Then, in 1873, economic disaster struck. The postwar period of industrial and financial growth reached overexpansion and came to a halt in a wave of defaults, business failures, and bankruptcies. The Panic of 1873 triggered what, until the 1930s, was referred to as the “Great Depression.” By 1876, more than half the nation’s railroads had defaulted on their bonds and were in receivership, and when the railroads slashed jobs and cut wages, eighty thousand railroad employees, black and white, walked off the job across the country. They were supported by hundreds of thousands of workers and unemployed people of both races in what became the Great Strike of 1877. For a brief period, desperation drove poor blacks and whites together. In Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, East St. Louis, and other rail hubs, strikers trying to halt all railroad traffic battled police and militia. The strike lasted for more than a month before state and federal troops and private police brought it under control. Dozens of strikers of both races were killed. Unions collapsed across the country, and those that remained found themselves more concerned with public relief for their unemployed members than with adding blacks to their membership.14
In the wake of the Great Strike and the virtual disintegration of the existing labor movement, the Knights of Labor, a radical, militant national group organized by industry rather than craft, emerged as a national force and grew rapidly for a decade. It welcomed blacks (and women) as members. At the organization’s height in the mid-1880s, about sixty thousand African Americans were among its seven hundred thousand members, but the organization went into a rapid decline after losing several crucial strikes and being accused of involvement in the bombing that killed eight policemen at the Haymarket Square riots in Chicago in 1886. Labor violence continued at a ferocious level into the following decade, with workers generally on the losing end of bloody battles. The Knights of Labor were shattered and moribund by the turn of the century.
The American Federation of Labor—an umbrella group of craft unions that was considerably more conservative than the socialistic Knights of Labor—gained a national following as the Knights of Labor declined, and at its convention in 1890, the federation declared that it looked “with disfavor upon trade unions having provisions which exclude from membership persons on account of race and color.” But many independent craft unions, such as the large National Machinists Union, refused to join if they had to accept black members. The federation changed the rule, and unions could enter if they did not openly exclude African Americans in their constitutions. Many all-white unions simply took the racial exclusion clause out of their constitutions while maintaining the policy.
The American Federation of Labor grew rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an overwhelmingly white organization. At the same time, few independent black unions succeeded against the virtual monopoly held by white unions. For decades after the decline of the Knights of Labor, blacks had little representation and essentially no clout in the mainstream of the American labor movement.15
After the collapse of Reconstruction, many thousands of blacks—angry, frustrated, and fearful of what would come next—left the South. The black population of the North rose from about 450,000 in 1870 to 615,000 in 1880.16 In the late 1870s, as the noose of white supremacy tightened on millions of Southern blacks, Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a dynamic black Ten-nessean with an audacious vision and a gift for promotion, decided it was time for African Americans to leave the South and that the appropriate Canaan for a black exodus was Kansas, where John Brown had waged bloody guerilla warfare in the name of abolition. Singleton established a real estate company to arrange for blacks to be transported to Kansas and, with the cooperation of steamship companies and the railroads, dispatched circulars throughout the black South with the help of itinerant preachers, railway porters, and steamboat workers.
Singleton was not alone in promoting an exodus to the West. An uneducated black Union soldier named Henry Adams—who had returned home to Louisiana in 1869 to find the treatment of former slaves unbearable—organized a committee of more than one hundred blacks to travel throughout the South and “see the true condition of our race, to see whether it was possible we could stay under a people who held us in bondage or not.” Confronted almost everywhere with terrible conditions, the committee reported in the late 1870s that blacks had to leave the South. Adams’s colonization council soon had tens of thousands of members from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas who were committed to a black exodus to the North and West.17
The exodus movement spread as far east as North Carolina, and in the late 1870s thousands of blacks crossed the South on foot to the Mississippi River, where they crowded onto steamboats headed North for St. Louis. From there they could continue west by land or water. A contemporary report described the scene at St. Louis:
Homeless, penniless and in rags, these poor people were thronging the wharves … hailing the passing steamers and imploring them for a passage to the land of freedom, where the rights of citizens are respected and honest toil rewarded by honest compensation. The newspapers were filled with accounts of their destitution, and the very air was burdened with the cry of distress from a class of American citizens flying from persecution which they could no longer endure. Their piteous tales of outrage, suffering and wrong touched the hearts of the more fortunate members of their race in the North and West, and aid societies, designed to afford temporary relief and composed almost entirely of colored people, were organized in Washington, St. Louis, Topeka and various other places.
