Resources

• Learning For Justice: Student Text, The Negro's Place in World Reorganization (grades 9-12)
• Learning For Justice: Lesson, Before Rosa Parks: Ida B. Wells (grades 6-8, 9-12)
• Learning For Justice: Article, I Didn't Know There Were Cities in Africa: Challenging Children's-and Adult's-Misperceptions about the African Continent
• Learning For Justice: Article, Teaching About King’s Radical Approach to Social Justice

Transcript

Bethany Jay: As teachers, we divide the narrative of history into discrete topics: a unit plan on the Revolutionary War, another on the Progressive Movement, another on the Depression. This strategy reflects the curriculum standards that we are asked to work with, and our need to craft a narrative that's coherent for our students. But it also puts historical events into different silos, very separate from one another. Then, every so often, a resource comes around that explodes those silos and challenges us to rethink that neat sequence of unit plans.

Bethany Jay: For me, that resource was Mary Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights. I realize that I'm dating myself here—Dudziak's book is now over 20 years old, but it is still relevant. In Cold War Civil Rights, Dudziak explores the history of the Civil Rights Movement within the international context of the Cold War. She argues that the limits of American democracy at home, with regard to what was commonly known at the time as "The Negro Problem" (but which we know as the violence and structural racism of Jim Crow), constituted an international public relations crisis. A crisis that Cold War adversaries like the Soviet Union seized at every opportunity. Even during World War II, writer Pearl S. Buck noted that America's racial problems were fodder for enemy propaganda. Buck wrote:

Every lynching, every race riot gives joy to Japan. The discriminations of the American army and navy and the air forces against colored soldiers and sailors, the exclusion of colored labor in our defense industries and trade unions, all our social discriminations are of the greatest aid today to our enemy in Asia, Japan. "Look at America," Japan is saying to millions of listening ears. "Will white Americans give you equality?"

Bethany Jay: The discrimination, segregation and violence directed at Black Americans that Buck identified as an ideological problem during World War II only became further amplified by a Cold War context. To respond to international criticisms of the United States—or perhaps to drown them out—various entities in the US government organized counter-narratives. One of the most prominent of these was a State Department publication that emerged in the early 1950s called The Negro in American Life.

Bethany Jay: It may be surprising to those of us living through today's controversies surrounding teaching slavery to learn that this 1950's publication went to great lengths explaining that slavery was the "cardinal cause" of American racism. But as Dudziak points out, their focus on slavery served as a useful origin story. She says, "The reader was asked not to view American race relations in isolation. Rather,"—and here she's quoting the State Department—"'it is against this background that the progress which the Negro has made—and the steps still needed for the full solution of his problems—must be measured.'" In other words, by beginning with the sin of slavery, The Negro in American Life argued that America under Jim Crow represented real racial progress. To accompany narratives like The Negro in American Life, the State Department also recruited prominent Black Americans like Louis Armstrong to serve as cherry-picked examples of Black achievement, as evidence of the nation's great strides towards racial equality.

Bethany Jay: Of course, to maintain this celebratory and progressive narrative of American race relations, the United States government needed to carefully control which messages were available overseas. And so the State Department and FBI became very concerned with the actions of African Americans abroad. In the 1950s, everyone from Josephine Baker to Paul Robeson to W.E.B. Du Bois found themselves the targets of some combination of government surveillance, travel restrictions, blacklisting and smear campaigns. Why? Well, labor and civil rights activist William Patterson ran afoul of the State Department when he placed the plight of African Americans in the context of international anti-colonization movements. In doing so, he had complicated the nation's campaign to sell racial progress as a hallmark of the possibilities of American democracy. And the State Department's justification for revoking Paul Robeson's passport may say it all: Robeson's "Frequent criticism of the treatment of Blacks in the United States should not be aired in foreign countries. It was a family affair."

Bethany Jay: Like Robeson and Patterson, those who found themselves the targets of government surveillance, restrictions and persecution during the Cold War were parts of movements that sought the liberation of Black people no matter where they resided—movements that began well before the Cold War. In the earliest decades of the 20th century, African-American leaders responded both to colonization abroad and the violence and segregation at home by uniting under groups like Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association, the NAACP or myriad other organizations to effect change. Despite its importance, this history of Black political thought rarely gets much mention in the history curriculum. And when it does, it is often as a sidebar to seemingly more pressing 20th century issues. When, in fact, their work had an impact on much of our modern history, on many of those silos that often define our classrooms: from the interwar years, to World War II, decolonization, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and today.

Bethany Jay: I'm Bethany Jay, and this is Teaching Hard History. We're a production of Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This season, we're offering a detailed look at how to teach the history of Jim Crow, starting with Reconstruction. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises.

Bethany Jay: Black political ideologies evolved against a backdrop of derogatory stereotypes and racial terrorism. In this episode, my co-host Hasan Kwame Jeffries spoke with historian Minkah Makalani about Black political thought during Jim Crow. They will help us to tell the complex and compelling history of this era in our classrooms by exploring how Black political leaders in the era of Jim Crow understood America's racial problems within an international context. Their work and their ideas influenced much of the 20th century as they actively worked to effect change both at home and abroad.

Bethany Jay: I'm so glad you can join us. Let's get started.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I have been looking forward to this episode and this conversation with this person since before the season began. I want to welcome to the podcast, Dr. Minkah Makalani. Minkah, what's up, brother?

Minkah Makalani: Man, it's all good. Thank you, Hasan, for having me on. Good to talk to you again.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely. Look, the reason why I've been looking forward to this episode, and to this topic, and to you specifically sharing some knowledge and insights with us is because too often when we look at the Jim Crow era, we don't look at the intellectual side.

Minkah Makalani: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We don't look at the side of Black folk thinking and acting on these thoughts and making sense of the circumstances that they find themselves in. And I can think of no better person to help us make sense of the political thinking of African Americans during this era than you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, one of the things, Minkah, that I love to introduce my students to as just sort of a springboard into this topic is the UNIA—Universal Negro Improvement Association—which was Marcus Garvey's organization. Could you just share with us sort of a rough outline of who Garvey was, and what the UNIA was?

Minkah Makalani: Right, so Garvey is a really intriguing character. Very charismatic, dynamic and a complex thinker. So he's born in Jamaica, and his father is a printer. And so he is introduced very early on to the word and to publishing as a central political activity. He's also learning from his father stories about Jamaica's radical history: the uprisings that occurred both among the enslaved, as well as those efforts to redress oppression after the period of enslavement ends.

Minkah Makalani: And early in his life, he decided to begin traveling. And one of the places that he goes is to the Panama Canal Zone. This had been a project to construct the Panama Canal, and it brought a number of Black Caribbeans to the canal zone. One of the things that he noticed there was that you had this differential pay system—what was known as Panama Silver. And this was a differential pay that was given to Black Caribbean migrant workers that was distinct from the pay that was going to white workers from the US.

Minkah Makalani: He goes to London. He works for Dusé Mohamed Ali and his international African Times and Orient Review. And he's being exposed to Pan-Africanist thought for the first time in a sustained way. He's also hearing stories coming from around the African world that are being published in the African Times and Orient Review.

Minkah Makalani: And then he returns to Jamaica, and he establishes in 1914 the Universal Negro Improvement Association. And the UNIA doesn't get much traction early on when he's in Jamaica. And in about 1916, he decides to embark on a tour, initially to visit Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute with the hopes of establishing a Tuskegee in Jamaica. He has the unfortunate timing of arriving in the United States after Washington had died. So he decides to have a tour anyway, a speaking tour, to try and raise money for the UNIA that he would return to and continue to build in Jamaica.

Minkah Makalani: And during his time in the US, he witnesses reports and accounts of the 1917 East St. Louis race riot. And this is one of the more brutal race riots that precedes the Red Summer of 1919. And with everything he has seen and heard about in Jamaica, in the Panama Canal Zone, the stories that he had read about and the conversations he had had in London, his anger and frustration kind of came to a head, and he decides to establish the UNIA in New York and work in the US.

Minkah Makalani: He frames a lot of the issues in these global terms, and connects what's going on in the US to everything that's going on around the world. He's insisting on the ability of Black people around the world to live freely without the yoke of white supremacy bearing down on them. And he's insisting on Africa for the Africans. And this means the ability of Africans on the African continent to direct their own lives, to direct their own societies, to be free of European domination.

Minkah Makalani: The other thing that he does is as a dark-skinned, Black Jamaican, he is critical of a Black elite, particularly in the US North, that is fair in complexion and that maintains a certain social distance from working class and poor Black folks. You know, they're being shunned, they're being talked about disparagingly. You had preachers on Sunday who would give a sermon chastising people for dressing a certain way, or for eating certain foods, and being loud in public—things that are "bringing the race down." And so Garvey actually is also tapping into a sense of racial pride that doesn't privilege those who are fair skinned, those who are richer.

Minkah Makalani: And so it taps into a whole range of things for a lot of people. And it really is inspiring to think about how it must have been in the context of being a generation removed from enslavement—the 19-teens, 1920s. This is the first full generation where people are largely born outside of the context of enslavement, right? And the kind of psychic trauma that that brings on, the constant barragement of racial stereotypes, demeaning depictions of Black people, demeaning discourses about Black people being lazy, being a danger, et cetera, to have someone in that context talk about Black pride, and talk about the African continent as a place of pride and a place that Black people should revere and focus on and try and liberate as they liberate themselves, ended up appealing to such a wide range of people that the UNIA remains the single largest organization ever in the Black world. I think the records indicate that it had upwards of 1.5 million members, people who were paying dues, who were consistently a part of chapters across the US, in the Caribbean, as well as on the African continent. But in terms of support, people who purchased and read its newspaper, The Negro World, people who sent money in to the UNIA, people who purchased shares in the Black Star Line, this was the UNAI's attempt to establish an international shipping line that would serve the interests of Black people around the world, that number rises to about eight million people. It's hard to overstate how important and profoundly influential the UNIA was to Black life around the world.

Minkah Makalani: And two examples I'll give in terms of the African continent, Jomo Kenyatta recounts how in his village in Kenya when he was young, The Negro World would arrive, and it would be read over and over and over. And young people would then go to different parts of town and relay the stories that were in The Negro World. And the other person that gives a similar account of how influential Garveyism was is Kwame Nkrumah, who was so influenced by Garvey and the UNIA that when he leads the Gold Coast to independence in 1957 and establishes the nation of Ghana, he takes the Black Star Line as inspiration. And so the Ghana national team is called the Black Stars after the Universal Negro Improvement Association's Black Star Line. So you get a sense of how important that is as a movement to so many people.

Minkah Makalani: A lot of people in the 20th century can trace their early intellectual beginnings to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. I like to tell my students about Audley Moore, or Queen Mother Moore, who is receiving considerable attention as of late with the resurgence of the push for reparations. A former colleague Ashley Farmer is writing a biography of Audley Moore and her work for reparations. But if you don't mind, I just want to read this interview that Mark Naison, a historian, did with her about her first encounter with Marcus Garvey in New Iberia, Louisiana, at a Longshoremen's Union.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely.

Minkah Makalani: So this is about 1920, 1921. Garvey was coming to give a talk at a Longshoremen's Hall, and the police wouldn't let him give his speech. And so she's explaining this. Quote, "Well, Garvey himself came, but the police wouldn't allow him to speak to us. And everybody vowed to go back the next night with the guarantee that we were going to hear Garvey. So we went. All of us went well-armed. Everybody had guns and big bags of ammunition. The police filed into the hall and stood up along the sides of the benches, man-to-man, on both sides of the aisle. So when Garvey came in, everybody stood up and applauded, and Garvey said, 'My friends, I wish to apologize to you for not speaking to you last night. But the mayor of New Orleans permitted himself to be used by the police, the chief, to prevent my speaking to you.' When he said that, the police chief jumped up on the platform and said, 'I'll run you in!' And when he did that, all of us stood on the benches, and everybody's guns came out. And with hand in the air, guns pointed, blue steel, Smith & Wessons, .44s, .38s, all kinds of guns, we said, 'Speak, Garvey. Speak!' And Garvey said, 'And as I was saying …' Garvey went on and repeated himself, and so the police filed out of the Longshoremen's Hall in New Orleans."

Minkah Makalani: I like to give that because it does a number of things. One, it does away with this myth that Black people in the South kind of just took oppression and were pushed around and bullied and never fought back. This is a clear indication that people were willing to bear arms if need be. But the other thing about this is that this is really her political awakening. She talks about beginning to read the newspaper, The Negro World and other newspapers after that, and then being compelled to move to New York in 1922 to really become involved in the UNIA. And then after its decline, moving into other political arenas. And this is where I think Garvey is really good also as a window onto a range of other organizations and political formations.

Minkah Makalani: Audley Moore is someone—or Queen Mother Moore, excuse me—is someone whose political career, intellectual activity extended over the course of the 20th century. She had the ear of Malcolm X. She informed a number of political movements throughout the 20th century, but her intellectual odyssey begins hearing about Marcus Garvey.

Minkah Makalani: And so I think, depending on how you want to approach Garvey, it can open up, and you can drill down into something very specific in the early 1920s, or you can expand it around the world, or you can expand it across the 20th century. But definitely you see those resonances throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and feeding on into those people who become very important figures in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What are some of the source materials that you use in the classroom to teach and talk about Garvey and the UNIA that you think might be useful to teachers K-12?

Minkah Makalani: The one document that I always use when teaching about the UNIA and Garvey is its "Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World." And this is a document drafted in 1920. And it kind of sets out some of the political concerns that the UNIA has. When you just look at the breadth of it, its preamble lodges 12 complaints, and then it goes on to make 54 demands. And this is a document that is so grand in scope that it goes from calling for Africa for the Africans to demanding the free and unfettered commercial intercourse with all the Negro people of the world, to something like, "We proclaim the 31st day of August of each year to be an international holiday to observed by all Negroes."

Minkah Makalani: So the document is long, and it can take a lot to kind of get into and walk students through, particularly in a K-12 context. But what it does, I think, which is so good, and it works equally as well in a university classroom, is it requires you to give the students some context. You have to explain a whole range of things that are going on in the world. You've had the Great War or World War I that has ended. You've had this concern about what to do with these African territories that were previously held by Germany. And pan-African congresses are seeking to make a claim at the founding of the League of Nations for the independence of Africa and the African colonies.

Minkah Makalani: President Woodrow Wilson has called for self-determination for European nations, but definitely does not consider that as an option for Africa. It's a very racialized notion of self-determination that he's articulating. And Garvey is saying, "Number 13: We believe in the freedom of Africa for the Negro people of the world. And by the principle of Europe for the Europeans and Asians for the Asiatics, we also demand Africa for the Africans at home and abroad."

Minkah Makalani: You see there that he's talking about Africa for the Africans in the context of Europe and these movements in Asia to assert independence and sovereignty. And so making those same kinds of claims for Black people. So you get students to think about what are the complaints and what are the demands that they are making, and why are they calling for this in this way?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You mentioned The Negro World and Marcus Garvey as its publisher. Would you recommend using The Negro World in the classroom?

Minkah Makalani: Mm-hmm. Definitely. There are a range of things you can do with looking at The Negro World to get students to see what are some of the topics that were covered. How did it mix a news story with an editorial that seeks to politically educate its readership, that seeks to situate a lynching or the Red Summer of 1919? Or an international congress—the Pan-African Congress or the UNIA's international congresses? How does it talk about them? It gets students to thinking about how everyday people are reading this newspaper, who are, say, going to a barbershop or maybe to a salon. People are talking about it in church groups, in their clubs. It shows the kinds of ideas they are debating, both with leaders but also amongst themselves. And then also what does it mean that so many people are reading this around the globe, and that in some instances it's outlawed?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One of the great ironies that I find in Garvey and his understanding of Africa is that, to a certain extent, it draws upon some of the prevailing stereotypes of what the continent was.

Minkah Makalani: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Is that a fair thing to say?

Minkah Makalani: I think it is fair to say that a lot of the views that Garvey expressed about Africans track with dominant, racist views about Africa and Africans. At the same time that Garvey is saying we need to look at Africa as our home, he would say that people need to be civilized, they need to be Christianized, and we need to redeem Africa. It is in many ways deplorable, but it's not uncommon for its period. Actually, Audley Moore recounts how her and her husband, after Garvey comes to Louisiana, they decide they're going to go to Africa. And an aunt tells her, "No, no, no, you can't go to Africa. If you go there, they're gonna eat you. They eat people there."

Minkah Makalani: Garvey sees himself as a very modern Black person, right? He's well-educated, he's well-traveled. Now it's the same thing that undergirds the thinking of Black leaders in the NAACP, the Urban League, and how they thought about their role to educate working-class Black people, and that is this idea of racial uplift. That those who are the most educated, who are the most culturally advanced, that it's their responsibility to uplift those Black people in the US who are poor, who are uneducated, and tell them what they need to improve themselves, but also to go back to Africa and civilize the continent.

Minkah Makalani: To talk about this history, to talk about this aspect of Garvey and this aspect Black thought at this time, is not to diminish it or bring it down, but to make it human. So Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, a whole host of characters, they end up not being heroes, but being amazing human beings who had flaws.

Bethany Jay: This is Teaching Hard History, and I'm Bethany Jay. We prepare detailed show notes for each episode of this podcast so that you can use what you learn here in the classroom. You'll find relevant resources as well as a full transcript, complete with links to materials mentioned by our guests. You can find them at LearningForJustice.org/podcasts. Let's return now to Hasan's conversation with Minkah Makalani.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Who were some of Garvey's contemporaries that we should know about, and would be helpful for students to be introduced to, to make sense of the thinking circulating at this time?

Minkah Makalani: So the figures abound in terms of his contemporaries. And some people who he was really close to, like the poet Claude McKay—also from Jamaica. He saw great value in some of his work, and then he denigrated other of his work. Langston Hughes, someone again who he saw great value in, but he denigrated his work. And Garvey was also critical of Paul Robeson, in particular his film Sanders of the River.

Minkah Makalani: You know, the most well-known contemporary of Garvey is W.E.B. Du Bois. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, excels in school; attends Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee; gets accepted to Harvard, but is forced to repeat a couple years of undergraduate work because it's deemed that Fisk isn't up to the standard for a Harvard education. And so he ends up studying economics and sociology in Germany, and ultimately ends up writing some of the works that become foundational to the field of sociology. And comes back to complete his PhD in history at Harvard on the suppression of the African slave trade. This becomes one of the most important early histories of the subject. It becomes the first in a series of books from Harvard University that issue from the dissertations that their students produce.

Minkah Makalani: After Du Bois writes his dissertation and graduates from Harvard, he immediately becomes involved in a number of political and intellectual formations in the late 19th century and early 20th century. And then in 1903, he publishes his first major work, which is The Souls of Black Folk, and it really does establish him as a major intellectual figure in the United States and around the world. He then goes on to help establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as become the founder and editor of its magazine The Crisis. And Du Bois is a contemporary and an adversary of Booker T. Washington, and Washington's focus on industrial education, and Du Bois's emphasis on kind of a liberal arts education. Then he becomes an adversary of Marcus Garvey.

Minkah Makalani: One of the resources that I tend to turn to with my students is a book that was edited by Henry Louis Gates and Jennifer Burton called Call and Response: Key Debates in African-American Studies. It covers key debates around a range of topics that begin during the period of enslavement on up to the present era. And it has such topics as the politics of art, government, civic rights and civic duties, nature, culture and slavery, separatism versus integration. So it covers a range of topics that are useful because it's giving documents where the people from these periods are speaking themselves, both lay figures, as well as intellectuals and names you would recognize.

Minkah Makalani: And just to give you a sense of how good this material is and how useful it can be, in about 1920, 1921, you have Du Bois speaking explicitly about Garvey, as well as Garvey speaking explicitly about Du Bois. And so in one instance in Du Bois's Crisis magazine in January of 1921, he's writing about Marcus Garvey's economic program and his design for an international shipping line, the Black Star Line. And he's really critical of it. He sums up by giving his characterization of Garvey that I'll just read for you. "To sum up, Garvey is a sincere, hardworking idealist. He is also a stubborn, domineering leader of the mass. He has worthy industrial and commercial schemes, but he is an inexperienced businessman. His dreams of Negro industry, commerce and the ultimate freedom of Africa are feasible, but his methods are bombastic, wasteful, illogical and ineffective and almost illegal. If he learns by experience, attracts strong and capable friends and helpers instead of making needless enemies, if he gives up secrecy and suspicion, and substitutes open and frank reports as to his income and expenses, and above all, if he is willing to be a coworker and not a czar, he may yet succeed in his schemes toward accomplishment. But unless he does these things and does them quickly, he cannot escape failure."

Minkah Makalani: And so in that, you get this critique of Marcus Garvey that also gives you a sense of who Du Bois is. This is someone who's committed to the development of a leadership class of highly-educated, primarily Black men, although he does allow for Black women to be in that leadership class as well, but primarily Black men who will lead the fate of the race. And so he's kind of marking out Garvey's failures in a number of ways along those lines.

Minkah Makalani: Now writing almost in response to W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey offers his assessment of Du Bois and the NAACP. I'll just read this paragraph, and you can get a flavor for what Garvey is saying. "Du Bois appeals to the talented tenth while Garvey appeals to the hoi polloi. The NAACP appeals to the Beau Brummell, Lord Chesterfield, kid gloved, silk stockinged, creased trousers, patent leather shoe, Bird of Paradise hat and Hudson Steel coat with beaver or skunk collar element. While the UNIA appeals to the sober, sane, serious, earnest, hardworking man who earns his living by the sweat of his brow. The NAACP appeals to the cavalier element in the Negro race, while the UNIA appeals to the self-reliant yeomanry. Hence, in no sense are Du Bois and Mr. James Weldon Johnson rivals of Marcus Garvey. Du Bois and Johnson as writers and speakers, and Garvey as prophet, propagandist and organizer and inspirer of the masses are doing good work and all should be free and unimpeded in perfecting their plans."

Minkah Makalani: And so Marcus Garvey offers his assessment of what he sees as a Black elite leadership that doesn't reflect the interests of Black people on a much larger scale. Du Bois is nonetheless like Garvey: pushing for a pan-African or a global approach to solving the issues of racial oppression and colonialism around the world. So he not only participates in the 1900 Pan-African Conference, where he delivers the famous line, "The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. And the color line belts the world." He leads the 1919 Pan-African Congress that's held in France, and then a number of subsequent Pan-African Congresses.

Minkah Makalani: W.E.B. Du Bois's Crisis magazine was widely influential. This is one of those periodicals that people would wait for in the mail, and they would read the stories, read his editorials. And it really helped shape how people thought about political struggles in the United States in this global context. And that helps shape a liberal to radical political orientation in the 19-teens and 1920s. In distinction from the NAACP, which is a very top-down organization—everything had to be controlled by the national headquarters—the Garvey movement and the UNIA was very decentralized in some ways. And so people who were in the UNIA chapters around the world and around the country had much greater latitude to organize and do a whole range of things that, by the time Garvey is arrested, he has no interest in them doing.

Minkah Makalani: And so in one case in particular, in Milwaukee, the leadership and most of the membership of the UNIA is composed of socialists and labor organizers who reject some of Garvey's business proposals in lieu of advocating for a Black working class struggle. Ultimately, Du Bois ends up falling out of favor by the 1940s with the NAACP as he becomes increasingly radical. And then you have a whole range of other people who are contemporaries of Garvey like Ida B. Wells, who did a great deal of work around anti-lynching, investigating lynchings. And this is beginning both in Memphis, Tennessee, when she exposed a lynching of three Black men, and was essentially ran out of Memphis, her printing press destroyed, but becomes a real important figure in terms of one of the earliest Black women intellectuals. Or people like Grace Campbell, who was a parole officer, a social worker but also a socialist and a communist. And you have her, along with a woman named Elizabeth Hendrickson, who helped establish the Harlem Tenants League, which organizes Harlem tenants around sanitary living conditions, affordable rents, really addressing the needs of Black people as they live in a day-to-day basis in their community, along with organizing people as workers in a radical movement.

Minkah Makalani: She's from St. Croix, Virgin Islands, and immigrated to New York at the turn of the century. Now she co-founds two organizations. One is the Virgin Islands Protective League. The other is the American West Indian Ladies Aid Society. Now these are mutual aid societies, but they took very radical political positions on a whole range of things. You know, they also live within probably five square blocks of one another in Harlem, and you can actually see how close their headquarters are. And so these are people who are interacting with each other and seeing one another on a daily basis. And then this kind of spills out into a whole range of organizing activities throughout the United States.

Minkah Makalani: You have organizations like the National Association of Colored Women. Or you have the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. And you have a whole range of Black women's clubs that take on a whole host of initiatives and projects. And some of those are concerned with improving the conditions that Black women and Black families are in, kind of social service oriented. Alongside that, you had organizations like the Ladies Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. And the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was a labor organization, and they had a ladies auxiliary. You also had a number of organizations like the African Brotherhood or the UNIA, where Black women played very important roles.

Minkah Makalani: These spaces that Black women are developing allowed them to engage in the intellectual activity of thinking and talking about and making sense of the world that they exist in, but not to see it simply as how race impacts Black people as if it's just one group. They're actually talking about how these issues that affect the race impact them specifically as Black women. You get this concern with what is known now as "intersectionality." And this is, I think, something that comes out of both formal political spaces like the National Association of Colored Women, and Black clubs, the labor organizations that people were a part of, but also beauty salons and social settings where they are talking to each other about problems with an employer. In some instances, they have to go out and work as domestics in the homes of white people, and they have to confront the range of issues that are presented there: low pay, sexual violence. Then they come home and they are confronting some of the same kinds of problems. And I think it's that constellation of spaces that allow for Black women to raise these questions and debate them.

Minkah Makalani: We have a lot of work that looks at the social world of Black men, but I think increasingly we have work that looks at the social world of Black women during the 1920s and '30s, and how those institutions and those social frameworks provide a much different picture of what Black politics looks like, and what the United States looks like, and what are some of these pressing issues. You could look at the work of, say, Brittney Cooper. You could look at Davarian Baldwin. You could look at LaShawn Harris. I try and draw on their work in my teaching.

Minkah Makalani: Other contemporaries of Garvey are the Negro Historical Association that is based in Harlem. It has members like Arturo Schomburg, George Wells Parker, John Bruce, Cyril Briggs from the African Brotherhood and others. And they are concerned with a range of things. So Arturo Schomburg, he's a bibliophile, and he's collecting works that get into the history of Black people around the world, which becomes the basis for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and History in Harlem today. George Wells Parker is articulating an early Egyptology. His pamphlet is called "Children of the Sun." And he's trying to look at and rehabilitate an image of Africa that looks to Egypt and some of Africa's more dynamic, well-known histories and civilizations that are seen as non-Black, that are seen as actually white or Middle Eastern, and arguing that these are African civilizations, and that this is a testament to the greatness of Black people. And so these are things that you see informing a range of political formations throughout the 1960s and '70s, but also intellectual approaches. So if you're thinking about Afro-centrism today, that is a kind of articulation of those early concerns with Egypt and ancient African civilizations that you have in the 1920s.

Minkah Makalani: Other contemporaries of Garvey are the African Blood Brotherhood, which is a radical organization that had ties to the Garvey movement, but ended up becoming some of the first Black members of the Communist Party. Cyril Valentine Briggs, Richard Moore, who had the Frederick Douglass Bookstore in Harlem for a good number of years, and one of the earliest to advocate for doing away with the use of the word "Negro" to describe Black people. Wilfred Adolphus Domingo, who actually had been in some of the same political formations with Marcus Garvey in their native Jamaica, some of their ideas end up really shaping what the Communist Party in the United States does. And some of their members, and some of those early Black people who come into the Communist Party through the United States, end up having this profound impact on what communism looks like internationally, and how it grapples with questions of racial oppression, national oppression and colonialism.

Minkah Makalani: One of the things I think is important to remember about the early 20th century, particularly the '20s and '30s, is that when you are talking about socialism or when you're talking about communism, it hasn't become this bogeyman that it is by the 1960s and '70s that can undermine someone's credibility or undermine a political movement. With the Depression, people are confronting the real drastic economic impact that capitalism is having in their lives. You're talking about people who are thankful to have oatmeal for a week, or to get bread. They're living in shantytowns, essentially. And you can find photographs of what were known as Hoovervilles, where people were constructing makeshift homes and towns really in the St. Louis area, on the banks of the Mississippi.

Minkah Makalani: So when people encountered the Communist Party or the Socialist Party, they were encountering a viable political party that spoke very specifically to their circumstances, to their economic life, to their social conditions. And at the time when people are being evicted from their homes, it provided them not only an organization that they could turn to if they are evicted who would come and confront the police or confront sheriffs, and then in many instances move families back into apartments or houses that they had been evicted from. And in terms of the Communist Party, in the '20s and '30s, you're talking about the only major political party that is explicitly articulating an anti-racist platform. You know, in all these parties: the Communist Party, Socialist Party, Democratic and Republican Parties, you had Black members encountering white racism, the racism of its members being dismissed, being ignored, being treated poorly, talked to poorly, even violence against its members, right?

Minkah Makalani: The Communist Party held trials where its members were tried for racism and expelled for racism. If someone called you a racial slur or if they hit you, or if they violated you or your person or your family in some kind of way, you could actually have that person tried and expelled. And that was profound. Audley Moore ultimately joins the Communist Party because of all the political parties that were around at that time, major political parties, she said that was the one that was actually dealing with Black people's needs at that point in time. The event that compels her is that the Communist Party takes up the case of the Scottsboro Boys. And these were nine boys who were arrested while hoboing on a train that stopped in Scottsboro, Alabama; were accused by two white women on the train of raping them; and were tried, convicted and sentenced to death in a matter of days, really. And the Communist Party took up that campaign, made it an international campaign.

Minkah Makalani: And the Communist Party is explicitly talking about the nature of colonialism in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean. And this is not to say that everything the Communist Party said about race, everything that it said about imperialism or colonialism was accurate or was the epitome of how one should think about these things, but these were issues that Black people held as central and essential to look at. And none of the other major parties were offering them any kind of language, any kind of political framework to either think about it, and then more importantly, I would say, none of these other parties offered Black people vehicles in which they could take their own ideas about racial oppression, about colonialism and bring it onto the political stage. And the Communist Party did that.

Minkah Makalani: So those are the kinds of things I think are important to really keep in mind to help explain to students who are encountering these terms in 2022 what the landscape was in that period. People who were trying to identify ways to transform their lives, and to address their most immediate needs, as well as speak to these larger global patterns.

Bethany Jay: Learning for Justice has a special opportunity just for educators. After listening to this episode, you can earn a certificate for one hour of professional development. All you have to do is go to LearningForJustice.org/PodcastPD—PD for "Professional Development." That's PodcastPD, all one word. Then enter the unique code word for this episode: liberation—all lowercase. You'll also find a link in the show notes. It's a great way to get even more out of Teaching Hard History.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: How did white authorities respond to the kind of organizing that was occurring through organizations like the UNIA, but especially the kind of public thinking that Black intellectuals and organizations were doing at the time?

Minkah Makalani: This is one of the more interesting things to talk about with students: the development and refining of state surveillance of Black intellectuals and Black political figures that begins in the 19-teens and the 1920s, that becomes a template for much of the FBI's activities in terms of domestic surveillance, and ultimately the COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program.

Minkah Makalani: So essentially, they begin to recruit people to infiltrate organizations and provide reports about the activities of organizations, or provide detailed reports about individual figures. And so you have reams and reams of federal surveillance reports on Marcus Garvey's activities; on the activities of Du Bois; A. Philip Randolph and The Messenger, his Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—a labor organization that organizes Black men who worked as porters on the trains; surveilling and monitoring labor organizations; Black women's clubs; a whole range of organizations. If they were concerned with and addressing political questions, they would put them under surveillance.

Minkah Makalani: And additionally, you had a cataloging and surveilling and monitoring of what went into their publications. So this occurs in the US. It doesn't necessarily disrupt the circulation of these publications, but they are also exchanging information with England, with France. And those authorities are barring the circulation of these periodicals in their colonies. And so it's really the work of maritime workers in some cases—Black maritime workers—to smuggle these publications into different places, once they get outlawed or barred or are taken possession of in the ports. So you have the whole range of these kinds of surveillance activities, and you can actually go through these reports and you can really construct, like, the day-to-day activities of some of these organizations.

Minkah Makalani: What this all leads up to though, are extreme levels of repression. So Du Bois is under constant surveillance. And people like he and Paul Robeson, they have their passports revoked, and they're unable to travel internationally. And this really limits their ability to make a living, as well as engage in the kind of robust political activity that they had before. You have the same thing happening with a number of individuals. In early 1921, Garvey goes on a trip to the Caribbean and to Central America, but ultimately the trip is extended for about five or six months, because the federal government is barring his re-entry into the United States. And he's ultimately forced to kind of tone down his more radical elements and begin to argue against radical political programs when he returns. And this doesn't stop him from being arrested, convicted and ultimately deported from the United States.

Minkah Makalani: So ultimately, Garvey is indicted on selling shares for his Black Star Line. And some of the boats that he's selling shares on, he doesn't actually own. You also have efforts that essentially destabilize some organizations, that create misinformation about different figures. And so what you have occurring in the 1920s and '30s is really leading up to that surveillance that happens of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement that we probably know a whole lot more about of Black radicals and Black intellectuals in the '50s and '60s.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I mean, literally, J. Edgar Hoover gets his start investigating the UNIA and bringing on Agent "800." Literally.

Minkah Makalani: Right, right. And you see him asking for more resources to expand his surveillance and get more agents under his guidance in these reports. And so you can go to the library. There's a person named Theodore Kornweibel, who compiled 25 microfilm reels worth of federal surveillance between 1917 and 1925 of Black political organizations. And in that, you see Agent "800," you see a whole range of people. You can see in those documents the thinking of someone like Hoover, and the language that he begins to develop, that 'We need to contain these threats. We need to surveil them. We need to make sure that we know all of their moves.' And you see to what extent those in power went to maintain power, and when they are forced to make concessions and to allow greater freedoms, to peel back some of the structures of racial oppression, they find new creative ways to maintain that control and domination.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When we think about some of the ideologies that are circulating at this time among these various organizations and thinkers—you've talked about Pan-Africanism, for example, being one of them—is there a way to think about this era as a Black nationalist era, that that is really serving as sort of a unifying ideology across many of these organizations?

Minkah Makalani: Yes, I think definitely. You know, it might not be what one might detail as a typology of what Black nationalism is, but in terms of a sense of a need for racial unity to grapple with racial oppression and to move towards liberation, I think that informs a great deal of what's going on in this period. I think that everyone, for the most part, they are concerned with what political program can we pursue, and what strategies can we deploy that's going to liberate everyone, that's going to give us all equal rights? And then how that will reverberate outside of the United States, and will inform the fate of the colonized African countries, the Caribbean, Black folks in South America. Marcus Garvey, the African Blood Brotherhood, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Black Club Women, they're all concerned about liberating Black people across the board.

Minkah Makalani: Now the interesting thing too about this period is that you do have the explicit formation of nationalist political ideologies and political groups. So one of the organizations that come out of this period is the Nation of Islam, which is established by W. D. Fard Muhammad in Detroit in 1930, but then after his disappearance is taken over by Elijah Poole, who becomes Elijah Muhammad. He was a member of the UNIA, and one of the earliest members of Fard Muhammad's Nation of Islam. And then goes on to build it into what it has become and what we know it as today.

Minkah Makalani: And there are influences from the Moor Science Temple, from Noble Drew Ali, from a number of figures who are engaged in millenarian movements in the teens, '20s, that become the basis for the Nation of Islam and its unique or idiosyncratic eschatologies or ideas about a white race that's genetically coded to attack and kill and oppress Black people. As problematic as all of that might be, it is speaking to some real experiences that people are having, in terms of what they are encountering, and what their lives have been, and how they've been impacted negatively by white people.

