of US Steel which had sold for $262 before the crash sold in 1932 for $22.

The stock market crash signaled the beginning of the Great Depression, but it was only one factor among many root causes of the Depression. A weak banking system, further collapse in already-low farm prices, and industrial overproduction each contributed to the economic downturn. The disastrous 1930 Hawley-Smoot Tariff (which raised average tariff rates to nearly 60 percent) caused America's international trading partners to retaliate by raising rates on US-made goods. The result was shrinking international trade and a further decline in global economies.

Hoover's response to the crisis

President Hoover initially met the economic downturn from the perspective of his long-held voluntarist principles-that is, his belief in minimal government interference in the economy, as well as a conviction that direct public relief to individuals would weaken individual character, turn people away from the work-ethic, and lead them to develop a dependency on government handouts. By 1931 Hoover reversed his earlier approach and embraced government intervention in the economy. The 1932 Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) authorized the lending of $2 billion to banks, railroads, and other privately held companies, and in July 1932 the federal government appropriated $300 million for the nation's first relief and public works projects.

For many, however, these actions were too little, too late. Shantytowns of makeshift hovels-disparagingly labeled " Hoovervilles " in disgust with the president's inaction in the face of crisis-grew up across the country in public parks and in vacant lots, as the out-of-work, unable to pay mortgages or rent, were evicted from their homes. Trouser pockets pulled out to signal the lack of money within them were "Hoover flags." Newspapers used for warmth by the homeless were "Hoover blankets."

In November 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in a landslide, winning 57.4% of the vote to Hoover's 39.7%.

What do you think?

What caused the stock market crash that began in October 1929?

Do you think President Herbert Hoover's response to the economic downturn that began in 1929 was adequate?

What do you think your life would have been like if you had lived during the Great Depression?

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The Great Depression (article) | Khan Academy

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