African American History- Final Exam Study Guide

Compare and contrast the different individual and group forms of resistance to derogatory images of African Americans in mainstream American culture and society in the 1930s.

Criticizing what he considered the group's overemphasis on integration, Du Bois advocated a program of self-determination he hoped would permit black people to develop "an economic nation within a nation." Black intellectuals attacked Du Bois for advocating "voluntary segregation." Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, for example, called the idea of black businesses succeeding within a segregated economy a black upper-class fantasy and social myth.

Analyze the strategies that African Americans devised in order to end segregation in military hospitals and to win integration in the nursing profession.

Employing a variety of strategies, they mobilized the black civilian workforce, black women's groups, black college students, and an interracial coalition to resist this blatant inequality. Published many editorials denouncing military segregation, with letters citing examples of improper, hostile, and humiliating treatment of black servicemen by military personnel and in the white communities where bases were located. William H. Hastie, resigned as civilian aide to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to protest the failure to outlaw discrimination in the military. His letter of resignation, which was published in the Chicago Defender, he explained that the Army Air Forces' reactionary policies and discriminatory practices were the catalyst to his resignation. The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. Mabel K. Staupers, its executive director, led an aggressive fight to eliminate quotas in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. To draw attention to the unfairness of quotas, Staupers met with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in November 1944 and described black nurses' troubled relationship with the armed forces. President Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802 was a significant victory for A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement and for black workers, who were able to appeal racial discrimination in defense industries to the FEPC.

Describe Booker T. Washington's program for the advancement of African Americans.

In 1900 Booker T. Washington was the nation's most influential black leader. He soothed white people and reassured black Americans as he counseled conciliation, patience, and agricultural and mechanical training as the most effective means to bridge the racial divide. His 1895 speech at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta elicited praise from both white and black listeners. He worked to subvert the Niagara Movement and the NAACP. But support for Washington and his conservative strategy diminished as the NAACP openly confronted racial discrimination. The Wizard of Tuskegee, as Washington was known, had little appreciation for criticism and did not hesitate to attack his opponents

Enumerate the contributions of the Tuskegee Airmen to the Allied victory in World War II.

In January 1941 the War Department announced the formation of an all-black pursuit squadron of fighter planes and the creation of a training program at Tuskegee Army Air Field, Alabama, for black pilots. The Tuskegee Airmen gained an impressive record. Confounded the expectations of white officers who doubted the black men had the ability or nerve to pilot fighter aircraft. Fighter Group flew more different kinds of fighter planes than any other group of pilots during World War II. RTecognized for their exceptional mechanical abilities during the war.

Explain the role of African Americans in the political system in the late nineteenth century.

In the late nineteenth century, black people remained important in southern politics. Black men served in Congress, state legislatures, and local governments. They received federal patronage appointments to post offices and custom houses. Southern Democrats steadily disfranchised black voters in the 1880s and 1890s, the number of black politicians declined until the political system was virtually all white by 1900. Divisions within the Democratic Party and the rise of a new political party—the Populists—accompanied successful efforts to remove black people entirely from southern politics.

Analyze the ways in which African Americans used religious faith and church services to benefit themselves and their communities.

It fulfilled spiritual needs through sermons and music. It enabled black people, free from white interference, to plan, organize, and lead. It was a sanctuary for black women, who immersed themselves in church activities. Although church members usually had little money to spare, they helped the sick, the bereaved, and those in need. Congregations also helped thousands of youngsters attend school and college. For many black people, the emotional involvement in church services was an escape from their dreary and oppressive daily lives.

Describe the backgrounds of key black men and women in the classic phase of the modern civil rights movement. Evaluate the effect that specific events had on the shape and contours of the 1950s phase of the modern civil rights movement and that laid the groundwork for the emergence of the Black Power movement.

Smith v. Allwright Supreme Court decision in 1944, which declared the "white primary" unconstitutional, helped reenfranchise black voters in Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, Jim Crow restrictions and the threat of white violence kept millions of African Americans from voting in the Deep South. Shelley v. Kramer Supreme Court decision—which outlawed the restricted residential covenants that had allowed homeowners to refuse to sell, rent, or lease their property to African Americans—was a significant victory, violence and extralegal practices still made housing integration a distant dream. Moving into urban centers, where the number of factories and jobs were just beginning to decline, African Americans suffered a higher unemployment rate than any other segment of the population. White workers, fearing for their jobs, felt threatened by competition from unemployed black workers. As urban neighborhoods deteriorated, conditions ripened for a massive explosion. The lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago. This event helped galvanize the emerging civil rights movement.

