The Birth of a Nation 1914

D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1914) is rightly notorious for its strident view of African American participation in Reconstruction. It is also a uniquely important and unforgetttable film in many ways. Viewing these films about it might be beyond the range of undergraduate interests but certainly more advanced students will find this helpful in understanding the mindset of the Jim Crow era as well as the emerging popular culture of America.


A year or two ago I attended a symposium on THE BIRTH OF A NATION at The New School where I was privileged to share the podium with the American historian of the Civil War in Popular Culture David Blight.  Not only that, the entire procedings together with beautifully edited selections of the entire length with the original music of The Birth of a Nation are available on Youtube for all to see: His talk, My talk.

I must say, I like my talk better.


Birth and Rebirth of a Nation Part I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSqUDxzv3bE
Birth of a Nation Part II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_YN6INiZ_Y&feature=related

African Americans and WWI

World War I is an important topic in understanding the nexus of blues people aesthetics and the history of African Americans in the 20th Century.  I knew this but couldn't explain how I knew it until I begun to really dig for some way to clearly represent this to an audience of students.

I started with a series of unconnected pieces, clues really: the fact that my great Uncle Cardoza had been a soldier in WWI and been stationed in France, that I had two photographs of him in uniform at the beginning and at the close of the war, as well as many pictures of friends in his regiment.  I also knew that James Reese Europe had led the Regimental Orchestra along with Noble Sissle, and that both of them were highly productive and well documented innovators in jazz and ragtime.  When I say documented, I mean not only written documents but also photographs.  I knew that WEB Du Bois had recommended to African Americans that they fight in WWI, Close Ranks with other Americans despite the unwelcome environment of racism and Jim Crow at home, in the hopes that things would get better after the war.  

But at the same time, I came to the realization that a great deal of negativity continues to radiate around African American participation in WWI, the notion that their contribution was less than dignified, that few of them fought, that others were employed in segregated units doing labor that failed to contribute to any advancement of the race.  

I had bought second hand a series of books by Kelly Miller containing many photographs of black troops from the U.S. and from other places throughout the Diaspora, which I haven't yet  had the time to read.  Then I found Walter Dean Myers lovely little volume written with Bill Miles, the documentarian of the 369th Regiment: The Harlem Hellfighters: When Pride Met Courage.  Although it is a text intended perhaps for a high school or junior high school audience, like much that Myers does, himself a collector of black photographs, it is beautifully done.  I had not even realized that I had never known what a regiment or a platoon was and how important it was to gather these rudiments of military vocabulary to comprehend what had happened to the black soldiers in my great Uncle's unit. 

Via Walter Dean Myers' book, I discovered other references, including The Unknown Soldiers: African-American Troops in World War I by Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri and Harlem's Hell Fighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I by Stephen L. Harris. And so now the thing to do is to put it altogether.  

But I do think the undervaluation of African American cultural contributions in the 20th century begins with the profoundly damaging misreading of how wars have and continue to eviscerate men's bodies and souls. 

Jim Crow Cartoon

Don't know anything yet about the origin of this cartoon but I got it from The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow site produced by PBS for a documentary and book of the same name. This illustration appears in the book as well but in black and white. In the documentary, it is in full color but it goes by in a flash, owing probably to its provocative nature. When such an image is exhibited today, no one wishes to take responsibility for the thought it seems to express.
In any case, it isn't entirely clear what the illustrator is getting at. The point of view is conflicted it seems as reflected by the stereotypical way in which the woman who is speaking by virtue of her language in dialect and the portrayal of her features. On the other hand, freedom is the subject of the cartoon with clear illustrations that all the benefits of society are closed to her by the practice of segregation in the South, and that the creator of the cartoon disapproves of such restrictions on the former slave's freedom.
It is often assumed that the stereotypical portrayal of blacks or the portrayal of blacks by whites in black face equals hatred for blacks and the belief that they are intellectually and socially inferior but what is considered superior in a woman at this time: she's dainty, frail, helpless and useless, to be placed on a pedestal. She has no vote and for the most part she is restricted from working. Her freedom is her husband's to give and take. Whereas this particular black woman is a large, strong, independent figure. Mentally she is easily baffled but physically she is obviously well endowed. So therein lies the conundrum of racism. What does the racist want? We're never quite sure.
I would date the cartoon at some point after Reconstruction heading toward the turn-of-the-century or immediately after.