The black immigrants to Kansas, who spilled over into Nebraska and other farm states west of the Mississippi, became known as Exodusters. Southern officials—alarmed at the departure of so many workers, some of them skilled—tried with little success to stop the exodus by various means, from trying to put pressure on steamship companies to stop selling tickets to blacks to arresting blacks on false charges as they waited to board ships or trains. Still, between fifteen and twenty-five thousand blacks moved to Kansas in the late 1870s.18
There were far more Exodusters than there was employment or land in Kansas for them, and many became refugees who crowded into some of the cities and towns. The immigrants were not always welcome, or even tolerated. At Leavenworth, on the Missouri River, police and city officials prevented a steamboat full of blacks from landing, and in Topeka a gang of whites tore down barracks being built to house black refugees. But there was nothing close to a riot. Aided by large contributions from church and charitable groups in other Northern states, Kansans founded organizations to provide food, shelter, and work for the refugees, and most of the Exodusters stayed, establishing at least one all-black town and large black enclaves in Topeka and Kansas City, Kansas. Black historian Carter Woodson observed in 1918, “The people of Kansas did not encourage the blacks to come. They even sent messengers to the South to advise the Negroes not to migrate … When they did arrive, however, they welcomed and assisted them as human beings.”19
Although some of the Exodusters failed in Kansas and went back to the South, most did not return, despite hard times and the winter wind knifing across the desolate prairie. A letter from a white woman in rural Kansas to a friend in Chicago vividly points out why. She wrote in horror, “A respectable colored man came here last spring, worked hard, earned enough to buy a lot, build a cottage and save $100 and then returned to bring his wife and family. The brutal Regulators seized him, cut off both his hands, and threw him into his wife’s lap, saying, ‘Now go to Kansas and work.’ “20
Black leaders disagreed about the wisdom and efficacy of migration. The venerable black abolitionist Frederick Douglass urged blacks to remain in the South, contending that leaving was not a permanent solution to ill treatment by whites and that the government should protect and defend its citizens no matter what their skin color or where they lived. The eloquent Douglass had been born a slave in Maryland in 1818 and, before his 1838 escape to the North, had been brutalized by a “slave-breaker” trying
to cure him of his rebelliousness. He argued:
Bad as is the condition of the Negro to-day at the South, there was a time when it was flagrantly and incomparably worse. A few years ago he had nothing—he had not even himself. He belonged to somebody else, who could dispose of his person and his labor as he pleased. Now he has himself, his labor, and his right to dispose of one and the other as shall best suit his own happiness … At a time like this, so full of hope and courage, it is unfortunate that a cry of despair should be raised in behalf of the colored people of the South, unfortunate that men are going over the country … telling the people that the government has no power to enforce the Constitution and laws in that section, and that there is no hope for the poor Negro but to plant him in the new soil of Kansas or Nebraska.21
But lawyer and educator Richard T. Greener, dean of the law school at Howard University and the first African American to graduate from Harvard, was among many blacks who argued that leaving the South would not only improve the lot of those who left, but would pressure Southern whites into better treatment for those who remained. Greener, who was born free in 1844 and had grown up in Philadelphia and Boston, contended that many blacks were actually worse off in the South than they had been in slave days. “Before the war,” he said, “the Negroes in the Southern cities and larger towns were the carpenters, bricklayers, stonemasons, and in some instances, manufacturers on a small scale. Send him West and open up to him the life of an agricultural laborer, a small farmer, a worker in the mines or on the great lines of railways, and you will soon find out what a steady, cheerful worker he is.”22
From 1880 through 1889, the black population of the North (including the North Central states) rose from about 615,000 to more than 700,000.23 Black migration often came in waves provoked by events—new crop failures, harsher Jim Crow laws, an increase in lynching. One wave of migrants left for the North after Grover Cleveland was elected president in 1884. A rumor had swept the Black Belt that when Cleveland and the Democrats took power, they would reinstitute slavery.
In a 1954 judgment that has met wide acceptance in the years since, African American historian Rayford W. Logan described the years from 1877 to 1901 as “the nadir” of the black experience in America.24 The Panic of 1893 brought an end to the so-called Gilded Age, which had been in part fueled by a modest economic recovery in the 1880s, and the nation sank back into depression as America’s boom-and-bust economy seemed to be forever locked into a vertiginous twenty-year cycle. Unemployment soared, labor violence erupted across America, and in the South, seemingly defying the tenets of free market economics, agricultural prices continued to fall despite crop failures. As usual, times that were bad for whites were even worse for blacks. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, Southern blacks lost virtually all of what little political power they had left. Populism, beginning in the 1880s, briefly and tentatively united some Southern blacks and whites in dreams of a radical reconstruction of the American economic system, but the People’s Party—a new national organization that bore no relationship to the party of the same name that murdered blacks in Vicksburg in 1874—and other manifestations of populism were undermined by the white supremacist campaigns of the Bourbon Democrats, campaigns filled with vicious antiblack propaganda that inevitably included charges of rape.