Discuss the methods employed to disfranchise black voters.

Southern states circumvented the amendment with poll taxes, literacy tests, and the grandfather clause. Thus, by 1900, after black men had held political offices across the South for 30 years, no black person served in an elected political position in any southern state. Frightened, discouraged, or apathetic, many black men stopped voting. White landlords could sometimes intimidate or bribe black sharecroppers and renters not to vote or to vote for the landlord's candidates.

Distinguish the differences between the music genres or styles of big band, bebop, and swing.

Swing emerged as white bands reduced the music of the more innovative black bandleaders to a broadly appealing formula based on a swinging 4/4 beat, well-blended saxophone sections, and pleasant vocals. Swing's popularity helped boost the careers of black and white bandleaders, but it also led to a creative slump that disheartened many younger black musicians. Bebop featured complex rhythms and harmonies and highlighted improvisation. Bebop music was of such enduring quality, however, that it shaped American popular culture and style for two generations. Before long, bebop became the principal musical language of jazz musicians around the world.Beboppers also created their own slang, hip Black English that mingled colorful and obscene language. They also engaged in a freewheeling lifestyle that often included love across the color line.

Describe the emergence of laws and customs that required racial segregation.

The Fourteenth Amendment had guaranteed the rights of citizenship that included due process of law. No state could deprive a person of life, liberty, or property without a court proceeding. The amendment also ensured each citizen equal protection of the law. But the Supreme Court had ruled that racial segregation in public places did not infringe on the right to equal protection of the law. The U.S. government abandoned black people to white southerners and their state and local governments. The federal government that had affirmed their rights as citizens during Reconstruction ignored the legal, political, and economic situation that entrapped most black southerners.

Analyze the competing strategies and effectiveness of black organizations in the 1920s.

The NAACP became an organization to be reckoned with as it fought for antilynching legislation in Congress and for civil and political rights in the courts. Its membership exceeded 100,000 during the 1920s. Although many black and white Americans ridiculed Marcus Garvey for his flamboyant style and excessive rhetoric, he offered racial pride and self-respect as he enrolled hundreds of thousands of black people in the UNIA.

Delineate the significant role that organized labor played in the radicalization of black Americans during the 1930s.

The New Deal, especially after 1935, did much to transform the labor movement. The NLRA and the militancy of workers provided the opportunity to organize the nation's great mass production industries. John L. Lewis (1880-1969), and his followers formed the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) to take on the task. Unlike the AFL, the CIO was committed to interracial and multiethnic organizing and so enabled more African Americans to participate in the labor movement.

Explain the role of middle-class black women in the advancement of African Americans.

The Talented Tenth of black Americans, distinguished by their educational and economic resources, promoted "self-help" through a variety of organizations—from women's groups to fraternities and sororities—to enhance their own status and help less affluent black people. The two groups—the National Federation of Afro-American Women and the National Colored Woman's League—merged in 1896 to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), with Mary Church Terrell elected the first president. The NACW adopted the self-help motto "Lifting as We Climb," and in the reforming spirit of the progressive age they stressed moral, mental, and material advancement. Middle- and upper-class black club women were sometimes more concerned with the morality and behavior of black men and women than with civil rights and white supremacy. They opposed premarital sex and warned against the evils of alcohol. The NACW clubs worked to eradicate poverty, end racial discrimination, and promote education. Members cared for older people, especially former slaves. They aided orphans; provided nurseries, health care, and information on childrearing for working mothers; and established homes for delinquent and abandoned girls.