Chronology: 1861-1909

1861--Southern States form Confederacy in response to election of Abraham Lincoln as President. Civil War begins.
**Confederate States/Territories:Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, California, Louisiana, Indian (later Oklahoma) and New Mexico Territories--a total of 14
**Union States/Territories:New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Iowa, Kansas, Oregon, West Virginia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Rhode Island, Maryland, District of Columbia, Washington, Utah, Nebraska and Colorado Territories--a total of 28

1863--Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves in Confederate "rebellious" states "forever free." 186,000 African Americans enlist during the final two years of the Civil War.

1865--Unions wins the Civil War. Lincoln assassinated. Southern states enact "Black Codes." Congress passes 13th Amendment outlawing slavery.

1866--Congress passes 14th Amendment granting citizenship to African Americans. Reconstruction begins. Ku Klux Klan formed in Tennessee. Congress authorizes four black units to fight Indians in the West. Dubbed "Buffalo Soldiers" by Native Americans.

1868--W.E.B. Du Bois born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts only child of Alfred Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt.

1869--Congress passes 15th Amendment giving black men the vote.

1870-1871 Congress passes Federal Ku Klux Klan Acts to protect black voters.

1875--The State of Tennessee is the first to institute Jim Crow (segregation) Law.

1877--Federal Troops withdraw from the South; Reconstruction ends.

1880--60,000 "exodusters" leave Nashville for Kansas to escape Jim Crow.

1880--Slavery abolished in Cuba.

1884--European nations convene in Berlin and divide the continent of Africa into colonies.

1884--Du Bois graduates from high school, the only black student in a class of 13.

1888--Slavery abolished in Brazil.

1890--Du Bois awarded B.A. cum laude in philosophy at Harvard. Begins graduate school at Harvard in political science. Frances Harper publishes her novel IOLA LEROY.

1890-- (Jim Crow Law) Segregation is made law in the state of Mississippi. Begins to use literacy tests to disenfranchise black voters.

1892--Du Bois visits 12 year old Helen Keller (blind and deaf child) at her school in Boston with the philosopher and Harvard Professor William James (brother of Henry James).

1892--Ida B. Wells begins her anti-lynching campaign in response to the lynching of three of her friends in Memphis, Tennessee.

1893--Colombian Exposition in Chicago: Frederick Douglass headquarters at Haitian Pavilion with Paul Lawrence Dunbar as his assistant; Dahomey Village inspired IN DAHOMEY, a Broadway show by Bert Williams and George Walker; the debut of Nancy Green as Aunt Jemima, the pancake queen. Henry O. Tanner's "The Banjo Lesson" is included in the American art exhibition.

1895--Atlanta Compromise speech by Booker T. Washington at the Cotton Exposition, describing racial segregation as an opportunity and black suffrage as not yet necessary. Du Bois who is the first black man to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in this same year, writes Washington a note: "Let me heartily congratulate you upon your phenomenal success at Atlanta--it was a word fitly spoken."

1896--(Jim Crow) Segregation made law in the state of Louisiana. Plessy v. Ferguson, U.S. Supreme Court upholds Jim Crow Law as constitutional.
The decision stated, "The object of the 14th Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the war, but in the nature of things it could not have intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either."

1897--Du Bois helps to found the American Negro Academy. Delivers address, "The Conservation of Races," calling on American blacks to serve as the "advance guard" of black racial development globally "and to maintain a separate identity within American society." Becomes professor of economics and history at Atlanta University.

1898--Spanish American War. Black soldiers played a major role in the winning of the Battle at San Juan Hill, which ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The U.S. victory against the Spanish led to the American possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and the Caroline islands, in one of the most poorly understood episodes in U.S. history.
Link: http://www.spanamwar.com/AfrcanAmericans.html

1898--Wilmington Massacre, in which Dixie Democrats violently remove Republicans from office and prevent blacks from voting.

