In this module blog post, we'll wrap up our examination of the Progressives. Then, we'll explore what it was like to live and work under the restrictions of Jim Crow and how Black Americans resisted segregation and discrimination through political activism, social reform, arts, and culture.
The chart above, created by W.E.B. DuBois for the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, is one of many featured in one of the module's required readings, an article from Brain Pickings.
Three questions will guide this module blog post:
How did Progressive reformers and leaders seek to solve problems of health and economic disparity in the early twentieth century?
How did African Americans resist the limitations of Jim Crow through social reforms and intellectual philosophy?
How did working-class Black men and women utilize art, culture, and leisure to escape the drudgery of everyday life under Jim Crow?
Let's get started!
Part I: Progressives (Cont'd)
Word Cloud #1:
For the first part of this module, we’ll wrap up our examination of the Progressives. Based on what we've covered so far, what do you consider to be the most significant characteristic of Progressive reformers?
Enter a response in the word cloud below, or access it here.
We’ve examined Progressive reform at a few different levels—we’ve looked at local efforts by reformers to work with immigrants in their communities to provide social services and “help” their transition to Americanization. We’ve also explored national reform and federal agencies that worked to create change on a larger level. Before transitioning to our examination of Jim Crow and African American life and resistance in the early twentieth century, we’ll look further at the three Progressive presidents: Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.
All three Progressive presidents brought their own methods and views to provide solutions to the national problems of poverty, economic insecurity, and labor.
Teddy Roosevelt
Roosevelt, a Republican, took office in 1901, after the assassination of President William McKinley. He focused on confronting the problems caused by economic consolidation by distinguishing between “good” and “bad” corporations. He defined “good” as those who served the public interest, and “bad” as those purely run on the greed of financiers only looking out for their own interests.
He utilized the Sherman Antitrust Act to dissolve the Northern Securities Company, a holding company created by J.P. Morgan, which owned the stock and directed the affairs of three major western railroads.
He also pushed for more direct federal regulation of the economy, including giving the Interstate Commerce Commission the power to examine railroads’ business records and set reasonable rates, and enacting the Pure Food and Drug Act, which introduced federal oversight into the quality and safety of food products.
He was an avid conservationist, setting aside millions of acres of land as wildlife preserves and encouraging Congress to create new national parks. (Here's a short, interesting article about sport hunting and national parks.)
William Howard Taft
Republican William Howard Taft replaced Roosevelt. He too pursued antitrust policy. In 1911 the Supreme Court found Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller’s company, in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and ordered its breakup into separate marketing, producing, and refining companies.
Taft also supported the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution which authorized Congress to enact a graduated income tax (one whose rate of taxation is higher for wealthier citizens). This provided a reliable source of income for the state, whose powers, responsibilities, and expenditures were growing.
When Taft fired the head of the US Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, he had a falling out with Teddy Roosevelt and the Republican Party. In 1912, Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican nomination, and lost. He launched an independent campaign as the head of the new Progressive Party.
The election of 1912 became a national debate on the relationship between political freedom and economic freedom in the age of big business. All four candidates—across political parties—expressed variations of Progressive-Era thinking. In other words, they all had ideas on how the state could play a role in solving social problems.
At one end of the spectrum was the Republican Taft, who believed that economic individualism could remain the center of the social order as long as government and private entrepreneurs cooperated in addressing social ills. At the other end was Socialist Eugene V. Debs, who believed in abolishing the capitalistic system altogether, including public ownership of the railroads and banking system, providing government aid to the unemployed, and establishing a minimum wage and shorter working hours.
In the middle were Roosevelt (Progressive Party) and the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson feared both big business and big government—he wanted to create the economic conditions for the renewal of economic competition without increasing government’s regulation of the economy. He wanted to restore market competition and free the government from domination by big business. He also wanted to strengthen antitrust laws, protect the rights of workers to unionize, and actively encouraged the creation of small businesses.