Minkah Makalani: And, you know, one thing I would say just as kind of a caveat in talking about Black nationalism is you want to be careful to not overly romanticize Black nationalism, but you also want to be careful not to vilify it or just dismiss it as a Black version of white nationalism. When we talk about white nationalism, we're talking about these movements that are designed to reinstitute explicitly racist regimes because it sees the granting of rights, access, greater movement, economic advancement, Black people and Asians and Latinx folks as threatening white people. And that's not what Black nationalism is in and of itself. You do have extreme strains of that, but that's not anywhere near a central current within Black nationalism, and particularly not in the '20s and '30s.

Minkah Makalani: You know, just to backtrack a little bit. You think about Woodrow Wilson with World War I, and calling for the right of self-determination for oppressed nations. The argument for Black nationalism is really Black people seeing themselves as an oppressed nation within a nation. We want to have the same kind of independence to determine our life and to determine the direction of our nation. So it is in that context that I think we have to think about Black nationalism.

Minkah Makalani: There are a number of reasons why teachers should include this material in their course plans, but I want to just give somewhat of a personal account. All the way through elementary and high school, I had never heard of Du Bois, Garvey, Booker T. Washington. I never heard of the New Negro Movement: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Audley Moore, any of these figures that we talk about in African-American history in the early 20th century. You know, we got Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, but not a real true portrait of what they were about.

Minkah Makalani: But when I got to college, and I had that first class that talked about and showed photos of Black people lining the streets of Harlem, all up and down Lenox Avenue, and you can see there are tens of thousands of people out on the street, and they're all there to get a glimpse of Marcus Garvey as he's driving in his motorcade parade at a UNIA convention. And they are hanging out of windows to see him. And then the professor is talking about the program of the UNIA—why it was so transformative and inspiring, as well as the problems of it. That lecture as a freshman at a small Black college really did transform how I thought about myself and how I thought about the world that I'd come into. And I began to try and hunt down material and read articles, try and find Marcus Garvey's speeches. And then that led me into trying to find the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, this person who was critical of Marcus Garvey.

Minkah Makalani: Learning about your past can really energize you to want to learn more about that period. And I don't think this is something that solely inspires Black children, but I think that is in and of itself a justification for doing this kind of work in the K-12 educational system. But I think it also, in terms of those who are encountering it for the first time, it gives them a much better sense of the world that they inherit. So if you're a white kid, if you are Latinx or you're Asian American, you're learning a complex and compelling history about the world that you live in and why the United States looks the way it does. Why the questions that are being raised in public political discourse, why the questions that are animating political movements like Black Lives Matter, and why the response to that in the form of seeking to ban Critical Race Theory, you begin to get a much better sense of why you are in the world you're in, and I think that helps you navigate it so much easier than going about your life blind until the point when you get to a college classroom and you're introduced to this material for the first time.

Minkah Makalani: I think you get this stuff to kids, and you give them a context and you give them a way to think about it and help them understand some of the debates, some of the circumstances and some of the things that were at stake. They can begin to formulate their own ideas. And it isn't indoctrination, it is giving students the tools and the resources to think about the world around them and how to make sense of that world themselves.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Minkah Makalani, thanks so much for joining us and for shining a light on the thinking of this era. Thanks a lot, brother.

Minkah Makalani: Brother, thank you as well, Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, for the work you do with this podcast. It is definitely something that I draw on when I'm preparing lectures. And I know it's influencing a whole range of people around the world. So thank you as well for the work you're doing.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks, man.

Minkah Makalani: And for having me on.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: For sure.

Bethany Jay: Minkah Makalani is an associate professor of history and the director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939, and the co-editor of Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem.

Bethany Jay: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center—helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and more. You can find award-winning films and classroom-ready texts at LearningForJustice.org.

Bethany Jay: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the Jim Crow era and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. In our fourth season, we put Jim Crow under the spotlight, examining its history and lasting impact.

Bethany Jay: Thanks to Dr. Makalani for sharing his insights with us. This podcast was produced by Mary Quintas and senior producer Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. "Music Reconstructed" is produced by Barrett Golding. And Cory Collins provides content guidance. Amelia Gragg is our intern. Kate Shuster is the series creator. And our managing producer is Miranda LaFond.

Bethany Jay: If you like what you've heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Bethany Jay: I'm Dr. Bethany Jay, professor of history at Salem State University, and your host for Teaching Hard History.

References

• Minkah Makalani, History, Johns Hopkins University
• Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights
• U.S. State Department, The Negro in American Life
• BlackPast, William L. Patterson (1891-1980)
• Universal Negro Improvement Association, About Us
• PBS American Experience, Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind (film)
• Library of Congress, The African times and Orient review : a monthly journal devoted to the interests of the coloured races of the world 
• BlackPast, The Pan-African Congresses, 1900-1945
• Minnesota Historical Society, The Negro World
• Google Arts & Culture, Jomo Kenyatta: Light of Kenya
• BlackPast, Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972)
• Mariners' Museum, Marcus Garvey's Black Star Line
• AAIHS Black Perspectives, Audley Moore, Black Women's Activism, and Nationalist Politics
• Mark Naison, Audley (Queen Mother) Moore (audio interview)
• BlackPast, (1920) Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World
• NBC News, Racial violence and a pandemic: How the Red Summer of 1919 relates to 2020
• Poetry Foundation, Claude McKay
• Sanders Of The River (film starring Jomo Kenyatta)
• NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois
• W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
• NAACP, Our History
• NAACP, History of The Crisis
• Henry Louis Gates and Jennifer Burton (editors), Call and Response: Key Debates in African-American Studies
• The Crisis, 1921: Vol 21 No. 3
• The Guardian, Ida B Wells: the unsung heroine of the civil rights movement
• New York Amsterdam News, Grace P. Campbell, a political activist in the shadows
• Harlem World Magazine, Harlem Civil Rights Leader And Political Activist Elizabeth Anna Hendrickson, 1884–1946
• National Museum of African American History and Culture, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
• North Omaha History, The Life of George Wells Parker
• BlackPast, African Blood Brotherhood (1919-1924)
• Rare Historical Photos, Inside the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression, 1931-1940 
• PBS American Experience, Who Were the Scottsboro Boys?
• Zinn Education Project, March 8, 1971: FBI's COINTELPRO Exposed
• BlackPast, Messenger (1917-1928)
• BlackPast, James Wormley Jones (1884-1958)
• Southern Poverty Law Center, Nation of Islam
• Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939
• Minkah Makalani (co-editor), Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem

 

Return to Episode Listing

Resources

• Learning For Justice: Article, Honor Henrietta Lacks
• Learning For Justice: Article, Just Science
• Learning For Justice: Lesson, Analyzing Health Disparities (grades 6-12)

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When the coronavirus stopped the world from spinning, my fraternity brothers and I did what many people did to break the social isolation of home confinement—we began meeting over Zoom.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Our conversations ranged from the serious to the silly. We encouraged each other to be safe, to mask up, and ribbed each other for the hilarious ways we chose to stay busy. We were grateful for this little bit of escapism.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And we were all excited when the COVID-19 vaccine was approved. But not everyone was eager to get the shot. Vaccine hesitancy among my frat brothers—all college-educated Black men—was real.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Like others in the African-American community, their caution was not irrational. It was not rooted in the fictitious belief that the virus wasn't real, a fantasy that continues to fuel vaccine refusal among politically conservative whites. It was rooted instead in historical reality.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: African Americans have long suffered from medical racism. Stories of abuse from the Jim Crow era circulate widely within the African-American community. Several of my fraternity brothers who said they did not trust the federal government pointed to the Tuskegee Experiment. For several decades, starting in the 1930s, federal officials in Tuskegee, Alabama, withheld penicillin from Black men suffering from syphilis so that they could measure the effects of the disease. Other brothers mentioned Henrietta Lacks, who while a patient seeking treatment for cancer at Johns Hopkins, had cells harvested from her body without her permission—cells that continue to replicate to this very day in research labs around the world. And still others pointed to the forced hysterectomies that Black women such as civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer endured at the hands of white doctors in Mississippi.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thankfully, though, this sordid history did not keep my fraternity brothers from getting the vaccine, but it did take several of them longer to get it—a pattern reflected in the broader Black community.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The Black essayist James Baldwin observed: "We are our history." Indeed, we are that which we have experienced directly, and that which we have experienced indirectly through collective memory. And when it comes to medical treatment, these experiences affect people's willingness to seek care.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History. We're a production of Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This season, we're offering a detailed look at how to teach the history of Jim Crow, starting with Reconstruction. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This nation has a long history of exploiting African Americans in the name of medicine, going back to the nation's founding and early outbreaks of yellow fever. After emancipation, racist medical practices were used to continue controlling the bodies and lives of African Americans, creating a painful legacy of experimentation, forced procedures, sub-standard care and neglect.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Historian Deirdre Cooper Owens is the author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology. In a conversation with my co-host Bethany Jay, she details a chronology of medical malpractice and a pattern of racist misconceptions about health in the United States. They also discuss lesser-known examples of game-changing medical innovations by African Americans.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm glad you could join us.

Bethany Jay: For those in our audience who are not aren't familiar with Deirdre Cooper Owens, she is the Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine, and Director of the Humanities and Medicine Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology, won the 2018 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the OAH as the best book written in African-American Women's and Gender History. Quite an accomplishment, and we're so happy you could be here with us today, your second appearance on the Teaching Hard History podcast. For those who don't know, Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens appeared on season one of the podcast in the ”Diverse Experience of the Enslaved” episode, which I think I have assigned to one or more of my classes every semester since. So thank you again for being here to share your expertise on medical racism.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Oh, my goodness. It is my pleasure to be back again. I feel very special and honored to be back a second time. And I am always happy to have a conversation with another historian who understands the import of this particular kind of American history. So thanks so much.

Bethany Jay: In season four of Teaching Hard History, we're obviously focusing on the post-emancipation experience of Jim Crow. But when we're talking about the intersections of medicine and race, we need to acknowledge that that history extends back into that very early colonial period. As we often do, we need to reach back into that era of slavery to provide context. Can you talk to us a bit about that?

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Yeah. I mean, you have European people coming to this country, and then you have a group of folk who are coming from a number of West African nations and some Central African nations, and they're also bringing their own knowledge about healing and medical care. And so I often tell students about an African enslaved man named Onesimus. I mean, obviously this is a name that was given to him by his owner. And he was gifted to a minister named Cotton Mather. And Cotton Mather was not just a minister, but an author and an intellectual, and a leader in colonial America. And in colonial America—I mean, as we're experiencing it now with this global pandemic—there were always these epidemics happening. And as people are dying from smallpox, Cotton Mather notices that his enslaved workers are not dying. Some of them are not even becoming sick. And he wants to know why, and so Onesimus tells him in his nation they practice inoculation.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: And so Onesimus is freed because of this. And Cotton Mather passes this on. It later circulates several decades later to General George Washington, right, before there's a United States, before he becomes the first president. He has to make a public health decision because his troops are dying because smallpox has reared its head again. And George Washington inoculates his troops. You know, it's a really contentious topic. People are outraged when they find out that, in fact, this information comes from an African-born person who was enslaved. You know, they think that it could be witchcraft. I mean, all kinds of things. But George Washington inoculates his troops. And guess what? They live. And they're able to fight in the Battle of Bunker Hill, and they win. And it really, some folk argue, changes the course of the war. And it's a public health initiative that comes from the knowledge of West African people. And so there are ways that you see African knowledge about how to heal that have really impacted early American history, even at the colonial level.

Bethany Jay: That's such a great story. I love that Onesimus's story is one where an enslaved person's medical knowledge leads to these advances in medicine. As you talk about in your book, one of the very common scenarios is one where enslaved people's bodies are used to promote the health and comfort of enslavers.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Oh, my goodness, yeah. I mean, teeth to create dentures would often be from enslaved people. Food was meted out to enslaved people, and so they weren't supping on sugary sweets, right? And so George Washington—you know, we learned as children, I don't know if children are still being taught this, I hope not, but I know when I was in elementary school I was taught oh, George Washington had dentures made of wood. No. In fact, two of his teeth were from an enslaved man.

Bethany Jay: Right. Can you give us an example or two of medical advances that have come through working with enslaved people or experimenting on enslaved people, as it were?

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Oh, yeah, there's so many. I talk about in my book a French-born physician who immigrates to the United States, and his name was Francois Marie Prevost. He performed two successful C-sections on enslaved women in Louisiana. He had first practiced performing C-sections on enslaved women in Haiti. And so he moves to Louisiana in the 1800s, and he continues this experimental work. And so he's been lauded for centuries as Francois Marie Prevost, the father of the C-section. A surgical method happened that revolutionizes gynecology, but it happens because the institution of slavery existed and Black women's bodies were very accessible.

Bethany Jay: Hmm.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: So many journals, medical journals during this time and medical case books are saturated with cases of enslaved people being used in this way. A physician or even a medical school can go to a slave owner, and they can say, "Hey, if your slaves were suffering from these conditions or illnesses, if you donate them to our school or allow me to perform these experiments on them, to fix them or to make them better, it's a good, it's a common good that I'm performing, because I'm increasing your property value, but I'm also advancing medicine."

Deirdre Cooper Owens: But there were also these beliefs about Black people. There are beliefs that Black people don't experience pain. Or if they do, it's so minimal that they can bear cutting, or they can bear really painful procedures in ways that white people cannot. So that means, "Oh! Of course Black women can give birth and don't experience pain. Oh, Black people can go through amputations of their limbs and not experience pain. Black people are in a state of intellectual arrested development, which means they don't have fear. They aren't afraid of surgeries or painful procedures." So doctors are using their bodies in ways that they would not use white patients.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: One of the clearest examples that I use for my students is the ways doctors would treat Black women for certain conditions. So there was a condition where, after women would give birth, sometimes there were tears. So they would have to be sutured or stitched. And the doctors believed that those surgeries were pretty painless for Black women. If a white woman, and in particular a white woman who was very wealthy or highly respected, suffered from the same condition, oftentimes she wouldn't even be approached because the doctor believed that she was so fragile she couldn't take the pain. And so what that means is ultimately the enslaved woman, her body is repaired surgically. But the white woman—I mean, it's really a cruel twist of fate—she's left to deal with the pain of that condition.

Bethany Jay: This idea about biological difference leads to some pretty devastating results in Philadelphia during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Yeah. 1793 and the yellow fever epidemic was ravaging the city of Philadelphia. And Benjamin Rush, who was a founding father, and he was also arguably the country's most well-respected physician, and known as the father of American medicine and also the father of American psychiatry, considered very progressive for his day—he believed in women's medical education, was a staunch anti-slavery advocate—Benjamin Rush believed, however, that Black people were immune from yellow fever, although Black people were dying in great numbers in Philadelphia. But he goes to two Black leaders—they were ministers and highly respected—Reverends Richard Allen, who was the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and also Absalom Jones.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: And he says, "Hey, I need you to recruit Black people to take care of sick white residents, because you all are hardier, you're sturdier," right? "This disease doesn't affect you." And although Richard Allen and Absalom Jones let him know that he was mistaken about this supposed immunity, this is a moment where Black people are really trying to prove they're worthy of citizenship. And so they recruit Black people, and guess what happens? Black people begin to die in even greater numbers. It wipes out about 10 percent of the Black population. Richard Allen, he is infected, and he nearly dies from his bout with yellow fever.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: But some white residents begin to say that Black people took advantage of white Philadelphians. This one guy, he publishes a tract, and he says, "Black residents, when they would be in the houses nursing these patients, they were stealing." And so, you know, they were really the great scourge on the city, not yellow fever. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen are like, "Wait a minute, we didn't want to do this. We were recruited. And then you have us doing"—and I'll use 21st-century language here—"You have us doing frontline work. We're the ones who are digging the ditches. We're nursing sick people. We're exposed. It's clear that we can become infected because many of us have died. And now, we're now being accused of avarice and theft."

Deirdre Cooper Owens: And so these two men, Reverends Jones and Allen, published a political tract. And it outlines all of the ways that these beliefs about Black people were rooted in discrimination. And so the first political tract written by Black leaders in the new nation was centered around medical racism.

Bethany Jay: It really is fascinating. And both the original accusation about Black Philadelphians during yellow fever and the refutation by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones are available online, and we'll link to those resources in the show notes.

Bethany Jay: That belief in biological difference hasn't necessarily gone away. Can you give us a couple of examples of where we see that legacy of the belief in biological difference?

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Oh, yeah. I mean, the one where Black people don't experience pain. There is a study that was done by the University of Virginia in 2014. The study was published in 2016, so it's a simple Google search. And several medical students and residents, they had undergone a study assessing their beliefs in pain management with regard to white patients and Black patients. And they believed that Black people didn't experience pain, that their bodies aged quicker, that Black people had thicker skin. I mean, these are the results that are coming from medical students and residents in the 21st century. It's very similar to these ideas of biological difference that stem from the 1800s, that Black people don't experience pain or Black people have less lung capacity than white people because of a study that was done in the 1850s by a physician named Samuel Cartwright.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Well, if you're talking about enslaved people in the 1850s who are living in cramped quarters, slave cabins that don't have insulation, it's a one-room shack where people are stuffing holes with paper and fabric, there's a big fireplace and chimney, there's no air circulation. Well, of course it's going to affect your ability to breathe.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Well, 2017, a study comes out. It was rife for statistical errors, but it claimed that race and biology indicated that the airways of asthmatic African Americans became more inflamed than those of asthmatic white Americans. But just as Samuel Cartwright didn't provide context, the same thing with this 2017 study. Right? So yes, do Black people or African Americans suffer more from asthma than white folk in the US? Yes. Yes, they do. But the context is, in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, you have more environmental hazards like air pollution from highways, from factories. There are disparities in access to high quality health care. And so when the context is provided, you see it has nothing to do with biology, but it has everything to do with the factors that create these kinds of conditions.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: And so you have these beliefs that have this lingering effect, it really is medical racism from the 18th and 19th centuries, still penetrating the ways that scientists and doctors believe.

Bethany Jay: How do we help students to understand the difference between the sort of faulty science that claims that there are distinct biological differences among races with environmental and contextual factors that do lead to different health outcomes at times for people of different races?

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Yeah. I remember when I was teaching students who were largely freshmen, they were just coming from high school. And so a lot of their information, you know, sometimes was anecdotal, you know, like, "I thought only Black people got sickle cell."

Bethany Jay: Right.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: It was an evolutionary response to malaria. And so anybody who was living in an area where there were bodies of water that had lots of mosquitoes, it becomes the body's response. So whether you're Greek, whether you are from Bali, whether you're from Nigeria, any place that's near a large body of water, that's the body's response to protecting itself from malaria. So if we were to think about race as the indicator, it's going to lead us down a wrong path every time.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History, and I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries. We prepare detailed show notes for each episode of this podcast, so that you can use what you learn here in the classroom. You'll find relevant resources, as well as a full transcript, complete with links to materials mentioned by our guests. You can find them at LearningForJustice.org/podcasts. Let's return now to Bethany's conversation with Deirdre Cooper Owens.

Bethany Jay: When we think about slavery, right at the center of it is the value, the monetary value, to put it very bluntly, of Black people's bodies, and in the case of obstetrics, Black women's reproductive potential. And so how does the reproductive value of enslaved people impact enslaved women?

Deirdre Cooper Owens: That's a really great question, because everything was bound up in the issue of money. A lot of really wealthy men were interested in the reproductive health of Black women, because they can't import Africans. The Constitution made that illegal in 1807, and so that means making sure that when Black women are pregnant and Black women give birth, trying to create the best health that we can for them under that condition. And I am using "best." I know you all can't see me because it's a podcast, but I'm using air quotes when I say that.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: You can Google databases that have slave ads. Oftentimes we'll look at these ads and they'll say "Breeding woman." So that indicates to someone interested in purchasing an enslaved woman that she can give birth.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Or that she's already a mother, that she has several children. And so that increases her economic value for the person who owns her. A lot of enslaved women would have children by their owners—not of their own free will, but because they were considered property. And typically, when you had people of European descent who were enslaving others, even in Europe, the condition of the child was not connected through the mother, it was always connected through the father. But what made the US unique: slavery, the condition of slavery was passed to a child by its mother. And what this means is it doesn't matter who the father was. It could literally be Thomas Jefferson, who indeed had children by his—the woman that he owned, Sally Hemings. Or it could be an enslaved man, a free man, a white man, a native man. It didn't matter, because if the condition passed onto the children from the father, that meant there could be a loss of enslaved children.

Bethany Jay: And when I talk about that rule that the child follows the condition of the mother, I often try to talk about the fact that it's very easy to know who the mother of a child is. It's much harder to know who the father is.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Yes.

Bethany Jay: And my students often pick up on the way that that rule incentivizes the sexual assault of Black women on the part of their enslavers.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Exactly.

Bethany Jay: How does the relationship between medicine and African-American people change as we transition from slavery to freedom, from slavery to Jim Crow, as it were?

Deirdre Cooper Owens: It's interesting. One would think, "Okay, everything's going to suddenly become better from slavery to freedom." And what we find is that same fraught history. There's a belief that, in essence, freedom was not necessarily a good thing for the health of Black people—mentally, but also physically. All of a sudden, the same ways that white physicians and scientists had been writing about Black people as stronger and hardier, you know, possessing a kind of superhuman strength to withstand pain, all of a sudden you have, they're weaker. And so from life insurance policies to medical insurance, you start to see that Black people have to pay more in terms of their insurance, these premiums.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: You also have a disregard for Black women's reproductive care, because there's no longer an economic price on the heads of Black people. The hospitals become segregated by law. Because if someone owns you, you're going to be treated at a hospital that the slave owner builds.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: And so sometimes that means that he's treating Black and white patients. When Jim Crow happens, the law essentially says that Black people and white people have to be treated separately. You now have these Black hospitals that are not Black-run. And the Black hospitals tend to be poorly-funded. I mean, there were all kinds of studies that were conducted by the government on Black people. They tended to be large scale and really unethical and medically irresponsible. And informed consent doesn't really seem to be applicable for Black people. This is during the age of freedom, and so it becomes the starting point for Black people having a real distrust of the medical field because where's the great change between slavery and freedom? They're not seeing a lot of it, in terms of their treatment.

Bethany Jay: And as you point out, one of those big changes is the erasure of monetary value associated with Black people. And so the idea of preserving Black women's reproductive health completely disappears, right? And we make a left turn into seeing Black women's reproductive lives as burdensome or dangerous. How does that impact Black women?

Deirdre Cooper Owens: We start to see that Black midwives, who were responsible for being the providers for Black women during pregnancy and childbirth, they are essentially being wiped out. There are all of these licensures that are being created, and because of very stringent and oftentimes very racist practices that leave them out, Black people are not able to get licenses. And so you begin to see a decline in the number of Black midwives. And so that greatly impacts the maternal health of Black women. We also see forced sterilizations of women in their early '20s. They would go in for routine exams, maybe there's something wrong, you know, they're suffering from migraines or, you know, they have a limp. They would find out years later that they had hysterectomies performed on them. The doctors, without their consent or knowledge, took away their ability to give birth.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: And so these kinds of things are happening. But also the ways that Black women started to be seen—and especially Black mothers are starting to be seen as financial burdens.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: And when you roll into the 20th century, you now have language like "welfare queens," the idea that Black women, single mothers are gaming the system. In the 1980s in particular, with the rise of crack cocaine, we have the idea that only Black mothers could give birth to crack babies. You know, Black women were not the only people smoking crack in the '80s. You know, that these little babies were somehow going to topple the US economy. I mean, there were all kinds of news stories, and senators making these pronouncements that these were going to be the single most expensive financial burden in the United States in its history. And then 20, 25 years later, you find out it was not true at all.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Learning for Justice has a special opportunity just for educators. After listening to this episode, you can earn a certificate for one hour of professional development. All you have to do is go to LearningForJustice.org/PodcastPD—PD for "professional development." That's podcastPD, all one word. Then enter the unique code word for this episode: consent—all lowercase. You'll also find a link in the show notes. It's a great way to get even more out of Teaching Hard History.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: In terms of studies that were conducted by the government on Black people, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study is probably the most famous. In 1932, the government wants to find out the ways that certain diseases affect the human body. And so Tuskegee, Alabama, is a town that has a disproportionate number of Black men who suffer from syphilis. And so the federal government and also the National Institute of Health partner with Tuskegee Institute, a really famous Black college. And so the leaders at this college, which is seen as the crown jewel in the Black community, they do a lot of recruitment, and they go to institutions that black people trust: the church, they go to schools. They have trusted community members and leaders who speak out on behalf of this study. And almost 600 Black men sign up.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: They weren't told they had syphilis, they were told they had "bad blood." "You have bad blood, and we're going to set up a study to help you." And they don't know that they're signing up in 1932 for a study that would last 40 years. In fact, the government was simply interested in finding out how the Negro male—that's what Black people were called then—would respond to syphilis throughout the course of their lives.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: The federal government, the National Institute of Health, they were utilizing this study to not cure Black men, but to see how the disease would ravage their bodies. These men are never treated for their disease. By the 1940s, when penicillin is known to cure syphilis, they're given a placebo.

Bethany Jay: That's amazing.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Black men died because they were never treated. They passed on the disease to their wives and their girlfriends and their children. And it really devastates the community. And so the 1950s roll around and the 1960s and the '70s. And the government is still doing this study. And there are a couple of doctors who find out about it and they're like, "Wait, what you're doing is wrong. This is unethical." And the government ignores the doctors' pleas, and in fact blacklists many of the doctors. And it wasn't until a whistleblower goes to the press in 1972 and a story breaks that the government finally suspends its study.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: After much petitioning by Black and white public health officials and activists and family members and some of the victims, President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, 60-something years after the start of the Tuskegee study, finally issues a formal apology to the victims and their families. An apology is issued after many of the players have died.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: I think Tuskegee is a culmination of the ways that medical racism had been at play from the colonial period all the way to the so-called age of freedom. It's enraging and in some ways unsurprising.

Bethany Jay: It's amazing, and as you point out, at the base of a lot of this are these issues of informed consent, of people knowing what they are signing up for or not, whether it's the forced sterilizations of women, or whether it's the idea that you're getting treatment and you're not. The other really famous example that's become prominent in recent years is Henrietta Lacks.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Yes.

Bethany Jay: And what happened to her. And again, the idea of informed consent there. Can you talk with us just a little bit about Henrietta Lacks?

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Sure. She was a relatively young woman, a young wife and mother. Goes to Johns Hopkins Hospital and finds out she has cancer. And unfortunately, she dies. The doctors harvested her cells. And what they found, it was amazing. She had these cells that kept regenerating. Most cells die outside of the body. All of a sudden, here you have this woman who—I mean, she's dead, but her cells are living. So the doctors are calling them immortal. And in fact, they named the cells after her—HeLa Cells. Capital H and small e, and then Capital L-a.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: And so the doctors are just kind of like, "Hey! We have these immortal cells," and they're sending it to their colleagues all around the world. And all of a sudden, you have research labs and hospitals and research teams and biotech companies, they're all profiting from the knowledge of Henrietta Lacks's cells.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: It's kind of hard to get informed consent from a patient who has died. But in those cases, you're supposed to get informed consent from the family. Henrietta Lacks's family was not informed of what the doctors did. And they never gave consent. The family doesn't find out until decades later. Decades later! And these places are really profiting from the knowledge of her cells, and these cells have gone into space. They're everywhere around the world. They've been on all the continents in research. Her family doesn't even have medical insurance, they're so poor.

Bethany Jay: Oh, jeez. Yeah.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: And so in 2021—remember, she dies in the 1950s, in 2021, her family finally gets the legal representation so that they can sue the biotech companies who have profited from their mother's immortal cells. So sometimes when people think, "Oh, we're talking about somebody who died in the 1950s," the legacy of these practices show up in the 21st century.

Bethany Jay: It's quite amazing, and it speaks, as you say, to the legacy and the long-term impact of these medical practices.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Yeah. Yeah. When you think about all of those things that we've talked about, I think what for me is probably the most promising in the 21st century is now we know better. So we know better. And we now have a government arm, which is the CDC, the Center for Disease Prevention and Control, who finally said in 2021, "You know what? Medical racism is a public health issue. And so now we are going to create steps to combat this." And so a part of that is through education, a part of that is through community outreach, a part of it is through creating pipelines for young students of color to become doctors and nurses. And so we are finally addressing these things through the implementation of structures that are designed to be more inclusive. And equity sits at the center of it. And so that's what makes me hopeful that hopefully in 50 years, we won't have to have another podcast. That this really can be about teaching history, and not necessarily having history be in conversation with the present.

Bethany Jay: That's absolutely fabulous, and with so many things that we've talked about this season on the podcast, there's hope, but there's also work and diligence that needs to happen to make sure that that hope turns into something tangible.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Right.

Bethany Jay: And hopefully our listeners will take up that charge. So thanks so much for being here, Dr. Cooper Owens. It was a pleasure to talk with you.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Yes, thank you so much.

Bethany Jay: Thank you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Deirdre Cooper Owens is the Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is the Director of the Humanities in Medicine program. Dr. Cooper Owens is the author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology. She is also the Director of the Program in African-American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, where you can find an online exhibition called Déjà Vu, We've Been Here Before: Race, Health, and Epidemics.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and more. You can find award-winning films and classroom-ready texts at LearningForJustice.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the Jim Crow era and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. In our fourth season, we put Jim Crow under the spotlight, examining its history and lasting impact.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks to Dr. Cooper Owens for sharing her insights with us. This podcast was produced by Mary Quintas and senior producer Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. "Music Reconstructed" is produced by Barrett Golding. And Cory Collins provides content guidance. Amelia Gragg is our intern. Kate Shuster is the series creator. And our managing producer is Miranda LaFond.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: If you like what you’ve heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University, and your host for Teaching Hard History.

References

• Nature, Henrietta Lacks: science must right a historical wrong
• McGill University, 40 Years of Human Experimentation in America: The Tuskegee Study
• PBS Independent Lens, Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States
• Bitch Media, Fannie Lou Hamer Sounded the Alarm on Forced Sterilization
• Time, I Am Not Your Negro, James Baldwin and a Moment in History
• Deirdre Cooper Owens, Bio
• Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
• Deirdre Cooper Owens, History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• Teaching Hard History, Diverse Experience of the Enslaved (podcast)
• Forbes, Meet Onesimus, The Enslaved Man Who Saved Colonial Boston From Smallpox
• The Washington Post, Enslaved African Onesimus taught Cotton Mather how to inoculate against smallpox
• George Washington's Mount Vernon, Smallpox
• JSTOR Daily, Were George Washington's Teeth Taken from Enslaved People?
• American Journal of Public Health, Black Maternal and Infant Health: Historical Legacies of Slavery
• Smithsonian Magazine, How the Politics of Race Played Out During the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic
• Harvard Library Bulletin, "Justice to Our Colour Demands It": Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s Narrative of African Americans in Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic
• PubMed, Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites
• Equal Justice Initiative, Pro-Slavery Doctor Claims Enslaved People's Desire to Be Free Is "Curable Mental Disease"
• Science News for Students, Racial discrimination may aggravate asthma, study finds
• The New York Times, People of Color Breathe More Hazardous Air. The Sources Are Everywhere.
• American Bar Association, Implicit Bias and Racial Disparities in Health Care
• HHS Office of Minority Health, Sickle Cell Disease Awareness
• National Archives, The Slave Trade
• Yale University, Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal
• Freedom on the Move, A database of fugitives from American Slavery
• Encyclopedia Virginia, "Negro womens children to serve according to the condition of the mother" (1662)
• Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, Sally Hemings
• African American Registry, The Black Hospital in America, a story
• The New York Times, Crack Babies: The Epidemic That Wasn't
• The Washington Post, 'You’ve got bad blood': The horror of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment
• Learning for Justice, Bill Clinton apologizes for Tuskegee Experiment
• Johns Hopkins Hospital, The Legacy of Henrietta Lacks
• CDC, Racism is a Serious Threat to the Public’s Health
• Library Company of Philadelphia, Déjà Vu, We've Been Here Before: Race, Health, and Epidemics

 

Return to Episode Listing

Resources

• Learning For Justice: Lesson, Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System (grades 9-12)
• National Council for the Social Studies: Lesson, Slavery After the Civil War: The Convict-Lease System, 1866–1928 (grades 6-8)
• Alabama Learning Exchange, Convict Leasing in Alabama: A System That Re-Enslaved Blacks After the Civil War (grade 11)
• Learning For Justice: Article, Teaching About Mass Incarceration: The Ongoing Narrative of Racial Oppression
• Learning For Justice: Article, From Slavery to School Discipline
• Learning For Justice: Article, ‘When They See Us’ in Schools

Transcript

Bethany Jay: George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Philando Castile. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Their names are familiar to anyone who watches the news, reads a newspaper, or scrolls through social media. They have become some of the most prominent examples of both the deadly police violence used against Black Americans and the systemic racism that has allowed it to go relatively unchecked. And they have become synonymous with the declaration and the movement “Black Lives Matter.”

Lawn signs, hashtags, t-shirts, and other ephemera proclaiming Black Lives Matter have become prominent in our communities, at sporting events, and in our online profiles. And, largely because of the public attention Black Lives Matter has brought to the issue, street art and memorials depicting the victims of police violence have appeared across the United States and around the world.

The hashtag Black Lives Matter first appeared after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a civilian who shot Trayvon Martin in 2012 and was acquitted on murder charges. It gained traction and visibility after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police. Today, the movement is guided by the mission “to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.” While their declaration, Black Lives Matter, is known around the world, the names Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi—the three Black women who created the Black Lives Matter Movement—are far less familiar.

On July 13, 2013, when Patrisse Marie Cullors posted to Facebook: “declaration: black bodies will no longer be sacrificed for the rest of the world’s enlightenment. I am done. I am so done. Trayvon, you are loved infinitely #blacklivesmatter,” she was, in fact, reigniting a movement—a fight against vigilantism and the legal system that allowed it—a fight that was started by Ida B. Wells during Jim Crow.

Like the founders of Black Lives Matter, Wells’ movement began in response to vigilante violence. She was already an activist when her friends, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Steward owned the People’s Grocery Company in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1892, a group of white men attacked the People’s Grocery Company because it was taking business away from white-owned grocery stores. During the attack, the owners of People’s Grocery defended their store, shooting three police officers that were part of the crowd. Arrested and brought to jail, Moss, McDowell, and Steward were later targeted by a lynch-mob and murdered. Wells spoke out. She advised Black Memphians to leave the city, saying “There is… only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.” As a result of her journalism, Wells was forced to move to Chicago for her own safety.

But she didn’t end her crusade against lynching. From Chicago, she published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. In this tract, Wells brought together data from lynchings across the country and exposed the lie that these acts were, as one article in the Memphis paper, The Commercial, put it: “the most prompt, speedy, and extreme punishment” to “hold in check the horrible and beastial propensities of the Negro race.”

In response, Wells argued, “…the butcheries of Black men at Barnwell, S.C., Carrolton, Miss., Waycross, Ga., and Memphis, Tenn., have gone on; also the flaying alive of a man in Kentucky, the burning of one in Arkansas, the hanging of a fifteen-year-old girl in Louisiana, a woman in Jackson, Tenn., and one in Hollendale, Miss., until the dark and bloody record of the South shows 728 Afro-Americans lynched during the past eight years. Not fifty of these were for political causes; the rest were for all manner of accusations from that of rape of white women, to the case of the boy Will Lewis who was hanged at Tullahoma, Tenn., last year for being drunk and "sassy" to white folks.”

Wells continued to expose vigilante violence and call out a legal system that either turned a blind eye or actively supported it, saying, “[The South’s] white citizens are wedded to any method however revolting, any measure however extreme, for the subjugation of the young manhood of the race. They have cheated him out of his ballot, deprived him of civil rights or redress therefor in the civil courts, robbed him of the fruits of his labor, and are still murdering, burning and lynching him.”

“The result is a growing disregard of human life… especially where an Afro-American is concerned.”

In other words, Black Lives Matter.

