( 2 0 T H C E N T U RY )

JIM CROW AND BLACK WALL STREET

WHAT ARE THE FACTS?

• Beginning in the late 19th century, states passed laws to keep the races separate and to restrict the opportunities of African Americans.

• The system created by these laws was known informally as “Jim Crow.”

• More than a million African Americans fled the Jim Crow South, especially, after World War I, seeking opportunity in northern cities.

• But some African Americans who stayed in North Carolina fought their way to success.

• In Durham, the black business district known as “Black Wall Street” was home to some of the largest black-owned businesses in the nation.

• Outside of Greensboro, Charlotte Hawkins Brown founded a prominent school for African Americans and won national respect as an educator.

THE BIRTH OF "JIM CROW"

• During the years that followed Reconstruction, and especially after 1890, state governments in the South adopted segregationist laws mandating separation of the races in nearly every aspect of everyday life.

• They required separate public schools, railroad cars, and public libraries; separate water fountains, restaurants, and hotels.

• Jim Crow could not have existed had the federal courts interpreted broadly the relevant constitutional protections. But the judicial branch instead seized upon technicalities and loopholes to avoid striking down segregationist laws.

• In 1875, Congress enacted what would be the last civil rights law for nearly a century.

WHAT’S THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1875?

• barred “any person” from depriving citizens of any race or color of equal treatment in public accommodations such as inns, theaters, and places of public amusement, and in public transportation.• In 1883, the Supreme Court declared the law

unconstitutional, reasoning that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited discrimination by states but not by individuals• Congress accordingly could not prohibit individual

acts of discrimination.

2 IMPORTANT COURT CASES

• Plessy vs. Ferguson: Supreme Court case from 1896 that upheld the rights of states to pass laws allowing or even requiring racial segregation in public and private institutions such as schools, public transportation, restrooms, and restaurants. (Separate but Equal)• Brown v. Board of Education: decision

overruled Plessy; 1954 Topeka, Kansas; Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional.

EXAMPLES OF JIM CROW LAWS

A SAMPLING OF JIM CROW LAWS

• http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newcentury/5103

THE GREAT MIGRATION AND NORTH CAROLINA

• As the decades of the late 1800s and early 1900s passed, thousands of African American families made the same decision to leave their home state of N.C. in search of a better life.

• When a group of Wilmington whites rioted in 1898, they killed and injured dozens of African Americans and chased hundreds out of the city. Rioters forced black officials, including the mayor, out of office.

• From that point on, North Carolina blacks rapidly lost power in government and society. Lawmakers passed “Jim Crow” laws that prevented blacks from voting (disfranchisement) and separated them from whites (segregation).

• African Americans faced housing and job discrimination and an unfair legal system. And although blacks in other states faced more frequent aggression, violence toward African Americans in N.C. increased in the 1890s and early 1900s.

Continued….

• Sharecropping ended, and more and more African Americans found themselves out of work or struggling to make ends meet.

• Not surprisingly, African Americans began leaving, and most of them headed north. By 1915 the migration of blacks went up dramatically due to World War I. The fighting in Europe increased factory orders in northern cities.

• When America joined the war in 1917 and sent soldiers overseas, war production rose, but the number of available factory workers fell. Carolina blacks welcomed the chance for good jobs with less discrimination.

• As blacks moved north in this “Great Migration,” they created communities within cities. (Harlem)

• But life for southern blacks who moved to the North was not necessarily better. Poverty and discrimination existed on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, but so did joy and inspiration.

DESCRIBE DURHAM'S "BLACK WALL STREET"

• In the early twentieth century, Parrish Street in Durham, North Carolina, was the hub of African American business activity.

• This four-block district was known as “Black Wall Street,” a reference to the district of New York City that is home to the New York Stock Exchange and the nation’s great financial firms.

• Elsewhere in North Carolina, in the depths of the Jim Crow era, race relations were as bad as they ever had been. But Durham’s black businessmen thrived with the tolerance, if not the active support, of their white counterparts.

• In 1906, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the nation’s largest black-owned insurance company, moved its headquarters to Parrish Street.

THE NORTH CAROLINA MUTUAL LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY

• On the first of April 1899 the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company opened for business in Durham, North Carolina.

• The 1st month’s collections, after the payment of commissions, amounted only to $1.12, but from such beginnings North Carolina Mutual grew to be the largest African American managed financial institution in the United States.

• Durham at the beginning of the twentieth century was fertile ground for the growth of such an enterprise. Forced out of politics by the successful “White Supremacy” political campaign of 1898, Durham’s African American leaders turned their talents to the business world instead.

• “The Company with a Soul and a Service” survived the hardship of its first years to achieve success and help make Durham’s reputation as a center of African American economic life.

CHARLOTTE HAWKINS BROWN

WHO WAS CHARLOTTE HAWKINS BROWN?

• Charlotte Hawkins Brown, born on June 11, 1883 in Henderson, North Carolina, was educated in Massachusetts before returning to the South to teach African-American children.

• In 1902, she opened the Palmer Memorial Institute (Greensboro, NC) , named after a benefactor; it went on to become a famed 200-acre prep school offering black students rich course offerings.

• Brown was also a world-traveler and suffragist• In the 1920s, Brown spoke out as the Jim Crow laws, a

series of laws and practices, primarily in the South, that treated African Americans as second-class citizens and denied them many of their rights. Around this time, the school expanded its offerings to include a junior-college program.