The Progressive Movement

Black Self-Reliance

• Countless individuals and groups worked tirelessly to improve the lives and situations of African Americans during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The Progressive Movement• Reform movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s• key issues were

– terrible poverty– unfair business practices– the lack of rights for women– racial discrimination

• Progressives published photos of horrible living conditions faced by the urban poor; wrote moving pieces about the unfair treatment of black Americans

• Many black activists among Progressives; heart of message was idea of self-reliance, that blacks should not have to depend on anyone else to succeed– To attain self-reliance, black people needed the same educational and

economic opportunities that whites enjoyed

Examples of Black Progressives

• Ida B. Wells, an outspoken critic of lynching she also wrote passionately for increased rights for blacks and women

• Mary Church Terrell traveled around the country calling for the same rights for women as for men

Booker T. Washington• Vocal black Progressive; had

been born a slave in 1856 in Virginia to a black mother and a white father

• His dream was to learn to read and write; a black school finally opened

• At the age of 16, he went to the Hampton Institute in Virginia; after graduation, Washington got a job as a teacher

• Booker T. Washington organized first successful national black business association of the early twentieth century

Tuskegee Institute• Washington felt he could help black people succeed by teaching

them; accepted the chance to open the Tuskegee Institute in 1881• At that time Tuskegee was nothing more than a rundown old

plantation and a barn; by his death in 1915, the institute had an annual endowment in excess of $2 million

• The Tuskegee Institute founded to train teachers and to teach poor blacks trades so they could succeed; school was successful

• Eventually focus changed from vocational training to a more traditional college curriculum; began offering college degrees

• Now called Tuskegee University, the school today has an enrollment of more than 3,000

The Atlanta Compromise

• What was Washington urging African Americans to do? What was he urging white Americans to do?

• What statements in this address made this speech appropriate for a white audience? Explain.

• What were Washington’s long-term goals for African Americans?

W. E. B. Du Bois• Du Bois was born to free parents in 1868 in

Great Barrington, Massachusetts. • One of the leaders of the Black Protest

movement; a brilliant economics professor at Atlanta University

• Du Bois feared if blacks just waited to gain full equality they would be headed back to slavery

• At early age won a scholarship to Fisk University; earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, the first black student ever to do so

• In 1903 penned The Souls of Black Folk

The Niagara Movement

• Du Bois set out to change the problems in society. Black Americans should have three things: the right to vote, civic equality, and the education of youth according to their ability.

• These men were determined to create an organization which would aggressively push for full civil rights for all African Americans

The NAACP

• On February 12, 1909, the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born.

• W. E. B. Du Bois and the Niagara Movement joined with white reformers to found the NAACP

• The magazine was called The Crisis; by 1920 it was selling as many as 100,000 copies a month

The NAACP

– Guinn v. United States (1915), in which the Supreme Court declared the “grandfather clauses” in Oklahoma to be illegal

– Buchanan v. Warley (1917), in which a Louisville, Kentucky, law that had forced black people to live only in certain sections of town was declared unconstitutional

– Moore v. Dempsey (1923), in which 5 black men convicted of murder in Arkansas who protested that their rights had been violated due to public pressure on the judge and jury were given a new trial

National Urban League

• By 1911 three organizations centralized their efforts; new organization called the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes

• It exists today as the National Urban League; devoting itself to helping African Americans in cities make progress in all walks of life

• Has helped newly arrived southern blacks adjust to the North; made training programs to help people progress beyond unskilled jobs