1899--Charles Chesnutt's THE MARROW OF TRADITION published. Portrays in a novel the Wilmington Massacre.

1899--Sam Hose accused of murder and lynched in Atlanta. Du Bois recognizes that activism is unavoidable.

1900--Segregation (Jim Crow Law) begins in Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia.

1900--WEB Du Bois travels by steerage to the Universelle Exposition in Paris to install the Exhibition on the Progress of African Americans. Receives gold medal. Attends first Pan-African Conference in London, and delivers speech in which he first says, "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line."

1900--Pauline Hopkins writes and edits THE COLORED AMERICAN, an illustrated African American journal, in Boston. She also publishes her novel CONTENDING FORCES.

1901--Article defending the Freedmen's Bureau, which will later become a chapter in SOULS is published in the Atlantic Monthly in March.*

1903--WEB Du Bois publishes THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, which brings him to national prominence and makes public his opposition to Washington's views.

1906--In homage to John Brown, the Niagara Movement first meets at Storer College in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia.

Detail from racist postcard from Rare Books, Manuscripts and Special Collections Library, Duke University, p. xii in THE RISE AND FALL OF JIM CROW by Richard Wormser, Companion Volume to PBS Series, St. Martins Press 2003.

1903-1909--Jim Crow practices (segregation) spread from Kansas to Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois and New Jersey.

1898-1909--Major race riots in Atlanta, Georgia; Wilmington, NC; Ft. Riley, Kansas, New Orleans, Louisiana; Ft Riley, Illinois, Greensburg, Indiana, Springfield, Ohio; New York, NY.

Lynching: How I Got Interested

Caption: The burning of Will Brown's body, Omaha, Nebraska, Sept. 18, 1919

Source: NSHS, RG2281-69

Nebraska born actor Henry Fonda was 14 years old when this incident occured.  He watched the riot from the second floor window of his father's printing plant across the street from the courthouse.  "It was the most horrendous sight I'd ever seen . . We locked the lan, went downstairs, and drove home in silence.  My hands were wet and there were tears in my eyes.  All I could thimk of was that young black man dangling at the end of a rope."

This material is taken from a series of pages on the history of racial tensions in Omaha at the following address-

http:/www.nebraskastudies.org/0700/frameset.html.

I got interested in lynching because of my interest in African American visual culture. It seemed to me that it was necessary to add certain previously ignored elements to the aesthetic ensemble in order to more plainly see the traditions of an African American visual culture.

When I decided to do a Ph.D., my first impulse was to do it in Art History but after very little research I realized that it would be entirely an uphill battle to do extensive coursework in Art History, most or all of it having nothing to do with African American visual culture, and then compose a committee from the current personnel of the best departments of Art History. Your committee is just as important or even more so than the available coursework when it comes to completing the dissertation.

As I imagined it, the better field to pursue would be film because it meant that I would be studying the 20th century, a period during which I thought the impact and visibility of African Americans was undeniable. My tropes were passing, lynching and Jim Crow, which I borrowed from the concerns so prominent in the African American literature of the 20th century.

A collection of lynching photographs was published in 2000, WITHOUT SANCTUARY: LYNCHING PHOTOGRAPHS IN AMERICA edited by James Allen (I finished my Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at NYU in 1999), which increased the general knowledge of lynching episodes in American history. Meanwhile, I had begun to include lynching in the courses I offered at the Graduate Center in the English Program. One of the students in my class, Anne Rice, put together an anthology of writings protesting lynching, dating from 1889 through 1935. She asked me to write the foreword, which I gladly did. WITNESSING LYNCHING: AMERICAN WRITERS RESPOND was published by Rutgers University Press in 2003.*

It is a truly wonderful and indispensable book with selections of writings on lynching by Frederick Douglas, Frances Harper, Ida B. Wells, Pauline Hopkins, WEB Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Walter White, Sterling Brown, Nancy Cunard, Claude McKay, Erskine Caldwell, Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Esther Popel, Angelina Weld Grimke.