The maverick Georgia populist Tom Watson, defeated in an 1892 bid for reelection to Congress by a white supremacist Bourbon Democrat, cried out to poor Southerners, black and white alike, “You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both … [and] perpetuates a monetary system which beggars you both.”25
Beginning in 1890 with the infamous “Mississippi Plan,” a noxious mixture of high poll taxes, rigged literacy tests, and various color-coded standards of ancestry and supposed character, the states of the South one by one made it legally impossible for the great majority of blacks to cast a ballot. But the assault on African Americans was not just political. The murder of Southern blacks rose dramatically in the 1890s. According to the cautious tabulation begun in 1882 by the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, lynching of blacks exceeded one hundred a year for the first time in 1891 and remained in the hundreds for all but two of the following ten years. The worst states were Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, and the worst year was 1892, when 161 blacks were lynched, almost twice as many as in 1890 and three times as many as in the years of the early 1880s.26
Sociologists E. M. Beck and Stewart Tolnay, in a close statistical study of the period, have shown a correlation between the politics and economics of the 1890s and the rise in lynching. They write, “The broad historical sequence is uncontested: The peak of black lynchings in the early 1890s coincided with a softening demand for southern cotton, the rise of populist and agrarian protest, and the birth of radical racism. The bloody 1890s were followed by several years of rising cotton prices and an apparent decline in violence against southern blacks.”27
Poverty and economic fear among poor whites—out of work and desperate, with time heavy on their hands and no food on their tables—bred seething anger, and racist politicians made certain that the anger was directed at the blacks on the lowest rung of the societal ladder rather than upward at the political and economic moguls perched on the top step. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict succinctly described this kind of displaced rage, as it was played out in Nazi Germany, in her illuminating study, Race: Science and Politics:
Desperate men easily seize upon some scapegoat to sacrifice to their unhappiness; it is a kind of magic by which they feel for the moment that they have laid [down] the misery that has been tormenting them. In this they are actively encouraged by their rulers and exploiters, who like to see them occupied with this violence, and fear that if it were denied them they might demand something more difficult. So Hitler … exhorted the nation in 1938 to believe that Germany’s defeat in 1919 had been due to Jewry, and encouraged racial riots.28
Lynching became so commonplace in the South in the 1890s that, in some cases, there was no need for sociological or anthropological analysis to detect economic factors at work. In March of 1892, three black grocers were lynched on the outskirts of Memphis. Outraged, Ida B. Wells, the twenty-nine-year-old editor of a black Memphis newspaper called the Free Speech and Headlight, charged in an editorial what most local people, black and white, already assumed (or knew) was true—that the grocers were lynched because they were successfully competing against a white-owned store in the same black neighborhood. Wells urged Memphis’s African Americans to “save our money and leave a town that will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts when accused by white persons.” Wells was fearless and fierce in her racial pride. At the age of twenty-one, she had unsuccessfully sued the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad in Tennessee for violating her civil rights by forcing her (with some difficulty; she bit the hand of a conductor) to move to a “colored” car.29
Ida B. Wells
Barely two months after her inflammatory editorials on the murder of the grocers, Wells became infuriated by the lynching in Southern states of several black men for allegedly raping white women, and wrote a thunderous editorial calling the rape charges a “threadbare lie” that hid—or exposed—the abiding white fear that white women were attracted to black men. Wells was fortuitously—or wisely—visiting New York when a mob descended upon the paper’s office and demolished it. Threatened with lynching if she returned to Memphis, she remained in the North and became a leader in the antilynching movement, her personal experiences adding to the power of her speeches as she swayed large crowds in America and on tours of England.30
Militant leaders like Ida B. Wells found themselves in direct opposition to the increasingly influential Booker T. Washington, a growing force for caution, gradualism, self-reliance, and accommodation to whites in the improvement of the African American condition. Unlike Ida B. Wells, Washington accepted the re
ality of a segregated rail system, and had once written a rail company praising it for having first-class cars for both blacks and whites.31
In 1895, at the age of thirty-eight, the educator made the most important speech of his speech-filled life before a large audience in a convention hall at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, a minor world’s fair where the accomplishments of blacks were relegated to the Negro Building. The speech, proffering what came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise, made Washington nationally famous and would influence white attitudes and policies toward blacks for decades to come.
Booker Taliaferro Washington was the founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which focused on vocational education. Having spent his childhood as a slave in Virginia—he proudly would title his autobiography Up from Slavery—Washington had worked long hours as a stevedore and saved his money by sleeping under an elevated sidewalk to pay for college at all-black Hampton Institute. He stayed in the South as an educator. “Cast down your bucket where you are,” the famous advice he gave for the first time in his 1895 Atlanta speech, was a typically humble-sounding, backcountry metaphor for a conservative position he had advocated for years: Blacks should stay in the South, work hard to better themselves, concentrate on vocational training rather than academic education, and not make trouble by pushing for rights the white man was not willing to give them.32
Booker T. Washington
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