African Americans and civil rights

African Americans and civil rights http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aaprace.html

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S.B. Wallace, "What the Government is Doing for Our Colored Boys. The New Slavery in the South. Two Sermons Delivered at the Israel C. M. E. Church, Washington, D.C." 1894

Be united in church, in business, in every industrial effort. Once united, and in spite of the monster prejudice and under the hand of Almighty God, we shall be a people in the world and every right guaranteed by nature and by law will be ours. There is a providence in our sufferings, and I believe the hand of God is waiting for united action among us...We need a higher and a broader education; an education with great width of range and depth of penetration. We must know economic questions and the far reaching principles which underlie them. We must reach the heights and stand with the other race upon the summit. It is in this that I see the hand of God. With all the channels for earning a livelihood closed against us, the school house door swings wide upon its hinges...God is preparing this people for an exalted station somewhere in his earthly kingdom and ere long the star of deliverance will appear in the heavens.

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Kelly Miller----"The Primary Needs of the Negro Race" 1899

"The first great need of the Negro is that the choice youth of the race should assimilate the principles of culture and hand them down to the masses below. This is the only gateway through which a new people may enter into modern civilization...The Roman youth of ambition completed their education in Athens; the noblemen of northern Europe sent their sons to the southern peninsulas in quest of larger learning...The graduates of Hampton and other institutions of like aim are forming centers of civilizing influence in all parts of the land, and we confidently believe that these grains of leaven will ultimately leaven the whole lump."

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Booker T. Washington

"Nineteenth Annual Report of the Principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute" 1899

The chief value of industrial education is to give to the students habits of industry, thrift, economy and an idea of the dignity of labor. But in addition to this, in the present economic condition of the colored people, it is most important that a very large proportion of those trained in such institutions as this, actually spend their time at industrial occupations. Let us value the work of Tuskegee by this test...Our students actually cultivate every day, seven hundred acres of land, while studying agriculture. The students studying dairying, actually milk and care for seventy-five milch cows daily...and so I could go on and give not theory, nor hearsay, but actual facts, gleaned from all the departments of the school.

Booker T. Washington,1856-1915 (Photo)

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W. E. B. DuBois, 1868-1963 (Photo)

The Meaning of Progress
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Protection of American Citizens
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Bishop B. W. Arnett, 1838-1906

In Louisiana in 1896 there were 130,334 blacks registered to vote; by 1905 only 1,342 were registered.

The Black Laws, 1886

Members [of the Ohio House of Representatives] will be astonished when I tell them that I have traveled in this free country for twenty hours without anything to eat; not because I had no money to pay for it, but because I was colored. Other passengers of a lighter hue had breakfast, dinner and supper. In traveling we are thrown in "jim crow" cars, denied the privilege of buying a berth in the sleeping coach. This monster caste stands at the doors of the theatres and skating rinks, locks the doors of the pews in our fashionable churches, closes the mouths of some of the ministers in their pulpits which prevents the man of color from breaking the bread of life to his fellowmen.

This foe of my race stands at the school house door and separates the children, by reason of color, and denies to those who have a visible admixture of African blood in them the blessings of a graded school and equal privileges...We call upon all friends of Equal Rights to assist us in this struggle to secure the blessings of untrammeled liberty for ourselves and prosperity.

Ida B. Wells, 1862-1931 (Photo)
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aapmob.html (http://www.research.umbc.edu/~lindenme/hist441/wellsbarnett/)

"I refused, saying that the forward car [closest to the locomotive] was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies' car, I proposed to stay. . . [The conductor] tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out." 1884

Lynch law in Georgia, 1899 (circulated in Chicago)

"During six weeks of the months of March and April just past, twelve colored men were lynched in Georgia, the reign of outlawry culminating in the torture and hanging of the colored preacher, Elijah Strickland, and the burning alive of Samuel Wilkes, alias Hose, Sunday, April 23, 1899.

The real purpose of these savage demonstrations is to teach the Negro that in the South he has no rights that the law will enforce. Samuel Hose was burned to teach the Negroes that no matter what a white man does to them, they must not resist."