Anne has written for this book a wonderful, lucid, crystal clear and succinct introduction to the issues of lynching in American culture, as well as shorter introductions to each writer, and to each essay, short story, play or poem included in the book, weaving all the material in the book together into a perfect correspondence with the actual events of the period.

Since 2000, I have had several copies of this book in my possession but I always end up giving them away to people I think may really need to read it and who won't go to the store and buy it for themselves. During my recent visit to the Schomburg, I found a copy of it in the gift shop for a price of $7. The proprietor of the store told me that the book was out-of -print and had been remaindered, which explains why the book was so inexpensive.

Anne's purpose in doing this book was to make available in one place a range of relatively obscure writings on lynching, most of which I had never seen before. These were the historical witnesses to lynching, able to articulate for their audiences then exactly what they thought they saw along with its deeper meaning. And yet so few people have ever had a chance to read this proud American literature. Fewer still will have the chance with the passing of this book, an obscure title during the best of times, from availability.

Just this past Wednesday, Judith Killens, a former M.A. student at the Graduate Center, a teacher and an intellectual, was saying during a visit to my office at CCNY (NAC 6/223) that it was getting more and more difficult to explain to students why they needed to go to libraries and do research in an archive since more and more everything can be found online.  She was pointing out in particular a booklet that Ida B. Wells, her husband and Frederick Douglas had produced at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 with the title WHY ARE THERE NO BLACKS AT THE COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION which is now online in its entirety. 

But I still worry about what will happen to WITNESSING LYNCHING.  I still worry that first, having something online doesn't make it necessarily more available to the people who need it and 2) that some projects are inherently against the grain and are therefore invisible to the majority of the reading and thinking public.  

Another project which is also probably indispensable in its importance is REMEMBERING JIM CROW: AFRICAN AMERICANS TELL ABOUT LIFE IN THE SEGREGATED SOUTH edited by William H. Chafe et al, The New Press and Lyndhurst Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Press, 2001, which contains two hours of interviews as well as a book of analysis and a transcript of the recordings, bibliography, etcetera and so forth. This project was in part inspired by the previous REMEMBERING SLAVERY project edited by Ira Berlin and others, and coordinated by Joe Wood, an editor and writer greatly loved and admired by myself and many others.  

I became Anne's mentor and the head of her dissertation committee. She subsequently wrote her dissertation on lynching and literature, completing her graduate work at the Graduate Center in 2004. She currently teaches African American Studies at Lehman College, CUNY, and is working on a book on lynching, photography and historical memory.

***There are inexpensive copies of WITNESSING SLAVERY at the Schomburg Gift Shop.  Also, they have piles of A SMALL NATION OF PEOPLE: WEB DU BOIS AND AFRICAN AMERICAN PORTRAITS OF PROGRESS, The Library of Congress with Essays by David Levering Lewis & Deborah Willis, 2003--African American Photographs Assembled by Du Bois for the 1900 Paris Exposition--at half price!!!! 

Jack Johnson and Trainers in Nevada

Notice that there are many children at the Johnson Camp in Nevada.  Wherever the unpleasant racial atmosphere exists around Jack Johnson, it seems not to be in this camp.  The emotions aroused by Jack Johnson becoming the first black heavyweight champion (1908-1915) of the world may have had much to do with some of the negative energy concerning the movements of black men, including lynchings and race riots, around the turn of the century.  Johnson was a tall, handsome man who enjoyed the "sporting life," drinking, gambling and the company of prostitutes and "loose women," both white and black.  

He was extremely well known, even notorious, during his own time because of the rise of the illustrated press, which documented his fights and his every move, because he was photogenic and many photographs were taken of him, and finally because his prize-winning bouts with white opponents were filmed and shown in movie theatres where they drew large audiences, composed of both blacks and white.  Not enough is understood of how these films were viewed, whether they were exhibited in the South, whether blacks and white viewed them together.  

We do know that his triumphs did result in some race riots and that many whites were uncomfortable with the way black communities celebrated his victories.