Discuss the issues that were at the core of the Scottsboro case and the consequences of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions delivered in the case.

the Communist Party intensified its support of African Americans' efforts to address unemployment and job discrimination and to seek social justice. The communists' militant antiracism and determination to be interracial attracted some African Americans. The Scottsboro case brought the Communist Party to the attention of many African Americans. The case produced two important decisions that reaffirmed black people's right to the basic protections that all other American citizens enjoyed. In Powell v. Alabama (1932), the Court ruled that the Scottsboro defendants had not been given adequate legal counsel and that the trial had taken place in a hostile and volatile atmosphere. Asserting that the youths' right to due process as set forth in the Fourteenth Amendment had been vin Norris v. Alabama (1935) the Court decided that all Americans have the right to a trial by a jury of their peers. The systematic exclusion of African Americans from the Scottsboro juries, the Court held, denied the defendants equal protection under the law, which the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed. evidence that the "boys" had been falsely convicted

Explain the origins and development of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

the Pullman Company, which owned and operated passenger railroad coaches, was the single largest employer of black people in the United States. Black workers made little progress as they sought concessions from big business and representation within the ranks of organized labor. A. Philip Randolph founded the BSCP and began a struggle with both the Pullman Company and the AFL that would begin to pay off in the 1930s.

Discuss the ways in which African Americans used the World War II crisis in order to protest against racial discrimination in America.

the fight against fascism abroad and for equality and justice in the United States (the "Double V campaign"). Black internationalism was never a more prominent component of black people's consciousness than during the spirited "Double V" campaign in which African-American protest groups and newspapers criticized discrimination at home and fascism abroad.

Identify the most significant people involved in the Harlem Renaissance and explain their lasting contributions.

Claude McKay was a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a writer whose work provides frank portrayals of black life. His first and most famous work, Home to Harlem, was published in 1928 and depicted the gritty, intense nightlife of Harlem. Nella Larsen, the only major writer connected to the Harlem Renaissance who did not have a college degree, wrote about black people who were indistinguishable from white people. Her novel Quicksand depicted the life of Helga Crane, who, like Larsen herself, had a Danish mother and a black father. In Passing, Larsen dealt with a young black woman who passed for white and, indeed, married a white racist. Jessie Fauset was the literary editor of the Crisis, and in 1924 she finished There Is Confusion, the first novel published during the renaissance. Her novels explored the manners and color consciousness among well-to-do Negroes. the Crisis, as well as Opportunity, a new publication of the Urban League, published the poetry and short stories of black authors, including Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Some, such as Alain Locke, Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, and Benjamin Brawley, wanted black writers to promote positive images of black people in their works. They hoped inspirational literature could help resolve racial conflict in America, and they believed black writers should be included in the larger (and mostly white) American literary tradition. Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston disagreed. Their work portrayed the streets and shadows of Harlem and the lives of poor black people.

Enumerate the events that inspired the NAACP to take up the case that resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Discuss why some may consider Brown to be one of the, if not the, most important cases in the twentieth century.

A year after the Sweatt and McLaurin decisions, black parents and their lawyers filed suits in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia asking the courts to apply the qualitative test of the Sweatt case to elementary and secondary schools and to declare the "separate but equal" doctrine invalid in public education. The two Brown decisions ended the legal underpinning of segregation and discrimination and set in motion events that would irrevocably transform the political and social status of African Americans. The Brown decision would eventually lead to the dismantling of the entire structure of Jim Crow laws that regulated important aspects of black life in America: movement, work, marriage, education, housing, and even death and burial.

Discuss the reasons why the American economic system collapsed into the Great Depression during the 1930s. Account for the disastrous impact it had on African Americans in the South and in the North.

Although its causes are hotly debated, the Great Depression was probably the result of several factors, including rampant speculation, corporate capitalism's drive for markets and profits unchecked by federal regulation, the failure of those in the government or private sector to understand how the economy worked, a weak international trading system, overproduction of—and low prices for—many agricultural goods and raw materials, and—most important—the great inequality of wealth and income that limited the purchasing power of millions of Americans. Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers, nearly powerless in the rural South, were reduced to starvation or thrown off the land. same forces that impoverished rural Americans swept those in urban areas further toward the economic margins as waves of refugees from the farms crowded into the cities and competed for scarce jobs

Describe both the opportunities and discrimination experienced by black athletes in the 1920s.

Andrew "Rube" Foster was the father of black baseball in twentieth-century America. In 1920 he was the catalyst in the formation of the eight-team Negro National League and became its president and secretary. The biggest obstacle that black teams faced was the lack of their own fields or stadiums. They were forced to rent, often at exorbitant rates, from major league clubs, which frequently kept the profits from concessions. Amateur sports were less rigidly segregated than professional baseball. Black men played for white northern universities, although few teams had more than one black player. Black college players on white teams encountered discrimination when the teams traveled. Spectators taunted and threatened them. All-white college teams sometimes refused to play schools with black players.

