Black Americans during the Progressive Era

African Americans had initially been hopeful during Reconstruction after the Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection under the law and the rights of citizens, and the Fifteenth Amendment granted Black male suffrage. African Americans were elected to local, state, and even national offices, and Congress passed civil rights legislation. However, the hopes of Reconstruction were dashed by horrific waves of violence against African Americans, the economic struggles of sharecropping (which, in some ways, resembled the conditions of slavery), the denial of equal civil rights including voting rights, and enforced segregation of the races. At the turn of the century, the new progressive reform movement heralded many changes, but whether African Americans would benefit from progressivism remained to be seen.

America’s tragic racial history was not erased by the Progressive Era. In fact, in all too many ways, reform distanced African Americans even farther from American public life. Racial mob violence permeated much of the “New South”—and, to a lesser extent, the West, where Mexican Americans and other immigrant groups also suffered severe discrimination and violence—by the late nineteenth century. The Ku Klux Klan and a system of Jim Crow laws governed much of the South (discussed in a previous module). White middle-class reformers were appalled at the violence of race relations in the nation but typically shared the belief in racial characteristics and the superiority of Anglo-Saxon White people over African Americans, Asians, “ethnic” Europeans, Indigenous peoples, and Latin American populations. Southern reformers considered segregation a Progressive solution to racial violence; across the nation, educated middle-class Americans enthusiastically followed the work of eugenicists who identified virtually all human behavior as inheritable traits and issued awards at county fairs to families and individuals for their “racial fitness.”

Disenfranchisement

In the South, electoral politics remained a parade of electoral fraud, voter intimidation, and race-baiting. Democratic Party candidates stirred southern Whites into a frenzy with warnings of “negro domination” and of Black men violating White women. The region’s culture of racial violence and the rise of lynching as a mass public spectacle accelerated. And as the remaining African American voters threatened the dominance of Democratic leadership in the South, southern Democrats turned to what many White southerners understood as a series of progressive electoral and social reforms—disenfranchisement and segregation. Just as reformers would clean up politics by taming city political machines, White southerners would “purify” the ballot box by restricting Black voting, and they would prevent racial strife by legislating the social separation of the races.

The question was how the southern states would accomplish disfranchisement. The Fifteenth Amendment clearly prohibited states from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of race. In 1890, a Mississippi state newspaper called on politicians to devise “some legal defensible substitute for the abhorrent and evil methods on which White supremacy lies.”^[1] The state’s Democratic Party responded with a new state constitution designed to purge corruption at the ballot box through disenfranchisement. African Americans hoping to vote in Mississippi would have to jump through a series of hurdles explicitly designed to exclude them from political power:

• The state first established a poll tax, which required voters to pay for the privilege of voting.
• Second, it stripped suffrage from those convicted of petty crimes most common among the state’s African Americans. Keep in mind, that many Black people were unjustifiably charged with crimes.
• Next, the state required voters to pass a literacy test. Local voting officials, who were themselves part of the local party machine, were responsible for judging whether voters were able to read and understand a section of the Constitution. In order to protect illiterate White people from exclusion, the so-called “understanding clause” allowed a voter to qualify if they could adequately explain the meaning of a section that was read to them.

In practice, these rules were systematically abused to the point where local election officials effectively wielded the power to permit and deny suffrage at will. The disenfranchisement laws effectively moved electoral conflict from the ballot box, where public attention was greatest, to the voting registrar, where supposedly color-blind laws allowed local party officials to deny the ballot without the appearance of fraud.

Segregation in the Jim Crow South

At the same time that the South’s Democratic leaders were adopting the tools to disenfranchise the region’s Black voters, these same legislatures were constructing a system of racial segregation even more pernicious. While it built on earlier exclusionary practices, segregation took on a new character as part of a modern, urban system of enforcing racial subordination and deference.

As with disenfranchisement, segregation violated a plain reading of the Constitution—in this case, the Fourteenth Amendment. Here the Supreme Court intervened, ruling in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment only prevented discrimination directly by states. It did not prevent discrimination by individuals, businesses, or other entities. Southern states exploited this interpretation with the first legal segregation of railroad cars in 1888.

Plessy v. Ferguson

In Plessy v Ferguson, a case that reached the Supreme Court in 1896, New Orleans resident Homer Plessy challenged the constitutionality of Louisiana’s segregation of streetcars. The court ruled against Plessy and, in the process, established the legal principle of separate but equal. Racially segregated facilities were legal provided they were equal in quality. In practice, this was almost never the case. The court’s majority defended its position with logic that reflected the racial assumptions of the day. “If one race be inferior to the other socially,” the court explained, “the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.” Justice John Harlan, the lone dissenter, countered, “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” Harlan went on to warn that the court’s decision would “permit the seeds of race hatred to be planted under the sanction of law.”^[2] In their rush to fulfill Harlan’s prophecy, southern White people codified and enforced the segregation of public spaces.

Segregation was built on a fiction—that there could be a White South socially and culturally distinct from African Americans. Its legal basis rested on the constitutional fallacy of “separate but equal.” Southern Whites erected a bulwark of White supremacy that would last for nearly sixty years. Segregation and disenfranchisement in the South rejected Black citizenship and relegated Black social and cultural life to segregated spaces. African Americans lived divided lives, acting the part White people demanded of them in public, while maintaining their own world apart from White people. This segregated world provided a measure of independence for the region’s growing Black middle class, yet at the cost of poisoning the relationship between Black and White citizens. Segregation and disenfranchisement created entrenched structures of racism that invalidated the premises of Reconstruction.

It was against this oppressive tide that African American leaders developed their own voice in the Progressive Era, working along diverse paths to improve the lives and conditions of African Americans throughout the country.