The Progressive Party did not share Wilson’s fears about expanding the power of the government. Roosevelt insisted that only “controlling and directing the power of the government” could restore “the liberty of the oppressed.” He called for heavier taxes on personal and corporate fortunes and federal regulation of industries, including railroads, mining, and oil.
The Progressive Party platform included:
woman suffrage
federal supervision of corporate enterprise
8-hour work day and a “living wage”
national labor legislation
national system of social insurance
Woodrow Wilson
The Republican electorate was split between Taft and Roosevelt. Wilson won the election of 1912. Although he campaigned against “big government,” Wilson expanded federal power during his time in office.
He established the Federal Reserve System in 1913, instituting 12 regional banks overseen by a central board empowered to handle the issuance of currency, aid banks in danger of failing, and influence interest rates to promote economic growth.
In 1914, the established the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which investigated unfair business practices such as price-fixing and monopolies. Both the Federal Reserve and the FTC were methods of restoring order to the economic marketplace. But they also reflected an expansion of the federal role in the economy during this era.
Wilson, a Southern Democrat, imposed segregation in federal departments in Washington, DC, and dismissed numerous Black federal employees after taking office. As noted in Module 9, in 1915, he allowed D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to be shown at the White House.
Part II: Living and Working Under Jim Crow
The goals of many Progressive-era reformers did not extend to improving conditions for African Americans. For example, as mentioned in Module 12, it was much more likely that one could obtain a mother’s pension if one were white. This reflected a larger acceptance on the part of many settlement house workers and even woman suffrage leaders to accept segregation as a natural condition.
Blacks were also barred from many unions, and in many cases, unable to access skilled employment, so had little access to Progressive-era reforms in the workplace. In many ways, they were really living in a different world. However, this did not mean that African Americans did not challenge segregation or push back against discrimination. In Part II, we’ll examine Black Americans’ experiences of the Progressive Era.
Poll #1:
Think about this question now, before you move through the rest of the module, and again at the module's end. See if your answer changes as you read more.
In your opinion, which would have been the most effective method of resisting Jim Crow? Developing mutual aid societies to provide social services? Developing systems to agitate for fairer employment practices? or participating in leisure activities after work hours outside of white oversight? (Answer the poll below, or access it here.)
Black Women Workers in Georgia
In the South, the main sources of employment for black women were domestic service and laundry work. Although they did not have official unions, these workers did organize and even engaged in strikes in order to demand higher wages from their employers, private families. In 1881, dissatisfied with their pay, laundresses in Georgia struck. After a week, they won their demand for an increase in wages.
Ten years later, in 1891, they organized again. Commenting on the 1891 strike, a white women who employed a Black laundress remarked: “I have never had such trouble as this before. My regular washerwoman came around and got the regular week’s wash Monday, and on Wednesday she came back and said that she could not do it for the regular price I had been paying her.” [1]
The patron refused to pay the higher wage and attempted to send her laundry out with a different worker. She encountered the same demand for higher pay—this was an organized effort on the part of laundry women in the city to demand higher wages.
African American women formed a mutual aid organization called the Colored Working Women and Laundry Women, “for the purpose of uplifting their class and color, to make better their conditions in social lines.” They defined “working women” as laundresses, maids, cooks, teachers, and housewives of elite men in business and politics. According to historian Tera Hunter in To ‘Joy My Freedom, this was a cross-class movement aimed at uplifting the race. [2]
Besides efforts like strikes and organizations, black women developed other routine strategies to make ends meet. For example, cooks relied on nonmonetary compensation, through cooked leftovers, unused scraps produced during meal preparation, and a cut of pantry staples. This practice, called “pan-toting” provided an essential supplement to their low wages. One worker spoke about this practice, denouncing the critique that pan-toting increased idleness and was “stealing”:
“Many a time, when I was a cook, and had the responsibility of rearing my three children upon my lone shoulders, many a time I have had occasion to bless the Lord for the service pan. I indignantly deny that we are thieves. We don’t steal, we just ‘take’ things—they are a part of the oral contract, exprest [sic] or implied. We understand it, and most of the white folks understand it.”