Analyze the reasons for the widespread outbreak of race riots during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

As black men served in World War I and as thousands of black southerners migrated north, many white Americans became alarmed that African Americans were not as content with their subordinate and isolated status as Booker T. Washington had suggested they were. Some white Americans responded with violence in race riots as they attempted to prevent black Americans from assuming a more equitable role in American society. The campaigns of the NAACP, the efforts of the black club women, and the services and sacrifices of black men in the war not only failed to alter white racial perceptions but were sometimes accompanied by a backlash against African Americans. The racial violence that permeated southern life expanded into northern communities as many white Americans responded with hostility to the arrival of black migrants from the South. Black people defended themselves, and casualties among both races escalated

Identify the major goals of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Because the ballot was deemed the critical weapon needed to complete school desegregation and secure equal employment opportunity, adequate housing, and equal access to public accommodations, the SCLC focused on securing voting rights for black people. The SCLC shared many of the NAACP's goals, but tensions arose between the two organizations. The NAACP's leadership doubted the effectiveness of the protest tactics the SCLC favored. They resented having to divert resources from work on important court cases to defend people arrested in protests and were troubled by the left-wing connections of King's advisers.

Explain the evolution of tactics used in the 1940s and those developed and practiced by the 1960s generation of student activists.

Beginning in 1960, motivated black college students adapted a strategy that the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had used in the 1940s—the "sit-in"—and emerged as the vanguard of the civil rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The newest addition to the roster of civil rights associations adhered to the ideology of nonviolence, but it also acknowledged the possible need for increased militancy and confrontation. More accommodating black leaders, even some of those in SCLC, objected to the students' use of direct confrontational tactics that disrupted race relations and community peace. The sit-in movement paved the way for the "Freedom Rides" of 1961. The Freedom Rides showed the world how far some white southerners would go to preserve segregation.

Describe the similarities and delineate the differences between key authors, artists, musicians, and performers who were prominent in the Black Chicago Renaissance.

Black Chicago became the center of black culture innovation and expressivity during the 1930s and 1940s. In contrast to some of the artists of the "Harlem Renaissance," the leading writers in Chicago harbored no illusions that art would solve the problems caused by white supremacy and black subordination. The Chicago writers of the 1930s and 1940s emphasized the idea that black art had to combine aesthetics and function. It had to be art that served the cause of black freedom. Cultural creativity was a potent force for raising consciousness and stirring resentment against oppressive living conditions and economic exploitation in different locations in America. Black counterculture artists had a lasting impact on America and facilitated the spread of black internationalism and anticolonialism. Black artists reflected a growing pride and a determination to resist complete assimilation into white culture. The comic strips, the Semple stories of Langston Hughes, the black press, the radio broadcast of Destination Freedom, and the black church preserved black people's dignity.

Explain the evolution of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and how it affected race relations in Alabama.

It was the result of years of organization and planning by protest groups. A 15-year-old Booker T. Washington High School student, Claudette Colvin, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white woman. The WPC was ready to use this incident to initiate the threatened bus boycott. The Colvins were not members of the black social elite in Montgomery, and for various reasons community leaders decided against protesting Claudette's conviction for allegedly "assaulting" the police officers who had dragged her from the bus. Insert Rosa Parks... At the time Parks was portrayed as simply tired, but she had been training for just this kind of challenge for years. When her moment came, she seized it; with this act of resistance, she launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott and inspired the modern civil rights struggle for freedom and equality. The black community did not ride the buses, and the movement had begun. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), to coordinate the boycott. They selected a 26-year-old minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., as its president. King's speech electrified the meeting, which unanimously decided to boycott the buses until the MIA's demands were met. The speech also marked the beginning of King's role as a leader of the civil rights movement. The boycott took 65 percent of the bus company's business, forcing it to cut schedules, lay off drivers, and raise fares. The Supreme Court in Browder v. Gayle ordered an end to Montgomery's bus segregation and overturned the convictions of Colvin and the other women. This decision, unlike the Brown decision, also expressly overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision because, like Plessy, it applied to transportation.

Identify some of the strongest characteristics of black religious culture and how the church was transformed into a haven for those engaged in resistance struggles.