I’m Bethany Jay, and this is Teaching Hard History. We’re a production of Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This season, we’re offering a detailed look at how to teach the history of Jim Crow, starting with Reconstruction. In each episode we explore a different topic—walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material, and offering practical classroom exercises.

We know that talking about the realities of the Jim Crow era can be emotional and complex. And this podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges. This episode contains graphic descriptions of racial violence, and we will discuss strategies for sharing this difficult content with your students.

In this episode, historians Robert Chase and Brandon Jett discuss the Jim Crow era legal systems that evolved to maintain control of Black lives and labor. They’ll also explore the connections between these early mechanisms of control and the more modern and familiar legal apparatuses of the justice system, from policing to penitentiaries.

And we’ll begin by taking a closer look at convict leasing. Dr. Chase is the author of We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America. He spoke with my co-host Hasan Kwame Jeffries about what his research uncovered.

I’m so glad you can join us. Let’s get started.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Slavery was a system designed to exploit the labor of African people. And when slavery ended in 1865, the desire to control the labor of African Americans did not dissipate. But instead, new systems emerged to replace the labor controls that were lost once the institution of slavery was abolished. I'm really excited to welcome to the podcast Dr. Robert Chase, my man Robert, to help us make sense of what came after the institution of slavery and how that connects explicitly and specifically to the criminal justice system. Robert, welcome aboard.

Robert T. Chase: Thank you, Hasan. I'm so glad to be here. I always love being in conversation with you. And this is such a pertinent topic both to today's struggles, but also to how we understand our past and indeed our troubled past. And I love the content of the show, so thank you for having me.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Glad to have you. And let's dive right in. Help us understand what comes after emancipation.

Robert T. Chase: What comes after emancipation is complicated. Historians have made arguments about a rupture, whether or not what comes after emancipation is a moment of capitalist development. And they've also made arguments about it being actually a seamless shift to a new kind of slavery. And I think one of the things to understand about convict leasing that's really critical is that it was both. It was both a system of a return to enslaving African American people through coerced labor and through a system where the criminal justice system took them from their families, took them from their homes and from their communities, and into a coerced labor. And it was also a system designed for the modernization of the American South and for its development along capitalist lines, along industrial lines. And of course, because it was bound up in very important changes in the law, in the criminal justice system and in the constitutional law, it also meant that it was operating within the framework not of slavery, even as it replicated it, but of criminalization. And so it immediately criminalized Blackness, as the historian Khalil Muhammad has written about in the north in Philadelphia. But in the American South, the very moment of emancipation is dealing with problems in the South, having to do with finances, having to do with emancipation, having to do with a mobile African American community who wants to move off the plantation and into something new—as a politicized body of people who had fought for their own emancipation by leaving the plantation during the Civil War—and then attempts to push them back into a system of oppression through the auspices of a new criminal justice system.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You mentioned convict leasing as being one of the core components of this new criminal justice system that is designed in large part to control Black labor. You know, my experience in the classroom is that when I introduce students to convict leasing, they've never heard of it. And I have to back up and explain just in very rudimentary terms, what it actually was. How do you define what convict leasing was? Could you provide a broad definition that would help teachers explain it to students? And then I want us to talk about the legal aspects of it and how it evolves over time.

Robert T. Chase: It is the selling of prison labor, principally African Americans, to private interests. The state was creating new laws that criminalize African American people for a variety of small offenses, such as vagrancy. And they ratchet up the cost of those laws. For instance, the Pig Law in Mississippi, something that had been a misdemeanor, taking a pig or something off the local farm and making that a felony with a long prison sentence. But once given a prison sentence, they were then sold to private interests. Their labor was sold, and in fact, it could be sold from one private company to the next or person, from coal mines, to road building, to the railroad construction in the American South to steel manufacture.

And convict leasing is not just in the American South. The North leased prisoners as well, but it begins first in Alabama in 1846, and it lasts really until 1928 when Herbert Hoover was vying for the White House. And it did exist in both the north and the South, but there are some differences. Alex Lichtenstein, in his work on the convict lease in Georgia, argued that, "Only in the south did the state give up its control of the prison population to the contractor. And only in the south did the physical penitentiary become synonymous with private enterprise." So that by the end of reconstruction in 1877, every former Confederate state, except Virginia, had adopted the practice of leasing—largely African American prisoners—into private hands. So it's a 50-year moment in the criminal justice system of leasing, African American largely, prisoners into private hands, private companies from, well, beginning in the mid 1860s, but really accelerating in the 1870s until the early 1920s.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But how, Robert, is this even legally possible given the 13th Amendment?

Robert T. Chase: The 13th Amendment has that exception clause that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States…" And it's within that loophole of the exception clause that allowed states to then make someone what became known as "a slave of the state." As the Virginia decision, Ruffin v. Commonwealth declared in 1871 that "a convicted felon is, for the time being, a slave of the state. He is civilly dead and his estate, if he has any, is administered like that of a dead man." And out of that came a whole series of laws that accelerated the criminal justice system. So, for instance, a minor theft like picking a strawberry, for instance, something that was kind of open and common during the system of enslavement, where slaves lived in an agricultural space, where they might have access to some of the agricultural goods and products of the plantation. So picking a strawberry in that context might not create punishment. But in this moment of emancipation, picking that same strawberry could land them into the system of convict leasing.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Could you explain a little bit more about what you mean and what scholars mean by the criminalization of Blackness and how that evolves from the era of slavery into this new era of freedom?

Robert T. Chase: It's important to understand that convict leasing was initiated almost immediately after emancipation. It traversed the moment of enslavement to freedom and then re-enslavement through the criminal justice system. Because the system was so potentially profitable and revolutionary for modernizing the South, there was an effort to look for any opportunity to re-enslave or re-coerce Black labor. We can look at the Black Codes, for instance, passed immediately after emancipation. These restricted African American people's access and rights to own property, conduct business, buy and lease land or move freely through public space, because public space itself was criminalized. And that was a contentious space, because the first thing that people who had been enslaved wanted to do was to reclaim their mobility, to move off the plantation where they had been. But planters were very interested in securing their labor through labor contracts. And if one didn't sign those labor contracts, that might get one a prison sentence. And that prison sentence would be then leased to these private companies.

Vagrancy laws criminalized public space, and any African American man out of work, for instance. Or failure to pay a tax, could be counted as vagrancy. Other laws included things like loud talk in a public place, engaging in sexual activity, or riding a freight car without a ticket, challenging employers without permission.

If you don't mind, I'm just going to read a little bit of this Mississippi Black Code: "That all freedmen, free negroes and mulattos in the State, over the age of eighteen years, found on the second Monday in January, 1866, or thereafter, with no lawful employment or business, or found unlawfully assembling themselves together, either in the day or night [time], and all white persons assembling themselves with freedmen, free negroes or mulattos… shall be deemed vagrants, and on conviction [thereof] shall be fined.” And in the case of a freed man, free negro or mulatto, $50. A white man, $200." But what's going on in this Black Code? One, they're criminalizing the idea of vagrancy, which simply means being in public space or moving in public space. They're also criminalizing the association of white folks and Black folks in that public space. And so that is one of those examples of how this criminality worked.

Another that's often cited is what's known as the Pig Law, passed in 1866 in Mississippi. And this redefined grand larceny offenses that had previously been minor misdemeanors, punishable now by five years, to include minor theft of a farm animal or any property valued at $10 or more. This Pig Law had a particular effect. Arrests quadrupled from 272 in 1874 to 1072 in 1877. So it lengthened the stay of someone in the convict lease system and made more severe the penalty. But in practice, these laws that were passed about loud talk, engaging in sexual activity, abrogating a lifetime labor contract, riding a freight car without a ticket, how they were practiced and how they were policed was targeted and focused on the Black community with the knowledge that incarcerating someone who was African American, one, meant that you had cheap labor for the convict lease system. But two, it also meant that the criminal justice system itself, through the process of criminalization and through the laws itself, was upholding the creation of the Jim Crow, white supremacist space of racial oppression.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One of the cornerstones of the institution of slavery was the use of violence. Do we see a similar exercise or use of violence when it comes to convict leasing?

Robert T. Chase: Sadly, I think it is impossible to root out violence from the criminal justice system. Violence is the very edifice that upholds the criminal justice system, and we see that particularly through the convict lease system. First, let me say that the daily labor itself was a punishment all of its own. Convicts were woken up at 4 a.m. in the morning, immediately put to work. That work was dangerous—in mines, on industrial lines—where during slavery, the loss of an enslaved person was also the loss of someone's commodity, someone's access to credit. A slave owner would not want to have one of their enslaved people die from their labor. That would be a loss of their wealth. But within convict leasing, they adopted the idea, as one lessee said, "One dies, get another." Also, the title of Matthew Mancini's book on convict leasing.

The death rates among leased convicts were ten times higher than the death rates of prisoners in non-lease states. In the first two years that Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly 20% of them died. And the following year, mortality rose to 35%. The fourth, nearly 45% of them died, almost half. As one convict said, "This place is nine kinds of hell and suffering death every day here." Of the five-and-a-half decades, 55 years of convict leasing, historians estimate that as many as 30,000 people died. So life became less valuable.

Violence happened within the individual camps. There were overseers. There were whippings, the lash, as they called them. They called the lash "a certain kind of medicine" to push them back into labor. There also were torture. One was called 'the come along,' which are steel bracelets that are snapped onto the wrists and fastened by chain to a small metal crossbar. And the lessees, the owner of these convicts, could twist the crossbar and twist a man's arms into a knot like a pretzel. And this would force him to his knees and potentially break his bones. Or the chains, when a prisoner was placed in handcuffs attached to a 30-inch long steel bar, which was then hoisted with a pulley until the man hung clear of the floor and he was suspended, stretched out. There was another really sort of medieval design called the 'alakazan degree,' in which a victim's ankles were cuffed behind his back and his feet drawn upward until his entire body was in the shape of a bow. And this was an incredible amount of torture. One convict said, "The intense agony inflicted by this method of torture is indescribable. Every muscle throbs with pain."

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I mean, what you describe is just, is just horrifying. Often when we think about convict leasing, we think about men and boys being caught up in the system. But they certainly weren't the only ones. Women get trapped in the convict leasing system as well, Black women in particular. Could you say a little bit about their experiences, both what they were and perhaps how they differed in some respects from the experiences of their male counterparts?

Robert T. Chase: They comprised a small number of the convict labor. Black women in Georgia, for instance, comprised about 2 to 3% over the years 1873 to 1908. But importantly, they represented 98% of all leased women prisoners. So the process of leasing a woman prisoner was exclusively meant for Black women. They, in some cases, did the same work as men. They worked in iron mills. In some cases, they were forced to dress as men as well. The historian Talitha LeFlouria calls that denial of their womanhood a kind of a social rape. They also, of course, experienced medical terror, as LeFlouria calls it, in that they had to have their bodies inspected. And they were stripped often in front of other male prisoners. And they were housed alongside of the men, in many occasions. In Georgia in 1874, one keeper of the convicts wrote this, "We have on hand about twenty-five female convicts, one of the number white, apportioned promiscuously to the several leases and employed as cooks, washer, women and at other light work in and about the prison quarters. They have separate lockups at night and with strict orders to keep them apart from the males. Still, the guard and trustees come in contact with them. And the result is there are children born in the penitentiary." And the legislative committee found similarly that, "In some of the camps, men and women chained together and occupying the same sleeping bunks. The result is that there are now in the penitentiary twenty-five," and this is their term, "bastard children, ranging from three months to five years of age. And many of the women are now far advanced in pregnancy."

So that also meant that there were children born in bondage, some perhaps of a consensual relationship, but more often than not a forced relationship of sexual violence. It's difficult to teach that, but important to talk about it because that was an experience that had broader cultural and societal ramifications for it did that association we've been talking about of associating Blackness, in this case Black womanhood, with criminality. And uplifting white womanhood as a more Victorian, high-minded ideal, as these white women who may have been convicted of a similar crime would almost never be placed in a convict lease camp. And then finally, women received what these historians have called sexualized rituals of punishment, where they would be stripped down and forced to be nude in front of the male prisoners. And only women would take this position. They would force their head down to the ground between their legs and then whip them in that position. They also experience different kinds of torture arrangements. For instance, the ‘blind mule,’ where a prisoner would have a rope tied around a girl's wrist and then pulled onto a pulley, quite horrible, and hoisted in the air until her toes barely reached the ground.

I'll read one last document by Lizzie Boatwright, who offered this testimony of her whipping. And it's, it's hard to read but important to grapple with. The guard "whipped me and a Negro woman convict from Greene County twice each. Both whippings were to punish us for trivial offenses, one time because our feet were sore and we stopped on the side of the road to fix the rags so as to protect them from the heavy brogan shoes that we were wearing. He ordered us to take down our trousers. We begged him to take us where the men convicts could not see us exposed. And he answered, ‘[with a pejorative], you strip.’ One time I had my monthlies, and I told him so. But he said it made no difference. And so we stripped us down and beat our naked skin with a strap. Several male convicts were all about us when we were whipped.” So that is the example of the kind of sexualized violence that women faced that made their position even more perilous than that of the men.

And historians like Mary Ellen Curtin in her book Black Prisoners and Their World; Talitha LeFlouria's book on Black Women in the Convict Lease in Georgia, Chained in Silence; and Sarah Haley's book, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, have brought women to the fore. And so teachers need to reflect that and think about how the system operated for women.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, we need those kinds of reminders that there was a real human cost suffered by those who were victimized by this system, especially the women who suffered in this way. This is something that we need to always keep in mind, especially when we're dealing with this subject.

Robert T. Chase: Hard to talk about, but important.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Do you have recommendations and suggestions for teachers with regard to how they should approach this subject so that it is conveyed accurately and effectively, but with the sensitivity and care that it needs to be treated with in the classroom setting.

Robert T. Chase: How do we not get overwhelmed by violence itself when we're trying to create understanding and empathy? That's always a very hard question to answer, and I have two thoughts about that. The first is that when we're talking about systems of oppression, it is critically important that we deal with them directly and honestly, because the history had been to forget, to ignore, to not put in our textbooks this really critical story. And the reason why it is so critical is because it's a story that we're now reliving today through the system of mass incarceration. And we cannot fully understand, countenance or confront today's mass incarceration unless we also understand its origins being bound up in the moment after emancipation and a return to a kind of re-enslavement and coerced prison labor.

But even within that, the other thing to think about, as a teacher, is to also tell stories of resistance, survivals, so that these people are not just being acted upon but also have agency and voice. And also to connect it not just to a series of lurid tales of violence, torture or sexual violence, but to the system that drives it and bounds everyone in it—white and Black—a system that relies on exploitative labor and sexual violence.

So, for instance, I think it's really important to point out that convict leasing also depressed wages. It also meant that people were less likely to join a labor union. So it had consequences for even those who were not incarcerated. And so that connection, that human empathy that we need to have, also needs to come with understanding the systemic problem of a system of industrialized re-enslavement and coerced labor. What that meant to people both bound up in that system and those having to live within a system of such exploitation who were not in prison but who had their lives impacted by it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When we think about the parallels to the institution of slavery, sometimes we get caught up in just looking at the brutality and thinking about it as this senseless, inhumane system. But it was for a purpose. The controlling of Black labor, the use of violence, was for a purpose. And that was to generate some profit for some people. And so who was profiting from this new system?

Robert T. Chase: I think there are a couple of things to note. First, that the criminal justice system in the American South before the Civil War was very small. Most Southern states had perhaps one penitentiary and very small prison populations. After the convict lease, the movement of prisoners out of the penitentiary, either to the fields or to these industrial spaces, were those occupied mostly by African American people. For instance, in Georgia, the antebellum penitentiary, in its entire existence from 1817 to 1854, received only 1343 prisoners. In 1850, Georgia with a total population of 900,000, had only 43 prisoners and convicted only 80. But in 1868, just three years after emancipation, Georgia had 205 prisoners and 177 of them were African American, and only 28 were white. And thereafter, year after year, African Americans comprised 90% of the Georgia prison population.

So it was a system that shifted from a penitentiary that held largely white prisoners. African Americans in the South were disciplined on either the prison plantation or through extralegal violence, through vigilante white violence, not so much within an institutional setting of the criminal justice system. And the crucial point to your question is that this process not only conditioned questions of race, but it also created a new capitalist design in the American South. And we have to understand that the convict lease system also created political power within the system. It created what historians have called that Bourbon southern alliance between capitalists and planters.

There was political power in the lease, for instance, Joseph Emerson Brown, who called for the abolition of the penitentiary in Georgia in 1865, then made a fortune leasing convicts as a senator in the 1880s. Jeremiah W. South, a lessee in Kentucky, who leased convicts from 1869 until his death, supposedly exercised greater political power over Kentucky government than any other official. "He controlled the legislators," it was said, "as absolutely as he controlled the convicts." And then in Alabama—from state to state we can see this—Governor Robert Patton, for instance, in a return for the sum of just $5, leased for six years 374 prisoners to a firm called Smith and McMillan. And this firm, Smith and McMillan, was actually controlled by the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad System, which he had invested in. So it's this direct linkage between Southern political power, and the development of the convict lease as a modern capitalist system and the profits that come out of this system, that we can see across various Southern states, including Georgia, where Governor Bullock, who leads the entire penitentiary to the railroad contractors, Grant Alexander and Company, for a very small amount, 3 cents a day. And at the end of that year, Grant Alexander and Company held 109 convicts. And then they would invest in these railroads, for instance, and gained great profits from them.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So are we literally talking about the modernization of the South on the backs of African Americans who are imprisoned?

Robert T. Chase: Well, that's precisely it, Hasan. That's precisely it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mmm.

Robert T. Chase: It's about profitability. In Tennessee, for instance, the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, they charged the convict labor that allowed them to build the railroads that crisscross the American South. And it's estimated that that effort of using almost-free convict labor, paid very little per person to the state, that that gave them a $70,000 annual advantage over all the other mines that depended on free labor. So it thrust them into a position of being able to build more, faster and cheaper. And they're doing that, as you said, on the backs of Black labor.

And it's important to note that then Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad was then purchased by U.S. Steel. Right? U.S. Steel, the biggest national steel maker and the country, at the moment when steel was king during the Gilded Age outside of the South, in the north. And U.S. Steel acquired the Tennessee Coal, and Iron Railroad Company in 1907. So this is about creating a new breed of industrialist in the American South, men like John T. Milner and James W. Silas. Milner, who famously said that, "Negro labor can be made exceedingly profitable in manufacturing iron and in rolling mills, provided there is an overseer, a southern man who knows how to manage Negroes." And so that link is very clear, even in how they imagine the industrial world that they're building—industry, and capitalism and racial oppression.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The racial oppression. I want us to pause there and probe that a little bit, because I'm curious as to what the public justifications were. What rationalizations were being offered by those individuals, companies, politicians and the like, for this kind of inhumane treatment that enabled this system to proceed, as you said, for half a century?

Robert T. Chase: I think the first thing to note is that the inhumanity of it took time to come into the public's awareness and consciousness. There were moments where the public decried what was happening. But for the most part, at its inception, it was argued that this would create an economic boom that the South sorely needed. The South was beset with Confederate scrip, now worthless. The enslaved were not only coerced labor, they also meant access to credit. And the loss of that, in addition to a war-torn economy, devastated the American South. And what those who lived in the South saw was not the human degradation or the beatings, but they heard the beat of the railroad line coming through their town, the rush of mercantile interest through the mines or the steel mills that started to redevelop the American South.

And at its very beginnings, for instance, there also was, I think, a desire among white Southerners to find a system that would deal with some of the political energy that had been unleashed by Reconstruction, with African Americans going to Congress, in their state militia or police, taking up arms. And these whites wanted to re-instill white supremacy. And the criminal justice system allowed them to do that. In Mississippi, one future warden, A. Phillips, for instance, made a thorough study of what to do after emancipation with the penitentiary system. And he said in the study, "Emancipating the Negroes will require a system of penitentiaries. The one in Jackson," Jackson, Mississippi, "was nearly full when the courts had it, but little to do with the Negroes. So how will it be now after emancipation?" So a clear sense that the system of convict leasing was modernizing, industrializing the South, making it a more palatable space for capitalists and industry and, at the same time, creating the kind of racial oppression that those who were white elites wanted the South to embrace. So it also erected the Jim Crow South.

I would say too, Hasan, it had another advantage economically in the labor system for planters, in that while the industrial convict labor was going on this depressed wages in the American South. It also meant that organizing of labor unions in the American South would be more anemic. Because if one wanted to organize a labor union and you were African American, well, you could be then the target of the criminal justice system. So it depressed wages in the South, kept labor anemic and at the same time modernized it and brought to those who wanted to re-embrace white supremacy, a system to uphold it.

As the historian Edward Ayers said, "Convict leasing drew on the worst of the past," meaning enslavement or here a kind of re-enslavement, "and the worst of the future," meaning capitalism and the profitability margin that drove convict leasing.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And African Americans, whether they were caught up within the system or were viewing it from the outside, were clearly aware of what was happening. What were some of the ways in which they responded and resisted?

Robert T. Chase: Within the system, those who were convicted had a whole variety of ways to try to resist what James Scott called the everyday 'weapons of the weak.' Some things involved theft, taking a small amount of material out of a steel mill, for instance, malingering, slowing their labor, timing it in a way that they were trying to reserve whatever strength they had to get through their day. Women, for instance, they would burn the shirts of the convict laborer. They would burn these clothes. Escapes were common. In Georgia, between 1866 and 1877, 555 convicts attempted to make their escape, which tells us that they were trying to take freedom in their own hands, in the same way that runaways from slavery did just a generation before. The company, Grant Alexander and Company, one of the overseers wrote that he whipped convicts for, "disobeying orders, for not working, for impudence, for running away or plotting to run away, for fighting, for screaming from each other and for abusing stock." Now, while he talks about it in terms of punishment, all of the things that he's punishing them for are the convicts themselves trying to confront the system in the very few tools that they have at their disposal.

Bethany Jay: This is Teaching Hard History, and I'm Bethany Jay. We prepare detailed show notes for each episode of this podcast, so that you can use what you learn here in the classroom. You'll find relevant resources,as well as a full transcript, complete with links to materials mentioned by our guests. You can find them at LearningForJustice.org/podcasts. Let’s return now to Hasan’s conversation with Robert Chase.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We talked a little bit earlier about how the system of convict leasing ends. Could you explain what leads to its eventual demise? And then I want us to talk about what follows in its footsteps.

Robert T. Chase: Convict leasing was phased out across the South beginning in the late 19th century, continuing on in some places until the 1920s. Only two states completely abolished the lease before the end of the 19th century. But by 1920, only Alabama had failed to pass a law to end the system. So it was coming to its decline. Georgia ended in 1908, Mississippi and Tennessee by the 1890s, so it was a system in decline.

For a long time, historians argued that it ends because it's a blemish on the Southern sense of honor, of that Lost Cause rhetoric of a renewed New South coming at the same moment of Jim Crow. But historians, beginning in the mid 1990s, revised that to think about the ways in which two things happened. One, they were affected by some of the progressive humanitarian impulses. There were proceedings in state legislatures about its inhumanity. There were exposés that did damage the system. But at the end of the day, Hasan, it's not a matter, I think, of conscience, but it's the end of its profitability. In an economic downturn, you can fire someone when your business goes south, but you can't diminish the number of convict labor that you have. And so as the economic winds changed at the turn of the century, suddenly convict leasing went from being very cheap, and a way to modernize the South, to increasingly expensive.

And it's really important to point out that the oppression that we see in convict leasing just simply moved from the private sector to the public sector. Roadwork became really important, and that was run by the state. The state would take convicts that had been once part of the convict lease system in Georgia, for instance, and move them into developing roads all across the state. And then another thing I would note, it also created another form of white supremacy. In my own book, I call them prison plantations, but at the time they were called farms.

So let's talk about James Vardaman, elected in Mississippi in 1903, a populist champion of white supremacy. But he thought convict leasing was bad. He thought it was bad for poor whites, that it hurt them in the labor market. And he believed that it hurt the image of the New South and the idea that somehow plantation life for African Americans was benevolent or paternalistic. And he turned to what's known as Parchman Prison Farm, even calling it these false nomenclatures to create this idea of a bucolic return to a rural, ideal space. Parchman Farm returned prisoners from private companies back to the state. But there they labored like slaves, picking the cash crop of cotton, clearing the land, a return to agricultural work but for state-made use. For in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, a series of three successive laws at the national legislature more or less outlawed the private leasing of prisoners to companies or individuals, but it returned those prisoners to state-made use. And across the American South, prisoners continued to labor, but they did so for the benefit of the state. So it changed the shape of how the prison system operated in the American South, but not the fact of its racial oppression.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So does the desire to exploit Black labor then end when we see the end of the convict leasing system?

Robert T. Chase: No, far from it. Convict leasing propelled and placed Black labor at the center of the criminal justice system, but it never left that center once it was achieved. African Americans are continuously incarcerated in the system. But important to note that from the 1930s until the mid 1960s, the rates of incarcerated people who are African American are less than they are after the 1960s. On the eve of Brown v. Board of Education, African Americans are incarcerated at four times the rate of whites relative to their number in the population, so still more than whites. But after 1965, after the Civil Rights Act of '64, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the acceleration of mass incarceration leads us to a number today where African Americans are incarcerated almost twice as often as they had been on the eve of Brown v. Board of Education, seven times the rate of whites. And of course, we know that a prison population of nearly 2.2 million draws heavily on Black and brown populations. Latinos are the fastest growing number of prisoners, along with women, in the modern-day prison system, such that the majority of our prisons today are filled with African American and Latinx people.

And there they work. They work for over a $2 billion industry. They are paid an average daily wage of about 89 cents. Four states, including the one that I study, Texas, pays them nothing at all. So that is coerced labor with no pay. And the work that they do builds a prison industry. The tables and chairs that we have in our universities are bought by state-made prison use. Prisoners produce all manner of commercial goods. In some political campaigns recently, prisoners were the ones who made the phone calls for politicians calling for more law and order. So while it changed from the period of 1930 to 1979, in 1979 the national legislature passed the Prison Industries Reorganization Act, which in many ways, Hasan, returns us to a moment where prisoners can labor once again for private companies and for profit.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One thing has become clear as we've been discussing, that this is no simple thing. What suggestions do you have for teachers to help them unpack this history for their students?

Robert T. Chase: One thing I would suggest is that there's a vibrant literature of prisoner memoirs, stretching from the period of the convict lease system to today. In Texas, for instance, Andrew George wrote The Texas Convict in 1893 [(sic) A Texas Prisoner]. A very vibrant memoir was written by Charles C Campbell called Hell Exploded: An Exposition of Barbarous Cruelty and Prison Horrors. There's also a book called Mama Emma's Boy [(sic) Racehoss: Big Emma's Boy], which is about African American prison labor in Texas in the 1950s and 1960s.

But I would also say importantly that some of the other sources are these state legislative committees that reviewed the convict lease system. There also was just a plethora of material that one can find in newspapers on the system of convict leasing. And then, of course, African American organizations also tried to address this problem. For instance, Carrie Steele Logan and Martha Holsey found philanthropic institutions to keep children out of the prison system. And Carrie Logan then founded the Orphan's Home in Atlanta. Mary Church Terrell has written about the number of African Americans in the prison system, and particularly the children born through moments when convict guards sexually assaulted convict women who had no other choice but to consent.

I like to use, in my class, convict labor songs. I find them to be really powerful material. And we have recordings of these at the Smithsonian. Bruce Jackson, who was an anthropologist who went down to Texas in the 1960s, recorded prison work songs. Now, you know, they may have been changed a bit from convict leasing, but they're there. And he has a book called Wake Up Dead Man, as well as a recording by the same name of these work songs that one can use in the classroom. And if it's okay, I'd like to read and interpret a couple of lyrics. These are things I use in the classroom. Would that be all right?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely.

Robert T. Chase: So here's one. And it reads as follows: "The Captain hollar 'Hurry.' I'm going to take my time.’ Says he's making money and trying to make time. Says he can lose his job, but I can't lose mine." So one thing to think about, that cadence when we move into agricultural labor. The cadence of these songs are hammers and hoes hitting the ground or trees, and that is the percussion element, just as it had been in some slave songs. But the lyrics also allow them to have some resistance or speak back to their keeper. In this one, he says, "The captain is hollering, 'Hurry.' But I'm going to take my time." Right? I'm going to slow it down. "Says he's making money and trying to make time. He can lose his job, but I can't lose mine." Right? So I'm still going to be here tomorrow, no matter how much I produce for him.

Another one that I like, which Bruce Jackson recorded, is called "Jody." And I'll just read a little portion of it. "I've been working all day long picking this stuff called cotton and corn. We raise cotton, cane and corn, taters and tomatoes. The boss is on a horse." The boss is the prison guard up on a horse above them. "And he's watching us all. Better tighten up if you don't want to catch the hall, wonder if the major will go my bail or give me 12 hours standing on the rail. I see the captain sitting in the shade. He don't do nothing, but he get paid. We work seven long days in a row, two packs of Bull and a picture show. In the wintertime we don't get no lay, cutting and cane and making syrups every day."

Now that that is a language that one has to decipher in the classroom. The boss on a horse is the prison guard “watching us all.” “Better tighten up,” means you got to work faster, harder. Or if you don't want to catch “the hall,” what could that mean? “Catching the hall” meant that you were put out into the hall of the prison and standing there with your nose in a circle for 24 hours, as people file past you. And if you moved, tried to sit down, tried to sleep out of that circle, you'd be beaten. They then say “12 hours standing on the rail.” That meant standing on a rail, two by four, with your hands extended outward and balancing on that rail. And if you fall off that rail on either side, you will be beaten.

"I see the captain sitting in the shade. He doesn't do nothing, but he gets paid. We work seven days in a row." Meaning they're working seven hour days, ten hour days, which they were. And what they get is two packs of Bull. That means Bull Durham, the cigarette rolled in the prison, and a picture show, meaning a movie. But the point at the end of the song is, they can never go home. This is their existence day after day. But within that existence, these songs allowed them opportunity to mock their keeper, to have some say and some resistance, to time their labor and to have some control over their day.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Wow. I can see teachers, you know, playing those songs. I can see teachers dissecting those songs. Are there documentaries or films that you would suggest teachers use as well?

Robert T. Chase: There are some really important documentaries that have come out. Of course, The 13th situates the criminal justice system principally after 1965 and its growth to mass incarceration. But if we were looking at the convict lease, Douglas Blackmon's book, A Slavery by Another Name, also developed a very good documentary. And what I liked, Hasan, about that documentary is they hired actors to read the words of convicts, and their letters and so on. And when I show it to my students, that really humanizes them and brings them into the conversation. And then, of course, there's a whole host of fictional movies from the 1932 I'm a Fugitive from a Chain Gang to Orange is the New Black. Both films though, or film and TV show, I should say, are interesting in that it takes a white protagonist in that condition to elicit human sympathy. And then, of course, there are those that had a more humorous take, like. Oh, I can't think of it, Hasan. What was the George Clooney convict lease?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Oh, yeah. I thought you were going to say Life with Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence.

Robert T. Chase: Oh, Life. Right, right. Life. And even, you know, I grew up in the late seventies, 1980s. I'm a Richard Pryor guy.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mmm.

Robert T. Chase: So Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in their film where they go to prison and perform in a rodeo. I mean, there's a whole thing to talk about there with performance of Blackness in public space and these prison rodeos. One in Angola, in Louisiana, which was known as the worst, baddest farm. And I mean bad in a bad way for being violent. And then one in Texas, which operated all the way until the early 1980s. But the performance that was going on there, for instance, there was a greased pig contest where African American prisoners, principally women, would be forced to catch this pig or 'convict poker' where they released an angry bull, and the prisoner that sits the longest at that poker table gets the money. It's a kind of public minstrelsy that is performing the condemnation of Blackness in public space as criminal and worthy not of human empathy, but of degradation and also of mockery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And whether it's the movie Life or O Brother, Where Art Thou, the 2000 film with George Clooney, often there's not enough time to show the whole film in the classroom. But what can be done is to use clips from the films. And then you also are able to sort of limit some of the exposure for younger high school audiences with language and the like. But a clip then put into context and interpreted can be used quite effectively, I think, in this context of teaching.

Robert T. Chase: Yeah, I would agree. The thorny problem of using the Hollywood fictionalized accounts, particularly when they're depicting the convict lease system, I can't think of a film that's handled it seriously.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mmm. Mmm hmm.

Robert T. Chase: It's always through the realm of making it a joke.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mmm hmm. Yeah.

Robert T. Chase: Now, why is that? Why is that? I think it's because of that reason you’d pointed us to earlier, Hasan, that most schools don't teach this. And if they were to teach it, as we're trying to do now, think of all the things we've had to talk about. We've had to talk about economic exploitation. We've had to talk about sexual violence. We've had to talk about torture. We've had to talk about mortality through labor, all of these things that are really hard subjects. On the one hand, these films give us opportunity to talk about them. But on the other hand, I think that they have yet to make a film that deals with these things in the way that, say, 12 Years a Slave did in depicting slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah. Robert Chase, I can't thank you enough for coming on and enlightening us about the criminal justice system and the Jim Crow era, and especially about convict leasing and its origins and long legacy. Thank you so much.

Robert T. Chase: Thank you, Hassan. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. I always enjoy our conversations.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely.

Bethany Jay: Robert T. Chase is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University. He is the author of We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America from UNC Press. Dr. Chase is also the editor of the anthology Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance.

The Jim Crow era saw a changing Southern landscape that promoted reliance on formal methods of racist social control. Brandon Jett is the author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South. In our next segment, he examines the social and commercial factors behind the transition from extralegal lynchings to police enforcement of the color line. He shows us how his students use a local lynching case to begin examining this subject.

Here’s Dr. Jett.

Brandon T. Jett: When people think about the role of racial violence in the Jim Crow period, I think the thing that immediately pops out is these extralegal acts of violence known as lynchings, which are typically understood as extrajudicial killings or killings that happened outside of the formal processes of criminal justice, whereby a group of people—could be three people, it could be twelve people, it could be hundreds, in some cases thousands of people—who participate in these spectacles of violence and brutality. But it's a mob of people, a group of people who are exacting some form of punishment against someone who has in some way, shape or form, transgressed community ideals or in some cases, laws—segregation laws or really any kind of law on the books that we would think of today.

Extralegal violence, like lynchings, had occurred throughout American history, typically in places that didn't have robust criminal justice institutions that we would typically associate with communities that are kind of on that western cusp of American migrations or white-Anglo migrations into the territories that were previously claimed by Native Americans.

But lynching was something that was taking on new forms in the 1890s and early 20th century. We know about those legal things, right? The segregation laws. The disenfranchisement laws. And they were clearly racially biased and racist in design and implementation. But it's this aspect of violence that really plays a crucial role in creating and perpetuating this new racial hierarchy and enforcing a lot of those legal aspects of Jim Crow.

There were something like 4000 African Americans lynched in the late 19th and early 20th century. And again, these are all people who were in some way, shape or form charged, although not always in the way that we would think of someone being charged of a crime, but at least suspected of committing some kind of crime or violating some social custom. This could range from murdering a white person. This could be alleged criminal assaults on white women. It could be something as small as owning land or even looking a white person in the eyes. So there's there's there's accounts of myriad issues that resulted in the lynching of an African American, largely men, but but there were also African American women who were subjected to lynch mob violence as well.

Lynching acted as a form of social and racial control. What more terrifying thing to make sure you abide by the rules and customs of this new white racist society that's being created and implemented in the Jim Crow period than the threat of being brutally killed and tortured, hung, burned alive, in front of dozens, if not thousands, of onlookers. And this proved to be a fairly effective way at reimposing white supremacy in the Southern landscape in particular, again, in the wake of the end of Reconstruction.