His career took place during the peak of anti-black violence in the United States and yet it is visually clear that Johnson, himself, had a capacity for enjoying life that was rare.  The famous documentarian Ken Burns made a documentary on Jack Johnson, Unforgiveable Blackness, not one of my favorite films.  Johnson was a vastly more interesting and complicated man, someone who served as a role model for many adventurous and creative black men to follow, including James Earl Jones (who played him on stage and in the wonderful film The Great White Hope), the trumpeter Miles Davis who did an album in tribute to him in 1970, and the boxer Muhammed Ali, who was also a world champion boxer.  

Contrary to Burns' tragic perspective on Johnson, he actually lived for decades after he was no longer a champion, as the proprietor of a popular Harlem nightspot.  He died in a car accident in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1946.  He was 68.  His life story epitomizes the era in which he lived.   I guess for white men just being a black man at the turn-of-the century would appear tragic but it is important to realize that there will always be some individuals just don't scare.  Johnson is a classic African American type, made famous in folklore and African American popular culture, represented for instance in the figure of John Henry, a steel-driving man. 

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

The Master's class viewed the second part of The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow yesterday.  We also had some time to discuss it.  After having seen it about six times myself, I had very decided opinions about it.  In particular, at the moment I would like very much to discover the origin and the source of the photographs and film footage used to document the convict lease system.  Richard Wormser's book and the PBS series cite the convict lease system as a key manifestation of the carry-over of slavery into the lives of blacks living at the turn-of-the-century in the South.

The photograph included above comes from the Library of Congress, the George Grantham Bains collection.  It shows a scene of corporal punishment (two men with hands and heads in stocks and another man below being whipped)  at a prison camp in Delaware around the turn of the century.  LC-USZ62-98905 (b&w film copy neg.). 

I have found other pictures on line as well although none as compelling as the ones used in the documentary and its companion book. 

One picture in the book of a collection of boys, perhaps eight to twelve, wearing stripes and chained together working in a field, is stamped "juvenile convicts at work in a field" and "copyright 1903 by Detroit Photographic Company,"  which turns out to have been a very successful photographic company that mass produced photos for popular consumption from the turn-of-the-century.  The Library of Congress has a large archive of their photographs.

Also, another key topic that emerges in the film is D.W. Griffith's THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) as well as Thomas Dixon's play THE KLANMEN, which provided the basis for THE BIRTH.  

I wrote an article in 2003 on THE BIRTH OF A NATION, which was published by THE CINEMA JOURNAL, 43, No 1, 2003.

The article provides much of the desirable background for race relations and could be helpful to read as a supplement to this documentary, which has some misleading characteristics I believe in that the analysis of images, music and cultural production by black or white artists isn't sophisticated enough.  There isn't enough of a comparative grid of the various kinds of images that were available at the time.  I, myself, had never seen that black "incubus" image before and am not sure what it means.  In fact, there are no analysts of culture used as authoritative sources with the possible exception of Grace Hale, who is primarily a social historian, not a cultural historian I believe.  I love her work but these people are using cultural production in a kind of shorthand to illustrate their overall assessment of a violent and fascistic time in American history.  It is simplistic the way you would feed it to a child and yet because of the sadistic violence portrayed, it would be unsuitable for children.

African American Time Line--First Draft

This "Afro-American Monument" is a composite of thirteen scenes portraying African American history from 1619 and the landing of the first blacks at Jamestown to 1897.  Crispus Attuck's name is mispelled as Christopher.  This was a poster to commemorate African American advancement at yet another world's fair,  the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in Nashville in 1897.  This would have been two years after Washington's successful speech encouraging the peaceful and separate co-existence of the races at the Cotton Exposition in 1895 in Atlanta.  

A picture of the "Negro Exposition Building" (presumably segregated) is featured on the lower, right hand side of the poster.  From the Library of Congress Collection of Prints and Photographs.

1861--Southern States form Confederacy in response to election of Abraham Lincoln as President.  Civil War begins.

**Confederate States/Territories:

Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, California, Louisiana, Indian (later Oklahoma) and New Mexico Territories--a total of 14

**Union States/Territories:

New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Iowa, Kansas, Oregon, West Virginia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Rhode Island, Maryland, District of Columbia, Washington, Utah, Nebraska and Colorado Territories--a total of 28

1863--Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves in Confederate "rebellious" states "forever free." 