Just as black religion was the "invisible institution" that helped African Americans survive slavery, the black church was the visible institution that helped hundreds of thousands of migrants adjust to urban life while affirming a set of core values consisting of freedom, justice, equality, and an African heritage. The black church helped workers transition from being southern agricultural laborers to becoming northern urban industrial workers. The blues and jazz performed in social spaces influenced the development of urban gospel music. Many of the nightclub musicians and singers received their training and held their first public performances in their churches. addressed specific needs growing out of the Depression and the traumatic experience of relocating to alien and often hostile northern cities.

Describe the various forms of intolerance that dominated in the 1920s.

Little appeared to have changed. Racial violence and lynching persisted. The Birth of a Nation mocked black people and inflamed racial animosity. "Experts" offered "proof" that people of color were inferior and threatened America's ethnic purity. The Ku Klux Klan became a formidable organization again. Millions of white men joined the Klan, and millions more supported it.

Explain what motivated African-American men to serve in U.S. military forces that fought against Native Americans, the Spanish, and the Filipinos.

Many black Americans were convinced, as they had been during previous wars, that their support for the war against Spain would reduce or even eliminate white hostility.Many black and white Americans, however, questioned the American cause. Some black people saw the war as an effort to extend American racial practices, including Jim Crow, beyond U.S. borders. Whether or not they harbored doubts, black men by the thousands served in the Spanish-American War and in the Philippine Insurrection that followed it. The War Department designated four of the black volunteer units "immune regiments" because it believed that black men would tolerate the heat and humidity of Cuba better than white troops and that black people were immune or at least less susceptible to yellow fever, which was endemic to Cuba.

Explain the purpose of the Tuskegee Study and evaluate its lasting impact on race relations and black health care status.

Memories of the Tuskegee experiment convinced many Americans to be wary and suspect the worst of federal government-sponsored health care projects. will forever fuel black ambivalence.

Analyze the scope and extent of racial violence and brutality in maintaining white supremacy.

Mobs had lynched hundreds of black people. White people often justified lynching as a response to the presumed threat black men posed to the virtue of white women, white men routinely harassed and abused black women. Many white people believed black women "invited" white males to take advantage of them. Black women were considered inferior, immoral, and lascivious. Therefore, white people reasoned it was impossible to defend the virtue of black women because they had none.

Describe opportunities that both existed and were denied to African Americans in business, professions, entertainment, and athletics.

Mostly barred from white schools, churches, hospitals, labor unions, and places of entertainment, they developed businesses and facilities to serve their communities in an environment mostly free from white interference. Black people relied on their own experiences and imaginations to create new music. They occasionally participated in sports with white athletes but more often played separately from them as segregation and white hostility spread. Although black people recognized their churches, hospitals, schools, and businesses were often inadequately financed and usually less imposing than those of white people, they also knew that at a black school or church, in a black store, or in the care of a black physician or nurse, they would not be abused, mistreated, or ridiculed because of their color.

Explain why African Americans began to leave the rural South in the early twentieth century, and describe the types of lives they made for themselves in urban communities.

People moved for many reasons. Often they were both pushed from their rural homes and pulled toward urban areas. The push resulted from disasters in southern agriculture in the 1910s.The pull resulted from labor shortages created by World War I in northern industry and manufacturing. The war interrupted European immigration to the United States, eliminating a main source of cheap labor. Black people who departed the South (see Table 16-2) escaped the most blatant forms of Jim Crow and the injustice in the judicial system. Black women fled the sexual exploitation of white and black men. Black people in the North could vote. The North also offered better public schools.

Explain how scientific and scholarly ideas were used to support and promote racism.

Pseudoscientific evidence and academic scholarship bolstered the conviction of many Americans that white people, especially those of English and Germanic descent—Anglo-Saxons—were culturally and racially superior to nonwhites and even other Europeans. Sociologists Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner drew on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and concluded that life in modern industrial societies mirrored life in the animal kingdom. This theory, called social Darwinism, held that through natural selection, the strong would thrive, prosper, and reproduce, while the weak would falter, fail, and die. Social Darwinism applied to both individuals and "races." It justified great disparities in wealth, suggesting that such men as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were rich because they were "fit," whereas many European immigrants and most African Americans were poor and unlikely to succeed because they were "unfit."