But what was widely accepted in the 1890s—at least among white Southerners and to an extent white Americans, broadly speaking—by the early 20th century, and especially into the 19 teens and 1920s, became increasingly problematic. The real specter of mobs of white people parading through towns and destroying property, taking lives, without going through these formal criminal justice processes was really problematic from the perspective of white ‘civic boosters,’ is the phrase I've associated with them. These are people who are promoting their cities and in some cases their states to outside investors. And in many ways, the name of the game in terms of the economy in the South and in the late 19th and early 20th century was cotton agriculture—reliant upon sharecroppers, largely African Americans, although not solely. And this kept them in a cycle of peonage, basically, that they could never pay off their debts that they owed at the end of the sharecropping season. And so they were kind of stuck to the land perpetually, producing a cotton crop for a white plantation owner.

But another part of the southern economy and one that these civic boosters were really pushing for is outside investment, largely from northerners. So banks in the north, private investors in the north, businesses in the north coming into the South and opening up new factories and really diversifying the Southern economy. And this was part and parcel of a larger strategy, and basically PR campaign by many of these boosters, that tried to depict the South as something that was fundamentally different. In fact, they called this the New South ideology. So not the Old South, that Antebellum South, the South of plantation slavery. But this was a new South, this was a progressive South. It is a place that is more economically diversified, attractive to outside investment, a place where new businesses, manufacturing businesses can come in and be successful. This was the South that was not mired down by the institution of slavery. It was not solely devoted to mono crop agriculture. But it was diverse and, as they would argue, ripe for investment from outsiders.

But by the early 20th century, investors were increasingly wary of placing their money in Southern locations, especially locations where it seemed like lynch mobs ran rampant and rarely, if ever, met with any kind of actual prosecution. And so as part of this promotion of the New South ideology, the ideas of lynching became challenged in ways that they really hadn't been, at least among white society in the 1890s. Many white Southerners defended the institution of lynching in the 1890s as something that was necessary to control this Black population that had been untrained by the civilizing, as they called it, the civilizing influences of slavery. So this was that first generation that was born free.

And part of their argument—that was completely discredited by Ida B. Wells and her really important investigative journalism in the 1890s and early 20th century—there's this idea that this new generation of African American men in particular, that that were born free, had this almost insatiable sexual appetite for white women, and there was this outburst of Black men raping white women. And to stop that from happening, to stop those Black men from engaging in that type of criminal activity. lynching was required. The criminal justice system was too slow. It was too undependable. It let people off for trivial reasons. This is what they argued. And so they needed lynching to demonstrate to African American men, in particular, and again, this is the argument that white southerners are making to defend lynching, that they couldn't get away with criminally assaulting white women. And while this may be held up for a little while in the 1890s, by the early 20th century that had largely been discredited too. And so the conversations around lynching also changed. This wasn't something that was necessary or required to protect the white community. At least many outsiders suggested, instead, this was just an example of sheer brutality and was really out of place and anachronistic, in terms of what the South was trying to present itself as and what the United States was trying to present itself as.

And so what we begin to see in the early 20th century is this move away from reliance on extralegal forms of racial and social control like lynching and an embrace of more formal institutions of criminal justice assuming that role from the community. These civic boosters, state officials, local criminal justice officials, like county sheriffs, police chiefs and county prosecutors, really wanted the onus of maintaining control over their community to place in their hands, not the wider community as a whole. And this was supposed to curtail instances of lynching. It's not necessarily done because they feel sorry for African Americans, who are overwhelmingly the victims of lynch mob violence in the late 19th and early 20th century. But it's really done out of their economic self interests.

Another thing to consider is the changing demographic of the Southern landscape, a region that had been largely rural and agricultural in the mid-19th century, still was that way by the late-19th century, but this was beginning to change, especially in the first several decades of the 20th century. And so another thing that is encouraging this idea of reliance on formal institutions of criminal justice is just the sheer growth of Southern cities at the time. The city of Birmingham in 1880 had 3000 people in it. By 1950, it had almost 330,000. Memphis had 15,000 people in 1880 [(sic) 33,592 people]. By 1950, almost 400,000 people living in the city. New Orleans, which was in many respects the most important and the largest Southern city in the Antebellum period, in 1880 had 216,000 residents. By 1950, it had 570,000 residents. And so relying on informal methods like lynching to control a population that is in the hundreds of thousands just really didn't seem to be effective or as effective as it could be in a small rural place of only a couple of thousand.

And so what we began to see in the early 20th century is a real robust investment in formal institutions of criminal justice on behalf of the southern states and southern localities. We see investments in prisons. We see investments in the police, which a lot of people don't realize were a relatively new invention. Modern policing, in terms of the police department, really wasn't introduced to the United States until the mid-19th century, in places like New York and Boston, to an extent. And so in the South, this is something that's relatively new. And it isn't until the late 19th and particularly early 20th century that southern cities began investing in their police departments and the police departments begin to look like things we could readily identify today.

Another really fascinating thing that the police do, in particular, in this 1920 to 1945 period is become increasingly militarized. And this is a result of a number of different factors, one being the end of World War One, which comes about right before 1920. And all of a sudden, the American military finds itself with a bunch of equipment. And police departments start getting their hands on some of these things, like grenade launchers, vehicles and weaponry that was previously used in wars, are now being introduced into the streets of American cities and in the South, in particular.

We don't really hear much about police forces in the South. Like if you think about the typical US History since 1877 or since 1865 course, we kind of talk about the Jim Crow South. And perhaps you talk about segregation, and disenfranchisement and maybe to an extent the violence that was used to maintain Jim Crow. But we don't really talk about formal institutions of criminal justice or their development over this time period. But by the time you get to the civil rights movement, there's Bull Connor with this robust police force. And they are relying on these aggressive military-style tactics, using weapons of war, in many respects, to thwart any progress that civil rights activists might make, especially in their street protests. And I think this is the link that's missing—in between that discussion of Jim Crow and then the efforts to really push back against civil rights activism using the police and the jails—is just where these police forces came from, where these institutions came from, that really allowed white southerners like Bull Connor, to tap into and really thwart efforts by activists during the civil rights movement.

And so as these formal institutions of criminal justice are expanded—as they're invested in, as they incorporate new technologies, prisons are being built, police are being invested in, prosecutors become stronger—we see a rise in incarceration rates. This can't be separated from this larger question of race and capitalism developing in industrialized ways in the South, not for the first time, but for much of the South for the very first time. Something that relies on more formal processes of criminal justice, like arrest for offenses ranging from, you know, typical things we would think of as as criminal acts—murder, assault, theft. But also smaller things, like vagrancy or not having visible means of employment, also became crimes in the context of the Jim Crow South that African Americans could be arrested for, placed behind bars, upending their life in many ways.

And so law enforcement and formal criminal justice service serve these dual roles of maintaining the racial status quo and perpetuating this racial hierarchy that has been created by Jim Crow, while also kind of stymying threats to this capitalist development that emerges in this more industrialized New South, but also kind of working-class activism that might develop from the working class. And if you're talking about the South, African Americans comprise a very large segment of that working class. So they're intimately bound up in questions of race, and class, and labor and the role of these institutions, in creating an atmosphere that is conducive to capitalist exploitation of the resources of the South. And also imposing this Jim Crow, white supremacist system that also has to be monitored and maintained.

And so that's this larger transformation that's taking place during this late 19th, early 20th century period. This shift away from reliance on informal methods of social control and racial control to more formalized institutions—the police, prosecutors, prisons, jails and the like—to maintain and perpetuate the system of racial inequality.

Bethany Jay: Learning for Justice has a special opportunity, just for educators. After listening to this episode, you can earn a certificate for one hour of professional development. All you have to do is go to LearningForJustice.org/podcastpd. PD for professional development. That’s podcastPD, all one word. Then enter the unique code word for this episode, all lowercase. You’ll also find a link in the show notes. It’s a great way to get even more out of Teaching Hard History.

Brandon T. Jett: When we think about this transition period—from this central role that extralegal violence played in establishing and perpetuating the new racial hierarchy that Jim Crow created, to this period where we've got this robust criminal justice apparatus that has in many ways supplanted the role that extralegal violence played—the way I like to introduce this into the classroom is through looking at lynching and the ways in which the responses to lynching unfolded over time.

One of the things that I think is really important to do in the classroom is not only look at what lynching was. There are professional websites that have been created with a vast number of lynching photographs to provide the larger public with access to some of these things to fully grapple with the atrocity that was racial violence and lynching in the Jim Crow period. One of the ones I used to use was Without Sanctuary, but the Equal Justice Initiative has also been doing a lot of work toward publicizing just how widespread and violent lynchings were. So you can certainly find some photographs on their website as well.

One of the things that I find useful for students is engaging with primary sources, these actual responses to lynchings that took place in the United States. And much like photographs were widely available, both then and now, so are newspaper reports of lynchings and other forms of extralegal violence. There are also books that were written, pamphlets that were written, in response to a lot of these actions. So I've had students delve into into both of those things, both the photographs to kind of grapple with what lynching was, what it looked like, the crowds that are there, how people are seemingly responding to these things. But also the responses. And the responses that I like to show them are, again, this kind of juxtaposition between the response that was there in the 1890s that is largely supportive and defensive of the institution of lynching to some of these responses that come later, like in the 1920s, that are that are critical of lynchings.

So I'd like to just kind of walk you through a couple of things that I've tried in the classroom. Some of them went very, very poorly. Some of them went and went really, really well. The very first thing I tried was to recreate this exhibition that the Without Sanctuary book and website grew out of. James Allen collected lynching photographs for a series of years, and then they displayed all of these photographs somewhere in New York City, I believe, and I think it was also a traveling exhibition in the early 2000s.

And I tried to recreate something like that. This was an undergraduate course, so largely freshmen students, and I just hung pictures that I found off the Internet of lynchings that had taken place around the classroom. And this came on the heels of our larger conversation about the Jim Crow system that had happened in a previous class. And I told them what we were going to be doing beforehand. But they essentially walked in, and then I kind of briefly introduced the concept of lynching and the role that it played in the Jim Crow system. And then just had students walk around silently, individually and take notes on all of the photographs that they saw around them. And then we just had a larger conversation about it.

And that was okay. There were a lot of mixed responses. I think it was an awful lot for students to handle for, you know, a 50-minute class. It was almost too much for them to handle and really adequately process what they were looking at and why this is significant. And so I would really discourage teachers out there from doing something like that, where you just throw these really traumatic images in front of students. Even if you kind of preface it the class before, I still think it is almost too jarring to really have a robust conversation about what this means and the roles that it played in American society.

But the second time I tried it, I actually introduced the idea at the beginning of the semester, and this was actually in a US history survey course from 1865 to the present. I told them we were going to be doing this at the beginning. And I actually encourage students to find a photograph that they thought was really significant. And they posted it in an online forum that I created for the class. And each student picked a photograph, and they explained why they thought it was significant and what their reactions to it were. And this allowed them to grapple with some of this stuff more, and also on a personal level, before it was just thrust upon them in a very public setting in the classroom. And this actually went better than the first approach of just kind of throwing it up there and having students react to it in real time. It allowed for a much more robust conversation about what lynchings meant. Students were particularly drawn to the mobs and more drawn to this conversation around what it meant that so many people seemed so comfortable and even proud of their participation in these acts of violence.

And I asked for student feedback at the end of the semester when we had these discussions. And I got a couple of reactions. Some students were not all that interested in doing this kind of assignment. They were really turned off by the violence of it, by the brutality of it and just found it a little off putting. Others didn't like it at first. I had several students who were very angry, they told me, that this was an assignment that they were having to do in class, when they first started looking into it. But they said that this 2-to-3 week window that I gave them from when they were supposed to find images and then come to class and have our conversations about it, they said that it really helped them process and went through this kind of mental transition away from just being mad, angry or overly upset, and instead recognizing the importance of grappling with the reality that was lynching and racial violence in the late 19th and early 20th century.

And I thought that was really an important experience for students to have and share that I would really encourage educators to incorporate into their classes, if they're interested in doing something that grapples with the photography and photographs related to lynching and racial violence, is provides students enough time to kind of process this stuff on their own, with your assistance, with their peers. Because I think in many ways it's that reaction and reflection that is more important than anything that could really happen, in real time in class, when you just try to get these knee-jerk reactions.

Introducing photographs of lynchings into classes is something that needs to be approached very delicately. Make sure that they have enough time and space and preparation to fully engage and understand what they're going to be looking at, because these are really graphic images. In some cases, they are hard to look at. And without appropriate framing, and contextualization and preparation, it can be an exercise that goes really poorly, really quickly.

I just try to prep them for what they are going to see. And I introduce the idea that we're going to be looking at lynching photographs well before we ever get to that point in the semester. Sometimes I've introduced it at the very first class. When we're talking about the syllabus, what we're going to be doing, I point out that, 'Hey. Understand, we're going to be engaging with primary sources, and photographs and music recordings throughout the course of the semester. But some of these are going to be pretty difficult images.’ And I'll point their attention to the week that we're going to be discussing Jim Crow, and the week that the activity will take place. And usually at that initial conversation, it's just a brief introduction. I'm not dwelling on it because it's an overview, but I do just prep them that these photographs depict people who are participating in the killing of other people. They, in some cases, are dead bodies. And they can be really, really difficult to look at. So I just kind of give them the sense that, 'Hey, something pretty hard and emotionally complicated is coming up in a few weeks. So I need to be ready.’

And then when we get closer. Say, when we're two weeks out, and I give them the assignment of, 'I'd like you to go see if you can find a lynching photograph that really resonates with you, that you find really powerful, or upsetting or something that you think helps us understand the context of of the Jim Crow South more broadly'. And when I introduce that idea, first, I tell them about how lynching photographs originated. Why it was unique to this period. I also introduce the idea of how long it took for photographs to be taken. Photography is relatively new. This isn't like our time period, where you can just snap it with your phone. But this is something that takes time. People have to set these things up well in advance in many cases.

We talk about the fact that many of these photographs were actually postcards that people were sending around to each other, kind of bragging about their experiences, what they did, the role that they played in this, or just to let their extended family and relatives know what's going on in their lives. And then I just remind them again about what's being depicted. These are human beings whose lives were brutally taken from them in front of dozens, hundreds in some cases, thousands of onlookers. And just really solemnly explain what lynching was in the context of the Jim Crow South. I show them a picture of a mob. So not a lynch mob victim, but the zoomed out photograph of what the mob looked like. I just say, like, 'These are all people who gathered to watch a human being be tortured to death,’ so we can just have conversations about what that means.

Again, I give them the opportunity to just reflect, and respond and grapple with this stuff on their own. And if they need to reach out to me, of course, I'm always available. I also give students the option to opt out. Just in case this is something that they are wholly uninterested in engaging with or don't think that they are emotionally comfortable exploring. So I always give students the opportunity to opt out.

Giving them that two-week window, and kind of explaining what lynchings were, broadly speaking, without any imagery, I think really helps. And then framing it, and introducing it, and prepping at multiple points throughout the semester, emphasizing what they're going to be looking at, the context within which these photographs were taken, what the Without Sanctuary exhibition was and why it's significant, and how what we're doing is not an exercise in continuing to push these these violent images to oppress African Americans, which is what the motivation was at the time. But instead try to come to a full realization of what Jim Crow was, what the United States was in this late 19th and early 20th century in very visible ways.

I’ve found that coming up with a local topic, as localized as you can get it, really helps. It kind of gets buy-in from school administrators too. You say, 'This isn't just about criminal justice change. This is local history. And this is something that public schools should be engaged in anyway,’ really provides buy-in, or at least in my case provided some buy-in from the institutions and also from the students as well. They were already interested in this topic because it was local.

And so just to give you one example that I've used in the classroom, There's a small town in Texas. It's called Paris, Texas. It's a small town in northeast Texas. It kind of hugs the Red River. You probably never heard of it, but in the 1890s, it rose to infamy. It first rose to infamy in 1893, when white residents there basically committed one of the first spectacle lynchings that took place. This was a lynching of a man named Henry Smith. In 1893, he was accused of assaulting and killing a four-year-old white girl named Myrtle Vance. He was captured, tortured, burned alive.

But the thing that really stood out to a lot of Americans at the time was that this was photographed. Photographers set up cameras. It was advertised in local newspapers. Train companies redirected more routes to Paris so people could come and watch. Thousands of people watched, watched this barbaric act take place. And in response to that, one of the local residents of Paris, Texas, a well-to-do businessman, J.M. Earley, actually publishes this really robust defense of the lynching of Henry Smith, in response to all of the attention that is being focused on Paris, Texas.

He says, "What have we done or left undone as a people of pride, as a people capable of being wrought up to indignation, in the vindication of our homes, our wives or daughters against ravishment. That when it is wired abroad, we have burned at the stake a monster for having ravished a baby to death. That it should not be credited, we go on record now as being credible." So he's essentially arguing that they're not ashamed of what happened. They are very proud of what they did.

He continues, "The burning of Smith for the crime, as herein related, was an act at the hands of the citizens of Paris, Lamar County, Texas, the sublimity of which has no precedent upon the American continent, perhaps not on earth. The sun will never rise upon another day in which another act more just, more sublime, in the vainly attempting by man, an eye for an eye." So he's simply saying this was perhaps the most just action that has ever been committed by a group of people. So you can just clearly see how enthusiastically he is supporting the lynching of Henry Smith.

And he's got economic interests in this town. This town is trying to attract outside investment. It's trying to attract newcomers to come to the city and set up shop. And J.M. Early is someone who's positioned very well to capitalize on some of that. And instead of saying this lynching was an aberration. This was something that, you know, a couple of rabble rousers participated in. He defends it as completely necessary and just. And one of the really fascinating things at the end of this book that he publishes, it's called *Eye for an Eye*, is he basically ends by saying 'this is a really great town. This is a really great place. You all should come and move here. We've got fertile ground. You can grow cotton. And we are really proud of our ability to protect white women and our community. And he kind of makes this offhanded remark, "even if it takes a little fire." So his defense of the lynching is also a kind of PR move designed to attract people to Paris, or at least assuage their concerns about the violence they just read about or saw on those postcards and those photographs that were taken.

But if you fast forward to 1920. Once again, whites in Paris, Texas, burn two Black men alive. These are two World War One vets who've returned. And they express some dissatisfaction about their continued employment as sharecroppers at a local landowner's plantation. And there's some confrontation, and they kill the white landowner. And they end up fleeing. They're captured, eventually tied to a stake and burned alive. But after this lynching takes place, you don't see that same robust defense of it that took place in 1893. Instead, you see the local Chamber of Commerce, religious leaders in the community, really condemn this lynching as something that is horrific, shouldn't be allowed to happen, and, they argue, won't happen again.

It's not necessarily that the J.M. Earley's of the world, and the leaders of the Chamber of Commerce in Paris, Texas, really changed their views on African Americans in 30 years. Instead, they probably had very similar views about the proper role of African Americans in American life and in Southern life, in particular. And that was to be decidedly below or subordinate to white Americans. Yet they are they are different in their reactions to lynching, because they feel like the economic well-being of themselves and their community, at least in 1893, depends on them defending and justifying what had happened. But by 1920, certainly suggesting that this is something that won't be able to happen again, because it is so problematic from an economic standpoint.

And again, this is all part of this larger PR campaign that Southerners are undertaking—it's not necessarily coordinated across a region, but within these communities—to try and bring people in. And we are making sure that things like this won't happen again, because we are going to handle things through the formal criminal justice system. The sheriff is going to be more responsive and reactive in these cases. So you begin to see this uptick in sheriffs moving prisoners and suspects who have been charged with crimes that could spark a lynching. They begin moving those in their custody around to protect them from the lynch mob and then prosecute them through the formal institutions of criminal justice.

The South in 1890 is really creating or recreating this racial hierarchy. They are enacting segregation laws. They are introducing disenfranchisement measures. That hierarchy isn't necessarily firmly entrenched just yet. It's getting there. And so they're relying on extralegal violence to help put it in place, right. 'If you don't abide by these new rules, this is the potential consequence.’ By 1920, in many ways, the Jim Crow system is more advanced. Some of those legal mechanisms, like segregation, disenfranchisement, are fully implemented. They had been upheld by the Supreme Court and broadly implemented across the South, and in some cases the country. You've also got this increased development of the more formal apparatus of criminal justice.

And I think having students play around with those different reactions, those defenses at the local level, is really important for helping them understand this change in mindset. And so I push the idea of motivation. I push the idea of motivation and audience a lot when I ask students to analyze primary sources. And I always tell them, you know, ‘The things they say me, and how they say them to me, are fundamentally different than how they would talk about me to their peers. So audience matters, motivation matters, when talking about analyzing primary sources.’

And so one of the assignments that I did with with looking at these different responses to lynchings that took place in Paris, Texas, one in the 1890s, one in 1920, is have students assess ‘Why.’ Why white people in the same town, who are presumably just as inculcated in the larger mindset of white supremacy and the Jim Crow South, even if they don't believe that that African Americans should be lynched, but they still certainly don't believe that they are equal to white Americans and still firmly ensconced in the kind of zeitgeist of the Jim Crow South, ‘Why are they responding differently?’

And so, I would have students come into class, and they would read both of these primary sources. And we’d just talk through what potential motivations could be. ‘What are some of the changes that had unfolded over the course of the 1890s, 19-tens, 1920s?’ And again, just try to put themselves in the shoes of these two groups of people. 'Why are they saying the things that they're saying? Who is their audience? What are they trying to accomplish? And what changes have occurred over that 30-year period that would maybe prompt this different response?'

If you think about it from the perspective of a rural place. You know, a place like Paris, Texas, has a relatively small population. Maybe they're trying to modernize in certain ways, introducing electricity, and paved roads and things like that. But one of the things that hurts Lamar County, Texas, which Paris is the county seat, really after 1920, is this exodus of African Americans from the region and from the county in particular. I forget the numbers, but the drop in Black population in Lamar County, Texas, from 1920 to 1930 is dire from the perspective of landowners there. They're just fleeing. They're going to places north. They're leaving a county that had proved to be incredibly violent, again and again and again and again. And so the threat of violence and Jim Crow is really pushing many African Americans. And this is obviously bound up in the larger Great Migration narrative of millions of African Americans leaving the South and going to northern cities where they had more job opportunities and didn't face the same vehemence, and violence and threats that they did in the South. There were certainly still threats and racial discrimination in the North, too, but wasn't quit as problematic. You treat people like the way white Southerners were treating African Americans for generations, eventually they're going to leave. And they did. So that's the labor pool that many of these rural places that relied on agriculture. That's their workforce. And all of a sudden they're leaving. So part of this is, 'Hey, we can't keep lynching African Americans, because they're just leaving. And now we don't have a pliable labor force to pick all of our cotton and continue to subjugate in economic ways.' So that's one way.

The second way is, if you're trying to convince an investor to sink a significant amount of money into your town, into your city, they're going to want to make sure that there aren't going to be mobs of lawless, violent people rampaging through town. There are numerous examples of these mobs kind of spiraling out of control and attacking businesses. And so that's not a very conducive place for investors to sink a bunch of money into, if this kind of lawlessness, at least from their perspective, is allowed to go unpunished and unmitigated. What's to stop this mob from turning on their businesses if they happen to employ African American laborers?

The other side of it that also needs to be emphasized in terms of this transition to the police in particular, especially in these urban spaces in the South, is that police become a very effective source of labor control. In northern cities, like Chicago and New York, many historians have argued fairly effectively that the police are introduced at the exact same time that industrialization is really picking up speed. And they are imposing regulations. They are breaking up strikes. They are challenging labor leaders and the like. And that's also true in the South.

Some of the most violent places in terms of police violence are places that have incredibly robust union efforts in the South. Birmingham, Alabama, in particular, had a pretty robust Communist Party presence there. And they were focused on organizing the working class and largely on working-class African Americans. And they are organizing at the exact same time that the police are becoming more aggressive, more violent, more technologically advanced. And they are the focus of police activism in many ways. They are facing threats of violence. They are actually being killed and threatened multiple times. There's one case where I believe it's the Communist Party in Birmingham holds a meeting, and something like 25 to 30% of the Birmingham Police Force was tasked with just monitoring that meeting. So in a city that has hundreds of thousands of people, a significant chunk of the police has just focused on the organizing activities of just one group. It’s pretty telling.

So the police are attacking labor organizers, labor leaders, chasing them out of town. They're arresting them. They are coming up with rules and laws in these places, like you can't distribute radical literature. Well, this gives the police a tool and an incentive to now go into these Black communities, and these working-class communities, and arrest and prosecute people.

And so one of the reasons why these civic boosters are also turning to formal institutions of criminal justice is they think this will be a way to limit the likelihood and the chances that that kind of lawlessness, as they would call it, mobs, destruction, would be present in their communities. But also they can rely on these more formal institutions of criminal justice and the law to also impose this kind of labor control. And in the context of the South is also very much bound up in racial control as well.

Those are the ways, I think, that this concern about lynching, and the buildup of the criminal justice apparatus in response to it, is also bound up in these notions of making the South look like a viable place for economic growth, and in some cases economic diversification. And so that was one of the ways I encouraged students to engage with this shift, in not only response to lynching, but the criminal justice apparatus.

So if I could give advice to any teachers out there who are interested in exploring how you can introduce these topics into the classroom, I always find doing things at the local level is way more impactful. Even though I didn't teach classes in Paris, Texas, I was teaching in Texas when I first came up with this idea and this teaching strategy. And so even something from the state that you are working in, and especially if you're in the South, there will be hundreds of examples that you can tap into.

This will really allow this kind of more intimate connection with what's going on, because it's places that students can recognize in many ways. But it also allows you to look at local newspapers, which most local historical associations will have. You can even find some of these readily available through the Library of Congress website, Chronicling America. There's just myriad digital resources that are also available for you to look at how how white Southerners are responding at the local level to lynchings that take place in their community.

And that just opens the door for you to explore these changes in legal processes that would probably typically be fairly boring to a class of students, if you just 'bullet point' talked about these changes. But this allows you to tap into the issue of lynching, and look at the ways in which reactions are related to the changing nature of criminal justice in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Bethany Jay: Brandon T. Jett is a Professor of History at Florida Southwestern State College. He is the author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920-1945. Dr. Jett is also the creator of the digital history project Lynching in LaBelle. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center—helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and more. You can find award-winning films and classroom-ready texts at LearningForJustice.org.

Most students leave high school without an understanding of the Jim Crow Era and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. In our fourth season, we put Jim Crow under the spotlight—examining its history and lasting impact.

Thanks to Dr. Chase and Dr. Jett for sharing their insights with us. This podcast was produced by Mary Quintiss and senior producer Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. “Music Reconstructed” is produced by Barrett Golding. And Cory Collins provides content guidance. Amelia Gragg is our intern. Kate Shuster is the series creator. And our managing producer is Miranda LaFond. If you like what you’ve heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback. I’m Dr. Bethany Jay, Professor of History at Salem State University, and your host for Teaching Hard History.

References

• Howard University School of Law, The Black Lives Matter Movement
• Tennessee Historical Society, Ida B. Wells’ International Appeal: The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law In All Its Phases
• Robert Chase, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America
• Robert Chase, History, Stony Brook University
• Convict Leasing and Labor Project, What is Convict Leasing?
• Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
• PBS Slavery by Another Name, Black Codes & Pig Laws
• Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South
• National Archives, 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865)
• African American Intellectual History Society, Slavery, the 13th Amendment, and Mass Incarceration: A Response to Patrick Rael
• Facing History and Ourselves, The History of Slave Patrols, Black Codes, and Vagrancy Laws
• Encyclopedia Virginia, Vagrancy Act of 1866
• BlackPast, Mississippi Black Codes, 1865-1866
• BlackPast, (1866) Mississippi Black Codes
• Matthew Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928
• Talitha LeFlouria, About
• Talitha L. LeFlouria, The Washington Post, Criminal justice reform won’t work until it focuses on Black women
• Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865-1900
• Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South
• Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
• Library of Congress, The Convict Leasing System: Slavery in its Worst Aspects
• Curious Kids, What happened to Confederate money after the Civil War?
• US House of Representatives, Reconstruction’s New Order
• The Conversation, Prison records from 1800s Georgia show mass incarceration's racially charged beginnings
• Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South
• James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
• PBS Fatal Flood, James K. Vardaman
• PBS NewsHour, Inside Mississippi’s notorious Parchman prison
• The Sentencing Project, The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons
• The Nation, The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor
• Albert Race Sample, Racehoss: Big Emma's Boy
• Georgia Women of Achievement, Carrie Steele Logan
• National Women's History Museum, Mary Church Terrell
• Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Prison Worksongs (music)
• Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Negro Prison Camp Worksongs (music)
• Bruce Jackson, Wake Up Dead Man: Hard Labor and Southern Blues
• Spotify, Wake up Dead Man: Black Convict Worksongs from Texas Prisons (music)
• Ava DuVernay, The 13th (documentary)
• Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
• PBS, Slavery by Another Name (film)
• I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (film)
• Orange Is the New Black (TV series)
• The Laugh Button, Revisiting “Stir Crazy,” arguably the best Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor film
• The Guardian, Angola prison rodeo offers risks and rewards for Louisiana's hard-knock lifers
• Brandon T. Jett, History, Florida SouthWestern State College
• Brandon T. Jett, Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945
• Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror
• Encyclopedia of Alabama, New South Era
• Library of Congress, Ida B. Wells and the Activism of Investigative Journalism
• Law and History Review, Policing Jim Crow America: Enforcers’ Agency and Structural Transformations
• Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (book and film)
• Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching Memorial
• Lynching in America, Remebering Henry Smith
• Texas Monthly, Can the Black Lives Matter Movement Heal Paris, Texas?
• Dr. Brandon T. Jett (website)
• Lynching In LaBelle: A digital history project about the lynching of a man named Henry Patterson.

 

Return to Episode Listing

Resources

• Learning for Justice Lesson, Mary McLeod Bethune (grades 6-8, 9-12) 
• Learning for Justice Lesson, The Real Monopoly: America's Racial Wealth Divide (grades 9-12)
• Learning for Justice Lesson, The New Deciders (grades 6-8, 9-12)

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I began teaching in the history department at The Ohio State University in 2003. It was my first tenure track job. I was one of three people to join the history department that year. The other two new faculty members were white women, and one, like me, was in her early 30s and was also from New York City.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That summer, when my wife and I moved to Columbus, we rented a townhome apartment about 25 minutes from campus. It was a pleasant upgrade from the one- and two-bedroom apartments we had lived in since college. But when my new colleague—the one my age from New York—moved to Columbus, she moved into a trendy neighborhood just south of downtown, in a house that she bought. She explained that her father gave her the money to make the purchase.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I thought, "Must be nice!" Because when I moved to Columbus, my father? He gave me a pat on the back. Now that's not because he didn't want to give me more. He knew that home ownership was the way to build wealth. He just didn't have the money to give.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: My parents were social workers and owned their own home—a row house in a Black neighborhood in Brooklyn that they had purchased for $55,000 in 1981. Some 20 years later, that house was their sole asset. It was also the first property that my family had owned since my great grandfather lost his land in Jasper County, Georgia. He had been born during Reconstruction, but when he died at the hands of parties unknown in 1917, his wife—my great grandmother—had to leave the South, and leave that land behind.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: My grandfather grew up in Newark, New Jersey. He never owned a home. Not because he didn't try. During the New Deal era, racial discrimination in mortgage lending prevented him from securing the home loan he needed to purchase a house. And after World War II, even if he could have gotten a home loan, he wouldn't have been able to escape overcrowded Newark for a new suburban community like Levittown—the gateway to the middle class—because these federally-subsidized developments explicitly excluded African Americans. My grandfather would have been in the same boat as his sister, Aunt Bessie, who managed to buy two houses in Newark for a few thousand dollars. But because these properties were in a Black neighborhood, they never appreciated in value. Decades after purchasing them, the two houses were worth about as much as they were when Aunt Bessie bought them.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But my white colleague's family was able to purchase a home in one of those whites-only, Levittown developments, which enabled her family to build intergenerational wealth. And this made it possible for her father to help her buy her first home.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Racial inequality isn't born simply of personal prejudice. It is a product of purposeful public policy. And the impact of racial prejudice isn't confined by time. It stretches far beyond the moment of discrimination, impacting Black families for generations. To see exactly how this happened and how Black people have responded, we need look no further than the New Deal.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History. We're a production of Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This season, we're offering a detailed look at how to teach the history of Jim Crow, starting with Reconstruction. In each episode, we explore a different topic—walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In this episode, historian Jill Watts examines the complex history of the New Deal with my co-host Bethany Jay. They begin their discussion with the growing political influence of Black voters in the 1930s, the election of FDR and the creation of the Black Cabinet. I'm glad you could join us.

Bethany Jay: I'm here today with Dr. Jill Watts, who's a professor of history at California State University-San Marcos, and the author of The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt, as well as other books. And I'm so excited to be here with you, Jill, because I have devoured your book. It's great reading and so on point for our discussion today about African Americans and the New Deal. So thanks for being here.

Jill Watts: Well, thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

Bethany Jay: Can you start us off a little bit today by sort of orienting us to the era of the New Deal? What should we know about the early deployment of the New Deal so that we can understand the experience of Black Americans during this time?

Jill Watts: I think one of the things about the New Deal is that it actually in a way starts before Roosevelt takes office. It's the height of the Great Depression, or maybe I should say it's the depth of the Great Depression. And it's on the campaign trail when he's running against Hoover. And as they're facing off against each other, unemployment is almost 25 percent, and we know in the communities of color it runs much higher. African Americans in some urban areas, it's double, it's up to 60 percent unemployment.

Jill Watts: Hoover has dug in in his philosophy of not intervening in the economy, and that any intervention in the economy, any kind of regulation would delay recovery, with the slogan "Prosperity is just around the corner," which has worn thin by 1932 when they're running against each other. And FDR is offering a New Deal. He intends to intervene in the economy and use the federal apparatus in order to heal the nation's economy and end the economic chaos.

Jill Watts: And he's also got this forgotten man theme—and it was "man." [laughs] The idea that no American would be forgotten. And that resonated with the nation. So if you think about that as the beginning of the New Deal, the promises on the campaign trail, and then FDR wins this landslide victory unlike any that we've seen before. He launches into the New Deal and begins the first 100 days. And never before in our history had we ever talked about the first 100 days of an administration, and he's the one who initiates the expectation that something really amazing is going to happen in those first 100 days. And every president since has been measured by that.

Bethany Jay: You talked about the landslide election of FDR, and African Americans and their votes are important to that landslide election of FDR, are they not?

Jill Watts: Yes. You have a number of important African-American leaders who defect from the Republican Party. African Americans have been voting for the Republicans, they're the party of Lincoln. That goes all the way back to Reconstruction. And amongst those leaders who leave the Republican Party in '32 is Robert Vann, who's the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier. It's one of the nation's most important Black newspapers. It circulates nationwide. And Robert Vann really dramatically in September of 1932 makes a speech that says to Black communities, "Turn Lincoln's picture to the wall. The debt has been paid." And this is because of the Hoover administration's philosophy of non-intervention, and also the Hoover administration's racial policy, which is zero. Hoover wouldn't even have his picture taken with Black leaders up until October of 1932. [laughs]

Bethany Jay: Oh, wow. A last ditch effort. Yeah.

Jill Watts: Yeah, to try to keep Black voters in the fold. And at the end, most Black voters still voted Republican. It was really hard to cross over and trust Democrats because it was the Southern Party. It was the party of the Confederacy in people's minds. But there was a significant group that moved because of Hoover's affronts and Hoover's unwillingness to do anything to help the community.

Bethany Jay: That's interesting. And then that early New Deal policy, you talked a little bit about FDR's first 100 days, how did that impact African-American workers and families?

Jill Watts: Well, it actually doesn't impact the African-American population. The African-American population is pretty much bypassed. There's agricultural policy that comes out of the New Deal which offers farmers support to reduce production of farm commodities in order to increase the prices, which is kind of a great contradiction in an era when people are starving, you're trying to increase the cost of food. And then you have the business and industry policy, the National Industrial Recovery Act, which was a comprehensive program to uplift business and industry, but also to provide jobs. And it had these massive job programs that were initiated as quickly as possible. And in both cases, those policies actually at the beginning completely not only bypassed the Black community, but it actually made things worse.

