of the law could put them into bondage. In both North and South, they were regularly victims of mobs. In 1829, for example, white residents invaded Cincinnati's "Little Africa," killed Negroes, burned their property and ultimately drove half the Negro population from the city.

Some Americans, Washington and Jefferson among them, advocated the gradual emancipation of slaves, and in the 19th century, a movement to abolish slavery grew in importance and strength. A few white abolitionist leaders wanted full equality for Negroes, but others sought only to eliminate the institution itself. And some antislavery societies, fearing that Negro members would unnecessarily offend those who were unsympathetic with abolitionist principles, denied entrance to Negroes.

Most Americans were, in fact, against abolishing slavery. They refused to rent their halls for antislavery meetings. They harassed abolitionist leaders who sought to educate white and Negro children together. They attacked those involved in the movement. Mobs sometimes killed abolitionists and destroyed their property.

A large body of literature came into existence to prove that the Negro was imperfectly developed in mind and body, that he belonged to a lower order of man, that slavery was right on ethnic, economic and social grounds-quoting the Scriptures in support. Spreading rapidly during the first part of the 19th century, slavery held less than one million Negroes in

1800 but almost four million by 1860. Although some few white Americans had freed their slaves, most increased their holdings, for the invention of the cotton gin had made cotton the heart of the Southern economy. By mid-century, slavery in the South had become a systematic and aggressive way of treating a whole race of people.

The despair of Negroes was evident. Malingering and sabotage tormented every slaveholder. The problem of runaway slaves was endemic. Some slavesGabriel Prosser in 1800, Denmark Vesey in 1822, Nat Turner in 1831, and others-turned to violence, and the sporadic uprisings that flared demonstrated a deep protest against a demeaning way of life.

Negroes who had material resources expressed their distress in other ways. In 1816, Paul Cuffee, Negro philanthropist and owner of a fleet of ships, transported a group of Negroes to a new home in Sierra Leone. Forty years later, Martin R. Delany, Negro editor and physician, also urged Negroes to settle elsewhere.

Equality of treatment and acceptance by the society at large were myths, and Negro protest during the first half of the 19th century took the form of rhetoric, spoken and written, which combined denunciation of undemocratic oppression together with pleas to the conscience of white Americans for the redress of grievances and the recognition of their constitutional rights.

A few Negroes joined white Americans who believed that only Negro emigration to Africa would solve racial problems. But most Negroes equated that program with

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Their first target was the office of the provost marshal in charge of conscription, and 700 people quickly ransacked the building and set it on fire. The crowd refused to permit firemen into the area, and the whole block was gutted. Then the mob spilled into the Negro area where many Negroes were slain and thousands forced to flee town. The police were helpless until Federal troops arrived on the 3d day and restored control. Union victory in the Civil War promised the Negroes freedom but not equality or immunity from white aggression. Scarcely was the war ended when racial violence erupted in New Orleans. Negroes proceeding to an assembly hall to discuss the franchise were charged by police and special troops who routed the Negroes with guns, bricks, and stones, killed some at once, and pursued and killed others who were trying to escape.

Federal troops restored order. But 34 Negroes and four whites were reported dead, and over 200 people were injured. General Sheridan later said:

At least nine-tenths of the casualties were perpetrated by the police and citizens by stabbing and smashing in the heads of many who had

RECONSTRUCTION

Reconstruction was a time of hope, the period when the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were adopted, giving Negroes the vote and the promise of equality. But campaigns of violence and intimidation accompanied these optimistic expressions of a new age. The Ku Klux Klan and other secret organizations sought to suppress the emergence into society of the new Negro citizens. Major riots occurred in Memphis, Tennessee, where 46 Negroes were reported killed and 75 wounded, and in the Louisiana centers of Colfax and Coushatta, where more than 100 Negro and white Republicans were massacred.

Nevertheless, in 1875, Congress enacted the first significant civil rights law. It gave Negroes the right to equal accommodations, facilities, and advantages of public transportation, inns, theaters and places of public amusement, but the law had no effective enforcement provisions and was in fact poorly enforced. Although bills to provide Federal aid to education for 'Ladler, New York's Bloodiest Week, American Heritage, June, 1959, p. 48.

Negroes were prepared, none passed, and educational opportunities remained meager. But Negroes were elected to every Southern legislature, 20 served in the U.S. House of Representatives, two represented Mississippi in the U.S. Senate and a prominent Negro politician was Governor of Louisiana for 40 days.

