The Battle against African Americans

Ida Wells has helped African American history. Ida Bell Wells was born on July 16, 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi and die in Chicago, Illinois on March 25, 1931. She was an African-American journalist, abolitionist and feminist who led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s. She went on to found and become integral in groups striving for African-American justice. A lynching in Memphis incensed Ida B. Wells and led to her to begin an anti-lynching campaign in 1892. Wells wrote articles decrying the lynching of her friend and the wrongful deaths of other African Americans.

Putting her own life at risk, she spent two months traveling in the South, gathering information on other lynching incidents. In 1898, Wells brought her anti-lynching campaign to the White House, leading a protest in Washington, D.C., and calling for President William McKinley to make reforms.

Booker T Washington

Born into slavery in Virginia in the mid-to-late 1850s, Booker T. Washington put himself through school and became a teacher after the Civil War. In 1872, Booker T. Washington left home and walked 500 miles to Hampton Normal Agricultural Institute in Virginia. Along the way he took odd jobs to support himself. He convinced administrators to let him attend the school and took a job as a janitor to help pay his tuition. The school’s founder and headmaster, General Samuel C. Armstrong, soon discovered the hardworking boy and offered him a scholarship, sponsored by a white man. Armstrong had been a commander of a Union African-American regiment during the Civil War and was a strong supporter of providing newly freed slaves with a practical education. Armstrong became Washington’s mentor, strengthening his values of hard work and strong moral character. In 1895, Booker T. Washington publicly put forth his philosophy on race relations in a speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, known as the “Atlanta Compromise.” In his speech, Washington stated that African Americans should accept disenfranchisement and social segregation as long as whites allow them economic progress, educational opportunity and justice in the courts. Educator Booker T. Washington was one of the foremost African-American leaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, founding the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, now known as Tuskegee University.

Web Dubois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American civil rights activist, leader, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar. He was born and raised in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Du Bois rose to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. In 1895, he became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Du Bois wrote extensively and was the best-known spokesperson for African-American rights during the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) in 1909.

The Emancipation Proclamation

The Emancipation Proclamation granted freedom to the slaves in the Confederate States if the States did not return to the Union by January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free all of the slaves. Since Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a military measure, it didn’t apply to border slave states like Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, all of which had remained loyal to the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation paved the way for African-Americans to fight for their freedom. In addition, under this proclamation, freedom would only come to the slaves if the Union won the war. The Emancipation Proclamation led the way to total abolition of slavery in the United States.

The New Deal

The New Deal was a series of programs and projects instituted during the Great Depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that aimed to restore prosperity to Americans. When Roosevelt took office in 1933, he acted swiftly to stabilize the economy and provide jobs and relief to those who were suffering. The New Deal programs were known as the three “Rs”; Roosevelt believed that together Relief, Reform, and Recovery could bring economic stability to the nation. Reform programs focused specifically on methods for ensuring that depressions like that in the 1930s would never affect the American public again. It was certainly successful in both short-term reliefs, and in implementing long-term structural reform. However, as Roosevelt’s political enemies fought him, the New Deal failed to end the Great Depression. Still, despite failing in its most important objective, the New Deal forever changed the country.

Brown v. Board of Education

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education marked a turning point in the history of race relations in the United States. On May 17, 1954, the Court stripped away constitutional sanctions for segregation by race and made equal opportunity in education the law of the land. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, case in which on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously (9–0) that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits the states from denying equal protection of the laws to any person within their jurisdictions. The decision declared that separate educational facilities for white and African American students were inherently unequal. It thus rejected as inapplicable to public education the “separate but equal” doctrine, advanced by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), according to which laws mandating separate public facilities for whites and African Americans do not violate the equal-protection clause if the facilities are approximately equal.

Franklin Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 to April 12, 1945) was the 32nd American president who led the United States through the Great Depression and World War II, greatly expanding the powers of the federal government through a series of programs and reforms known as the New Deal. His ambitious slate of New Deal programs and reforms redefined the role of the federal government in the lives of Americans. Reelected by comfortable margins in 1936, 1940 and 1944, FDR led the United States from isolationism to victory over Nazi Germany and its allies in World War II. Washington’s two-term limit became the unwritten rule for all Presidents until 1940. In 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt won a third term. … Roosevelt was the first and only President to serve more than two terms. The amendment was passed by Congress in 1947, and was ratified by the states on February 27, 1951

Herbert Hoover

Herbert Hoover was the 31st president of the United States (1929–1933), whose term was notably marked by the stock market crash of 1929 and the beginnings of the Great Depression. Born in Iowa in 1874, Herbert Hoover gained a reputation as a humanitarian in World War I by leading hunger-relief efforts in Europe as head of the American Relief Administration. From there he moved into the post of U.S. secretary of commerce and spearheaded the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Hoover Dam. In 1928, Hoover was elected president, but eight months later the stock market crash of 1929 occurred, ushering in the Great Depression. Hoover’s policies could not overcome the economic destruction and despair that resulted, and he lost his reelection bid in 1932.

The Great Migration

The Great Migration was the mass movement of about five million southern blacks to the north and west between 1915 and 1960. During the initial wave the majority of migrants moved to major northern cities such as Chicago, Illinois, Detroit, Michigan, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and New York, New York. During the Great Migration, African Americans began to build a new place for themselves in public life, actively confronting racial prejudice as well as economic, political and social challenges to create a black urban culture that would exert enormous influence in the decades to come.

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