Jill Watts: In the agricultural policy, for example, farmers were paid to not produce and to take land out of cultivation. Well, most African Americans, they worked as sharecroppers and as tenant farmers, so when landlords took land out of cultivation, that's the land they took out of cultivation, and in areas where they received subsidies to do that. In many cases, the program intended it to go to the sharecroppers to help them get through, but white farmers kept it and they didn't distribute it. So it drove people off the land.

Jill Watts: And then if you look at industrial and business recovery, the National Recovery Administration wanted businesses to establish fair codes of competition, stabilize prices and production, and businesses got incentives like tax breaks. And you also got the blue eagle to hang in your window or to put on your product to say that you did your part. But Black businesses, they can't afford to buy into that. You know, there's minimum wage, maximum hours established under that act, and if you're a small Black business, it's really difficult to cut production if you've got a business that does that, or to cut your prices or stabilize your prices at a certain rate. So that doesn't help. But the biggest problem was the work programs, the jobs programs. The job programs totally discriminated against African Americans. In that first 100 days, very few African Americans were able to find relief in the job programs. And they would go in and apply, but they would be bypassed for white workers. So the New Deal is not a New Deal for Black Americans in that first 100 days. In fact, for the first year almost, it's just the same old deal.

Bethany Jay: Yeah, so how do African-American communities then respond to this exclusion?

Jill Watts: There's all kinds of pressure coming down on FDR. Eleanor Roosevelt actually has ties in the Black community at this time, and she's very supportive. She's a way in which Black leaders—especially in the NAACP, because that's where most of her ties are at that time—are able to try to get to Roosevelt. Even before FDR takes office, the NAACP is requesting a meeting, asking to meet with FDR in order to bring to his attention the fact that the Black community can't be bypassed, but they're told he's too busy to see them. After he takes office, the Urban League writes him and says, "Very often in cases of emergency, Black people are bypassed, and you can't do this. We're an important part of the nation's citizenry, and we are also an important part of the nation's economy."

Bethany Jay: Hmm.

Jill Watts: FDR is getting pressure from the Black press. Personal letters to the administration. So the administration receives numerous personal letters addressed to the Roosevelts pleading for help from Black Americans.

Bethany Jay: Do you have some examples of those that you could share with us that might be useful in the classroom?

Jill Watts: Yes. And in fact, there's a book by Robert McElvaine called Down and Out in the Great Depression, and there's an entire chapter that has primary source letters that teachers can use. And that book is easily accessible, so you can bring those letters into the classroom and use them with students. I'm going to read some samples from McElvaine's Down and Out in the Great Depression. And these are written by people with very little education, so I'll have to translate them a bit. "Dear Mr. President, would you please direct the people in charge of relief work in Georgia to issue the provisions plus other supplies to our suffering Black people? I'm sorry to worry you with this, Mr. President. But as hard as it is to believe, the relief officials here are using up almost everything that you send for themselves and their friends." And the relief officials would be all white.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Jill Watts: All white. "Please help us, Mr. President, because we can't help ourselves and we know you is the president and are a good Christian man. We are praying for you. Yours truly. I can't sign my name, Mr. President. They will beat me up and run me away from here. And this is my home."

Bethany Jay: Oh my goodness. Yeah.

Jill Watts: Yeah. Yeah. There's a great fear that if people are seen asking for what is due them rightfully as American citizens, that they're going to face racial violence.

Bethany Jay: And rightfully so, right? I mean, they're very justified in that fear, knowing what we know about the Jim Crow South. As we're talking about all of the different activity that is happening within the Black community to lobby Roosevelt to do more, what's the impact of all of that work? How does he, and how does his administration respond?

Jill Watts: So Black leaders are asking for—and this is an NAACP agenda, but it's also in the Urban League and other Black organizations and in the Black press—is for Roosevelt to appoint more Black advisers, to create a Black voice within the administration or within the New Deal programs. That was the major agenda. The Democrats are waking up to the possibility that what was just a trickle of Black voters coming into the Democratic Party, that that could eventually become a stream, and that maybe Black voters could cross over, that they'd be willing to cross over and vote Democrat. And that would secure victories. And by the fall of 1933, it's still early in the New Deal, you'll start to see some key appointments of major Black leaders. And Robert Vann is the first appointee from the Black community into the Roosevelt administration. He receives an appointment in the summer of 1933 in the Justice Department. It took a long time actually to get him that appointment, even though it had been promised.

Jill Watts: Eugene Kinckle Jones, who was the head of the Urban League, he's appointed into the Department of Commerce. And that's the first time you have an activist organization have a leader appointed to an advisory position. And then Robert Weaver, who's the first African American to earn a PhD in economics from Harvard. So Robert Weaver arrives in the Department of Interior, and is embedded within a specific office that's been organized to deal with African-American problems.

Bethany Jay: And it's the—am I right in this? That those members become members of the Black Cabinet?

Jill Watts: Yeah. The Black Cabinet is an informal group of African-American advisers who kind of forged their own Black cabinet within the administration. It wasn't sanctioned.

Bethany Jay: It seems like the Black Cabinet is wielding influence where they can, but have little to no actual institutionalized power within the New Deal structure. Is that fair to say?

Jill Watts: Exactly, exactly. They form themselves and they demand to be heard, but FDR never acknowledged the existence of a Black cabinet.

Bethany Jay: Mary McLeod Bethune is somebody that she's really a driving force in the Black Cabinet. She seems to be just a force of nature her entire life and, you know, forges that close relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, and really does make a big influence on policy. Can you talk a little bit about Mary McLeod Bethune and her role in the Black Cabinet?

Jill Watts: Yeah. Mary McLeod Bethune is a teacher, and she embraces the passion of education, believes that education is the one equalizer in the nation. She was the daughter of slaves, and had grown up in tremendous poverty, but had forged a career in education simply through sheer determination, intelligence and this unstoppable character that she is. And she was the first Black woman to found an HBCU, a historically Black college, and actually the first and only Black woman to found a historically Black college. And she comes to Washington, DC, as an adviser first to the National Youth Administration, which was established to provide young people with relief, with education and job training. And she's sitting on the advisory board, and she's pressuring the administration to establish a specific program targeted at Black youth because what she sees and what she knows is that those programs are going right past Black communities into white communities, and Black youth aren't experiencing the benefits of that. And through a series of fortunate connections—including Eleanor Roosevelt—she's able to secure the position as the head of the Black Division of the National Youth Administration, and with that, she becomes the first Black woman to head a federal program in Washington, DC. She not only was Black America's leading Black female leader, she was Black America's leading leader. But then also she was one of the nation's most highly-regarded female leaders period. So to have her incorporated within the administration, that was a big step forward.

Jill Watts: And at that time, the Black advisers are kind of really loosely affiliated. They're scattered throughout the administration. And she's the one that calls all these young men, mostly young men, together in her home. And they've been working throughout all these different agencies, and not always getting along because those agencies compete for programs and funding. So Mary McLeod Bethune calls this group together and says, "We're going to have to work together. You're not working together. If we're going to make any progress in the administration, we have to unite together as one. And we will march forward. We will share the information we have from all our divisions with each other, and we're going to make progress."

Bethany Jay: I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how members of the Black Cabinet interacted with FDR.

Jill Watts: I think that's really important in understanding their experience, because with the exception of Robert Vann very briefly, none of them except for Mary McLeod Bethune had any interaction with FDR at all. And Vann only met with him a few times. And one of the meetings was actually after he'd left the Black Cabinet because he was furious with how conscribed he'd been in terms of trying to do good work in the administration. He'd been kind of reconciled to pushing paper at a desk. But Mrs. Bethune had access primarily through Eleanor Roosevelt, and was able to gain appointments, but they were often after hours and never on the books because they didn't want it to be publicly known that he was meeting with her.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History, and I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries. We prepare detailed show notes for each episode of this podcast so that you can use what you learn here in the classroom. You'll find relevant resources, as well as a full transcript, complete with links to materials mentioned by our guests. You can find them at LearningForJustice.org/podcasts. Let's return now to Bethany's conversation with Jill Watts.

Bethany Jay: Just to give a sense of what these Black leaders are up against, can you tell us a little bit about what these mostly men, but men and women found when they got to their posts at these different New Deal agencies? What was the situation when they went for their first day of work, you know, as the associate director of such and such alphabet soup organization?

Jill Watts: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting microcosm of what people, Black people found in the nation as a whole. When Black advisers arrive on the job, in the vast majority of cases in these divisions, their division heads who are white don't welcome them and don't know what they're going to do with them. Robert Vann, he's the first appointee, when he arrives literally he has no place to work. Nobody has created office space for him. He's sitting out in hallways trying to begin and commence his work. The secretarial pool was all white. They refused to work for any of the Black appointees, and what that did is trigger a hiring of a Black secretarial pool to serve the Black appointees. The office spaces were segregated. In many cases, they would seat Black advisers in another space, in the kind of open offices apart from everybody, or give them small offices like in a closet.

Jill Watts: Elevators were segregated. A lot of people had to take freight elevators up and down. The cafeterias where people relied on to go eat, they were segregated. The federal government is in a Jim Crow city. Washington, DC, was a segregated city. So yeah, they dealt with insults on a daily basis.

Bethany Jay: But despite all that, they do have an impact, mostly it seems, from sheer force of will and drive. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of the successes that the Black Cabinet helped to bring about for the African-American community during the New Deal?

Jill Watts: Yeah. I mean, in addition to expanding Black voices in federal service and pushing to integrate the Washington, DC, workplace, if you think about it, they have two goals. The first goal is to achieve adequate New Deal relief for Black Americans, but they have a broader goal. Their idea is that the New Deal is an opening for a change in American society, that the philosophy of the New Deal—that no Americans should be forgotten—can be applied broadly, and to the idea of racial uplift and desegregation, voting rights. And so they see it as an opportunity for a philosophical shift, as not just an economic program, not just as something to get us out of the Great Depression, but as something to revitalize the nation and compel the nation to live up to its democratic promise.

Jill Watts: So New Deal relief, Robert Weaver and others are able to get relief increasingly more and more to the African-American community. Al Smith, in his position at the WPA, is able to get literally hundreds of thousands of jobs out to Black Americans, and as well as education opportunities. Agriculturally, they were successful in getting agricultural relief, having African Americans integrated into what was called the resettlement programs. Black Americans had been excluded from those, but that was collective farms or individual farms that were set up by the government. And opening up schools and recreational facilities and community centers for Black Americans.

Jill Watts: And then there's this other kind of policy-level achievement, which is they are able to get the government to integrate the first anti-discrimination clauses into federal contracts. That really lays a groundwork for what's to come later in terms of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That's kind of amazing when you think about, gosh, back 30 years before that, they're able to compel the government, at least within the instance of the New Deal, to do that. And, you know, in addition, they lead the migration out of the Republican Party.

Jill Watts: It's 1936. Mary McLeod Bethune calls this group together and says, "The first thing on our agenda is to get FDR re-elected. Despite the deficiencies that we see in the New Deal, if a Republican comes back into office, there'll be no deal. So what we have to do is get behind FDR, get him elected, and then after the election, the administration owes us." And that's what they did. They went out and they campaigned. And in the '36 election, African Americans voted for FDR. They moved over. They left the Republican Party and began voting Democrat.

Jill Watts: On the other hand, you know, there was a lot that they didn't achieve, and it was in that broader agenda of shifting the nation's attitudes towards race, they pushed for anti-lynching legislation, which they never achieved, which today is still tabled in the Senate.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Jill Watts: Broader integration, they weren't able to achieve that. And that was a great disappointment. Bethune is really determined to see a lot of the New Deal programs made permanent, not just for the emergency, but her argument was that all poor will need long-term assistance. You can't just discontinue college scholarships or educational grants or funding for training young people because there's going to be poor after the economic crisis will seem to be resolved. So they weren't able to institute a lot of the things that they felt were needed for the long run to keep America on a healing path.

Bethany Jay: And it seems as though at every turn, they're also meeting with a lot of resistance from white Americans. You know, so not only meeting with resistance within the government, but also within the larger nation as they're taking on these projects.

Jill Watts: Right. One of the responsibilities of their job is to do field visits. And you can imagine doing field visits in the South in the 1930s with the Ku Klux Klan active. And so people really had to be very careful. And there were cases where Black advisers were literally attacked for visiting the area. And the Black community often, they would try to go into Black communities and try to see if relief was getting to where it was supposed to go. And they encountered resistance where the Black community would say, "No, we don't want to talk about this because if we complain, after you're gone, you know, there'll be a retaliation against us and people could lose their lives."

Bethany Jay: One of the things that I'm thinking about as you're talking about the Black cabinet figures traveling to all of these different places across the American South and meeting with resistance not only from white Southerners, but from Black Southerners who are a little nervous about talking to them, is the WPA slave narrative project, which we've talked about on the podcast before but is for the study of African-American history, really one of the major successes of the New Deal, I would say.

Jill Watts: Right. We often use those in the classroom. Bethany, you use them in the classroom, yes?

Bethany Jay: I do. And the context of them being taken during the New Deal and, you know, in the Jim Crow South by mostly white interviewers is the hurdle that we have to sort of get through in order to interpret them successfully in the classroom, right? So for so long that context seemed to be insurmountable, that they almost seemed like these are too flawed to be able to tell us much, but we can get past that. And if we take that context into account and think about what the people being interviewed are actually saying, they're really powerful resources.

Jill Watts: Yeah. I think so often you see teachers using them to study slavery and enslavement, right? But I think they're an interesting way to study Black-white relations, but also there's a lot of commentary in them going on about the New Deal and how Black lives are being impacted. And these narratives are taken not just in the South. There are some narratives from outside the South. And yeah, so they're an interesting resource to kind of get a peek into how the Depression is impacting Black people, but what their perceptions are. Because they will often mention—they often presume that the person is there on behalf of the government and is going to extend relief.

Bethany Jay: Have some kind of aid for them, yeah.

Jill Watts: Yeah. You know, there's that great interview with the same woman by the two different interviewers. One is a white woman and the other is a Black male. And to have students kind of compare those two to see what the flaw that you mentioned about as historical evidence. But at the same time, her presumptions in which she shares about her current experience is really interesting. So that's a great tool that you can use with students, and can get at not just slavery, but also at the New Deal.

Bethany Jay: If listeners want to find the WPA narrative that Jill mentioned, it's Susan Hamlin, also Susan Hamilton. So she used two different names, but it is the same person who's interviewed twice, and you can go and find those online fairly easily. And we'll link to them in the resources for this show.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Learning for Justice has a special opportunity just for educators. After listening to this episode, you can earn a certificate for one hour of professional development. All you have to do is go to LearningForJustice.org/PodcastPD—PD for professional development. That's "PodcastPD," all one word. Then enter the unique code word for this episode: uplift. All lowercase. You'll also find a link in the show notes. It's a great way to get even more out of Teaching Hard History.

Bethany Jay: Can you talk to us a little bit about how this played out in Northern cities? How did the New Deal sort of impact Black Americans outside of the South, and what kind of resistance did it face there?

Jill Watts: Yeah, I think one thing that we don't teach is racism in other parts of the country outside of the South. And in the North and Midwest and the West, Black Americans encounter racism at a vicious level as well, and the efforts to deploy the New Deal in these areas, in many ways, they encounter the same kinds of resistance. In fact, one of the New Deal Black advisers was visiting a site in Pennsylvania and he was attacked.

Jill Watts: A great test to this, Bethany, is the Civilian Conservation Corps. Black advisers decide what they can do is they can really push to integrate the Civilian Conservation Corps camps. And the Civilian Conservation Corps camps enroll young men, you know, teenagers and young adult males. And the idea is that outside of the South where segregation isn't legalized, that you could integrate those Corps, and that would be a place where you could get the same resources to Black Americans, and then at the same time bring about integration. But the Civilian Conservation Corps are run by the US military, and the US military is strictly segregated. And the commanders of the camps are white military commanders, and they block that over and over again.

Jill Watts: Eventually, they succeed in some places of getting Black youth incorporated into these conservation corps. Like in Minnesota, okay? But then what they find out is the young Black men are being used as servants and as cooks, rather than being sent out to be trained in—oh, they did things like trained young men in woodshop and in iron work, and they built roads, and in construction. And there's cases in the North. There was one case in one camp where the young Black men were sent to fan the camp commander. And they really resented that. And it wasn't uncommon for these military commanders to use the worst of racial slurs against the young enrollees. There were cases where these young Black men would continually file complaints with the Black Cabinet member who was overseeing the camps, but they did so at their own risk because they'd file a complaint and then they'd be dismissed. So in the end, they did set up some separate camps. You know, there were very few young Black men who were integrated into other camps, although it did happen, but they ended up setting up separate camps.

Jill Watts: So that'll give you a sense of outside the South what young Black people faced in New Deal programs attempting to get New Deal relief. And it was an important relief. You know, they sent the money home to their parents. The whole family was dependent on this.

Bethany Jay: I was wondering if we could talk about a specific New Deal policy like housing, and think about how housing policy sort of evolved during the New Deal, and how the legacy of that policy is still impacting us today?

Jill Watts: Right. This is a great example of where you can look around in your own community and see the impact of the New Deal. You have the founding of the Federal Housing Authority in 1934. The Federal Housing Authority is going to get homes for people. It's addressing the issue of homelessness. But the author Richard Rothstein in the great book The Color of Law, he talks about it as state-sponsored segregation, because the federal government decides where they will fund mortgages and home loans. They look at the areas and designate the ones that are most valuable, the properties that are the best properties and the best bet if you're going to fund a loan. And what they decide is that they won't fund mortgages or home loans in Black communities. So that brings about the origins of what's called redlining.

Bethany Jay: My understanding of how the FHA loan policies worked during the New Deal era is that really no African-American person could get an FHA loan because just by nature of the fact that they were buying that house, it made it a Black neighborhood and therefore an at-risk property, and not somewhere that the federal government would underwrite a loan.

Jill Watts: I think that's the byproduct of that policy, yeah. It creates areas that are reserved for whites only, and then hence whites buy in those areas with the help of those loans, which not only entrenches residential segregation, but it entrenches school segregation. And on top of it, it creates what we now talk about as generational wealth.

Bethany Jay: And then those redlined districts, or those districts I should say, that allow Black Americans to buy properties also become targets of industrial building and, you know, they are zoned to allow for all sorts of things, right? Dumps, heavy metal factories in some cases. So through no fault of the African-American community at all, a lot of those neighborhoods become increasingly sort of less desirable.

Jill Watts: Well, and these communities are subjected to environmental pollution and undermines the health of the community residents.

Bethany Jay: And we're still seeing the impact of that today in many cities and towns around the nation.

Jill Watts: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Bethany Jay: One of the things that I find with my students is that the New Deal, this era, seems like forever ago to them. You know, the 1990s seem like forever ago to my students. And it can be hard for students to really visualize how these policies actually played out in the ground in communities like theirs. Can you give us some sort of activities or ways that you make this real for your students?

Jill Watts: So they can do all kinds of visual things: creating websites, writing visual essays, that would really make the New Deal come alive to them. The Library of Congress has these great photographs from the New Deal era, right? The Depression era of photography. And I actually have students right now writing essays interpreting the photographs. But there's a whole segment of photographs dedicated to documenting the lives of Black Americans, and there's descriptors associated with it in the Library of Congress that give students a jumping-off point to do a little more research about who's in the photograph or where the photograph was taken and the community in which it was taken, and the purpose. You can ask them to look around in their world and see what legacy there is of the New Deal: social security, student loans, the idea that the nation does have a responsibility to the individual. Every time you go get a COVID shot, right? They're free. And it's the government that provides it for you. And many places across the country, when you drive on a road, that road was built probably in the '30s, or at least planned then, right? A bridge. There's a great site called the Living New Deal which maps New Deal sites throughout the country, and that's really great to use with students. And you can offer a contribution to it in your community. And it's surprising how many communities still have buildings that they're still using that were built in the New Deal.

Jill Watts: I think in terms of looking at federal housing policy and relating it to the New Deal, you can find your community's maps often online, the redlining maps that determined who got home loans and who didn't, and rated different areas within your community. And students are pretty shocked when you pull them up because they see how literally the government considered communities of color in the New Deal era. So you can have students look at those maps and then compare them to the current communities that they're living in or the communities that they know, and see how those maps entrenched a certain kind of segregation and inequality.

Bethany Jay: And I'm just looking, and the 1950 census will be released sometime next year, right? So that will allow students to be able to use census records on top of those redlining maps to look at a good portion of time and how those communities change.

Jill Watts: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It would be interesting for students to take 1930 and 1940 and 1950.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Jill Watts: A good thing you can get them to do too, is you can use Google Earth and have them travel through communities using Google Earth. Google Earth has these overlays that can take you back several years. You can set Google Earth to look at an aerial view at a certain period of time, and you can see how communities shift.

Jill Watts: There is a set of tools by Knight Lab that came out of Northwestern University. It has timeline tools and it has mapping tools, and what you can do with students is they can take the redlining maps and use that to make a story map, and talk about a story of a community and do some research. They can use historic newspapers and use that to look at segregation and just the New Deal overall. But they can also create timelines too, which is kind of interesting, if they can create a timeline of how a community shifts and changes. So those tools, I've used those tools with students, and they've really enjoyed doing that. There's something about using that digital world in order to make the world of the past come alive, and for them to come to the realization on their own to say, "Oh my gosh, you know, well, this is the kind of community I live in now, and here's what it was like back then."

Jill Watts: And in many cases, some students will be able to say, "My community isn't any different. It's the same as it was. And here's why my community hasn't changed." Or, "My community—this community has now become gentrified," right?

Bethany Jay: Right.

Jill Watts: This was a Black community. I'm living in an area where Black people built these places and built these structures and lived in these homes. So you can do these kind of community studies, folding in all kinds of historical techniques and archival work.

Jill Watts: You can do family histories. You can get out of the community mode and look at families as they move. And especially in Black families for Black students, doing Black genealogy, as you know, the challenge is great because of the roadblock that slavery creates. But from 1870 on, the records are there. And if students can look at that period from 1870 on and look at the migration patterns of their families, you know, throughout the nation, and you can kind of trace the first Great Migration where African Americans arrive in these communities, and then look at the impact of the Depression. And then the second Great Migration, which occurs, you know, triggered by World War II.

Bethany Jay: Yeah, it's really so interesting to bring these sort of large national conversations down to the community level.

Jill Watts: Yeah.

Bethany Jay: You know, we talked a little bit about the legacy in terms of housing. What are some of the other legacies of the New Deal as it relates to African Americans that we see today?

Jill Watts: Well, I think one of the major legacies of the New Deal is we see that the migration into the Democratic Party continued and then it will solidify in the 1960s. And that's really important because Black Americans proved the power of their vote, and having established themselves within a party, able to continue to advocate for policies that make the nation more equal. And so you can't say that that's not a major contribution to not just reforming the Democratic Party, but also contributing to public policy in the nation and also placing Black Americans not just as advisers but in political office. That's a big deal.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Jill Watts: That's a big deal. So I think that that's a legacy that we can see. The anti-discrimination clauses that were brought in under the New Deal, I said earlier, they provide this groundwork for civil rights legislation and for us thinking about what kind of safeguards need to be placed within law and within legislation, within policy to make sure that people get equal treatment and equal share of the goodness of American society in jobs and education. So you can see this generation as the bridge to the next generation of the civil rights movement, the classical civil rights movement, and how it influences Dr. King, Martin Luther King. And you can imagine Martin Luther King as a child sitting in his home church in Atlanta where his father is the minister, and sitting in the pew listening to a visitor. And that visitor is Mary McLeod Bethune there in the 1930s to talk to the congregation about uplift and about the New Deal and about the potential of those programs. You know, his father was a friend of hers. He was exposed to her. So that's why this group is so important and so empowering, because it leads us to the next generation and the next victories of civil rights leaders.

Bethany Jay: The New Deal is such a standard part of US2 curriculum. And I'm wondering if you could give us a sense of how integrating this story of the New Deal, you know, the Black Cabinet and the impact of the New Deal on African-American people, why is it important that we should do that? And what changes have you seen it bring about in your students in your classrooms?

Jill Watts: I think that it gives the New Deal a different dimension. I think what we do when we teach the New Deal, and we were talking about the alphabet programs, we run through these alphabet programs, you know, you can tell me what NRA stands for, right? And yeah, it's surface, it's flash card, but this gives the New Deal a depth, and it helps them see the complexities. And students in K through 12, they can handle these complexities. I think students respond to stories where people encounter hardships but persist. You know, it's true the Black Cabinet didn't win everything they wanted and they fell far short, actually, if you asked them. But they won a lot of victories and they were important. I think it makes it real because these are real people who went to work in Washington, and they had these experiences. And it's empowering. You think, "Oh, I could go to Washington. Maybe I could make a difference. I could make a change." And I think that that's a story that not only just teaches us history, but it shapes you if you encounter it early in your life.

Bethany Jay: And particularly for African-American students, I think this becomes an empowering story, not just talking about African-American people during this era as victims, but talking about some of these, you know, real heroes that had a major impact.

Jill Watts: Yeah. Yeah, I think to strike that balance as we narrate our history, I think that that's really important. And it's encouraging if all—you know, you have to acknowledge the realities of the past and the brutalities of the past. That's imperative. But acknowledge perseverance and resistance and agency. That's important, too. And that gives us hope. I always teach with hope. I think that that's the best way to approach history is it's not a history of failure, but it's a history of hope. The people who had the hope are the ones who made the change. What the Black cabinet did was about hope. And I think the whole entire New Deal is all about hope, if you think about it. The bigger picture is about hope.

Bethany Jay: Thank you so much for being with us and taking us through a story that is maybe familiar but we looked at it in a very way, and I'm thankful for that and for all of your time today. So thanks so much for being with us, Jill.

Jill Watts: Oh, thank you so much. I so enjoyed this.

Bethany Jay: Great.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Jill Watts is a professor of history at California State University-San Marcos, where she was awarded the Harry E. Brakebill Distinguished Professorship in 2017. Dr. Watts is the author of several books, including The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt and the biography, Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice, the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center—helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and more. You can find award-winning films and classroom-ready texts at LearningForJustice.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the Jim Crow Era and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. In our fourth season, we put Jim Crow under the spotlight, examining its history and lasting impact.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks to Dr. Watts for sharing her insights with us. This podcast was produced by Mary Quintas and senior producer Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. "Music Reconstructed" is produced by Barrett Golding. And Cory Collins provides content guidance. Amelia Gragg is our intern. Kate Shuster is the series creator. And our managing producer is Miranda LaFond.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: If you like what you’ve heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University, and your host for Teaching Hard History.

References

• Institute for Research on Poverty, Impact of Government Programs Adopted During the New Deal on Residential Segregation Today
• The Guardian, Levittown, the prototypical American suburb
• Jill Watts, About
• Jill Watts, History, California State University-San Marcos
• Jill Watts, The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt
• Kennedy Center: Resources for Educators, Part V: The New Deal
• Khan Academy, The Great Depression
• History, Last Hired, First Fired: How the Great Depression Affected African Americans
• The American Presidency Project, Radio Address From Albany, New York: "The 'Forgotten Man' Speech"
• BlackPast, Robert Lee Vann (1879-1940)
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Pittsburgh Courier wrote the history of Black Americans from its hometown
• BlackPast, Pittsburgh Courier (1907- )
• PBS, The Black Press: Soldiers without Swords
• PA History, Robert Vann, excerpt from speech delivered at the St. James Literary Forum in Cleveland, Ohio. September 1, 1932
• Our Documents, National Industrial Recovery Act (1933)
• Library of Congress: Resource Guide, National Recovery Administration and the New Deal
• Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, African Americans in the Great Depression and New Deal
• PBS American Experience, Eleanor Roosevelt and Race
• NAACP, Our History
• National Urban League, Mission and History
• Google Arts & Culture, The Roots of the National Urban League
• History Matters, "Please Help Us Mr. President": Black Americans Write to FDR
• Robert S. McElvaine, Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man
• Google Arts & Culture, National Urban League Leadership Series: Eugene Kinckle Jones 
• National Archives, Robert C. Weaver and the Groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement
• The New York Times, African-Americans in the New Deal (review of The Black Cabinet)
• Smithsonian Magazine, Mary McLeod Bethune Was at the Vanguard of More Than 50 Years of Black Progress
• National WWII Museum, The Extraordinary Life of Mary McLeod Bethune
• National Park Service, Mary McLeod Bethune and the Creation of FDR's Black Cabine: Part 2 (video; Part Two)
• National Archives, Mary McLeod Bethune and the Negro Affairs Division of the NYA
• The Washington Post, How D.C. ended segregation a year before Brown v. Board of Education
• PBS, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
• Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Alfred Edgar Smith
• National Archives, African Americans and the Federal Work Programs during the Great Depression
• Agricultural History, The Negro in the New Deal Resettlement Program
• Library of Congress, The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom 
• National Archives, Eleanor Roosevelt’s Battle to End Lynching
• History, Why FDR Didn’t Support Eleanor Roosevelt’s Anti-Lynching Campaign
• Library of Congress, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
• Library of Congress, Susan Hamlin, Charleston, South Carolina
• Library of Congress, Susan Hamilton, Charleston, South Carolina
• The Corps Network, The African American Experience in the Civilian Conservation Corps
• US Congress, Federal Housing Administration
• NPR, A 'Forgotten History' Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America
• Learning for Justice, Segregation by Design
• Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
• University of Richmond, Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America
• Library of Congress, Digital Collections: African American History
• Living New Deal, Still Working For America
• Google Earth, Explore
• Google Earth, Timelapse
• Knight Lab, Projects: Storytelling
• Knight Lab, Timeline JS
• Knight Lab, StoryMapJS
• Jill Watts, Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood

 

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Resources

• Learning for Justice Student Text, Negro Hero (grades 9-12)
• Learning for Justice Student Text, Hidden Figures of Women's History: Cathay Williams (grades 6-8)
• Learning for Justice Student Text, James Henry Gooding's Letter to Abraham Lincoln (grades 6-8, 9-12)
• Learning for Justice Student Text, Enslaved People in the War (grades 3-5, 6-8)

Transcript

Bethany Jay: During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass gave a speech entitled "Negroes and the National War Effort." As he addressed the audience at National Hall in Philadelphia, he argued, "Once let the Black man get upon his person the brass letter US, let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on Earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States." Douglass' statement was a response to the fact that Black men had been barred from military service, and a call to duty now that Abraham Lincoln had allowed Black enlistment in the Union Army. But it also was a call for the racial equality and equal rights that Frederick Douglass believed Black military service would bring.

Bethany Jay: It must have seemed that Douglass was too optimistic, or just plain wrong about the connection between service and rights. The Union Army gladly began accepting Black soldiers in 1863, but equality was not part of the deal. Black soldiers were paid $10 each compared to the $13 white soldiers earned. And while white soldiers were given an extra $3 for uniform needs, Black soldiers had the same amount deducted from their paycheck. And the inequity didn't stop there—only white men were allowed to be commissioned as officers.

Bethany Jay: African American leaders around the country—and the soldiers themselves—worked simultaneously to protest inequity in the military while bringing victory to the Union. And Black soldiers had a big impact on the Union war effort. By the end of the war, about 180,000 Black soldiers had served. At battles like Fort Wagner—you probably remember this one from the movie Glory—the heroism of these men invigorated the Black movement for citizenship rights.

Bethany Jay: During the 1864 National Convention of Colored Men, which was attended by the likes of Henry Highland Garnett as well as Frederick Douglass, abolitionist John S. Rock, Esq. of Massachusetts spoke about Black military service. He acknowledged that it had not always paid the dividends they expected, explaining, "Many of our grandfathers fought in the Revolution, and they thought they were fighting for liberty. But they made a sad mistake, and we are now obliged to fight those battles over again, and I hope, this time, to a better purpose. We are all loyal. Why are we not treated as friends? This nation spurned our offers to rally around it for two long years and then, without any guarantees, called upon us at a time when the loyal white men of the North hesitated. We buried the terrible outrages of the past, and came magnanimously and gallantly forward.

Bethany Jay: "In the heroism displayed at Milliken's Bend, Port Hudson, Fort Wagner, Olustee, in the battles now going on before Richmond, and everywhere where our men have faced the foe, they have covered themselves all over with glory. They have nobly written with their blood the declaration of their right to have their names recorded on the pages of history among the true patriots of the American Revolution for liberty."

Bethany Jay: John S. Rock also linked heroism in war to the pursuit of equality in peacetime. "All we ask is equal opportunities and equal rights. This is what our brave men are fighting for. They have not gone to the battlefield for the sake of killing and being killed; but they are fighting for liberty and equality. We ask the same for the Black man that is asked for the white man; nothing more, and nothing less."

Bethany Jay: Black soldiers and radical Republicans also made calls for Black citizenship rights. Wendell Phillips of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society argued that Black men had an "Equal share with the white race in the management of the political institutions for which he is required to fight and bleed." And Lincoln himself voiced his support several times during the war for some form of Black enfranchisement. In his last public speech, Lincoln addressed Black citizenship rights saying, "I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers." Of course, Lincoln did not live long enough to see that plan through. Instead, Black voting rights would be a product of Congressional Reconstruction, secured by the 15th Amendment.

Bethany Jay: So why, you ask, are we talking about the Civil War when this episode is about Black service in 20th-century world wars? It's because there is a long legacy of Black men using military service as a claim for civil and political equality. And there is also a long legacy of being "obliged to fight those battles again."

Bethany Jay: Unfortunately, the promise of suffrage and civil rights—those rights that the blood of Black soldiers seemed to have secured—were short-lived after the Civil War. The dismantling of Reconstruction and the end of federal oversight of elections in Southern states led to the racial violence and voter suppression of Jim Crow. So as Black men volunteered or were drafted in 20th-century world wars, for the most part they faced similar questions and had many of the same goals as those Civil War soldiers.

Bethany Jay: I'm Bethany Jay, and this is Teaching Hard History. We're a production of Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This season, we're offering a detailed look at how to teach the history of Jim Crow, starting with Reconstruction. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises.

Bethany Jay: African Americans have served in every major conflict since the Revolution despite segregation and resistance to those strides towards equality. In this episode, we examine the complicated relationship between military service and the Black freedom struggle. Historian Adriane Lentz-Smith spoke with my co-host Hasan Kwame Jeffries about the diverse stories of servicemen and women in World War I. They discuss the transformational impact of their experiences overseas, the backlash they faced at home, and how their service bolstered efforts to dismantle Jim Crow.

Bethany Jay: I'm so glad you can join us. Let's get started.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I am really excited to welcome to the Teaching Hard History podcast, Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith. Adriane, I'm so glad that you could join us. Welcome!

Adriane Lentz-Smith: Thank you, I'm glad to be here.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, one of the central themes in the American experience, in the African-American experience, in the courses that we teach on American history is the centrality of conflict, war. And certainly during the Jim Crow era, we have two major wars—World War I and World War II. And African Americans play a major role in those conflicts, and those conflicts play a major role in the lives of African Americans. But the wars during the Jim Crow era certainly weren't the first wars that African Americans participated in. Could you share a little bit about the longer history, a little background if you will, on African-American participation in American conflicts?

Adriane Lentz-Smith: Sure. African Americans have been involved in every major war in American history, and have in fact been part of the fight for American independence, democracy, freedom, whatever you want to call it, since the colonial period, right? So Crispus Attucks was one of the first people to give their blood in the cause of American independence, and he was Black. And you go from Crispus Attucks through the American Revolution, through the War of 1812, forward and forward, and so forth and so on.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: African Americans have been a part of every war. Their participation in those wars have been largely under-narrated and undervalued. And their experience in most of those wars, time and time again, was of giving something to the cause of American democracy, freedom, security, that the Black community did not get back in return.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What is motivating African Americans to take up arms in defense of the United States? And does that change over time from the Revolutionary era to World War I?