Some laundry women also asserted their rights to borrow garments before returning them. One white woman recalled memories from her childhood about garments being delayed:
“If my best white dress, for instance, failed to appear on Saturday, there was sure to be a special children’s service at the black church on Sunday, and my dress would be needed by the washerwoman’s daughter, who was my age.” [3]
White employers weren’t always happy about this. Many Black women found themselves arrested and convicted of petty theft of laundry and other household goods, usually on the basis of the employer’s word alone and without due process.
At times, washerwomen and maids would deliberately withhold their employers’ laundry or steal, in order to enact retribution against employers’ nonpayment or late payment of wages—this was one of the only options they had to protest or demand redress.
Black Women Progressive Reformers
Black leaders also enacted their own institutions and progressive reforms in their communities. For example, Lugenia Burns Hope, a social worker and teacher, had worked in settlement houses in Chicago. She came to Atlanta in the late nineteenth century, and worked with other prominent middle-class black women to bring necessary child care and information on child development to working women in Atlanta.
Hope and several other women started the Gate City Free Kindergarten Association in 1904, and by 1908, had four additional kindergartens in operation, serving a total of 150 children. By 1917, three thousand children were cared for in programs located in poor neighborhoods.
Hope also started the Neighborhood Union (NU) in 1908, to dispense social welfare services among African Americans. The NU provided many services associated with settlement houses of the period. One of its first priorities was to educate reformers and the community on the prevention and care of infectious diseases like tuberculosis.
The NU was concerned with the health and safety of the Black community. However, it was not without class conflict. Hope designed NU as an alternative to dance halls, which she viewed as places without virtue, “to encourage wholesome thought and action in the community by disseminating good literature among the young.”
The NU charter stated that its purpose was partly “to unite our efforts in breaking up dens of immorality and crime.” [4]
However, there was something different about the dynamics between the middle class reformers who worked at Neighborhood House and other white settlement house workers. Jim Crow tied them to their clients in specific ways.
Whereas white middle-class reformers left their settlement houses in poor neighborhoods to go home to a nicer neighborhood, most of the social workers at NU lived near or among their clients.
Poll #2:
Think about the interesting place that middle-class Black Progressive reformers occupied in society and their efforts to provide care for Black communities as well as "break up dens of immorality and crime." Do you think that women like Lugenia Burns Hope were more socially and politically conservative? or progressive? (Answer in the embedded poll below, or access it here.)
Great Migration
On the eve of World War I, 90% of African Americans lived in the South. Between 1910-1920, half a million Blacks left the South, seeking higher wages, opportunities for education, and escape from the threat of lynching. (You read about the connection between lynching and this great migration in the JSTOR Daily article for Module 9.)
However, relocation did not mean safety from racial violence and discrimination. Race riots throughout the end of the 1910s in both the North and South demonstrated that racial tension was not regionally specific.
In 1919, more than 250 people died in riots in the urban North. One particularly gruesome event happened in Chicago, where white bathers drowned a black teenager who had crossed the unofficial dividing line between Black and white beaches on Lake Michigan. By the time the National Guard restored order, 38 people had been killed, and more than 500 injured. Blacks were not safe from racial violence in the North.
The interactive map from the University of Washington embedded below shows the number of Southern-born African Americans living in the North and West by decade.
Part III: African American Cultural and Intellectual Life in the Early 20th Century
To conclude this module, we’ll examine some of the prominent Black thinkers of the early 20th century. Additionally, we’ll explore the dynamic and influential arts and culture coming out of Harlem in the era.
In both intellectual debates and cultural pursuits, black Americans expressed differing ways of coping with segregation and racism as well as celebrating Black history and life.
Booker T. Washington
One of the leading voices in the late-19th and early-20th centuries was Booker T. Washington. Washington was born enslaved and educated at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. He advocated adjusting to segregation, and advised that blacks abandon civil rights agitation. He emphasized that it was more important to obtain farms or skilled jobs than citizenship rights.