Describe the different ways in which the New Deal created new opportunities for African Americans both in terms of economic development and in the cultural arena.

The first and second New Deals stimulated economic recovery and, more important, laid the basis for a strong national state and forged a political coalition that, beginning with World War II, would challenge the nation's racial caste system. pumped billions of dollars into an economic sector on which over 4.5 million black people relied for their livelihood. African Americans also gained new influence and allies within the Roosevelt administration. Their experience reflected the growing availability of highly trained African Americans for government service and the emerging consciousness among white liberals about the problems—and potential electoral power—of black people. The WPA illustrates the changes that resulted because of the second New Deal and the movement of African Americans to the Democratic Party.

Separate the positive from the negative impact that the Cold War had on African Americans, in both their political and cultural activism.

The long conflict resulted in the rise of a large permanent military establishment in the United States. The reorganized American military enlisted millions of men and women by the early 1950s and claimed most of the national budget. The federal government also grew in power during the war and provided a check on the control that white southerners had exercised over race relations in their region for so long. external pressures reinforced domestic efforts to change American racial policy. Radicals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois found no place in this movement or in American society. Instead, more moderate organizations, such as the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund, pursued their goals within the ideological and legal constraints of the American political system and met with some success.

Analyze the impact of the federal government's intermittent support on the Long Freedom Movement.

The sacrifices in Birmingham and the intensification of the movement throughout the South set the stage for Congress to pass legislation for a Second Reconstruction that would at last fulfill the promise of the first. The act banned discrimination in places of public accommodation, including restaurants, hotels, gas stations, and entertainment facilities, as well as schools, parks, playgrounds, libraries, and swimming pools. banned discrimination by employers and labor unions on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, and sex in regard to hiring, promoting, dismissing, or making job referrals. Allowed government agencies to withhold federal money from any program permitting or practicing discrimination. created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to monitor discrimination in employment. The protests at Selma and the massive white resistance spurred Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which President Johnson signed on August 6.

Explain the ways in which World War II made more visible the tensions and competition between white and black Americans over fair housing and equal opportunities for jobs.

The wartime need for workers, backed by pressure from the government, helped break down some barriers to employing African Americans in industry. Some white unionized workers continued to oppose hiring black workers, even going on strike to prevent it, but the union leadership, the government, and employers often deflected their resistance. The growth in black membership did not end racism in unions, even in the CIO, but it did provide African Americans with a stronger foundation on which to protest discrimination in employment.

Explain how law enforcement and the court system affected African Americans.

White people regarded black Americans as an inferior race not entitled to those rights that the Constitution supposedly guaranteed.

Compare and contrast the main purposes of education according to Booker T. Washington to those of his critics.

To combat white racism and improve the economic status of black people, educators like Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Booker T. Washington recommended agricultural and mechanical training for black Americans. But critics such as W. E. B. Du Bois stressed the need to cultivate the minds as well as the hands of black people to develop leaders. Not everyone shared Washington's stress on industrial and agricultural training to the near exclusion of the liberal arts, including literature, history, philosophy, and languages. Washington's program, critics charged, seemed designed to train black people for a subordinate role. Black people, they worried, would continue to labor much as they had in slavery and not far removed from it.

Evaluate the contributions of African Americans to U.S. military forces in the early twentieth century.

U.S. forces, including the black 10th Cavalry, spent 10 months in Mexico in 1916-1917 in a futile effort to capture Villa. Charles Young led the black troops against a contingent of Villa's rebels who had ambushed an element of the 13th Cavalry, a white unit, at Santa Cruz de Villegas. Although the military remained rigidly segregated, black newspapers and the NAACP campaigned to commission black officers to lead black troops.Black officers, however, were confined to the lower ranks. None of the new black officers were promoted above captain, and the overall command of black units remained in white hands. As in earlier wars, black troops were discriminated against, abused, and neglected. Some had to drill with picks and shovels rather than rifles. At Camp Hill, Virginia, black troops lived through a cold winter in tents with no floors, no blankets, and no bathing facilities. White men failed to salute black officers, and black officers were denied admission to officers' clubs. Morale among black troops was low, and their performance sometimes reflected it. The army did not prepare black soldiers adequately for combat, but military leaders complained when black soldiers who did face combat performed poorly.

Identify the key components of white southerners' strategy of massive resistance and explain their impact on the modern civil rights movement.