Adriane Lentz-Smith: It does. I mean, as with all questions in history, some things change and some things remain relatively consistent, right? In the early period, in the making of the thing that we will end up calling America, people fight for a wide variety of reasons. And this is true. Like, a job as a job. And sometimes you fight because it's available and it's a thing to do. There are people who fight in service to the idealized, the abstracted American project. But people are literally fighting during the Civil War for freedom—for their freedom and that of their families. And Black soldiers' service was one way to force the issue of emancipation, to make a claim on the American state and nation and to say "We've given our lives, we have been far more loyal to this thing that we call America than the folks who would hold us in bondage."

Adriane Lentz-Smith: And in the Civil War that pays off. And I think what happens in subsequent wars time and time again is that people are looking for the compact to work in much the same way, even aware of the absurdity and the awfulness that they are having to do this yet again and yet again and yet again. I think that folks in the moment have an expectation, right? African Americans and their allies have an expectation that military service will bring expanded access and acceptance. But by and large, Black military service incites the same people who are opposed to other manifestations of kind of Black people participating in public life of any kind.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: If we zero in on this period after the Civil War to World War I, what is the driving assumption about military service specifically that leads Black folk to believe or to hope that it will provide access to this promise as opposed to something else? Is there something very specific going on in the American mind that says, "Huh, if you do this in war, this then becomes the reward."

Adriane Lentz-Smith: And not just in war, but in military service in general, right? There is a standing army, and there are not a lot, but, you know, four Black units in the standing army. So this is both about the way that Black folks serve in state militias, and then it's about how they serve in the federal army. In wartime, like in the Spanish-American and, you know, Philippine Wars, and in all of those, there is a rhetorical linking between Black soldiering, manhood and citizenship, that not just Black folks are doing, right?

Adriane Lentz-Smith: The way that Americans, broadly speaking, talk about what it means to be a soldier, bounds those three things up deeply together. And it is hard to have someone act as a soldier without ceding some understanding of them as men in this, you know, early 20th century way that is about valor and courage and duty and all of those things. And it's also hard for folks not to put those two associations together and say, "And this is the model of what it looks like to be fit for citizenship." So much so that in the 1890s and early 1900s, when Southern legislatures are stripping African Americans of their citizenship rights, you also see them disbanding Black state militias by and large. There are a few by the time we get to 1917, but not very many. And they do it—and they will say as much that they do it—because you can't have people in the militia who are not treated like citizens. And even more, they're aware that Black folks in military service will expect themselves to be treated like citizens.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: While African Americans are soldiering for citizenship if you will, and for the recognition of their rights and to secure freedom in a broadly conceived way, especially after emancipation, like, "Okay, we've ended slavery. But we're going to continue in this project, because there's these citizenship rights that we have to secure." They're also engaged as agents of American Empire. And I'm thinking as a kid hearing stories about the Buffalo soldiers, and it was like, "Yeah! That's cool! That's awesome!" And then you get a little older, and it's like, "Oh, wait. That's what they were doing out West? Participating in land theft and genocide?" So whether it's out west or in the Philippines, what was going on there, and how do we make sense of it?

Adriane Lentz-Smith: I mean, you're right. We can talk about the Indian wars, we can talk about the Buffalo Soldiers or the standing four units in the regular army as the kind of ground troops of American Empire in the continental West and then in the Pacific.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: The Indian wars and the Civil War overlap. And Black soldiers who become part of the Union Army find themselves actually part of those Indian wars. And as we develop these four standing army units: the 24th and 25th Infantries and the 9th and 10th Cavalries—the Buffalo Soldiers—they become really important and active parts of pursuing and subduing Native Americans. And it could be that some soldiers were troubled by that and it gave them pause. It could also be the case that some people were so bound up in the kind of mainstream imagination of the American project that they had no pause at all.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Hmm.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: So they're doing the work of what we would have called in an older time that actually hides the settler colonialism of it all, "Winning the West," right? And then keeping it won. Which is really the work of American Empire, right? It's the work of American expansion. It's the work of American Empire. And it's the same work that many of them will end up doing in the wars of the 1890s and into the early 1900s. We have the Spanish-American War, Spanish-American and Cuban wars and then the Philippine wars, which all sort of come of a piece.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: What happens when Spain concedes the Philippines to the United States is that folks in the Philippines who'd been fighting a war for independence then pivot to fight against Americans. And so when Black Americans are fighting that war—and in many ways experiencing the benefits of being empowered and ferocious and manly in this space—they are again doing the work of American Empire, right? Americans will end up staying in the Philippines for quite some time with Black soldiers, with Buffalo soldiers, an important part of that policing force. And so they really are, in many ways, experiencing the kind of bump in status and prestige that comes with a certain kind of imperialism or sort of colonial presence.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: Willard Gatewood's wonderful book of letters from Black soldiers in that war, Smoked Yankees, has accounts of people who are all over the spectrum, right? So some of them are excited because they have an elevation in status and stature that comes from being the colonial force, right? Like, they're the ones with the power and the money, and they get treated in ways that they're not going to get treated at home, precisely because in those ladders of hierarchy and subordination, they're for the first time occupying a higher rung. That's not solidarity, that's not thinking about, like, "We are people who are somehow subject to the same racial logic suffering under power." They're thinking, "Look where we are," right?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mm-hmm.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: There's this really tricky kind of irony and web in which Black soldiers are pursuing citizenship through military service, they're pursuing an end to white racial democracy, or maybe even racialized democracy overall, but they're doing it in such a way by participating in the very imperial system that is going to intensify and strengthen the racial logics that manifest in American empire. But then there are people like David Fagen who actually deserts and goes over to the side of Filipino nationalists, and who I think ends up getting caught and executed. But he sees the critique and acts on it. But we know his name, Fagan's name specifically, because he tends to be the exception as opposed to the rule.

Bethany Jay: This is Teaching Hard History, and I'm Bethany Jay. We prepare detailed show notes for each episode of this podcast so that you can use what you learn here in the classroom. You'll find relevant resources—as well as a full transcript, complete with links to materials mentioned by our guests. You can find them at LearningForJustice.org/podcasts. Now let's return to Hasan's conversation with Adriane Lentz-Smith.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, once America gets involved in World War I, close to 400,000, 386,000 African Americans will have some kind of wartime military experience. And about half of those—200,000—will go abroad with the American Expeditionary Forces. What are the experiences of African Americans during World War I?

Adriane Lentz-Smith: Well, so of the 200,000 who go abroad with the AEF, 160,000 of them are in labor battalions, which means that they're doing work like stevedoring, building roads, building railroads, that sort of thing. And then 40,000 of them, or roughly 40,000 of them are combat troops. And so for the folks who are in labor battalions, a lot of the experience is just of crushing hard work and not a lot of glory. For the folks who are in the combat troops, some see a little combat. Some see a great deal of combat. The members of the 93rd, which include the handful of Black National Guard units that have been federalized, are actually given over to the French, to French command for the duration of the war, because the French were woefully short on men and just begged for someone, and this is who the US was willing to give up. They were incredibly well decorated by the French military, because the French were willing to acknowledge Black military accomplishments in a way that the Americans were not. But those decorations bespeak a great deal of suffering and trauma and injury even as they speak to courage and heroism.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: Often when you look at primary sources, people writing diaries about their service, or letters home, or those wonderful digitized surveys that the Library of Virginia has about soldiers' experiences, you see folks, even folks who are proud of themselves and in no way regret their military service, who would do it again, you see those folks willing to talk about or sometimes hint at the toll that that service also took on them, the trauma that soldiers experienced. And I think it's important for us to understand that when people say that they're willing to make this sacrifice for the nation or for their race or for their community or sort of whatever they're doing it for, that it is no small sacrifice, and that it hurts them. And some of those folks will heal from that hurt, and some won't. The 369th, which had been the 15th New York National Guard, was under fire for something like 190 days, the longest of any American unit.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The 369th. Those are the Harlem Hellfighters, no?

Adriane Lentz-Smith: Those are the Harlem Hellfighters, although historians Jeff Sammons and John Morrow will tell you that they were more correctly called Harlem's Rattlers, but I think then as now, Hellfighters is a catchier name, and that's what stuck, right?

Adriane Lentz-Smith: So they're the most famous Black unit of World War I. They're the one with the incredible band that is led by James Reese Europe, who is both a musician and composer and lieutenant in the Army. So he had to shift between leading this band and actually fighting. And they produce probably the most famous story of Black combat in this period, which is the story of Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts, who are two guys out on patrol who end up fighting off an incursion of attacking German soldiers just the two of them. And after Roberts is wounded, it's really just Henry Johnson alone, right? First with gun, and then when his gun gives out, when his bullets give out, hitting them with the gun, and then when the gun breaks, pulling out a knife. That story is broadcast everywhere. He's incredibly celebrated, but I think it's also very indicative of something of the Black experience with the military, because he's celebrated for a minute and then he's forgotten, and then he dies in poverty. And his story's gone until the 1970s or '80s.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: I think one of the reasons that the 369th is as famous as it is, it's both because of what they accomplished and what they did, but it's also because there were folks in that unit who leave a trace, who were either famous before they went in or who do something that let us see what the 369th did. Folks who were involved in the 369th have written memoirs. From Noble Sissle, who was sort of James Reese Europe's right hand man both as a musician, but then very close to him also in the 369th, to Arthur Little, who was a white officer but one who appreciated what his men could do. James Reese Europe and Noble Sissle, the musicians whose music that they write songs about the war, the kind of use of the syncopated beat to talk about No Man's Land, that's both striking to people in the time and fun to teach with now.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: And then there are people like Horace Pippin, who was not famous going into World War I, who was just a working guy who joins the 15th New York National Guard, but who was an artist. And so he both keeps a diary that tells you a little bit about what it was like to be under fire for so long. He draws sketches in his notebook, so you can see pictures of them sitting in their bunks or what have you. And when he comes out of the war, he paints and paints and paints. He says that the war sort of like, "Put the art in me," or some quote like that. And his material, some of it is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, some very striking paintings. But his World War I diary is at the Smithsonian and digitized. So I often pull that up to teach with.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: 1915, 1916, the color line is certainly well-established, and anything that is going to happen militarily is going to be racially segregated. Is there something that you could point to to explore the ways in which African Americans are debating what to do about segregation in the military?

Adriane Lentz-Smith: Yeah, I think the most prominent example, and in some ways, the one where I'm not sure that if I were a person sitting around in 1917, I don't know where I would come down, sort of the most outstanding example of folks debating how to respond to, deal with and/or accommodate segregation in the military comes with a debate over an officers' training camp, right? African Americans want there to be Black officers. The standard assumption on the part of military leadership and of the Wilson administration broadly speaking is that even if you're going to have Black troops, you should have white officers. And they often say, "And if we're going to have white officers, it should really be white Southerners who oversee Black troops because they know how to handle them." And so pulling again on these long histories of, if not coerced, deeply ill-treated labor and the assumption that you get people to do things through maltreatment.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: And so Black folks are like, "Okay, all of that sounds terrible. And what we want and what we deserve are Black officers in charge of Black troops." If that's to happen, if the army is going to do that, then they say, "Okay, fine. We'll give you a segregated officer's training camp." And it becomes a dilemma. W.E.B. Du Bois writes an article in The Crisis where it's basically like, "What do we do? Do we hold the line and then have no officers? Do we compromise on this and reinforce this idea that segregation is acceptable?" And then he comes down, and eventually the community broadly speaking comes down on the side of, "Okay, if it means our consistency of position and no officers or a segregated camp and officers, we'll take the segregated camp. But know that we don't like it."

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mm-hmm. And how should we explore the experiences of African-American women during this time?

Adriane Lentz-Smith: I'm a sucker for memoir. And so memoirs of Black women who were in France with the AEF, the most famous of which—which is in the public domain, so you can search for it on the interwebs—is Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces by Kathryn M. Johnson and Addie Hunton. You know, what they say is that they realize no one was going to tell this story if they didn't, or tell it fairly. And so they gathered a memoir that is both about Black soldiers, but about what they were doing as YMCA volunteers on behalf of Black soldiers. And I love that book. I love that book because it has a kind of like sensitive, heartbroken admiration for the willingness of soldiers in the AEF to continue doing what they were supposed to do in the face of all kinds of maltreatment.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: One of the things that makes World War I interesting from the perspective of African-American history, World War I is one of the first mass experiences of being out in the world and experiencing something beyond what you know. You know, you've had Black travelers for a very long time. You've had transnational networks through things like the AME Church or folks who were missionaries, but this is a wide cross-section of folks, and they're seeing things with their own eyes that they may or may not have ever heard about or read about. But this is immediate and it's visceral and it's eye popping, right?

Adriane Lentz-Smith: For someone who never meant to go further from Monroe, Louisiana, than, say, Rayville, Louisiana, to suddenly find yourself in Saint-Nazaire or Marseilles or on the Western Front somewhere, and to see racial dynamics and logics playing out in a way that doesn't look like how they played out where you are. I mean, Kathryn Johnson tells a story of sitting on a streetcar and a Tirailleur, so a Senegalese soldier boards. And a white French woman not only gives up her seat but kisses his hand. She's saying, "Thank you. Thank you for what you've done to France," and sort of honoring him. And Kathryn Johnson writes, "Well, if that had happened in the US, someone would have stuck a bomb under the car." Like, "I don't know what the dynamics are that are here, but they are not the ones that I'm used to."

Adriane Lentz-Smith: And African-American men have emotional relationships, friendships, sometimes sexual relationships, sometimes sexual transactions with French women who are often white. And the fact that they can break something that is such a taboo as to mean death where they come from, and can just be a thing that people do where they are is also really mind boggling, right? So it starts making them think about the ways that Jim Crow is specific or particular to their parts of the US. The way that they've experienced racism and racial interactions is a product of their local contexts. Or they look across a cafe, and they see, again, a Tirailleur, or a Moroccan soldier, or an Indo-Chinese laborer or what have you, and they think, like, "All right. I don't really know what that person is about, but here they are, and here I am. And we're all like these people of color sitting around. Do we have any kinship or connection?"

Adriane Lentz-Smith: One of the things that's very hard for soldiers who are overseas in World War I is that they're getting news from home. Like, they know what's happening back home. And in this moment domestically, white racial violence is spiking. Two things bring about the escalation in racial violence. One is the Great Migration. So this mass demographic shift of Black folks out of Southern rural areas into Southern cities and then into Northern cities. And that great migration and demographic shift putting tensions on housing, competition over labor, inciting what may or may not have been more latent racial antagonisms in places that folks move to, like Chicago or East St. Louis, Illinois, or Washington, DC. But all kinds of places, right? So that's part of it.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: And then the other part of it is making sure that this push for increased civil and human rights doesn't go anywhere. A lot of that escalation in violence is saying to people, "Let me show you all of the ways in which your continuing to try to pursue change is only going to bring you pain."

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mm-hmm.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: So as and even before many folks ship off with the AEF, we see the East St. Louis—what we call the St. Louis race riot, which is more akin to the kinds of attacks on folks in eastern European ghettos, right? To pogroms. And East St. Louis was the worst incident, worst riot in US history up to that point. And not long after East St. Louis, and in some ways as the kind of opening salvo of the war that does not bode well for Black soldiering, we see the Houston mutiny in late summer, when members of the 24th Infantry, who've been sent down to guard the building of a camp clash over and over again with white Houstonians who are very concerned about what having these "outside" Negroes who have too much sense of their own consequence, who are career military. Like, white Houstonians are trying to tamp down the 24th's sense of their own consequence because they see the 24th as potential outside agitators for their Black communities.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: There are a number of small-scale conflicts that then blow up when two white policemen attack a Black woman in front of members of the 24th who try to intervene and who are then beat up by those same policemen. That day ends with a small subset of Black soldiers marching on the town to go out and get the policemen who instigated all of the mess in the first place.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: It's a horrific tragedy. I mean, one of those policemen is killed in the fight, but most of the folks who are hurt are civilians who have nothing to do with it. A number of Black soldiers are arrested, 13 of them court-martialed and hanged almost immediately, before anybody even knew that their court martial was over. It's this terrible, terrible, terrible mess, and a terrible tragedy that kind of points to the dilemmas, contradictions and heartbreak of the whole military experience in this period.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: But then there are other horrors, right? Like, one of the most famous incidents during the war prior to the Red Summer of 1919 is the lynching of Mary Turner in South Georgia, a woman who's lynched basically for continuing to speak out about the murder of other Black folks in her community not so many days before. Turner is killed viciously by a large public mob. She is pregnant. And so to try to fight a war that will be traumatic anyway, right? The worst conflict in terms of casualties and emotional toll that perhaps folks had seen in modern times, to try to do that while knowing that all of this is happening. Like, what are you fighting for at that point?

Bethany Jay: Learning for Justice has a special opportunity just for educators. After listening to this episode, you can earn a certificate for one hour of professional development. All you have to do is go to LearningForJustice.org/PodcastPD—PD for "Professional Development." That's podcastPD, all one word. Then enter the unique code word for this episode: enlistment. All lowercase. You'll also find a link in the show notes. It's a great way to get even more out of Teaching Hard History.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: How are African-American former soldiers treated when they return?

Adriane Lentz-Smith: There's pride within Black communities about Black soldiering. Outside of their communities, there's a huge amount of hostility to even the uniform. You know, I write in my book Freedom Struggles about a guy, Ely Green, who was a chauffeur who went and was a stevedore in Saint-Nazaire and came back. And not only do folks in his small Texas town react against his military uniform, at some point they get so upset about uniforms that they're basically like, "Stop wearing your limo driver's uniform. Like, we don't want to see you in anything! In fact, we want you to leave. The very fact of where you've been and who you think you are because of it is dangerous to us." And he's not anomalous. In that terrible summer of 1919, there are numerous lynchings of Black soldiers, and some of those are Black soldiers in uniform.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Does that response from white Southerners—white Americans, but white Southerners specifically—does that change attitudes of African Americans who thought fighting in the war would be a largely productive thing?

Adriane Lentz-Smith: Yeah, it does. I think it shifts the primary strategy of many African Americans who are actively thinking about how you pursue citizenship and freedom rights. So there's a lot of writing in the lead up to the war among pro-war Black folks. So in kind of middle class, Black periodicals that are basically like, "This is our moment to prove what we can do." Or we can think back to the famous editorial by Du Bois, where he writes, "Close ranks. We're going to set aside our special grievances. We don't do this happily, but we do it willingly. And we're going to go, and we're going to help you. And when this is over, we'll come back and try to get what we deserve." So it's all kinds of demonstrating that you're worthy and then asking for something afterwards.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: And when they get to the end of the war, and they realize that whatever it is that they accomplished, one would be denied, right? So just as much as there are folks writing memoirs about what Black soldiers did, there are white military people writing narratives of failure to justify removing them out of the standing army. So that's one. They realize one, we're going to be lied about and libeled. And then they also realize, and everything that we accomplish doesn't actually soften segregationists' opinion of us. It doesn't make white supremacists less committed to white supremacy. It incenses and it inflames them and makes them more murderous. And so when this happens again, we're going to figure out how to make demands first, before we offer ourselves over.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: And there are some people who will respond by just saying, "Look, I'm going to work within my community to build my community. I'm not going to run at things head on." Like, when I say that, I'm thinking specifically of Ernest McKissick in Asheville—Floyd McKissick's father, right? Who was basically like, "I wanted to work with the Young Men's Institute, and I just wanted to make my community better." One could argue that, again, a sense of kind of militancy, of Black pride, of what have you, is something that he instilled generationally in his family. And it manifests in later generations and in his children.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: But then there are people who come home, and they're so upset and needing an outlet for actively pursuing change that they look for an organization. The NAACP, but even more the UNIA, the Universal Negro Improvement Association. It explodes! And there's a way that the trappings, the aesthetic trappings of Garvey, the organization, the sort of paramilitary haze of it all really appeals to people who are coming out of the military, and for whom that has given them meaning.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: And because the sort of Garvey-ite women are also organized and strong and visible, it provides a space and an outlet for Black women for whom this military period was formative as well. And I think the UNIA appeals a lot because the other thing that you see people thinking about coming out of World War I is what does it mean to be part of a broader community of Black people? What is my connection to Afro-descended people around the world? The UNIA becomes a place for people to sort that out. And then you have radicals, right? So there are some people who are going to go hard left into organizations like the African Blood Brotherhood and then from there into the Communist Party.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When we think about teaching American history in high school in particular there's always that unit on World War I. If there were one or two things that you would want students to take away from this introduction to this aspect of the American past, specifically as it relates to African Americans, what would those one or two things be?

Adriane Lentz-Smith: I would want students to think about how the domestic freedom struggle and the war shaped one another. So I'd want students to think about how African Americans tried to use the international stage as a theater for domestic battles over how far citizenship might extend, and whether Black people can claim it. So we can also have them think about the ways that the Black freedom struggle and other struggles against empire and racialized power, how there's resonance across them.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: You know, I think it's important that we talk about Woodrow Wilson. And I think that Wilsonianism remains so very current in contemporary debates about what US foreign policy should look like: the idea of self-determination, of democracy as something that Americans are willing to pursue and protect. The question that I'm always left with is whether or not that idea can have meaning and promise that is bigger than the man who produced it.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: I don't think that it is controversial. I don't think it's debatable to say that Woodrow was a white supremacist. I mean, I think to say that of a Southern-born Democrat in the early 20th century is about as remarkable as saying that, I don't know, "It rains sometimes," right? People always want to push against that, to argue with it, to say things like, "Wilson was a man of his time," to which I always say, "Okay, but there were lots of people in that time. Du Bois was a man of his time. Ida B. Wells was a woman of her time." Like, Wilson didn't have to think the way that he did, even if so much of his experience pushed him to do so. He had other voices, he had other perspectives offered to him and who were willing to debate him on it.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: He was the president who oversaw the embedding of segregation in Washington. There had been some before him under Taft, but it was extensive, it was systematic. It reached into employing people in the civil service. The expansion and the systemization of it during the Woodrow Wilson administration was striking and had long-reaching consequences. Wilson was a Progressive—capital P—appropriate to the era, but Wilson was a Progressive with close ties and affinities to Southern Progressives, and he appointed many of them into his cabinet and into influential positions in DC.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: Being a Southern Progressive meant that among the many questions and issues and social matters that they set about to solve was "The Negro problem." They saw race relations and framed it as a Negro problem. And segregation was their modern response to "The Negro problem." So in bringing those folks to office and empowering them, they were bringing that kind of set of solutions and practices to DC.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: African Americans saw great danger in this. You see headlines that say things like, "The South is in the Saddle Again." Like, they really see this as Jim Crow gone national, and their concern is about the ways that it could go from there to becoming international. Keep in mind that it's during the first Wilson administration that the US invades Haiti and then remains for two decades. It invades the Democratic Republic. They see Jim Crow as having wings, African Americans do. And they're worried that it's about to take off.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: So the coming of World War I, among the many things that it does, is to offer an opportunity either for African Americans and their allies to disrupt this expansion of Jim Crow, or for Jim Crow's defenders and advocates to see to its expansion. And so one of the questions going into World War I for all of these folks is, "What's going to happen next? And what will the role of this president be? And how will we use the president and his rhetoric and his attitudes and all of these other things to bring about the next thing?"

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Adriane Lentz-Smith, thank you so much for sharing these tremendous insights with us.

Adriane Lentz-Smith: You are very welcome. Thank you so much for having me on.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely.

Bethany Jay: Adriane Lentz-Smith is an associate professor and associate chair in the Department of History at Duke University. She is the author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I from Harvard University Press. Dr. Lentz-Smith is also the host of The Ethics of Now, a Community Conversation Series from The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke. We'll put a link in the show notes so you can keep an eye out for her recent interview with Questlove.

Bethany Jay: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and more. You can find award-winning films and classroom-ready texts at LearningForJustice.org.

Bethany Jay: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the Jim Crow Era and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. In our fourth season, we put Jim Crow under the spotlight, examining its history and lasting impact.

Bethany Jay: Thanks to Dr. Lentz-Smith for sharing her insights with us. This podcast was produced by Mary Quintas and senior producer Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. "Music Reconstructed" is produced by Barrett Golding. And Cory Collins provides content guidance. Amelia Gragg is our intern. Kate Shuster is the series creator. And our managing producer is Miranda LaFond.

Bethany Jay: If you like what you've heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Bethany Jay: I'm Dr. Bethany Jay, professor of history at Salem State University, and your host for Teaching Hard History.

References

• Frederick Douglass, Negroes and the National War Effort
• American Battlefield Trust, Fort Wagner Battle Facts and Summary
• Glory, Breaching Fort Wagner (1989 movie clip) 
• Onondaga Historical Association, October 1864: The National Convention of Colored Men Takes Place in Syracuse
• BlackPast, John S. Rock (1825-1866)
• Adriane Lentz-Smith, History, Duke University
• Crispus Attucks Museum, Who was Crispus Attucks?
• United States Army, A History of African American Regiments in the U.S. Army
• History, How Power Grabs in the South Erased Reforms After Reconstruction
• National Museum of African American History and Culture, Buffalo Soldiers
• US Dept. of State: Office of the Historian, The Spanish-American War, 1898 
• Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., "Smoked Yankees" and the Struggle for Empire
• Zócalo Public Square, The 19th-Century African-American Soldier Who Fought for Filipino Liberation
• Library of Congress, The American Expeditionary Forces
• The National Guard, Highlighting the 93rd Division in World War I
• Virginia Memory, The World at War: Library of Virginia WWI Collections
• New York State Military Museum, 369th Infantry Regiment: Harlem Hell Fighters
• Jeffrey Sammons & John Morrow, Jr., Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War
• Library of Congress, James Reese Europe, 1881-1919
• Smithsonian Magazine, Remembering Henry Johnson, the Soldier Called "Black Death"
• The Syncopated Times, Noble Sissle: A Messenger of Musical Uplift
• Arthur W. Little, From Harlem to the Rhine: The Story of New York's Colored Volunteers
• James Reese Europe's 369th U.S. Infantry "Hell Fighters" Band, “On Patrol In No Man's Land”
• National Gallery of Art, Horace Pippin
• Horace Pippin, Autobiography
• W.E.B Du Bois, Returning Soldiers
• Addie Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson, Two Colored women with the American Expeditionary Forces
• University of Washington, The Great Migration (African American)
• Smithsonian Magazine, The East St. Louis Race Riot Left Dozens Dead, Devastating a Community on the Rise
• Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture, The 1917 Houston Riots/Camp Logan Mutiny
• Zinn Education Project, Remembering Red Summer — Which Textbooks Seem Eager to Forget
• Zócalo Public Square, A Hundred Years After Her Lynching, Mary Turner's Memorial Remains a Battleground
• Adriane Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I
• WEB DuBois, Close Ranks
• Citizen-Times, Black History Month: Ernest McKissick
• The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, Floyd Bixler McKissick 
• National Park Service, Young Men's Institute Building, Asheville, North Carolina
• NAACP, Our History
• Universal Negro Improvement Association & African Communities’ League, About Us
• National Humanities Center, Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association 
• BlackPast, African Blood Brotherhood (1919-1924)
• Vox, Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist — even by the standards of his time
• Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, The Ethics of Now

 

Return to Episode Listing

Resources

• Learning for Justice Lesson, What Counts as History? (grades 6-8, 9-12)
• Learning for Justice Article, Teach This: HBCUs Are Not Pioneers of School Choice
• Learning for Justice Student Text, Meet Hiram Rhodes Revels (grades 3-5)

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One reason I love living in Columbus, Ohio—in addition to Buckeye football, of course—is the airport. Seriously, it's the airport. The John Glenn Columbus International Airport—CMH.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: First, the Columbus airport is only 12 minutes from downtown. Second, you can park your car for just $7 a day. Just $7 a day! And third, you can usually get through TSA in less than 10 minutes.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But the John Glenn Airport isn't perfect. Good eats? Nope! Just pizza and fake Philly cheesesteaks. And direct flights? Not nearly enough. John Glenn isn't a hub, making connections necessary. So when I fly out of Columbus, I do two things: I never eat there, and I try to route my connecting flights through Atlanta. Now why Atlanta? It's that whole two-birds-with-one-stone thing. I have to connect someplace, and Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson Airport has some good eats. And I mean some good eats!

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: My favorite place to grab a bite at Atlanta airport is Paschal's. Paschal's serves traditional soul food: fried chicken, mac and cheese, candied yams, collard greens, cornbread. Every bite, delicious. And every bite, a bit of history too.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The original Paschal's was a 30-seat luncheonette that opened in 1947 in a segregated Black neighborhood near downtown Atlanta. The owners were a pair of brothers, James and Robert Paschal. Their shop was an immediate success. Black patrons loved the good food, and they also appreciated the good service. As a Black-owned restaurant, African Americans were treated with dignity. None of that Jim Crow "You can buy lunch here, but you can't eat here" nonsense.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In the 1950s, the Paschal brothers expanded their restaurant using an $85,000 loan from Black-owned Citizens Trust Bank. In 1960, they added a jazz lounge that featured headliners like Aretha Franklin and Dizzy Gillespie. And in 1967, they built a six-story, 120-room motel, making Paschal's the first Black-owned hotel in Atlanta.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Paschal's has always served good food, but during the Jim Crow era, it was more than a restaurant—it was a vital community institution. Paschal's provided jobs for hundreds of African Americans, including students from the nearby Black colleges: Morehouse and Spelman. It also provided meeting space for the civil rights movement. Sit-in protesters met at Paschal's to map strategy. And Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his lieutenants gathered there to plan the Poor People's Campaign.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The recipe for Paschal's famous fried chicken is a secret, but the recipe for its success during the Jim Crow era is not. Paschal's served the Black community as an autonomous Black space, helping African Americans not only survive Jim Crow, but also thrive despite Jim Crow. And African Americans rewarded them with their patronage.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Paschal's was typical of Black institutions during the Jim Crow era. Places such as Citizens Trust Bank, which provided the brothers with the capital they needed to expand, did more than simply ply their trade. From restaurants and banks to churches and colleges, Black institutions helped to topple Jim Crow one meal at a time, one loan at a time, one Sunday service at a time, one literature class at time.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So when you find yourself traveling through Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, take the train to Terminal B, turn right at the top of the escalator, and go get you some good eats—with a side of history—from Paschal's. And be sure to tell them that Hasan sent you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History. We're a production of Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This season, we're offering a detailed look at how to teach the history of Jim Crow, starting with Reconstruction. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In this episode, we examine Black institution-building during the Jim Crow era. First, we discuss the changing nature of work after emancipation. Historian Tera Hunter explains how Black workers reorganized labor to their advantage, despite virulent white resistance.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Then we turn our attention to Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Professor Jelani Favors walks us through the evolution of HBCUs, and their role in producing generations of leaders, and in resisting white supremacy.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: First, here's my co-host Bethany Jay, in conversation with Dr. Tera Hunter. I'm glad you could join us.

Bethany Jay: Tera, I'm so happy that you could be here with us on the Teaching Hard History podcast. For those who don't know, Tera Hunter is the Edwards professor of American history and professor of African-American studies at Princeton University. She's also the author of To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War, and Bound in Wedlock—her newer book—Slave and Free Black Marriage in the 19th Century, which has won numerous prestigious awards. And like I said, I'm very excited to talk to you today. You were the first person who came to mind when we conceived of this episode, mostly because I am constantly waving To 'Joy My Freedom at my historiography students who want to write about this era. So you were right at the top of my mind. [laughs]

Tera Hunter: Thank you so much, Bethany. I really appreciate that. And thanks for inviting me.

Bethany Jay: As we think about the post-Emancipation era, one of the big questions that emerges is what is labor going to look like? Can you set the scene for us a bit about the different expectations for free Black labor at this time?

Tera Hunter: So I think it's important to think about this period in terms of a kind of contest of wills with former slave owners—whites in general, not just slave owners, but whites in general—really trying to hold on to the old institution as much as possible, while African Americans were trying to create something new, something liberatory. And so you have employers and landowners trying to have complete control over the kind of labor African Americans are doing, how they perform that labor, whereas African Americans were more interested in what kind of system of labor would advance their own economic and political and social interests. They wanted autonomy. They wanted to be able to take care of themselves. They wanted to be physically safe from violence.

Tera Hunter: African Americans' greatest aspirations in terms of their economic lives was that they wanted to be landowners. Only a relative few of them were able to achieve that. Rural workers were mostly reduced to a form of tenant farming—they became sharecroppers. Or they moved to Southern cities where they could have more freedom, and not be under the thumb of landowners or systems of debt that tied them to landowners year after year.

Bethany Jay: One of the interesting ways to understand this period is looking at the Freedman's Bureau, who are sort of in the middle of this contest of wills, as you say. What are some of the ways that the Freedman's Bureau negotiates this moment?

Tera Hunter: Yeah, so they're definitely seen as sort of mediators. Initially, they're providing a lot of relief for basically all Southerners in the form of food and shelter and clothing, because we're talking about the economy having been destroyed by the Civil War. We're talking about infrastructure in disarray. And so there's a lot of desperation across classes, but especially among poor people. And so the bureau fills in the gaps by providing aid to people across race and class. They help to reunite families in terms of African Americans. They kind of serve as a bureau for people to go to when they're looking for family members that they've been separated from either during the war or before the war. And one of their major roles is to negotiate contracts, and this is where things get really tricky because they're negotiating between landowners and African Americans. And on the one hand, they are trying to prevent the landowners from essentially reinstalling slavery.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Tera Hunter: And using corporal punishment. But at the same time, they want African Americans to stay where they are, you know, on the plantations and work. And so they're sort of jockeying between being advocates for African Americans, but also ultimately wanting to revive the Southern economy, and wanting African Americans to return to work. African Americans are reorganizing their labor in a way that is to their own advantage. And so one of the concessions that they win is the ability to organize their labor in family groups as opposed to indiscriminate gangs, which is what landowners initially prefer. They just want, you know, bodies in the field picking cotton, or whatever the crop is. Whereas African Americans were much more conscious of trying to organize in family units so that they could control the labor. They could decide, you know, who should be in the fields and when they should be in the fields. And so they chose to have women, you know, work in a flexible way so that they did field work, but also they could take time to take care of their children or cook dinner or whatever they needed to do for the family. So laboring for the family was an important component to African Americans that the landowners do not appreciate at all. They called it "Playing the lady."

Bethany Jay: Yes.

Tera Hunter: You know, Black women were trying to pretend like they were white women by what they call "withdrawing" from the fields, even though they weren't wholesale leaving the fields. They were just being very strategic about the labor that they did in the fields versus the labor that they did for their families.

Bethany Jay: And in so many of those instances you see people describing these women as idle.

Tera Hunter: Exactly.

Bethany Jay: And I think you show me a woman with several children, you know, and a house to maintain who's idle. I don't think so. Yeah.

Tera Hunter: Right. She's idle, she's playing the lady, she's just laying around, you know, being pretty.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Tera Hunter: And not doing the kind of hard labor that she is fit for, according to the kind of, you know, racist ideology that prevailed.

Bethany Jay: We often start with and focus on that rural experience because, you know, it's a huge part of this era. But I like shifting that focus to the urban environment because it provides a really different look at this moment. And in particular, we can look at the experiences of Black women in some detail. What are some of the challenges that confronted urban Black women and their labor during this time?

Tera Hunter: Well, in the cities men have more opportunities for diverse employment in various manufacturing plants such as tobacco and textile mills and transportation. Enterprises in municipal jobs as longshoremen, as lumber yard workers and so on. For African-American men, some of them were able to continue in skilled jobs as they had during the antebellum period, especially as carpenters, as brick masons, as coopers. And there were some, a small number that formed their own businesses as grocers, especially and draymen.

Tera Hunter: And for African-American women, the choices were more limited. Mostly, they were working as domestic workers. They mostly worked as domestic workers in private homes. In some cases they worked in hotels and boarding houses doing domestic work. And then a relative few were able to branch out as skilled workers, such as seamstresses, tailors and hat makers. And it's important to note also that Black women worked more than white women in wage work because men's wages, Black men's wages were so low. And so—and that was by design, because one of the contests over labor had to do with trying to basically enforce all African Americans to work: women, men as well as children. And so we see that men aren't paid sufficiently to be able to take care of their families, which then means that women have to work in wage employment.

