AFRICAN AMERICAN RESPONSES- AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

A

Rise of Populism

In the 1890s black farmers and white farmers, joined by common poverty and unjust treatment from wealthy planters and business interests, attempted to construct an interracial political alliance. This populist movement (see Populism) organized a political party, the People’s Party, and recruited blacks, some of whom were still voting in the mid-1890s. The party advocated political equality, and white populist leaders such as Georgia’s Tom Watson spoke out against the poll tax and other measures that discriminated against blacks. African Americans saw the populists as potential allies against the racism that threatened their rights, and many risked their lives to campaign for populist candidates. Black minister H.T. Dole gave 63 speeches on behalf of Watson; in Georgia, 15 black populists were killed during the state elections of 1892. Some white populists saw African Americans as allies in their campaign to take power from Southern Democrats and elected blacks to positions in the People’s Party.

But the appeal of white supremacy was too strong. This coalition fell apart after 1896 as a result of intimidation and racist appeals to whites. The Ku Klux Klan's racist beliefs that all whites were superior to all blacks meant that whites were never at the bottom of society. In the end these beliefs were far more appealing than the prospect of an interracial political alliance.

B

Racial Accommodation

African Americans debated the best response to the rising tide of racial discrimination. Black educator Booker T. Washington reacted to this erosion of rights by advocating a policy of racial accommodation. Washington, who had been born into slavery, believed that protest aiming for social integration and political rights was doomed to failure in the South. Instead, he urged blacks to acquire occupational skills for economic advancement. He argued that African Americans were the backbone of Southern labor and urged sympathetic whites to encourage manual and agricultural education for blacks to strengthen the Southern economy. With the financial support of wealthy white businessmen, he established the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama in 1881 to educate black workers.

Washington's school was remarkably successful, considering the racially hostile atmosphere. His accommodationist stance made him one of the most influential African Americans among powerful whites during the late 19th and early 20th century, but many blacks resented his seeming willingness to accept without protest the deprivation of African American rights.

Many college-educated blacks disagreed with Washington and pursued equality through political and social protest. Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, William Monroe Trotter, and W.E.B. Du Bois were among those who established such all-black groups as the African American Council, the Niagara Movement, and in 1909, the interracial National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They demanded their civil rights and worked against the Jim Crow system of segregation through the courts and, where possible, through politics.