White southerners resisted the changes Brown unleashed, and as their resistance gained momentum, violence against African Americans and their allies exploded. The Virginia legislature had closed all public schools in Prince Edward County to thwart integration. 96 southern congressmen led by North Carolina's Senator Sam Ervin, Jr. and South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond issued "The Southern Manifesto," vowing to fight to preserve segregation and the southern way of life. The manifesto called the Brown decisions an "unwarranted exercise of power by the court, contrary to the Constitution." The only southern senators who refused to sign the manifesto were Albert Gore, Sr. of Tennessee and Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Some states, alleging the NAACP was linked to a worldwide communist conspiracy, made membership illegal. Membership plummeted and the association lost 246 branches in the South. Under these pressures, educational desegregation ground to a halt. White southerners' had violent reactions to black victories and assertiveness, as seen in the summer of 1955 in the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago.

Discuss the relationship between Mary McLeod Bethune and President Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

With the New Deal, Bethune became a Democratic Party activist and a government official. She had a close relationship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt that gave her access to the president that few others enjoyed. She and Eleanor Roosevelt had persuaded the president that the National Youth Administration (NYA) needed a Negro division to ensure that benefits would be distributed fairly, and Bethune was named the NYA's director of Negro affairs. She was the first African-American woman to hold a high position in the government. During the 1936 campaign, Bethune helped convince African Americans that their best interests lay with the Democratic rather than the Republican Party.

Describe the ways in which local leaders and parents provided support for the cultural training and educational institutions for their communities.

a second wave of black migrants made St. Louis the fifth largest city in the United States. Yet, because of segregation and discrimination, the city's black community developed institutions to nurture and advance its educational interests and cultural needs. Music instructors organized a range of cultural programs. black churches—including Antioch Baptist, Central Baptist, and Berea Presbyterian—often sponsored religious programs highlighting the works of both black and white composers.

Compare and contrast the nuanced differences and similarities in the works and lives of the twentieth century's most prominent African-American writers. Identify similar or shared themes in their novels.

address questions of identity and to define and describe urban life to the dispossessed and impoverished black migrants who moved to the cities. delineate the dimensions of a shared American heritage by portraying the contributions that African Americans had made to American society. black writers explored the issue of the rights African Americans were entitled to as Americans and the demands they could and should make on the state and society. The most distinguishing feature of black literature may be the way that black writers have attempted to create spaces of freedom in their work, to liberate place, a trait that also marks black religious culture and folk cultural practices, such as storytelling. Richard Wright published Native Son. A younger generation of black writers, however, especially James Baldwin, took issue with Wright. African Americans, they argued, need not be portrayed as hapless victim Ralph Ellison's Invisible Mans of racism.

Discuss the ways in which black graphic artists offered different ways to view or express the ways in which they reimagined themselves and their people.

artists, such as Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, and Eldzier Cortor, and Harlem's Jacob Lawrence celebrated working-class black people while implicitly criticizing the racial hierarchy of power and privilege. Their art belonged to the social realist school that flourished in the 1930s. Social realist art was intensely ideological. It strove to fuse propaganda—both left and right wing—to art to make it socially and politically relevant.

Analyze the ways in which black artists used their diverse artistic talents and skills to support social justice struggles at home and abroad.

black artists against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the World War II calamity shaped a consciousness that would generate an eruption of black consciousness in the 1950s. African-American artists and intellectuals joined with people throughout the African Diaspora to support Ethiopian resistance to Italian aggression in 1935. black artists not only to create beauty but also to use their art to promote freedom across the black diaspora and to forge cultural and political linkages with all oppressed peoples. Music encapsulates and reflects the core values and underlying tensions and anxieties in black communities. In black music we witness cultural producers developing strategies of resistance to white domination.

Analyze the ways in which popular presentations of African Americans in popular culture may have reinforced negative stereotypes during the Great Depression era.

film that most firmly cemented the role of black Americans as servants in the American consciousness: Gone with the Wind (1939). Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen played servant or "Mammy" roles throughout the 1930s. The image of Mammy, the headscarf-wearing, obese, dutiful black woman who preferred nurturing white families to caring for her own children, appealed to white America. innovative black filmmakers to develop alternative films and artistic institutions that allowed the development of a more balanced representation of black life and culture.