Tera Hunter: And also in the cities, we have a disproportionate number of single women, widowed women, divorced women. These are women who are having to support themselves and their families, even though the majority of women are in families and married to men, there is still a disproportionate number that are basically working on their own.

Bethany Jay: Women who were working in domestic service inside white homes were still having a hard time getting people to treat them as free laborers in this time period. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Tera Hunter: Sure. So domestic work was also very contested. So even though African-American women were very restricted to, you know, domestic work occupations, they also were very insistent on trying to carve out as much autonomy as they could, as much respect and dignity as they could. They spoke up when they felt that they weren't being treated fairly. They tried to negotiate the best terms that they could for better wages. They tried to speak up when they were being treated in disrespectful ways or being assigned unpleasant tasks. So there was a lot of contest over the nature of domestic work. What tasks should they be responsible for doing? You know, what their hours per day or per week should be? Those kinds of things. And when negotiations failed, they had their own strategies, and one important strategy was that they quit.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Tera Hunter: And sometimes the women who were in the most demand could use it as leverage, to be able to play employers against one another to increase their wages or improve their conditions, to force concessions. Quitting could not necessarily guarantee better conditions, but it was a very effective strategy in depriving employers of having complete control over Black women's labor. And in the absence of having time off, they would quit for temporary periods to be able to juggle other kinds of responsibilities for their families, especially women who were mothers. And so this was something that employers constantly complained about, that they couldn't keep good workers, that women would just quit for no good reason, you know, as far as they could tell.

Bethany Jay: Right. It's funny, I was just teaching the diary entries of Gertrude Thomas right after the Civil War, when she's complaining about how she doesn't understand why all of her staff is quitting.

Tera Hunter: Right.

Bethany Jay: We see that over and over and over again. And then sometimes those women end up going to—or their husbands go to the Freedman's Bureau and try to get them to intervene in this sort of domestic labor peace. We're used to thinking about the Freedman's Bureau with rural labor, but they're also active in urban areas like this.

Tera Hunter: Yes, exactly. And also, I mean, that was a positive thing actually when they went to the Freedman's Bureau because sometimes they took a much more retaliatory route of, you know, trying to punish Black women who quit. There were cases of women being brutalized, especially by the men in the households when they were seen as disobedient to the white women. And then sometimes the white families went to the Ku Klux Klan. And so here is a report from a Black legislator in Georgia describing one such situation. He says, "Many times, you know, a white lady has a colored lady for a cook or waiting in the house or something of that sort. They have some quarrel, and sometimes probably the colored woman gives the lady a little jaw," meaning that, you know, she's talking back.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Tera Hunter: "And in a night or two, a crowd will come in and take her out and whip her."

Bethany Jay: Hmm.

Tera Hunter: So that document is taken from testimony provided by Alfred Richardson. He was a legislator in Georgia, and he was testifying before the congressional committee investigating Ku Klux Klan violence in the South during Reconstruction.

Bethany Jay: And that is taken from your book To 'Joy My Freedom, correct?

Tera Hunter: Yes. And you can find more information in my book, To 'Joy My Freedom. So essentially, they're calling on vigilante violence when they were upset by women's actions, or when women didn't conform to the behaviors that they wanted them to conform to.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History, and I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries. We prepare detailed show notes for each episode of this podcast, so that you can use what you learn here in the classroom. You'll find relevant resources, as well as a full transcript, complete with links to materials mentioned by our guests. You can find them at LearningForJustice.org/podcasts. Let's return now to Bethany's conversation with Tera Hunter.

Bethany Jay: There's also some legal measures that are taken in order to enforce a particular set of work expectations. Can you talk with us a little bit about those laws and legislation that had passed?

Tera Hunter: Sure. So after the Civil War, Southern legislatures passed discriminatory laws to limit the freedoms of African Americans. They criminalized freed people for various infractions. And one of the most notorious of these kinds of laws were vagrancy laws, which employers capitalized on. People were charged with being vagrants if they were perceived to be not working during regular work hours. They could also apply to people who were engaged in a variety of activities that white people simply disapproved of. They wanted to continue to have control over their lives, not just at work, but also outside of work.

Tera Hunter: African Americans are going to, you know, play pool or they're going to beer saloons. They're going to play cards or gamble or eat and drink and dance. And employers in particular were very disturbed by these kinds of activities because they saw all of these activities as being distractions from work. Again, they're trying to control not just their labor during work hours, but also what they do outside of work. And as far as employers were concerned, they should be resting to get ready for the next day of work as opposed to, you know, out partying or going to a movie when the movies arrive or, you know, vaudeville shows or whatever kinds of activities they're participating in.

Bethany Jay: They go so far as sometimes to raid these different places and throw people in jail, right?

Tera Hunter: Mm-hmm. Exactly. Exactly. Those who were charged with vagrancy could be arrested. They could be charged with fines, put in jail, and in some cases, put on the chain gang to work.

Tera Hunter: So here is an example of a Black code in Mississippi, which was passed in December, 1865. "Be it enacted by the legislature of the state of Mississippi that all rogues and vagabonds, idle and dissipated persons, beggars, jugglers or persons practicing unlawful games or plays, runaways, common drunkards, common night walkers, pilferers, lewd, wanton or lascivious persons in speech or behavior, common railers and brawlers, persons who neglect their calling or employment, misspend what they earn or do not provide for the support of themselves or their families." That's my favorite part. "Or dependents. And all other idle and disorderly persons, including all who neglect all lawful business, habitually misspend their time by frequenting houses of ill fame, gaming houses or tippling shops, shall be deemed and considered vagrants under the provisions of this Act." And it goes on.

Bethany Jay: That's fairly broad in its language, I would say.

Tera Hunter: Which is the whole point.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Tera Hunter: To be as vague as possible, to allow the most room for prosecution.

Bethany Jay: And then as you say, people who are taken up as vagrants are then generally forced to labor without compensation.

Tera Hunter: Exactly. Right. So it's a way for employers to basically take advantage of and use public laws for their private gain.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm. You focus a lot in your book To 'Joy My Freedom on washerwomen. And this group of women seems to be particularly useful as a lens into this moment because, if I'm correct, part of the reason why women take on work as washerwomen is because it provides them a little bit more autonomy. Can you talk to us a little bit about that particular occupation, and why so many women were drawn to it?

Tera Hunter: Sure. So one of the things to know about this period is African-American women, for those who chose domestic work, they refuse by and large to live in with their employers. And so that's a very distinctive post-emancipation demand that they're making to be able to live in their own homes, to be able to avoid the kind of 24 hours a day, seven days a week requirements that that entailed, and also the sexual exploitation that often accompanied living in with employers. And so washerwomen chose to avoid that type of domestic work, working in the private homes altogether, even during the day because it gave them more autonomy. They were totally self-supervised because they picked up the laundry from their employers, from essentially their customers, and then brought it back to their homes. It allowed them to enlist the participation of family members—children especially—and it allowed them to intersperse working, doing the laundry, along with other kinds of responsibilities that they had for child care. And they conducted the labor, when weather permitted, outside and often in communal spaces. And so this allowed them to conduct the labor, you know, in community with other African-American women, and provided opportunities for them to socialize with other women. And so this gave them the most autonomy in distancing themselves from the kind of control that employers of more conventional domestic workers tried to assert.

Bethany Jay: Yeah, it sort of changes that relationship from an employer-employee to more of a client relationship.

Tera Hunter: Exactly.

Bethany Jay: As much as possible. Can you talk to us a little bit about the Washing Society strike of 1881?

Tera Hunter: Black workers, both women and men, were part of many of the labor mobilizations that were happening during Reconstruction and afterwards in cities—especially across the South. There were protests or strikes by various groups of workers, including domestic workers, in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1866, in Galveston, Texas, in 1877, and then in Atlanta in 1881.

Tera Hunter: The Atlanta strike was organized by the Washing Society, and this was a kind of mutual aid organization that focused on labor issues, and improving the wages and the conditions of the women. And gaining respect for their labor and respect for the autonomy that they enjoyed.

Tera Hunter: These were workers who today we would call "essential labor" because the city literally could not get by without their work. There were no washing machines. You know, the laundry was done by hand, so private white homes depended on the labor of these women. Businesses depended on the labor of these women.

Tera Hunter: And so the women got together in 1881, and there were brief moments even before back in the 1870s when they had thought about organizing. But in 1881, they got together and they capitalized on those communal spaces where they did the laundry. And they began to organize. They begin to mobilize supporters and other strikers by going door to door, you know, asking the other washerwomen to join the strike. They held meetings in churches throughout the city to bring people together to talk about the issues. And they grew in size. They started with maybe 20, and they ended up having a few thousand strikers and supporters. And this turns out to be the most successful strike of domestic workers in the South, and also the most successful strike up to that point in the history of the city of Atlanta. And their opponents really underestimated their ability to organize and mobilize.

Bethany Jay: The strike was organized around the International Cotton Exposition that was coming to Atlanta. Am I right about that?

Tera Hunter: Well, the formal strike had ended before the Exposition, but the women threatened another strike. So they threatened a general strike, not just the washerwomen, but all the domestic workers at the time that the Cotton Exposition was scheduled to be held. So that was really shrewd on their part because again, their labor is essential. The city is hosting this major event. It's kind of like a coming-out party for the city of Atlanta as, like, the capital of the new South.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Tera Hunter: So they're trying to showcase to capitalists throughout the country and the world that, you know, look at us, we're a great city, we're progressive, we're trying to move forward, we're trying to industrialize, we're trying to, you know, sort of remake the Southern economy in these more modern ways. And we also have a workforce that we can control. And you have these women who are really challenging all these myths that they're constructing about the new South. Now they actually don't end up calling the strike, but it's the threat that I think is so important because it just demonstrated that they had a kind of symbolic power that they could exercise to make their voices heard.

Bethany Jay: What were the responses of the white community to these strikes and the threats of strikes on the part of domestic workers?

Tera Hunter: So they came up with a lot of different tactics. Individual landlords threatened to raise the rent of women who were involved in the strike. There was a group of businessmen who got together and they said that they were going to raise money to create a steam laundry that would be competition for these women. Of course, the absurdity of that is that this is not something that can materialize in any immediate way, but thinking long-term, they were suggesting that essentially these women needed to be put out of business. But that's also ironic because Southerners really didn't adopt the technology as quickly as they did in the North, precisely because they wanted to use the labor of Black women, to continue to use manual labor even when, you know, industrialized labor was possible.

Tera Hunter: They arrested women for disorderly conduct as they were engaged in organizing the protests. And the city also threatened to create a license fee. And they said that they were going to treat every single individual washerwoman who participated in the strike as though they were an individual business. And so that really rankled the washerwomen, and they wrote a letter to the mayor where they spelled out their demands, why they were going to strike, why their labor was important. And they tried to turn that provision on its head by saying, "If you want to charge us a license fee, go ahead. And then we will be able to claim the benefits of being treated as a business."

Tera Hunter: Of course, you know, they didn't have that kind of money, but it was important that they were trying to rhetorically challenge the absurdity that they would be treated in that way.

Bethany Jay: The strike of 1881 feels very hopeful. It's, you know, a lot of women coming together to really organize together. But after the strike, as we get further into the 1890s, race relations in Atlanta in particular and in the South largely go downhill quickly. Can you talk to us a little bit about that moment?

Tera Hunter: Yeah, so the 1880's are an interesting moment because it's after Reconstruction, and it's after the period where many historians at least tended to emphasize in the past that—you know, that political mobilizations were essentially over. And what you see in Atlanta is that they're continuing. And so what's happening in the 1880s is that, with the washerwoman strike, it's part of larger kind of political mobilizations that are happening with African Americans still very involved in the Republican Party, still trying to assert themselves as voters before they're disfranchised in the 1890s. And so increasingly, moving towards the end of the decade, we see the implementation of more and more Jim Crow laws, and the increase in racial violence, which one could say reaches a peak with the race riot in 1906.

Tera Hunter: So the race riot of 1906 was instigated by false charges that Black men were raping white women. And the newspapers, the white daily newspapers, played a big role in reporting these stories, which again were false.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Tera Hunter: And white vigilantes began attacking African Americans. Many were killed. And so these tensions had been building since Reconstruction as African Americans were progressing, as they were getting educated, as they were buying homes and opening up new businesses, developing institutions, there was a lot of white resentment towards those achievements. And in addition to that, the gubernatorial campaign of 1906 really tried to stir up racial anxiety even more, which fed into these attacks that occurred in the riot. And so these kinds of incidents of white supremacist mass violence happened across the South and other parts of the country. So Atlanta was not unique, but it really tarnished the city's reputation. It was a clear indication of how much racial segregation had become entrenched in the city, how much violence against African Americans was tolerated within the city. And it actually led to African Americans leaving the city at that point. Many people left the city out of frustration and concern for their lives.

Bethany Jay: We see a lot of African-American people, not just in Atlanta but across the South, leaving in large numbers during the Great Migration. So as we're thinking about labor, we see 50 years or so of attempts to redefine labor in the South, and then eventually many people giving up on that. Is that a fair assessment of the period?

Tera Hunter: I think that's a very fair assessment. I mean, if you think about, you know, the longer history, there were concerns and fears and anxiety among white Northerners that African Americans, you know, once slavery ended, were going to leave the South wholesale and move to the North. There was some movement of African Americans in the late 19th century towards the North, but by and large, African Americans were committed to staying in the South because they saw the South as their homes. These were the lands that they built, and they wanted their fair share and they wanted to recognize, you know, the generations of family members that had survived and lived in the South.

Tera Hunter: But people also eventually gave up hope. The ability to own land did not materialize in the way that they had hoped. Urban employment didn't always materialize the benefits that they had hoped. And so the Great Migration is one of those moments when you see large numbers of people deciding that it's time to try something new. It's time to find another place that maybe would give them better opportunities.

Bethany Jay: Why should we give this particular story the time and the energy that it deserves in our classrooms?

Tera Hunter: So as we think about this moment that we have been living through in American history these past couple of years with COVID, there has been increasing attention to thinking about the people who do labor that we think of as essential, but we don't necessarily treat them that way in terms of the wages that they receive, in terms of the conditions under which they work, the hours that they labor. We don't give them the respect that they're due, even as we—during this period of the last couple of years—have called attention to their centrality in our lives. All the service workers, all the grocery store clerks, you know, all the people who deliver food, who do the shopping and then deliver it to us.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Tera Hunter: We like to think of people as being middle class and not working class. And in doing so, I think we kind of hide and obscure the work, the physical labor, the unpleasant tasks that we often assign to a group of workers. And those workers have been disproportionately African American, they've been disproportionately other people of color, Latinos especially, and they have been disproportionately women. So I think that it's important for our teachers to help students to understand this longer history, which I think will also help them to appreciate things that are happening right now.

Bethany Jay: That's a very good point. Thank you so much for being with us today, and helping us to unpack such a complicated issue, and one that is so necessary for teachers and students to be talking about in the classroom. I can't think of anybody better to have had this conversation with, and I really enjoyed it.

Tera Hunter: I appreciate that, Bethany. I enjoyed it as well. Thank you so much.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Tera W. Hunter is a professor of history and African-American studies at Princeton University. She is the author of To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War and Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century, which won the Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In his book, Shelter in a Time of Storm, historian Jelani Favors examines how Historically Black Colleges and Universities—or HBCUs—played a critical role in fostering generations of leaders and activists. In my conversation with Dr. Favors, we explore how their commitment to democracy and social responsibility played a distinctive role in their evolution. We also explore the impact that HBCUs had during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I can't tell you how excited I am to welcome to the podcast Dr. Jelani Favors. J. Favors what's going on, my man?

Jelani Favors: Man, it's good to be with you, brother. Thanks for the invitation, and I'm happy to be here.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Of course, of course. Look, we have been talking for much of this season about African Americans, about how they've experienced Jim Crow, how they have thrived, how they have survived. But we know that the African-American experience isn't just about individuals or families, it's about community. And when you talk about community, you're talking about institutions. And one of the key institutions in the African-American community—certainly during the Jim Crow era—is historically Black colleges and universities. So I want to begin, Jelani, by asking you to tell us what falls under the umbrella of HBCUs?

Jelani Favors: So HBCUs, this is a designation that actually doesn't come until the 1970s. It's a federal designation. Prior to this, they were simply referred to as "Negro colleges." As I'm sure many of your listeners are aware of, it was illegal to educate enslaved Black men and women in the deep South. And so education is looked at really, as I often use this terminology, it's looked at as sort of a figurative messiah. It's looked at as not just only a way upward for the individual, it's looked at as a way upward collectively for the race. And that in itself is a concern for white America, who does not believe in the idea of Black social upward mobility, who are concerned about the idea of education itself.

Jelani Favors: The idea of a literate Black population is something that had always been a concern, particularly for slaveowners, but even for working class white Americans who believed that access and upward mobility is something that should belong particularly to white males only. That's where we begin to see a stark difference in what is being taught within these Black educational enclaves compared to predominantly white institutions. This antebellum era becomes a very important period where Black folks are defining what education is going to be for themselves, and you see a period where the concepts of white supremacy are becoming crystallized within the academy. The academy is playing a critical role in advancing these ideas. And of course, within Black educational spaces you see a counter effort to dismiss that, to preserve the confidence, the abilities of young Black students who are attending these spaces to understand that even though society is trying to convince you that you are pickaninnies and coons and sambos and second-class citizens, these spaces are being dedicated to countering that message at every turn. And it's very much going to be linked to, as you argue in your work, Hasan, the freedom dreams of Black people, the pursuit of freedom rights. And that becomes again a major difference between what's being taught at predominantly white institutions compared to the founding era of HBCUs.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Why is it important that students who are learning about the Jim Crow era learn about HBCUs?

Jelani Favors: Well, spaces matter in social movements. When you look at the long history of political activism and social activism within the Black experience, those spaces are absolutely essential in formulating strategies and tactics, in training future leaders. How do we get someone like a Mary McLeod Bethune? How do we get someone like a W.E.B. Du Bois? How do we get someone like a John Lewis or a Diane Nash or an Ella Baker, right? These are products of HBCU spaces and it absolutely mattered in helping them to articulate why white supremacy was problematic for the future of this country. Why, as Du Bois argued, the color line would be the problem of the 20th century. In helping someone like a John Lewis find the courage and find his voice, or Diane Nash and the scores of young people that she helped to lead through the streets of Nashville, who were products of Fisk University. Those spaces mattered. And unless we understand the type of energy that went into building those spaces, the type of intellectual discussions that emerge within those spaces, and how that helped young people to engage in dissent, then we won't really have a full understanding of the history of the Black experience in America.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: HBCUs, they are started by a wide range of organizations and people. Could you say a little bit about people and organizations that are responsible for founding these educational institutions?

Jelani Favors: Yeah, so you have a white philanthropic push combined with a Black urge for education. Again, Black folks were already creating their own Black educational spaces. We think of the African free school that existed in New York. There were other institutions like this in Philadelphia as well. The Institute for Colored Youth itself was founded by Quakers in Philadelphia who play a critical role in the founding of this institution. The African Methodist Episcopal Church will play a critical role in founding Wilberforce University, what's going to become Wilberforce University. So the Baptist Church, the Methodist Church, the Episcopal Churches, they're all kind of involved in this idea of providing educational spaces for newly-freed Black folks as we make this transition from the antebellum era to the post-emancipation era. You begin to see a proliferation of Black colleges emerging, dozens upon dozens of these institutions being founded in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm wondering, though, Jelani, we're talking about institutions, certainly after 1865 in the South, that are coming into existence in places where white folk had wanted to keep African Americans from not just attending school, but even learning the basics of reading and writing, where it was illegal just a few years earlier to teach an African American—whether enslaved or free—the fundamentals of literacy. So how did white Southerners respond to this push for education for African Americans?

Jelani Favors: Well, I mean, they are fearful. They are fearful, and they are also curious. You know, the idea of institution building in the deep South was something which was always of a major concern to the white Southern aristocracy in particular. You know, what are those folks doing down there in those brush arbors? You know, are they simply worshipping God, or are they also plotting to overthrow the institution of slavery? And the same thing could be applied to education. What are these kids learning? Are they learning a curriculum which is simply going to make them docile and amenable to the culture of white supremacy? Or are they going to become emboldened, question, push back against the social customs, the political customs of the region?

Jelani Favors: And of course, I think part of the balancing act that many of these early institutions are attempting to do is to try to convince, whether it's white benefactors or the white proletariat is that, hey, we're of no consequence. We're not here to directly challenge you. I think this is where people like Booker T. Washington comes in, where he stands in the middle of Piedmont Park in Atlanta and tells folks that, hey, we can be as one as the hand, as separate as the fingers. He is very much endorsing and embracing, at least publicly, the idea of segregation. But as Black folks are carving out that space, we begin to see something else taking place there. And Black folks indeed are going to question the assumptions of white supremacy. They are going to reject the idea of a second class citizenship. That's where we begin to see a stark difference in what is being taught within these Black educational enclaves compared to predominantly white institutions.

Jelani Favors: When you look at the antebellum era, you see a period where the concepts of white supremacy are becoming crystallized within the academy. The academy is playing a critical role in advancing these ideas. And of course, within Black educational spaces you see a counter-effort to dismiss that, to preserve the confidence, the abilities of young Black students who are attending these spaces to understand that, even though society is trying to convince you that you are pickaninnies and coons and sambos and second class citizens, these spaces are being dedicated to countering that message at every turn.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Now you have talked eloquently and written eloquently about what you call the second curriculum. Could you go into a little detail regarding what you mean by the second curriculum and its impact on students at HBCUs?

Jelani Favors: So HBCUs, yes, they're teaching classes in Greek and Latin and history and math and biology. But there's also another concept that emerges within these spaces. As I said before, it is very clear that the mission and purpose of these institutions is going to be resting on a pedagogy of hope, a pedagogy of resistance, and that pedagogy is composed of what I identify as really sort of three major ingredients. Within these institutions we see race consciousness. And by race consciousness I mean, how do we counter the disastrous impact and effects of white supremacy? We don't want our young people again believing that they are inherently inferior. And so race, it was the subject of debates. It was the subject of essays. And again, they talked about in the sense of an affirming sense of Black manhood and Black womanhood, promoting the highest ideals of success and these lessons in history of what Black folks have accomplished because again, the dominant society rejected Black manhood and Black womanhood at every turn. So race consciousness is one of those principal ingredients.

Jelani Favors: The other one is the idea of cultural nationalism, and when I speak of cultural nationalism in this context, I mean the idea and the necessity of building up Black institutions, building up Black organizations, of creating what they would later refer to as "race men" and "race women" who were proud to be Black in a society which again tried to strip them of that dignity and of that pride. And so the idea of building up their own becomes a major intellectual current flowing through these spaces.

Jelani Favors: And then the third one is what I refer to as idealism. And when I began to put together my study and I'm looking through these student newspapers, which became a major part of the primary resources that I was consulting, there were two words that popped up over and over and over again, and those words were "democracy" and "citizenship." Democracy and citizenship. I mean, they were constantly talking about the paradox of continuing to deny Black people democracy and citizenship. And a concept of idealism which was steeped in democracy and citizenship for all. So that formed the second curriculum. Again, idealism and cultural nationalism and race consciousness, not only did it create a charge and a mission for young Black people, but it gave them intellectual tools to go to identify white supremacy and Jim Crow-ism, and to attempt to deconstruct them.

Jelani Favors: We see the second curriculum at work in the student newspaper, The Freshmore, which was a newspaper which was written by the freshman and sophomore students at Alabama State University. December of 1955, there's this great article written by a student by the name of Loretta Jean Thomas, and the name of that article is "Is White Supremacy Faltering?" Right? I'll say that again. "Is White Supremacy Faltering?" This is 1955 in Alabama, and again herein lies the importance of the space, that a young Black woman in Loretta Jean Thomas can feel empowered enough to raise this question. And it's not a rhetorical question, because at the end of this article, she concludes that yes, not only is white supremacy faltering, but we should hasten its demise. And throughout that article, it is absolutely laced with the second curriculum. She's running down the history of the nation and racism that has existed. Again, that's an example of race consciousness. She's talking about the contradictions of continuing to deny Black people democracy and citizenship. Again, that's idealism, right? And so you see this legacy of the second curriculum very much materializing.

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Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Running any institution cannot be done without resources. I'm wondering how did these colleges and soon-to-be universities manage to keep their doors open? What were their financial sources that they were able to draw from?

Jelani Favors: It's a massive challenge. You know, so many resources to keep institutions afloat were being deliberately in many ways and systemically underfunded by local, federal and at the state levels. There are a number of white communities that are very much opposed to the idea of Black education altogether, and don't want to send their tax dollars to support these institutions. And indeed, there will be a disparity in terms of the type of funds and resources that are being allocated to these institutions, as opposed to white, publicly-funded schools.

Jelani Favors: In fact, there is an entire body of Black educational institutions that emerge in the Reconstruction era that don't make it out of that era. Many of them end up closing their doors. And so there's an incredible challenge about how they are going to keep their doors open. People like Booker T. Washington and others are leaning upon white philanthropy. But as Dr. James Anderson argues in his book on the history of Black education in the South, we cannot overlook and underestimate the role that Black folks played in keeping these doors open. Black folks are using their churches, they're using other civic organizations to draw upon and call for economic support. And this is something that Black folks are very much embracing. There's this great story in James Anderson's book about having a fundraiser at a local church, and a Black man, you know, comes and lays out his life savings for the local school and says, "Hey, I pledge everything that I have in order to keep these institutions and keep these doors open."

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One Black college pioneers in a method of raising funds, and that's Fisk University in the 1870s, and the tradition that that then launched among other HBCUs.

Jelani Favors: Oh, yeah. The Fisk Jubilee Singers were a chorus that traveled the country and would sing these Negro spirituals to largely white audiences and help raise money to keep the doors open. But of course, this is a case at other institutions that that is not a story in and of itself, that there were a number of Black colleges that were doing similar types of fundraising efforts.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: There was some debate about whether they should be singing and performing Negro spirituals, not just throughout the United States and hitting the Black community and Black churches, but at segregated concert halls and even overseas into England.

Jelani Favors: Yup.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Could you say a little bit about why it was an issue that they were performing particular songs?

Jelani Favors: Well, when you look at the history of what they often refer to as the Negro spirituals, and particularly as you begin to move into a newer generation, we're talking about the era of the new Negro that begins to emerge in the early 20th century, there are a number of particularly younger Black folks who did not want to sing what they thought of as slave songs, songs that invoked the spirit and the misery of fieldwork. Because, you know, we're entering into a period, particularly from the Reconstruction into the early 20th century, where you see this sort of harkening for the "Good old days" amongst white America. And one of the things that reminds them of the good old days is hearing, you know, those work songs that were often sung by Black folks. And so it's really sort of a generational divide that begins to emerge amongst a number of young Black people who say, "Look, we no longer want to sing these songs for largely white audiences."

Jelani Favors: And of course, there are also a number of Black composers and educators who teach at these institutions, who remind some of those younger Black folks that there is dignity to be found in that music. There are coded messages to be found in that music. And it remained a debate for a number of years on how we should move forward. Are we celebrating the legacy and the heritage of Black folks? Or are we simply giving to white folks a romanticized view of slavery days? That's a debate that ultimately resolves itself. We begin to see new pathways for economic support opening up for HBCUs, particularly as you see the rise of a number of state-supported institutions. But yeah, I think that's a really great window and insight into how you begin to see a new Negro generation rejecting some of the principles of entertaining white folks and keeping a romanticized view of slavery moving forward.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Who do we find teaching at HBCUs?

Jelani Favors: So right out of the gate, you know, a number of these institutions, you're going to see white educators who are coming down from the North. You're going to see white administrators at many of these institutions, certainly in many cases, you're going to see white trustee boards. And that's going to remain the case for much of the 19th century and well into the 20th century. You know, institutions like Lincoln University for a number of years had an all-white faculty, and they weren't alone. But again, as we move into this new Negro era, you begin to see calls and demands amongst particularly again, Black youth who are being educated within these spaces, that they want to see—they want to see their own, right? They take pride in their own.

Jelani Favors: And Tougaloo College is one of those institutions where a number of younger Black students said, "Hey, we should take great pride in our race. And that includes understanding that there are educators and administrators who are more than capable in leading this institution and educating us." And that begins to simmer and boil over. I think probably one of the most popular examples of this is the protests at Fisk in the 1920s, where a number of Fisk students really kind of reject the idea of white paternalism that they find in the instruction and education and leadership of someone like President McKenzie, who was the head of Fisk at that time in the 1920s. And they said, "Look, you know what? We're sick and tired of that level of paternalism. We're sick and tired of these white supremacist ideals finding their way into our campus by suggesting that the only people who can lead these institutions and who can teach our own are white folks." And it's from a lot of that consternation and frustration that we do begin to see, slowly but surely, Black faculty assuming greater roles within these institutions and ultimately Black administrators as well.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What's the day-to-day interaction between local Black folk, folk who aren't attending the Black college and the institution itself during this time in the early 20th century?

Jelani Favors: I think it's important to understand and realize that there were scores of working-class Black folks, impoverished Black folks, who looked at HBCUs as a beacon of hope. These were institutions often located in these impoverished communities, and they provided a sense of hope and a sense of connection. Education is looked as not just only a way upward for the individual, it's looked at as a way upward collectively for the race. One of my good friends at Duke University, she identified and talked about this idea of a linked sense of fate with the masses, right? A linked sense of fate with the masses. And these are Black youth who are coming out of these institutions who have a linked sense of fate with the masses. They don't simply go into their own ivory towers and create these lush, private communities and disconnect themselves completely from the struggles of the Black masses. Their struggles are their own.

Jelani Favors: The HBCUs open up their doors to try to provide training, vocational and professional training for working-class people. Many of them are having conventions on campus particularly for agriculture in the deep South, places like Tuskegee, Southern University, Talladega.

Jelani Favors: And then, of course, there's something which we celebrate quite a lot in the HBCU world: the cultural pageantry of it all. Because the HBCUs also provided a space where Black folks could be free. They could go and celebrate by going to watch the football games, listening to the bands, going and enjoying the homecoming and the revelry and again, the cultural pageantry which often define these spaces. And it became a community celebration.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: There is an equally long legacy, strong legacy of student activism. And it doesn't just begin in the 1960s. Could you say a little bit about those who were going to school during the depths of Jim Crow?

Jelani Favors: Well, you know, as you mentioned, prior to the 1960s, the '30s, the '40s, the '50s, the 1920s, you begin to see seeds developing. You begin to see Black youth finding their voices. I just want to share another passage, which I think really highlights that. Solomon Seay Sr., who would go on to become a major prominent voice within the Movement for Black Liberation in Alabama. It's very interesting to identify what brought Solomon Seay into that development in terms of finding his voice on these political issues. And if I could just share this brief passage, which I identify as the very important work the HBCUs were doing to help facilitate that.

Jelani Favors: From the book it says quote, "In 1929, a special student arrived at Alabama State University. For Solomon Seay Sr., the dawning of racial responsibility did not occur until he enrolled at the university. An itinerant preacher with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Seay enrolled in colleges when he could, picking up a course or two along the way." And this is from his memoirs. "'About all that I can remember from that experience,' wrote Seay of ASU, 'Is two courses that did something special to me.' To judge from their formal titles, these two classes, Rural Sociology and Human Geography, did not broadcast their militancy. Such was the magic of the second curriculum. Seay's professors had the opportunity to close their doors, begin their instruction and relate the coursework to the oppressive social, political and economic conditions Blacks suffered in Alabama. In doing so, they hoped that the outcome would be conscientious citizens at least, even freedom fighters. They hit the jackpot with Seay." Seay goes on to say quote, "'Both courses helped to awaken me far more than either of those teachers could imagine,' he recalled. 'This was an additional motivation for my whole civil rights thrust in the years to come.' As the movement came to life in Montgomery during the 1950s, Martin Luther King Jr. described Seay as quote, 'One of the few clerical voices that in the years preceding the protest had lashed out against the injustices heaped on the Negro, and urged his people to a greater appreciation of their own worth.'"

Jelani Favors: Throughout the book you find stories like this, of students finding their voices. And that's the legacy, I think, of these institutions that we have to lift up is how they help people find their voices and find their purpose and how those voices and those purposes were very much linked to the freedom dreams of the Black masses. It's one thing to talk about the legacy of social activism and student agency, it's another thing to try to help students find their own student agency, and to help find their own voice. I think that's one of the things as educators that we need to be trying to do is to help students find their voices, particularly in areas of intolerance and inhumanity, and how these things persist in our society today. Not only persist, but in many ways are intensified in this space in our country today, and how they can be agents of change.

Jelani Favors: One of the projects that I've done in my own courses has been what I refer to as "Project activism," where I actually get students to do group projects that require them to participate in or generate their own protests and relate that project to the course material and historical narrative of Black people in this country.

Jelani Favors: So when I taught at Morgan State University in Baltimore, I had students who did projects on the boarded-ups in downtown Baltimore. If you've ever seen the television show The Wire, it talks a lot about the boarded-up communities, and there's a lesson in the history in terms of housing segregation and gentrification to be told within that. But I had a group of students who did really brilliant projects on that, where they would go downtown into these communities, interview residents within those communities, and then find ways to highlight the significance of rejecting and protesting that legacy. I had students who did projects on bullying, I had students who got involved in local political campaigns that they believed in. I think youth have always represented the promise of tomorrow, and I hope that the educational spaces that we're exposing them to continues to equip them with the type of intellectual tools to serve, to continue to serve as a promise for a better tomorrow.

Jelani Favors: So for educators who are looking to discuss the importance of HBCUs, thankfully, there are indeed a group of digital collections which document the legacy of these institutions. Educators can go to HBCUDigitalLibrary.auctr.edu. Again, that's HBCUDigitalLibrary.auctr.edu. And there you can find a litany of primary resources, of digitized history from Alabama State, from Bennett, from Fisk, from Bowie. There's a growing number—Hampton University. There's a growing number of HBCUs, which are funneling their digitized history into this space. That includes student newspapers. It includes presidential papers. It includes photos and images. So I certainly would point teachers to that space.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: As we move through the Jim Crow era, at a certain point there are victories with regard to overcoming segregation. And this is getting a little bit beyond the general scope of the podcast as a whole, but we would be remiss if we did not get you to say a word on the impact of desegregation on HBCUs by the time we get to the 1960s and certainly the 1970s and early '80s.

Jelani Favors: Yeah. You know, by the time you reach the late 1960s, early 1970s, these institutions are beginning to change in more ways than one. And one of the ways that they were changing is that they were no longer able to recruit some of the top flight Black scholars that were emerging from graduate school, because many of those students were now beginning to take these new job opportunities that were beginning to emerge at predominantly white institutions. And so if indeed, the relationship between Black faculty and Black students provided one of the very important foundations for the militancy that's emerging out of these institutions throughout much of the 20th century, that relationship begins to evolve. I won't say it weakens, because there are still a number of incredibly talented Black faculty who teach at HBCUs, but there are greener pastures. You know, I'm having my air quotes going here, "greener pastures" that are being offered now to a number of Black faculty.

Jelani Favors: You know, there's this great story that I tell in my chapter on North Carolina A&T, where a professor who was very well known in the area of English literature, Darwin Turner, was teaching it at North Carolina A&T during the Black Power era. And he was so recognized for his talent that I believe it was the University of Wisconsin I believe, began to fly him round trip back and forth just to come teach one class on Black studies, this emerging field of Black studies that's coming out during the Black Power era in the late 1960s. And so they said, "Hey, we need to get a Black guy here on campus who can teach this." They identified Darwin Turner, who's still teaching in North Carolina A&T, and they're flying him round trip just to come teach this one class. And it's such a phenomenon that they bring in a television crew to capture this, right? A Black guy teaching Black studies at the University of Wisconsin. And the very next year, I believe, he accepts a job at the University of Michigan.