Washington became the head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a center for vocational education which emphasized job training. He gained support, not only from wealthy whites in the North who sent aid to Tuskegee, but also from members of the black community who believed that attacking white power was impossible, and that blacks should concentrate on building up their segregated communities.
W. E. B. DuBois
W.E.B. DuBois was born in 1868 and was educated at Fisk and Harvard. He became the first African American to hold a doctorate from Harvard. In his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, he challenged the politics of Booker T. Washington, and issued a call for Blacks to push for equal rights with whites.
He believed that educated Blacks, who he called the “talented tenth” of the Black community, needed to use their education and training to challenge inequality. As a Progressive, DuBois believed in researching and investigating to find solutions for social problems. He also understood the importance of political action.
In 1905, he organized a group of black leaders to form the Niagara movement, which sought to invigorate the abolitionist tradition. The group’s manifesto stated, “We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American.” Four years later, in 1909, DuBois and a group of Black and white reformers created the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or NAACP.
Poll #3:
In your opinion, whose political philosophy would have been more successful for improving African American lives in the early twentieth century? Booker T. Washington's? or W.E.B. DuBois's? Answer in the poll below, or access it here.
New Negro Movement
Becoming increasingly fed up with persistent examples of racial violence and turmoil, a new political and ideological philosophy was created in the wake of the Great Migration.
Writers, thinkers, and artists of the “New Negro Movement” refused to silently accept the continual denial of their democratic rights as American citizens, and sought out ways to express their disillusionment, using “democracy” as a rhetorical device, stressing its literal absence from their lives.
In his 1925 essay, "Enter the New Negro," Alain Locke defined the term:
With this new self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pressure there may be of conditions from without. The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing happens spiritually in the life-attitudes and self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education and his new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise and greater certainty of knowing what it is all about.
So the choice is not between one way for the Negro and another way for the rest, but between American institutions frustrated on the one hand and American ideals progressively fulfilled and realized on the other.
The New Negro Movement is part of what we refer to as the Harlem Renaissance. This was a movement of art, music, poetry, and thought that celebrated Black culture, revising the traditional Black image, and showing ability through art, as well as humanity and dignity.
Working-class African Americans in the 1910s and 1920s had little choice in their employment options. Relegated to domestic service or factory work, opportunities for assertion of independence and acknowledgment of talent were limited. The blues offered an edgy, at times risqué, alternative to the drudgery of everyday life, through a variety of ways.
For most Black workers, nightclubs, jook joints, and house parties represented an escape from their everyday life. Some took advantage of the informal economy and entertainment industry to supplement their incomes as well as relieve their minds and bodies from the constant toil of their everyday lives. Rent parties or house parties would raise enough money to pay for apartments that were often overpriced and subject to absentee landlords and overcrowding. [5]
Fun fact about the image below: a former HIST 110 found these sources for her I-Search Paper!
A Black immigrant described the appeal of rent parties to the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s: “When I first came to New York from Bermuda, I thought I thought rent-parties were disgraceful. I couldn’t understand how any self-respecting person could bear them, but when my husband, who was a Pullman porter, ran off and left me with a sixty-dollar-a-month apartment on my hands and no job, I soon learned, like everyone else, to rent my rooms and throw these Saturday get-togethers.” [6]
The Blues and the Underground Economy
At parties and jook joints, people would listen to performers singing the blues. Some Black women were able to achieve economic autonomy and freedom through entertainment, and provided inspiration for others seeking to shake off the boundaries or limitations of their lives.
In “Young Woman’s Blues,” Bessie Smith sings:
“I ain’t gonna marry, ain’t gonna settle down/I’m gonna drink good moonshine and run these browns down./See that long lonesome road, cause you know it’s got an end/And I’m a good woman and I can get plenty men.”
Listen to the full song below!
The blues operated as a challenge to middle-class ideologies of respectability. In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes writes, “Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand…We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.”
(I wonder what Lugenia Burns Hope would have to say about the lyrics in Bessie Smith's "Young Woman's Blues?!)