186,000 African Americans enlist during the final two years of the Civil War.

1865--Unions wins the Civil War.  Lincoln assassinated.  Southern states enact "Black Codes."  Congress passes 13th Ammendment outlawing slavery. 

1866--Congress passes 14th Ammendment granting citizenship to African Americans.  Reconstruction begins. Ku Klux Klan formed in Tennessee.  Congress authorizes four black units to fight Indians in the West.  Dubbed "Buffalo Soldiers" by Native Americans.

1868--W.E.B. Du Bois born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts only child of Alfred Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt.  

1869--Congress passes 15th Ammendment giving black men the vote.

1870-1871 Congress passes Federal Ku Klux Klan Acts to protect black voters.

1875--The State of Tennessee is the first to institute Jim Crow (segregation) Law.

1877--Federal Troops withdraw from the South; Reconstruction ends. 

1880--60,000 "exodusters" leave Nashville for Kansas to escape Jim Crow.  

1880--Slavery abolished in Cuba.

1884--European nations convene in Berlin and divide the continent of Africa into colonies.

1884--Du Bois graduates from high school, the only black student in a class of 13.

1888--Slavery abolished in Brazil.

1890--Du Bois awarded B.A. cum laude in philosophy at Harvard.  Begins graduate school at Harvard in political science.  Frances Harper publishes her novel IOLA LEROY. 

1890-- (Jim Crow Law) Segregation is made law in the state of Mississippi.  Begins to use literacy tests to disenfrancise black voters.

1892--Du Bois visits 12 year old Helen Keller (blind and deaf child) at her school in Boston with the philosopher and Harvard Professor William James (brother of Henry James). 

1892--Ida B. Wells begins her anti-lynching campaign in response to the lynching of three of her friends in Memphis, Tennessee.

1893--Columbian Exposition in Chicago: Frederick Douglass headquarters at Haitian Pavillion with Paul Lawrence Dunbar as his assistant; Dahomey Village inspired IN DAHOMEY, a Broadway show by Bert Williams and tk Walker; the debut of Nancy Green as Aunt Jemima, the pancake queen.  Henry O. Tanner's "The Banjo Lesson" is included in the American art exhibition.

1895--Atlanta Compromise speech by Booker T. Washington at the Cotton Exposition, describing racial segregation as an opportunity and black suffrage as not yet necessary.  Du Bois who is the first black man to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in this same year, writes Washington a note: "Let me heartily congratulate you uon your phenomenal success at Atlanta--it was a word fitly spoken."

1896--(Jim Crow) Segregation made law in the state of Louisiana.  Plessy v. Ferguson, U.S. Supreme Court upholds Jim Crow Law as constitutional.  

The decision stated, "The object of the 14th Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the war, but in the nature of things it could not have intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either."

1897--Du Bois helps to found the American Negro Academy.  Delivers address, "The Conservation of Races," calling on American blacks to serve as the "advance guard" of black racial development globally "and to maintain a separate identity within American society." Becomes professor of economics and history at Atlanta University.

1898--Spanish American War.  Black soldiers played a major role in the winning of the Battle at San Juan Hill, which ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.  The U.S. victory against the Spanish led to the American possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Phillippines and the Caroline islands, in one of the most poorly understood episodes in U.S. history. 

Link: http://www.spanamwar.com/AfroAmericans.htm

1898--Wilmington Massacre, in which Dixie Democrats violently remove Republicans from office and prevent blacks from voting.

1899--Charles Chesnutt's THE MARROW OF TRADITION published.  Portrays in a novel the Wilmington Massacre.

1899--Sam Hose accused of murder and lynched in Atlanta.  Du Bois recognizes that activism is unavoidable. 

1900--Segregation (Jim Crow Law) begins in Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia.  

1900--WEB Du Bois travels by steerage to the Universelle Exposition in Paris to install the Exhibition on the Progress of African Americans. Receives gold medal.  Attends first Pan-African Conference in London, and delivers speech in which he first says, "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line."