Jelani Favors: So, you know, that matters, right? When a school like North Carolina A&T begins to lose the type of talent that's embodied in someone like Darwin Turner, or a number of the other preeminent Black scholars that are emerging in the late 1960s, many of them are taking their talents to institutions that had a lot greater material resources to offer than HBCUs. And that impacts. It impacts the legacy of these institutions, the type of talent that these institutions once almost exclusively had access to. It's not just faculty who are being seduced by the trappings of capitalism, if you will, but Black students as well. Many of them are being seduced by the material resources that were being offered by predominantly-white institutions as this era of integration begins to open up. And that is a trajectory I think that has continued to this day, even though we've seen an increase in Black enrollment at HBCUs, particularly in the last few years due to a lot of the increased racial hostilities that are intensifying in our country. But make no mistake about it, going into the period of integration, HBCUs are going to witness a lot of transformation on their college campuses.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, we're living in a time now where teachers are receiving any number of questions concerning what they teach when it concerns issues of race and racism. And I can easily see someone asking a teacher why on Earth would you be instructing our students about historically Black colleges and universities. Aren't these just promoting segregation? And what would be your advice to teachers with regard to how to respond to that?

Jelani Favors: Well, I mean, one, I would say we have to embrace the hard histories of understanding the legacy of segregation within this country. And part of understanding that legacy of segregation is that these institutions and spaces were created out of necessity, and they weren't immediately deemed as historically Black colleges and universities. They were the Black college and the Negro college because of segregation. Certainly there's a stigma of inferiority that a number of white Americans have had about these institutions and spaces. But white people were employed there, who taught there, certainly administrators there. At various points there have been white students that have attended there. I'm thinking about Joan Trumpauer, who came down to Mississippi with the Freedom Rides, and ultimately stayed and enrolled at Tougaloo, and became one of the most important voices within the Tougaloo movement.

Jelani Favors: But I think what's most important is that we recognize the realities of what emerged out of these institutions and spaces. And that is again, a push for liberation for all Americans, and most expressly African Americans who have been marginalized and dehumanized for years in this country. You can't begin to talk about the Black experience in America and not recognize the significance of these spaces, of the women and the men that they produced who went on to become very important parts of the Black liberation movement within this country. They're still very much vital. They're still very much of a high necessity. And so I hope that they'll continue to keep their doors open for years and years to come, and in doing so continue to help lead the way on some of these issues as it relates to deconstructing white supremacy and intolerance within our society.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Aggie Pride. That's what's up.

Jelani Favors: Aggie Pride. [laughs]

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Jelani Favors, brother. Jelani, man, thanks a lot for blessing us with your insights.

Jelani Favors: I mean, thank you so much for having me. It's been a joy.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely. And as we roll the credits, it sounds to me like I hear "Dear Old Morehouse" in the background. I could be mistaken, but it certainly does sound like that. We'll get up, brother, we'll get up.

Jelani Favors: We can only pray, brother. Take care, man, thank you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: All right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Jelani M. Favors is the Henry E. Frye Distinguished Professor of History at North Carolina A&T State University. He is the author of Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism, which received the Stone Book Award as well as the Lillian Smith Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pauli Murray Book Prize from the African American Intellectual History Society.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center—helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and more. You can find award-winning films and classroom-ready texts at LearningForJustice.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the Jim Crow Era and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. In our fourth season, we put Jim Crow under the spotlight, examining its history and lasting impact.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks to Dr. Hunter and Dr. Favors for sharing their insights with us. This podcast was produced by Mary Quintas and senior producer Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. "Music Reconstructed" is produced by Barrett Golding. And Cory Collins provides content guidance. Amelia Gragg is our intern. Kate Shuster is the series creator. And our managing producer is Miranda LaFond.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: If you like what you've heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University, and your host for Teaching Hard History.

References

• Paschal's Soul Food Restaurant in Atlanta, GA, Timeline
• Citizens Trust Bank, Our Legacy
• Tera W. Hunter, About
• Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War
• Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century
• National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Freedmen's Bureau Records
• Teaching American History, Excerpts from the Journal of Gertrude Thomas
• David M.Kennedy, The American Spirit: United States history as seen by contemporaries (Alfred Richardson testimony)
• Facing History and Ourselves, The History of Slave Patrols, Black Codes, and Vagrancy Laws
• Encyclopedia Virginia, Vagrancy Act of 1866
• BlackPast, (1866) Mississippi Black Codes
• New America, The Atlanta Washerwomen Strike of 1881
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 115 years ago, a deadly race riot reshaped Atlanta
• University of Washington, The Great Migration (African American)
• Jelani M. Favors, Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism
• Jelani M. Favors, Clayton State University 
• US Dept. of Education, What is an HBCU?
• Fisk University, History
• Moonstone Arts Center, The Institute for Colored Youth
• African Methodist Episcopal Church, Our History - AME Church
• Wilberforce University, About
• New Georgia Encyclopedia, Atlanta Compromise Speech (Booker T. Washington)
• James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935
• Fisk Jubilee Singers, Our History
• New York Times, Black Spirituals as Poetry and Resistance
• Tougaloo College, Our History
• PBS: Jim Crow Stories, Fisk Student Protests
• Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, Solomon Snowden Seay, Sr.
• HBCU Library Alliance, Digital Collection
• BlackPast, Darwin T. Turner (1931-1991)
• National Museum of American History, "They called me 'race traitor'": Joan Trumpauer Mulholland's lifetime of resistance

 

Return to Episode Listing

Resources

• Learning for Justice Article Remember the Tulsa Race Massacre
• Learning for Justice Informational Text, Race Riots (grades 9-12)
• Learning for Justice Student Text, For My People (grades 9-12)

Transcript

Bethany Jay: I spend a lot of time thinking about some of the most painful parts of our nation's history. Slavery, the slave trade, segregation and racial violence pervade so much of my work. This stuff is hard, so I'm not apologetic about keeping my TV viewing light. I remain unashamed that I watch every Hallmark Christmas movie, even though I can tell from the first scene exactly how it will play out. And I'll much sooner watch Saturday Night Live than an episode of Ozark. But a lot of my family members like their entertainment to be a little bit darker, a little more real, than I do. Those family members watch the HBO show Watchmen that premiered in 2019.

Bethany Jay: The show takes place in a modern-day Tulsa, Oklahoma, but in an alternate timeline of American history. In this Tulsa, our protagonist is serving as both a police officer and a vigilante superhero named Sister Night. Spoiler alert: her grandfather is a survivor of the Tulsa Massacre. I'm not gonna get into what seems to be an alien-squid attack or a subplot set on one of Jupiter's moons. Let's just say that even though it's set in a very different America, the characters are dealing with political and racial issues which are grounded in the very real American universe.

Bethany Jay: In 1921, white Oklahomans, aided by police officers and the National Guard, razed 35 square blocks of Black Tulsa and the thriving Greenwood community known as Black Wall Street. The reason? The rumored assault of a white girl by a Black man. The allegation was proved false and the Black community resisted, but before the massacre was over, between 70 and 300 people were dead and 8,000 were homeless.

Bethany Jay: The first episode of Watchmen begins with a reenactment of the Tulsa Massacre. We see chaos on the streets. There's smoke everywhere, and people are ducking gunfire as planes are buzzing overhead and dropping incendiary bombs on buildings.

Bethany Jay: It was in this opening scene that my family learned about the Tulsa Massacre. Sure, they had heard Tulsa referenced—probably by me—but Watchmen made them really get Tulsa. They weren't alone. The show's star, Regina King tweeted, "Seeing so many tweets that Watchmen was the first time they had heard about Black Wall Street, and had no idea that our opening depicted the Tulsa Massacre—which had not been taught in US history classes—made me want to post this post." Then she linked to a Washington Post article about the search for mass graves from the 1921 massacre.

Bethany Jay: Two years later, Joe Biden became the first sitting president to commemorate the 1921 massacre. He delivered an emotional speech in the city on the event's 100th anniversary.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Biden: For much too long, the history of what took place here was told in silence, cloaked in darkness. But just because history is silent, it doesn't mean that it did not take place. Hell was unleashed. Literal hell was unleashed. We do ourselves no favors by pretending none of this ever happened or doesn't impact us today, because it does still impact us today. We can't just choose to learn what we want to know and not what we should know. Because in silence wounds deepen.]

Bethany Jay: When President Biden's address forced national attention on this event's centennial, it seemed a whole other segment of the American population heard about the Tulsa massacre for the very first time. And again, numerous articles were written about the many Americans who had never learned of the event.

Bethany Jay: Like so much of American history that doesn't fit the comfortable and celebratory narrative—what I call the "Things started out great, and have been getting better ever since" narrative—Tulsa had been buried. And it's not just Tulsa. East St. Louis, Chester, Pennsylvania, Houston, Philadelphia, Charleston, Longview, Washington, DC, Chicago, Knoxville and Elaine, Arkansas, all are instances of anti-Black collective violence that occurred between 1917 and 1919.

Bethany Jay: Joe Biden's speech, shows like Watchmen, and HBO's Lovecraft Country, which also depicts the massacre, maybe these are signs that America is ready to begin confronting the racial violence that pervades its past. But there are entrenched interests in politics and government that are determined to make this difficult. Just three weeks before Biden's visit to Tulsa, the Republican governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, signed a law prohibiting certain ideas about race and racism from being taught in the state's schools.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kevin Stitt: Now more than ever, we need policies that bring us together, not rip us apart. And as governor, I firmly believe that not one cent of taxpayer money should be used to define and divide young Oklahomans about their race or sex. That is what this bill upholds for public education.]

Bethany Jay: In all, 23 states from Rhode Island to Texas have either enacted similar bans or have legislation to do so under consideration. As educators, we don't have to wait for the next sci-fi television show to teach our students about this history. We can use our classrooms to actually help them make sense of this hard history—and the nation it helped to create. Because it's not just African-American history, it's definitely not revisionist history, this is US history, in all of its complexity.

Bethany Jay: I'm Bethany Jay, and this is Teaching Hard History. We're a production of Learning for Justice, the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This season, we're offering a detailed look at how to teach the history of Jim Crow, starting with Reconstruction. In each episode we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises.

Bethany Jay: Starting In the 1910s, African Americans began leaving the South in record numbers during the Great Migration. African-American businesses were thriving in many places, and the Black middle class was growing, as thousands of Black veterans who had been making the world safe for democracy were returning to a nation that resented them. What followed was a series of coordinated anti-Black acts of collective violence around the country.

Bethany Jay: David Krugler is the author of 1919, The Year of Racial Violence. In this episode, he talks with my co-host Hasan Kwame Jeffries about the massacres that occurred during Red Summer and in Tulsa, about the lasting damage that they caused and how Black communities fought back, resisting these premeditated acts of white supremacist terrorism.

Bethany Jay: I'm so glad you can join us. Let's get started.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: David, I am really excited to welcome you to the podcast and say thank you so much in advance for joining us today.

David Krugler: Thank you, Hasan. It's a pleasure to be here, and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In a number of the episodes that we've had so far, we've spent a lot of time focusing on African-American experiences in the South. But there comes a time in the African-American experience where Black folk begin to move out of the South. And this movement we call the Great Migration. Could you share a little bit about what the Great Migration was, and what led African Americans to migrate out of the South?

David Krugler: Yes, so one of the greatest social changes taking place during the 1910s is that approximately 500,000 African Americans leave the South for Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh. After the war years, approximately 1914 into 1918, we have an even greater migration. And so in the decades that follow: the '20s, the '30s and the '40s during World War II, millions more leave the South. And there are many reasons for that departure and relocation. During 1914, there are cotton failures, there's flooding. There is the structure of debt peonage that holds Black sharecroppers in bondage to the land. If they try to leave, they'll be arrested. They're cheated out of their earnings so that they're permanently in debt. So that's a big reason to leave if they can make the escape.

David Krugler: Because of the shut off of European migration to the United States because of World War I, Northern factories need labor. They desperately need labor. They send labor agents to the South to recruit African Americans and offer them incentives to come north.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Most African Americans actually remain in the South. Why didn't more people go?

David Krugler: There are obstacles to it. Southern officials try to block this. Some states require these labor agents to pay $500 for a license to do this. The point was to make it prohibitively expensive. And the reason for blocking African Americans from leaving is pretty clear: they had a captive labor market. They had an exploited population which wanted to leave.

David Krugler: For those who try to leave, violence awaits. Sheriffs can track them down and arrest them. They could be subjected to mob violence. There's also the very real fear of retaliation against family members. So if one person leaves, they worry about elderly relatives who may not want to make the move or may not physically be able to. Will there be retaliation against them? When you've got a system that has all the resources of the state, not just law enforcement and the courts, but also all elected officials, appointed positions, the running of municipal and state governments and county governments, and then you've got an economic system that's rigged against African Americans, that's, you know, a pretty big obstacle to get over. And it takes a great deal of courage to leave, but it also takes courage to stay. We shouldn't think that those who chose to remain behind were cowardly in some way. There's a complex mix of reasons to stay or go.

David Krugler: And I think also when we look at the Great Migration as a decades-long process, with millions more leaving the South for the North in the '20s, '30s and '40s, then we see that it does snowball. And so more and more people do make that choice to leave. We can think of that 500,000 as a vanguard.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What are some of the things that teachers can do to teach the Great Migration, both the reasons why African Americans left, and also some of the issues that African Americans encountered when they arrived in the cities of the North and the West?

David Krugler: I think one of the best tools for teachers are a series of letters to the Chicago Defender that the Library of Congress has—letters written by Southern African Americans who want to move north. The Chicago Defender is a weekly Black newspaper, obviously published in Chicago, but it has national distribution. And its publisher, Robert Abbott, was a big fan of migration. And a lot of the content of the Chicago Defender played up the opportunities in Chicago, encouraged Southern Blacks to move. And this got the attention of African Americans of all ages across the South. And so you read these letters, and some are from teenagers asking for help. And they always say, "Look, I'll pay you back. But the conditions are so bad here. We live in fear. People are being lynched, we're cheated out of our wages. We have families to support. We'd like to come North." And these letters—and you can get the original scans so you can see how the people wrote them out in pencil on paper. It's pretty moving and a great teaching resource.

David Krugler: And also, one of the great cultural depictions, artistic depictions of the Great Migration can be found in a series of panels that the Black painter Jacob Lawrence produced. He's got a very distinctive style. These are figurative paintings, but there is a certain level of abstraction with a lot of angular presentation. But it's really striking. I mean, his color palette is amazing. And so in one painting, we see African Americans flowing into three doors to go to different locations of the Great Migration. And he captures so well the press of bodies, you know, the urgency that people felt to get out. And from there, the panels go on to show trains at night, and the arrival in the city, finding work, finding inferior housing stock, experiencing discrimination, resentment in the South, efforts to block labor agents from even coming south to recruit these migrants. One of the panels shows hands gripping a prison bar, and we only see those hands in this small prison window. It's a labor agent who's been jailed for recruiting. And so that gives us this really great artistic presentation of the Great Migration. And all the panels do that.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And what were some issues that African Americans would have encountered when they arrived from Alabama and settled in Cleveland, or leaving Mississippi and settled in Chicago?

David Krugler: The North was often seen as a promised land, but it had lots and lots of problems itself. There were a lot of issues awaiting these migrants. Let's start with two. One: residential segregation. So Chicago, one of the prime destinations for Southern migrants, part of Chicago becomes known as "North Mississippi" during the interwar years, they find a small and thriving African-American community, but one bounded by strictly, rigidly enforced residential lines of segregation. This is maintained by a variety of practices. So the migrants pour into this existing community, which is known as the Black Belt. And by 1919, it's bursting at the seams, and the housing stock is not great, either. So that's the first big problem. The second, there's a lot of hostility within Chicago's workplaces, and this is true in Pittsburgh and Detroit. White-only unions shut out Black laborers, and this breeds resentment on both sides. There's already this malicious stereotype that African Americans are strikebreakers, and in some cases, employers did bring in Black workers, many times unwitting Black workers. They don't know they're being used to cross picket lines. And that adds to the resentment. We're going to see both of these problems, the existence of this discrimination cause Chicago to boil over in the summer of 1919.

Bethany Jay: This is Teaching Hard History, and I'm Bethany Jay. We prepare detailed show notes for each episode of this podcast, so that you can use what you learn here in the classroom. You'll find relevant resources—as well as a full transcript, complete with links to materials mentioned by our guests. You can find them at LearningForJustice.org/podcasts. Now let's return to Hasan's conversation with David Krugler.

David Krugler: The summer of 1919 was famously called by James Weldon Johnson, the Red Summer, referring to regular outbreaks of anti-Black collective violence that took the lives of hundreds of African Americans. In just one site of the violence, Phillips County, Arkansas, more than 230 African Americans were killed by white mobs and white soldiers. There were nine other sites of such violence in 1919. And it preceded the summer, and it continued after the summer. It's one of the worst periods of mob violence directed at African Americans in US history. Indeed, one of the worst stretches of any mob violence in the nation's history.

David Krugler: So during the war years, many African Americans with the means to do so rent or purchase homes in dominant white neighborhoods. In Chicago, for example, when African Americans move into those homes, they are the target of terrorism. There were, in the first six or so months of 1919, more than a dozen bombings of Black-occupied homes on white streets, or bombings against realtors who brokered either the rental or the sale of the home. So we have targeted violence to drive African Americans out. And this is building up.

David Krugler: Then in late July, 1919, there's an altercation on the shore of Lake Michigan. It's a hot day, it's 100 degrees Fahrenheit. And a young Black man with three friends, a teenager named Eugene Williams, was on a raft. They were floating by a white area, and a young white man started throwing rocks at them, and one of them hit Eugene Williams and he drowned. This created an incident on the beach. African Americans were angry when a Black witness pointed out the rock thrower, a white police officer arrested the witness rather than the perpetrator. So this creates a tension, a conflict on the beach. What happens that night is that organized gangs in the white neighborhoods, among them one known as Reagan's Colts—and they took their name from a prominent local Democratic official, Frank Reagan, who sponsored the club. They were called athletic clubs, but they often blurred that line between that sort of social activity and extra-legal action. And they began targeting Black-occupied homes.

David Krugler: And if you look at photographs of Chicago after this violence, it's remarkable to see streets where all the homes are untouched except for one, and that was a Black-occupied home. There are photos of young white children and teenagers filling the looted home, leaning out of broken windows, filling the yard, standing on the sills of broken windows, cheering at the photographer. It's a staged photo. They're celebrating the expulsion of these unwanted neighbors. And that's one of the purposes of the white violence against African Americans in Chicago, and we see it in other cities as well: to drive out these newcomers. It's really a form of ethnic cleansing.

David Krugler: This is why we need to be careful not to call them "riots." It's very problematic because when we think of a riot, it looks like random or spontaneous mayhem, and it's easy to conclude that anyone participating is equally to blame. But these weren't riots, they were organized attacks against African Americans for the purposes of driving them out of these homes. There were organized attacks in Chicago against Black packinghouse workers. So the packinghouses, the Back of the Yards, was in a white neighborhood, and to get home, Black workers had to take streetcars across this territory that's very hostile to them. And white gangs pull Black workers off or chase them off the cars and hunt them down.

David Krugler: And there's a Japanese immigrant named Jun Fujita, who was a photographer for one of Chicago's daily newspapers. And he took on-the-scene photographs of these murders taking place. They're very graphic. They're hard to look at, but they are very important resources because they document beyond a doubt just how meditated this was. It wasn't random.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You use the phrase, "Anyone who participated is equally to blame" when we call these massacres, these intentional killings "riots." So the language that we use, we have to be very mindful of. And I'm glad that you reminded us of that. How did African Americans respond in the moment to this orgy of violence that isn't just limited to Chicago?

David Krugler: They responded in three ways. First, through armed self-defense. So they did the job that the police were unable or even refused to do. And one of the decisions made by Chicago's superintendent of police was to cordon off the Black Belts. And Garrity, the head of Chicago's police, said, "Well, this will protect African Americans, will keep hostile whites from coming in." But there were already gangs active within that cordon, so it did nothing to protect them. So African Americans had to do it themselves. And veterans, Black Chicago veterans of the war, they were determined not to be mown down during outbreaks of white mob violence. So they take up arms to defend themselves and their families and their community against the violence.

David Krugler: What's interesting about Chicago is that it had an all-Black National Guard unit. So this unit was comprised of men who had served together for a while, who knew each other, they're friends and neighbors in many instances. And it was a unit led by Black officers. So they have this cohesion that they can call upon. And so they put on their uniforms. Some of them even were wearing the Croix de Guerre, the medal of honor that the French government had given them for their service because they had been assigned to French units. And they're on the streets stopping gangs from attacking African Americans.

David Krugler: Later, after Chicago's violence, a coroner's grand jury praises them for helping to keep the calm. But if you read Chicago's newspapers, they are portrayed as villains. As the violence unfolds, the newspapers are providing daily coverage, and there are multiple editions being published each day. We should remind ourselves that at this moment in time, in 1919, this is the major source for timely news. There's no radio news, certainly no television news. And so the newspapers in Chicago—and this is a pattern seen in other cities as well—they immediately begin blaming African Americans for the violence, though as we've established, African Americans are the targets of violence, and they are often responding with armed self-defense. So when Black veterans in Chicago took action to protect Black families and the Black community from these roving violent gangs, the white press presented that as the problem. And in one article, the Chicago Tribune provided a script for a new version of The Birth of a Nation. They described these Black veterans as "marauders" who were storming down the streets, firing indiscriminately at women and children, sending terrified whites scurrying. And then they describe a brave white police officer who stands up to these marauders and is shot, but the bullet bounces off his shields.

David Krugler: So I mean, think about, you know, this fantastical symbolism that is being put forward here. And although this is an extreme example, there are similar stories in Chicago's other papers, similar stories in Washington, DC's papers and the other cities that are sites of anti-Black collective violence. And so this idea we have of riots where everyone's to blame, we inherit that from the very biased, slanted media coverage of the violence itself, which blamed African Americans for it when, in fact, they were defending themselves.

David Krugler: And they also resisted in two other ways: they tried to get out the truth about the riots, and the NAACP is a leader in this, but so too the Black press such as the Chicago Defender. And the third way is to go to court and defend African Americans who were charged with murder if they killed a white in self-defense or other very serious felonies. And in Chicago, they win several victories. They get acquittals or dismissal of charges.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm thinking about how teachers can teach about Red Summer, can teach about this violence, can teach about the African-American response to this violence in ways that are both accurate and effective, and yet do not traumatize students because this subject matter is so intense. Do you have some recommendations?

David Krugler: Yes, I think one way to approach this is to look at editorials published in Black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, also The Messenger, Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph's publication, or in The Crisis, the publication of the NAACP. In particular, Walter White helped write reports describing what happened in Chicago, describing resistance to it. And to look at how there's an appraisal of what happened and a celebration of the fighting back. And so that provides a counter to the fallacious presentation to be found elsewhere in the media in 1919, but does so in ways that don't glorify or linger on the violence.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Would you suggest using cultural productions as well? What comes immediately to mind to me in 1919 and sort of the Black response is Claude McKay's powerful poem "If We Must Die."

David Krugler: Yes, absolutely. And using poetry is a good way to do it, and that poem in particular with its opening line, "If we must die, let it not be like hogs." And, you know, it talks about the violence and being outnumbered, but celebrates this willingness, this determination to stand up and make a sacrifice if necessary. It's a short, well-crafted piece of verse, and it works superbly in the classroom.

Bethany Jay: Learning for Justice has a special opportunity just for educators. After listening to this episode, you can earn a certificate for one hour of professional development. All you have to do is go to LearningForJustice.org/PodcastPD—PD for "Professional Development." That's "PodcastPD," all one word. Then enter the unique code word for this episode: violence. All lowercase. You'll also find a link in the show notes. It's a great way to get even more out of Teaching Hard History.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Is 1919 an anomaly? Is it a blip on the radar?

David Krugler: It's not an anomaly. It is a culmination of years and years, even decades of regular anti-Black collective violence, violence that's been going on since Reconstruction. In Reconstruction, we see recurring political terrorism that inflicts heavy, heavy casualties. The state of Louisiana alone during the years of Reconstruction, records more than 1,100 African Americans killed, often at political rallies by organized terrorist groups—the Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist organizations. That continues even after the formal end of Reconstruction.

David Krugler: We've got the infamous example in Wilmington in 1898, where you have mob actions that depose a lawfully-elected government in furtherance of white supremacy and white-only elections and governance. We have anti-Black collective violence in Springfield in 1906. So we can track these events in the post-Civil War era and see them occurring regularly, and then reaching this peak in 1918 going into early 1920, more than 10 major episodes of anti-Black collective violence. Not just Chicago, but Washington, DC, Omaha, Bogalusa, Louisiana, Gary, Indiana, Knoxville, Tennessee. We're talking about not just the South, but the North and the Midwest as well. That's in that end of the war period—the long 1919 we might call it—but it doesn't end there. The violence continues into 1920, and then there's another paroxysm of it in the summer of 1921 in Tulsa. And that race massacre, we just passed the 100th anniversary of that earlier this year.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And what exactly happens in Tulsa in 1921?

David Krugler: I think the first thing that should be said is that Black people were doing well. Tulsa, though it's not thought of as a destination during the first Great Migration, by 1921, Greenwood—the Black area of Tulsa—was home to around 10,000 African Americans. And the business district of Greenwood, which later came to be called Black Wall Street, had a variety of prospering businesses. You know, we have the example of J.B. Stratford, who had been born in Kentucky as a slave at the start of the Civil War. He built and ran a hotel that was considered the nation's largest Black-owned hotel. This was a threat to white supremacy because it proved African Americans could succeed and prosper, so how could they be racially inferior to whites if they're doing so well? There's a lot of resentment at this prosperity.

David Krugler: One of the causes of Washington DC's racial violence in 1919 is white resentment at the Black middle class, which emerged as a result of opportunities working for that city's biggest employer: the national government. So a spark occurs Memorial Day weekend. Tulsa's two main papers, the white papers, published these really exaggerated, completely false accounts of an attack on a young white woman by a young Black man. And this becomes the spark for mob action in which thousands of whites attack Greenwood. And African Americans defend themselves, but they're outnumbered. And by the time the pogrom, by the time this massacre is over, a 35-square-block area was gone. It was rubble and smoking ashes. Thousands left homeless. The value of businesses lost in today's dollars is estimated anywhere from $20 million to $100 million or more dollars. I mean, it's just—it was wealth wiped out.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: David, when it was over, how do cities respond to these crises?

David Krugler: One notable response comes in Chicago where, unlike in most other cities where the violence occurred, there is a sustained effort to figure out how this happened, why it happened and what must be done to prevent it from ever occurring again. So the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, a biracial group, hires investigators, conducts months of study and research, and produces a lengthy report that pinpoints racial segregation, racial residential segregation, as a major problem, and proposes methods or ways to end that. But those recommendations go unheeded. Instead, there's a doubling down on the color line in Chicago, and the entrenchment of measures including realty practices and banking, lending and credit, which become even more entrenched when they're baked into federal housing policies emerging during the New Deal years. So the color line in Chicago becomes even harsher and more rigid. And then this produces the very same problems that led to 1919's violence, when Black families move into white neighborhoods or buy buildings in white communities, there's this tremendous and violent backlash.

David Krugler: And it's often overlooked that Martin Luther King comes north. He comes to Chicago and he marches in Cicero and he's attacked in Cicero. When he turns his attention and his efforts toward Jim Crow in the North, the backlash he receives is as harsh as anything he experienced in the South.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One of the things that struck me during the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre was the number of people who were shocked that something like that had even occurred. What happens to the memory of these events after they occur?

David Krugler: The survivors and their descendants keep that history alive. They kept artifacts, they kept documents proving what had happened. They shared the stories with one another. They understood that there was some risk in doing so because Tulsa as a whole didn't want to acknowledge this, just wanted to move on, forget it had happened. At best, acknowledge it as an anomaly, something that would never happen again, that was a one off. But keeping those records, keeping those stories alive makes it possible for scholars decades later to revisit this. And one of the scholars of the massacre, a reporter and writer named Tim Madigan, you know, he's recently remarked like, "How could I not know this?" You know, he's like, "I'm an educated person. I'm a reporter in the region, and I've never heard of this." And there's a reason for that. This is a really difficult episode in American history to engage with. I think a lot of us would like to believe it wasn't part of a pattern, but it was. It was part of a pattern that had been building for decades, going back into the mid-19th century, as mentioned earlier. And so it becomes easier to bury it, to forget it, to hide it. Or it seems to be easier.

David Krugler: But that creates all sorts of problems for us as a population if we hide this from our young people. If we say, "Oh, we shouldn't teach about this because it makes people uncomfortable," or it's a way of, you know, blaming people today for something that happened in the past. I mean, we know that's not what we do in history.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One of the remarkable developments of this past year is the passage of legislation that ostensibly is designed to teach sort of a patriotic version of the past—this anti-Critical Race Theory legislation. And Oklahoma has passed one of these bills, which in effect would make it illegal to teach about Tulsa.

David Krugler: Which pits the new law against standing law in Oklahoma. Back in 1997, at the initiative of a Black legislator, Oklahoma created a commission to study the Tulsa race riot of 1921. And for the last 20 years—since 2002—state public schools must teach about the destruction of Greenwood. So how do you reconcile those two laws? You can't. And so it speaks to the inherent flaws in the new law. This is not unique to Oklahoma. Florida has put itself in such a trap, too. Florida has long required the teaching of the Holocaust in its public schools, and they do a very good job of doing that. Now there's a new law that is part of this initiative to suppress this history that bans Florida public school teachers from introducing material that could make students uncomfortable. Well, that too goes against the law requiring the teaching of the Holocaust.

David Krugler: You know, another thing that's so wrong about this is I think one of the purposes of these initiatives is to say, "Well, we need to focus on the founders and the creation of the Republic." Well, when you look at just a little bit of the writings of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, you can see them wrestling with this dilemma that they are creating, that they are trying to forge freedom at the same time they are building and protecting slavery. And, you know, this unsettled them intellectually. They wrestled with this. And so these laws are in effect telling us we can't even look at how the founders of our nation wrestled with this. We're doing a disservice to their own actions. If the founders could wrestle with this, surely fifth graders can in the hands of capable teachers.

David Krugler: The 100th anniversary of the 1919 violence occurred two years ago, and it was interesting to note which communities and states engaged openly and fully with this past. I think Chicago did a really good job of engaging with it. They had programs through the public schools and The Newberry Library, a private research institution in Chicago, bringing in public school students to write poems about this, to produce art, to learn about it. They had exhibits. And so there's a positive example of what we can do. Rather than shirk from it, learn from it, engage with it and understand how that produces the world in which we live.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: If there's one takeaway, one key point that you would want students to know about this period, this moment, the 19-teens into the early 1920s, about the Jim Crow North, what would it be?

David Krugler: I would want students to know about the premeditation and the dedication that goes into maintaining a very rigid color line. So in Chicago, for example, there is the use of terrorism, violence to enforce it. But that's the action of last resort. It's preceded by contracts, standard contracts that exclude the sale to people of color, the rental to people of color. It includes agreements between banks and realtors not to provide loans or credit to African Americans to buy in these neighborhoods. Think about what that then perpetuates. This would be also important for the students to learn: that produces schools of one race or the other, all-white schools or all-Black schools. That is done without a state law in Illinois requiring segregated schools. In Wisconsin, in Milwaukee, you see something similar happen. There's no state law requiring it, as there is in South Carolina, for example. So the Brown v. Board decision, which we rightly focus on, directs our attention to the South, but when we point our attention to the North, we see that the same unequal segregated school system is produced through different practices, but the results are very much the same. And then think about how that then affects opportunities throughout one's working life if they are receiving an unequal education, if they're shut out from universities too, if employment offices are closed to them, that basis of segregation fans out in the North.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: David, I can't thank you enough for these tremendous insights. Appreciate you so much.

David Krugler: Thank you, Hasan. It's just been great to talk with you, and I really appreciate the opportunity.

Bethany Jay: David Krugler is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. He is the author of several books, including 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back. He is a former Institute for Research in the Humanities Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. David is also a novelist who has written multiple Cold War spy thrillers, like Rip the Angels from Heaven.

Bethany Jay: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center—helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and more. You can find award-winning films and classroom-ready texts at LearningForJustice.org.

Bethany Jay: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the Jim Crow Era and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. In our fourth season, we put Jim Crow under the spotlight—examining its history and lasting impact.

Bethany Jay: Thanks to Dr. Krugler for sharing his insights with us. This podcast was produced by Mary Quintas and senior producer Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. "Music Reconstructed" is produced by Barrett Golding. And Cory Collins provides content guidance. Amelia Gragg is our intern. Kate Shuster is the series creator. And our managing producer is Miranda LaFond.

Bethany Jay: If you like what you've heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Bethany Jay: I'm Dr. Bethany Jay, Professor of History at Salem State University, and your host for Teaching Hard History.

References

• HBO, Watchmen
• The New York Times, What the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed
• HBO Watchmen, Black Wall Street - Behind the Scenes
• The Washington Post, Tulsa searches for mass graves from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
• The White House, Remarks by President Biden Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre
• KOKO Oklahoma City, Gov. Stitt signs controversial bill into law to restrict teaching of certain ‘critical race theories’
• David Krugler, Biography
• David Krugler, 1919 The Year Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back
• University of Washington, America's Great Migrations
• African American Intellectual History Society, Mentha Morrison: A Story of Debt Peonage in Jim Crow Georgia
• The Atlantic, The Chicago Defender's Role in the Great Migration
• Library of Congress, Chicago: Destination for the Great Migration
• BlackPast, Robert Sengstacke Abbott (1870-1940)
• The Phillips Collection, Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series
• ArcGIS StoryMaps, The Segregated Urban Landscape of Chicago
• PBS American Experience, Red Summer: When Racist Mobs Ruled
• Illinois State Archives, Coroner's Official Report of Race Riot (1919)
• Chicago History Museum, The Red Summer of 1919
• The New York Times, Beyond Tulsa, Overlooked Race Massacres Draw New Focus
• Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project, The History: Photos (Jun Fujita)
• Black History Heroes, Black Soldiers in American Wars: Chicago's "Fighting 8th" and the 370th Regiment
• The Messenger, September 1919
• The Messenger, The Cause and Remedy for Race Riots
• The Crisis, The Work of a Mob (Walter White)
• Claude McKay, If We Must Die
• Zinn Education Project, Nov. 10, 1898: Wilmington Massacre
• Equal Justice Initiative, On Apr 14, 1906: Horace Duncan and Fred Coker Lynched in Springfield, Missouri
• Forbes, The Baron Of Black Wall Street
• BlackPast, John "the Baptist" Stradford (1861-1935)
• The Washington Post, 1919 D.C. race riot: The violence that left 40 dead was 'aided and abetted' by The Washington Post
• Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago; a study of race relations and a race riot
• Chicago Tribune, Black Chicago teen's death fueled Cicero march during 1966 protests
• Tim Madigan, Books
• Brookings, Why are states banning critical race theory?
• WKMG-TV, Florida bans critical race theory education but most Central Florida school districts don’t teach it
• The Newberry, Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots
• David Krugler, History, University of Wisconsin-Platteville

 

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Eligibility Requirements: 

1. To be considered for a Virtual PLC, applicants must be an educator who will implement the relevant LFJ resources with PK-5 or 6-12 students (for example, through a classroom, higher education, non-profit or museum setting, etc.) or who directly teaches or manages other adult educators who will implement the resources with students.
2. Educators across the United States are encouraged to apply, but there will be preference given to those teaching in Southern Poverty Law Center states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. 

 

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to participate in a Virtual PLC?

Learning for Justice Virtual Learning Cohorts are offered free of charge. Instead, we ask that you invest your time in actively engaging in, and contributing to, this learning experience. 

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The application can be completed using Submittable. It includes a performance task that allows educators to show how they approach materials that are relevant to their selected Cohorts. We recommend that you set aside enough time to thoughtfully complete the application. Submittable will allow you to save your work and return at a later time, so it does not need to all be completed in one sitting.

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