One additional manifestation of the New Negro Movement was Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey, an immigrant from Jamaica, founded the UNIA in 1916. It became one of the biggest mass movements that black America had ever seen. Garvey is considered the father of “Black nationalism.” With his magnetic personality and forceful appeals, he was able to organize a huge number of African Americans in order to improve their status in society. He claimed to have over one million followers. The UNIA put out a newspaper, The Negro World, started cooperatives to allow people to specifically purchase from black farmers, and started the Black Star Line, a fleet of ships.
The UNIA put on massive parades complete with pageantry including uniforms. He emphasized pride in African identity. He led one of the largest “back to Africa” movements in American history, and encouraged African Americans to settle in Africa (Liberia), uniting with others of the African diaspora to start their own country.
Ultimately, Garvey was arrested and convicted of mail fraud. However, his legacy of Black nationalism and pride in African culture persists up through this day. He was not without his critics—DuBois critiqued Garvey’s rhetoric on the grounds of practicality.
Poll #4:
Which aspect of Progressive-era Black cultural and political expression do you find to be most significant to resistance against racial discrimination? The Harlem Renaissance or Garvey’s UNIA? Answer the poll below, or access it here.
Back to Poll #1:
After having finished the post, did your answer to this question change? Let me know in the comments/annotations:
In your opinion, which would have been the most effective method of resisting Jim Crow?
Developing mutual aid societies to provide social services?
Developing systems to agitate for fairer employment practices?
Or, participating in leisure activities after work hours outside of white oversight?
Conclusion
Fixing economic disparity was a main goal for Progressive reformers. Progressive leaders disagreed on just how big of a role government bureaucracy should play in managing and regulating businesses and the market in order to ensure economic equality. At the local level, Progressive reformers like Lugenia Burns Hope established centers for social and health services in communities that needed them.
Black intellectuals and social workers pushed for economic stability and political action through organizations and education. However, there was no true consensus on the best way to resist Jim Crow, as can be seen in the debate between Washington and DuBois.
Working-class Black Americans used art, music, culture, and leisure to express pride in their history and heritage, and celebrate Black beauty and freedom. Engaging in an underground economy allowed them a space to be themselves outside of the watchful eyes of reformers and employers.
Citations:
[1] Tera Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom, 131.
[2] Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom, 131-132.
[3] Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom, 133.
[4] Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom, 139.
[5] Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 94.
[6] Federal Writers Project, “Harlem,” in Aaron Siskind, Harlem: Photographs 1932-1940, ed. Ann Banks (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 71.
In your opinion, were middle-class Black Progressive reformers like Lugenia Burns Hope more:
I said that they were more progressive since they had newer and different ideologies.
When looking at the poll I felt that all of the answers did play a large part. Although the one I mostly agree with is the development of mutual aid societies and providing social services. By developing black communities and investing in them, over time Black Americans can start making progress. It is a common attitude shared even today, as migrants come to wealthy countries and come back to their home countries to help build and develop their homeland. More so in a time period of violence and race riots, adapting to the situation at the time required such a method. Book T Washington focused on training and building up his communities in the south. Marcus Garvey did something simila…
In your opinion, whose political philosophy would have been more successful for improving African American lives in the early twentieth century?
In my opinion, W.E.B. DuBois would have been more successful for improving African American lives in the early twentieth century because he advocated for researching and investigating to find solutions for social problems. DuBois also saw the importance of political action to face inequality. As well as, later on created the NAACP with the help of other reformers.
In your opinion, whose political philosophy would have been more successful in improving African American lives in the early twentieth century?
I believe W.E.B. DuBois has been more successful because he has always thought that African Americans should be treated equally He believed that they needed to use their education and training to challenge inequality. He has tried to find solutions to social problems.
In my opinion, participating in leisure activities outside of white oversight the most effective method of resisting Jim Crow. The reason being is because African Americans are able to do what they want, develop their culture and talk about issues in their life. Being politically active and helping the community with mutual aid societies is the best way to bridge the divide between white and black.