The historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois referred to hardships of African Americans in the post-Reconstruction era as "life within the veil." In 1875, a sweeping Civil Rights Act had been passed in Congress. Yet in 1883, the act was essentially ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The clock was being turned back by the American judicial system and would have to wait until 1965 for a new Civil Rights Act.
Ida B. Wells was a pathfinder as a teacher and activist in this era. She was fighting against what Du Bois would later describe as the time when "the slave went free and stood a moment in the sun and then moved back again towards slavery." The phenomenon of sharecropping turns black farmers into virtual serfs starting in the later 1860s and 1870s, but truly coming into its own in the 1880s.
A mass movement of blacks in the South heads to Kansas where they appear to be welcomed. But the so-called Exodusters do not find greater opportunities there. In Alabama, Eli Madison's plan for an all-black community comes to fruition in Madison Park. A third political party emerges out of a coalition of blacks and whites known as the populists.
Mob violence figures prominently in the 1880s. In one of his greatest speeches, Frederick Douglass's "The Lessons of the Hour" on January 9, 1894, denounces the barbaric practice of lynching at the at the historic Metropolitan A. M. E. Church in Washington, D. C.
Booker T. Washington is instrumental in advancing educational opportunities. But the 1896 Supreme Court ruling of "separate but equal" is another court decision that turns back the clock and enables Jim Crow. Things were about to get worse before they got better.
Ida B. Wells was a pathfinder as a teacher and activist in this era. She was fighting against what Du Bois would later describe as the time when "the slave went free and stood a moment in the sun and then moved back again towards slavery." The phenomenon of sharecropping turns black farmers into virtual serfs starting in the later 1860s and 1870s, but truly coming into its own in the 1880s.
A mass movement of blacks in the South heads to Kansas where they appear to be welcomed. But the so-called Exodusters do not find greater opportunities there. In Alabama, Eli Madison's plan for an all-black community comes to fruition in Madison Park. A third political party emerges out of a coalition of blacks and whites known as the populists.
Mob violence figures prominently in the 1880s. In one of his greatest speeches, Frederick Douglass's "The Lessons of the Hour" on January 9, 1894, denounces the barbaric practice of lynching at the at the historic Metropolitan A. M. E. Church in Washington, D. C.
Booker T. Washington is instrumental in advancing educational opportunities. But the 1896 Supreme Court ruling of "separate but equal" is another court decision that turns back the clock and enables Jim Crow. Things were about to get worse before they got better.
