Racial and Ethnic Politics in the US

Solutions to America’s “race problem”

 

Two strands: 

Integrationism

                  I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will                                         be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
                            Martin Luther King

      Separatism

In all things social and political as separate as the five fingers, in things of mutual progress one as the hand.

Booker T. Washington

 

I.  Integrationism

      Life in north, commercial cities

      Reconstruction

Freedmen's Bureau: schools, courts, work contracts, sold land taken from southerners to freed slaves (sharecropping!!)

Used the bureau to punish south for war end of war to 1878

           

      WEB DuBois

            Niagara Movement 1905

 

      NAACP 1910

 

      Martin Luther King

 

      Civil Rights Movement

 

 

II.  Separatism

     Pan-African Movements

as early as 1714

            1816 American Colonization Society

Edward Blyden (1832-1912)

      “African diaspora”

1850s colonization of Liberia

Islam as more authentic religion of Africans

And unifying force

            Marcus Garvey (b. 1887 (Jamaica)-1940)

                  Father of Black Nationalism

Negro State, mass organizing, mobilizing

Universal Negro Improvement Association

Deported from US in 1927

                 

Chief Sam Movement - 1897-1914
in present day Ghana

 

Reasons for colonization/repatriation given by Black leaders of movement:

 

1. Blyden said "faith against reason" to expect Blacks to be fully equal in the U.S.

 

2. Christian call - their mission as members of African Diaspora to bring Christianity to Africa

 

3. Responsibility to bring "civilization" to Africa

 

4. Africa as land promised land; resource rich

 

5. Africa as source of spiritual, psychological renewal

 

6. Economic recessions –

interest in repatriation generally rose as econ. conditions worsened

 

     


Black Capitalism

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)

must build from bottom - don't need real university educations - first businesses and trades;

Tuskegee Institute, 1881

The “Atlanta Compromise” 1895

Back off demands for civil, political rights in exchange for aid in economic development

            1900 founded National Negro Business League

      Nation of Islam