A Century of Segregation 1863-1880
•Emancipation Proclamation: Early in the civil war, President Abraham Lincoln was pressed by the Radical Republicans to abolish slavery by proclamation. But Lincoln knew that if he decreed emancipation at the beginning of the war, Missouri, Kentucky, and probably Maryland would have joined the South. Eventually, he realized that he would have to end slavery and issued a preliminary proclamation five days after the battle of Antietam.
•Reconstruction Begins: Reconstruction generally refers to the period in the United States history immediately following the Civil War in which the federal government set the conditions that would allow the Southern States back into the Union. The main condition for re-admittance was that at least 10% of the voting population in 1860 take an oath of allegiance to the Union. The Radicals criticized Lincoln’s leniency. After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson became president. Southerners, with Johnson’s support, attempted to restore slavery.
•Ku Klux Klan: The Ku Klux Klan was originally organized in the winter of 1865-66 in Pulaski, Tennessee as a social club by six Confederate veterans. According to the founders of the Klan, it had no malicious intent in the beginning. The Klan grew quickly and became a terrorist organization. The Klan included mayors, judges, and sheriffs as well as common criminals.
•Civil Rights Act: In 1875, the Republican-controlled Congress managed to pass a civil-rights bill that sought to guarantee freedom of access, regardless of race, to the “full and equal enjoyment” of many public facilities.

A Century of Segregation 1881-1900
•Civil Rights Act Declared Unconstitutional: In 1883, The United States Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional and not authorized by the 13th or 14th Amendments of the Constitution. African Americans would have to wait until 1964 before Congress would again pass a civil-rights law that was constitutionally accepted that would forbid discrimination in public.
•Plessy vs. Ferguson: On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the “white” car of the East Louisiana Railroad. When Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, legally segregating common carriers in 1892, a black civil rights organization decided to challenge the law in the courts. Plessy deliberately sat in the white section and identified himself as black. He was arrested and the case went all the up to the United States Supreme Court. The Plessy decision set the precedent that “separate” facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were “equal”. The “separate but equal” doctrine covered many areas of public life. But the doctrine was fiction, facilities for blacks were always inferior to those for whites. It was not until 1954 that the “separate but equal” doctrine would be struck down.
•Spanish American War: America declared war on Spain in 1898, and black soldiers were needed to fight for their country. Black soldiers saw the war as an opportunity to prove themselves and show their bravery. As the soldiers traveled through the North, crowd of blacks and whites gathered at stations to welcome them. But when they went through the south, no one came to cheer for them. The black troops played a major role in Roosevelt’s victory at the battle of San Juan Hill but, they gained little from their important role in the war.
•The Blues: The Blues had its roots in other forms of black music that included African rhythms, field hollers, jump-ups, spirituals, and church music, but it became a distinct form by the turn of the century. J.C. said that the blues were conceived in aching hearts.

A Century of Segregation 1901-1920
*The Souls of Black Folk: Du Bois published “The Souls of Black Folk”, a collection of essays, in 1903. “The Souls of Black Folk” explored a variety of subjects of black life. What made the book a sensation was that it was the first widely public shot in the debate between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. “The Souls of Black Folk” marks the beginning of Du Bois’ transition from a scholar to and activist. He criticized Washington in a number of articles, and in 1905 he formed a civil rights organization.
*The Brownsville Affair: The Brownsville Affair was a racial incident that grew out of tensions between whites in Brownsville, Texas, and black infantrymen stationed at nearby Fort Brown. Their was a shooting incident in town on the night of August 13 and even though white commanders at Fort Brown affirmed that all black soldiers had been in their barracks at the time of the shooting, local whites claimed that black soldiers had been seen firing. The blacks insisted that they had no knowledge of the shooting, so President Theodore Roosevelt ordered 167 black infantrymen be discharged without honor because of their alleged conspiracy of silence. In 1972, the army conducted a new investigation and reversed the order of 1906.
*NAACP Founded: In 1909, after a race riot in 1908, William English Walling and Mary White Ovington called a conference to which the invited a number of prominent civil-rights activists, black and white. The organization would eventually be named the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Du Bois became the editor of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, in 1910. By 1918 the NAACP had 165 branches and 43,994 members. The NAACP fought against racial injustice in many ways. The NAACP played a major role in the civil-rights movement and is still active today.
*U.S. in World War I: congress declared war on Germany in 19 17. Although the black community supported the war, they knew they would suffer discrimination in a Jim Crow Army. They were assigned to a battalion in Logan outside of Houston that had an aggressive police force to black people at the time. Soldiers suffered segregation, beatings and arrests for crimes without evidence. When a rumor spread they killed their Corporal Charles Baltimore, the black soldiers marched into town for revenge and killed sixteen whites as well as four black men killed. For this they were denied rights of appeal and 13 were hung on December 11, 1917. Protest against this caused President Woodrow Wilson to commute the sentence of some of the others, but six more were killed the next year. Black soldiers were accepted much better in France, with the 369th regimen winning many medals of French military honors and 71 medals the highest. The writer Alain Locke called African-American soldiers the “New Negro” and they hoped their service would earn them equality in America society, but their hopes were not achieved.

A Century of Segregation Summaries