1900--Pauline Hopkins writes and edits THE COLORED AMERICAN, an illustrated African American journal, in Boston.  She also publishes her novel CONTENDING FORCES.

1901--Article defending the Freedmen's Bureau, which will later become a chapter in SOULS is published in the Atlantic Monthly in March.*

1903--WEB Du Bois publishes THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, which brings him to national prominence and makes public his opposition to Washington's views. 

1906--In homage to John Brown, the Niagara Movement first meets at Storer College in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.  

Detail from racist postcard from Rare Books, Manuscripts and Special Collections Library, Duke University, p. xii in THE RISE AND FALL OF JIM CROW by Richard Wormser, Companion Volume to PBS Series, St. Martins Press 2003.

1903-1909--Jim Crow practices (segregation) spread from Kansas to Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois and New Jersey.  

1898-1909--Major race riots in Atlanta, Georgia; Wilmington, NC; Ft. Riley, Kansas, New Orleans, Louisiana; Ft Riley, Illinois, Greensburg, Indiana, Springfield, Ohio; New York, NY.

1889-1918--Blacks were lynched in almost every state. 

1909--NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) is founded in order to attack segregation, lynching and race riots.  Du Bois hired as Director of Publications and Research.  Moves to New York to found, edit and write THE CRISIS, the monthly magazine of the NAACP.

1910--National Urban League founded to direct migrants from the South to jobs, housing and education.

1912--Jelly Roll Morton publishes his first song, "The Jelly Roll Blues."

1913--Du Bois writes and stages THE STAR OF ETHIOPIA, a pageant celebrating black history to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the emancipation.

1914--Du Bois supports women's suffrage in CRISIS editorial.

1915--NAACP campaigns actively against the public exhibition of THE BIRTH OF A NATION.  

"Let us while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy." 

1917-1919--More than 400,000 served in the United States Army during WWI

1920--Negro National Baseball Leagued founded.

1920--500,000 blacks leave the rural South for the North.  The Great Migration begins.

1923--Jean Toomer publishes CANE.

1926--Langston Hughes publishes THE WEARY BLUES.

1929--Stock Market Crash.  The Depression begins.  The Nation of Islam formed in Detroit.

1932--Black voters switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party, in time to vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the architect of the New Deal.  

1935--Zora Neale Hurston publishes MULES AND MEN.

1937--Zora Neale Hurston publishes THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD.

1940--The War Department begins to train black pilots at Tuskeegee University in Alabama.

1944--701,678 African Americans in the U.S. Army.

1945-1947--Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Dizzy Gillespie pioneer "bebop" jazz at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem.

1947--Richard Wright publishes 12 MILLION BLACK VOICES.

1948--President Harry S. Truman integrates the U.S. armed forces.

1954--U.S. Supreme Court declares segregation unconstitutional in the public schools in the case of Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

1954--Gwendolyn Brooks publishes MAUD MARTHA.

1955--Emmett Till (14 years old0 lynched in Money, Alabama for whistling at a white woman.

1955--Montgomery Bus Boycott begins after Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white man.  The one year boycott is led by Martin Luther King Jr.

1959--Berry Gordy founds Motown Records in Detroit, Michigan.

1960--Sit Ins begin in Greensboro, North Carolina.

1963--March on Washington led by Martin Luther King, Jr., 250,000 people.

President John F. Kennedy assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

1963--Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) published BLUES PEOPLE.

1965--Malcolm X assassinated in New York City at the Audobon Ballroom.

1968--MLK assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

*Notes on Du Bois prepared by Nathan Huggins in Library of America edition of SOULS OF BLACK FOLK.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow--PBS Series

The first two parts of The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow are 60 minutes each. A lot of information is communicated in a fairly efficient manner. If you had seen DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) (the entire film can be viewed at video.google.com or read the two books -- The Klansman (1903) and The Leopard's Spots (1901) by Thomas Dixon upon which the plot of the The Birth of a Nation was based-- you will recognize many of the images and substantial portions of the narrative, except that Griffith simply reversed antagonist with victim, making blacks the antagonists and whites the victims who then bravely bring the "Negro rebellion" under control. It is just crazy but it is a skillfully made film, in fact innovative in the genre at the time and there were no lack fo racist audiences who were eager to see it in 1915. It didn't help at all that the president then, Woodrow Wilson, had it screened it at the White House and then endorsed the film in a statement that was then included in the film.