Opposition to Negroes in state and local government was always open and bitter. In the press and on the platform, they were described as ignorant and depraved. Critics made no distinction between Negroes who had graduated from Dartmouth and those who had graduated from the cotton fields. Every available means was employed to drive Negroes from public life. Negroes who voted or held office were refused jobs or punished by the Ku Klux Klan. One group in Mississippi boasted of having killed 116 Negroes and of having thrown their bodies into the Tallahatchie River. In a single South Carolina county, six men were murdered and more than 300 whipped during the first 6 months of 1870.

The Federal Government seemed helpless. Having

withdrawn the occupation troops as soon as the Southern states organized governments, the President was reluctant to send them back. In 1870 and 1871, after the 15th Amendment was ratified, Congress enacted several laws to protect the right of citizens to vote. They were seldom enforced, and the Supreme Court struck down most of the important provisions in 1875 and 1876.

As Southern white governments returned to power, beginning with Virginia in 1869 and ending with Louisiana in 1877, the process of relegating the Negro to a subordinate place in American life was accelerated. Disfranchisement was the first step. Negroes who defied the Klan and tried to vote faced an array of deceptions and obstacles: Polling places were changed at the last minute without notice to Negroes,

SEGREGATION BY LAW

When the Supreme Court in 1883 declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, Southern states began to enact laws to segregate the races. In 1896, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson approved "separate but equal" facilities; it was then that segregation became an established fact, by law as well as by custom. Negroes and whites were separated on public carriers and in all places of public accommodation, including hospitals and churches. In courthouses, whites and Negroes took oaths on separate Bibles. In most communities, whites were separated from Negroes in cemeteries.

Segregation invariably meant discrimination. On trains all Negroes, including those holding first-class tickets, were allotted seats in the baggage car. Negroes in public buildings had to use freight elevators and toilet facilities reserved for janitors. Schools for Negro children were at best a weak imitation of those for whites as states spent 10 times more to educate white youngsters than Negroes. Discrimination in wages became the rule, whether between Negro and white teachers of similar training and experience or between common laborers on the same job.

Some Northern states enacted civil rights laws in the 1880's, but Negroes in fact were treated little differently in the North than in the South. As Negroes moved north in substantial numbers toward the end of the century, they discovered that equality of treatment did not exist in Massachusetts, New York, or Illinois. They were crowded by local ordinances into sections of the city where housing and public services were generally substandard. Overt discrimination in employment was a general practice and job opportunities apart from menial tasks were few. Most labor unions excluded Negroes from membership-or granted membership in separate and powerless Jim Crow locals. Yet when Negroes secured employment during strikes, labor leaders castigated them for undermining

severe time limitations were imposed on marking complicated ballots, votes cast incorrectly in a maze of ballot boxes were nullified. The suffrage provisions of state constitutions were rewritten to disfranchise Negroes who could not read, understand or interpret the Constitution. Some state constitutions permitted those who failed the tests to vote if their ancestors had been eligible to vote on January 1, 1860-a date when no Negro could vote anywhere in the South.

In 1896, there were 130,344 Negroes registered in Louisiana. In 1900, after the state rewrote the suffrage provisions of its constitution, only 5,320 remained on the registration books. Essentially the same thing happened in the other states of the former Confederacy.

the principles of trade unionism. And when Negroes. sought to move into the mainstream of community life by seeking membership in the organizations around them-educational, cultural, and religious—they were invariably rebuffed.

By the 20th century, the Negro was at the bottom of American society. Disfranchised, Negroes throughout the country were excluded by employers and labor unions from white-collar jobs and skilled trades. Jim Crow laws and farm tenancy characterized Negro existence in the South. About 100 lynchings occurred every year in the 1880's and 1890's; there were 161 lynchings in 1892. As increasing numbers of Negroes migrated to Northern cities, race riots became commonplace. Northern whites, even many former abolitionists, began to accept the white South's views on race relations.

That Northern whites would resort to violence was made clear in anti-Negro riots in New York City, 1900; Springfield, Ohio, 1904; Greensburg, Ind., 1906; and Springfield, Ill., 1908.