The odd thing about The Birth of a Nation, which presents itself as being about the Civil War and Reconstruction, is that it is actually about events related to the political ascendancy of Jim Crow taking place at the turn of the century and in the early 20th century.  In this we see a characteristic danger in historical film dramas (from Gone With the Wind to JFK), which is that they almost always reveal a lot more about the time in which they were made than about the period represented.

But the important thing about paying attention to this now is to see what happens when people get confident enough to believe that the situation is settled and that nothing can overturn the progress that has been made. In a country of our size and history, that probably won't ever be true. So I think one should be careful and humble.

I am hoping we can find time to schedule some portion of a screening of The Rise and Fall. The book by Richard Wormser (St. Martin's Press 2003) has some interesting illustrations, as does the dvd (which can be purchased via California Newsreel) and the PBS website.

As somebody who is interested in tracking the history of images in photography and film for what the surviving fragments can tell us about events and people, it is irritating beyond belief to encounter again and again this dumbed down techno-wizardry which will use the ocean lapping up on the beach or the side of a boat as a perpetual stand-in for the slave trade, or any vaguely old vaguely humble group of blacks in a photograph to stand in for a group of slaves, or ex-slaves or migrants to the North, as the case may warrant. The photographers are never identified even when they are known. The situation in which the photograph is known is never talked about.

They call them stock images or stock footage.  It happens all the time in films and other uses of photographs and I never was bothered about it at all until I became a student of African American history and culture, so I would suppose it happens with images of people in every society now.  The way images are used in a technological society is designed to eventually make it impossible to track their genealogy of creation and use.  

Photographic and filmic images rarely come with provenances in the way that art images are expected to have, and when they do, it is a deep dark secret difficult to obtain and impossible to make public.

In the Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, I recognize a fair number of photographs that are used.  

In particular one photographer who did very special work, Julian Dimock.  Soon after the turn of the century, he and his father, a writer of travel literature, went on a trip to Columbia, South Carolina and Beaufort, North Carolina and took a number of pictures of the people in the black communities there immediately following the downfall of the Republican Party and the forcing out of office of all black office holders.  

The Souls of Black Folk was published right before their trip.  The resulting photographs, are a perfect accompaniment to Du Bois's text. These photographs were taken in Beaufort, North Carolina (an isolated region of the state) and Columbia, South Carolina of  black men, women and children following the so-called "Wilmington Massacre" portrayed strikingly by the African American writer Charles Chesnutt in the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) in which white racists physically prevented black registered voters from voting in local elections and also forcibly ejected local black office holders from office.  

The people look poor and a little shabby but their dignity and coherence is striking. In particular, most of the photographs were of children who make the best photographic subjects in all circumstances. Dimocks' pictures had been hidden away in the Museum of Natural History for decades when somebody there decided to publish them in a book so that we could see what this community looked liked given the extraordinary political pressures of the time. Several of these photographs are used in the documentary The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, without any mention of their origin.  Probably the reason why it took so long for Dimock to be presented in such a monograph is partly because the lack of popularity in our time for photographs of black people taken by white photographers, particularly in this period of Jim Crow history.  

Included in Dimock's collection was a photograph of Robert Smalls, a native Beaufortian whose life is described in Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839-1915.  Smalls had served five terms as a U.S. congressman but by 1904 when Dimock took his picture such offices were no longer viable for blacks because of Jim Crow laws. 

This shuffling of unidentified images is a technique which has existed for a long time, but which has become associated in my mind with Ken Burns' approach to documentary as popularized in his series on The Civil War.  The historical critique of his documentary on The Civil War is more highly developed than the criticism of his many other documentaries, as demonstrated in Robert Brent Toplins' Ken Burns's The Civil War: Historians Respond (Oxford University Press 1996).