The Springfield, Ill., riot lasted three days. It was initiated by a white woman's charge of rape by a Negro, inflamed by newspapers, and intensified by crowds of whites gathered around the jail demanding that the Negro, arrested and imprisoned, be lynched. When the sheriff transferred the accused and another Negro to a jail in a nearby town, rioters headed for the Negro section and attacked homes and businesses owned by or catering to Negroes. White owners who showed handkerchiefs in their windows averted harm to their stores. One Negro was summarily lynched, others were dragged from houses and streetcars and beaten. By the time National Guardsmen could reach the scene, six persons were dead-four whites and two Negroes. Property damage was extensive. Many Negroes left Springfield, hoping to find better conditions elsewhere, especially in Chicago.

Between his famous Atlanta Exposition Address in 1895 and his death in 1915, Booker T. Washington, principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama and the most prominent Negro in America, privately spent thousands of dollars fighting disfranchisement and segregation laws; publicly he advocated a policy of accommodation, conciliation, and gradualism. Washington believed that by helping themselves, by creating and supporting their own businesses, by proving their usefulness to society through the acquisition of education, wealth, and morality, Negroes would earn the respect of the white man and thus eventually gain their constitutional rights.

Self-help and self-respect appeared a practical and sure, if gradual, way of ultimately achieving racial equality. Washington's doctrines also gained support because they appealed to race pride: If Negroes believed in themselves, stood together, and supported each other, they would be able to shape their destinies. In the early years of the century, a small group of Negroes led by W. E. B. Du Bois formed the Niagara Movement to oppose Washington's program. Washington had put economic progress before politics, had accepted the separate-but-equal theory and opposed agitation and protest. Du Bois and his followers stressed political activity as the basis of the Negro's future, insisted on the inequity of Jim Crow laws and advocated agitation and protest.

In sharp language, the Niagara group placed responsibility for the race problem squarely on the whites. The aims of the movement were voting rights and "the abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color."

Although Booker T. Washington tried to crush his

EAST ST. LOUIS, 1917

Elsewhere there was violence. In July 1917, in East St. Louis, a riot claimed the lives of 39 Negroes and nine whites. It was the result of fear by white working men that Negro advances in economic, political, and social status were threatening their own security and

status.

When the labor force of an aluminum plant went on strike, the company hired Negro workers. A labor union delegation called on the mayor and asked that further migration of Negroes to East St. Louis be stopped. As the men were leaving City Hall, they heard that a Negro had accidentally shot a white man during a holdup. In a few minutes rumor had replaced fact: the shooting was intentional-a white woman had been insulted-two white girls were shot. By this time, 3,000 people had congregated and were crying for vengeance.

critics, Du Bois and the Negro "radicals" as they were called, enlisted the support of a small group of influential white liberals and socialists. Together, in 1909-10, they formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The NAACP hammered at the walls of prejudice by organizing Negroes and well-disposed whites, by aiming propaganda at the whole Nation, by taking legal action in courts and legislatures. Almost at the outset of its career, the NAACP prevailed upon the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional two discriminatory statutes. In 1915, the Court struck down the Oklahoma "grandfather clause," a provision in several Southern state constitutions that, together with voting tests, had the effect of excluding from the vote those whose ancestors were ineligible to vote in 1860. Two years later, the Supreme Court outlawed residential segregation ordinances. These NAACP victories were the first legal steps in a long fight against disfranchisement and segregation.

During the first quarter of the 20th century, the Federal Government enacted no new legislation to ensure equal rights or opportunities for Negroes and made little attempt to enforce existing laws despite flagrant violations of Negro civil rights.

In 1913, members of Congress from the South introduced bills to federalize the Southern segregation policy. They wished to ban interracial marriages in the District of Columbia, segregate white and Negro Federal employees and introduce Jim Crow laws in the public carriers of the District. The bills did not pass, but segregation practices were extended in Federal offices, shops, restrooms and lunchrooms. The Nation's Capital became as segregated as any in the former Confederate States.

Mobs roamed the streets beating Negroes. Policemen did little more than take the injured to hospitals and disarm Negroes.

The National Guard restored order. When the Governor withdrew the troops, tensions were still high, and scattered episodes broke the peace. The press continued to emphasize Negro crimes. White pickets and Negro workers at the aluminum company skirmished and, on July 1, some whites drove through the main Negro neighborhood firing into homes. Negro residents armed themselves. When a police car drove down the street, Negroes riddled it with gunshot.

The next day a Negro was shot on the main street, and a new riot was underway. The area became a "bloody half mile" for 3 or 4 hours; streetcars were stopped, and Negroes, without regard to age or sex,