The African American Experience - Term Paper Example

? Robert Sims HIS 204 The African American Experience Christine Hansen April 19, INTRODUCTION African-Americans have undergone a tremendous historical journey in the years of 1865 to the present day. It is my intention to document the historical progression in terms of what was happening to African Americans, what they did, and how they coped and endured. Specific attention will be given to the time-line of slavery, Reconstruction, sharecropping, the Great Migration and one work of Zora Neale Hurston that exemplifies these struggles. SLAVERY The African American experience in the United States begins with slavery. The WPA project of the 1930’s recorded statements by fomer slaves. These statements rang truest when the interviewer allowed the subjects to speak freely. Henry Green’s voice is especially compelling: “I don’t know how old I is, young mistress. I was here ‘fore the civil war, young mistress. I was born in south Alabama…my mama name Emily Green, young mistress. She had three children to my knowing. I don’t know no father…I never went to school a day in my life…When I come to this state, Van Vicks and Bill Bowman immigrated one hunderd head of us…our family was landed at Phillips Bayou…I was a cowboy, me and George…Mama was a mik woman…I was willed to Mars Billy…Nobody run off from Boss William Green. He told ‘em if they run off he would whoop ‘em…the Ku Kluckses come one night…They was getting submission over the country…They would make you be quiet ‘long the roadside…the Ku Kluckses whipped some, tied some out to trees and left ‘em. They was rough, young mistress” (Green, 1939). Green’s harrowing account of life during slavery, and the vengeance of the Klan after the Civil War, bears witness to the events that were to set the stage for the African American experience ever after. He reports voting, and owning a pony. Land-ownership, the right to vote, the right to legal marriage and a full name were all given to former slaves during Reconstruction (Davidson et al, 2010, p. 474). The Civil War and its aftermath, Reconstruction, had far-reaching implications for the former slaves. Lincoln enacted the ten percent plan, which legitimized pro-Union governments in the South that only allowed white men to vote. Lincoln’s assassination led to the installment of President Johnson, who allowed the South to encact Black Codes of law whose main purpose was to preserve the antebellum status quo: a caste system ensuring that white men would retain their previous power (Davidson, et al, 2010, p. 474). Many states in the New South codified restriction on the freedoms that had been promised to African Americans. The former slaves were called freedmen, but in some states could not work where they chose, could not serve on juries, and could not rent or buy farmland. Johnson, a political coward, ignored the cries of outrage coming from the North, and eagerly adopted the Black Codes as well as eagerly pardoned many former rebels. In addition, Congress defeated proposals to give freedmen forty acres of land each. In these ways, land ownership was denied to African Americans (Davidson, et al, 2010, p. 475). New state constitutions were enacted in the South, which gave freedmen the right to vote, yet ignored social segregation. In response, African Americans developed their own important institutions--the black schools and churches. Literacy was extremely important to the freedmen and women, because they knew it was needed to defend their rights. The schools were faced with white opposition: “Hostile white southerners destroyed black schools and…even murdered white teachers” (Davidson, et al, 2010, p.482). The Freedmen’s Bureau stepped in to train black teachers. Black churches were hugely important at this time because they were the only institutions completely controlled by African Americans. The Black church offered sanctuary from the white wolrd, and a chance to form and nurture a new identity. The hopes and dreams of African Americans were set in motion with the abolition of slavery. However, the white supremacists of the South were far from ready to admit them into society on equal terms. This set the tone for the next stage in the move from slavery to freedom: sharecropping. SHARECROPPING African Americnas “refused to live in the old slave quarters located near the master’s house” (Davidson, et al, 2010, p. 482). They instead built their own cabins on the periphery of the old plantation. They had only their labor to offer. They signed a contract with the landowner, which promised a certain share of the crop to be given to him. In exchange, the sharecropper could farm the land and sell the rest of the crop. It was backbreaking labor, and all the family members participated. The system arose in large part because “the former plantation owners and the former slaves needed each other” (Reconstruction: Sharecropping). The Freedmen’s Bureau was set up by Congress as a way to manage relations between these two groups. They used Freedmen’s Courts to enforce the rules of this new workplace, to offset the certain discrimination black litigants would face in all-white state courts. The agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau were on hand to make sure that sharecroppers did not desert the farm at harvest time, “they arrested those who violated their contracts or refused to sign new ones at the end of the year, and they preached the gospel of work and the need to be orderly and respectful” (Davidson, et al, 2010, p. 482). The racial attitudes of these agents were variable, and there was a wide variety of interaction, ranging from defending the sharecroppers’ rights, to enforcing the rule of the planters. In 1869, the Freedmen’s Bureau was dismantled. It will never be know if this agency could have been effective in protecting the rights of African American sharecroppers. The North at this time was backing away from all efforts of the Reconstruction (Davidson, et al, 2010, p. 483). The major crop in sharecropping continued to be cotton. The system was controlled by the white landowner, who sold the crop and controlled the money. The landowner would also operate a store, where sharecroppers would be forced to buy essentials at high prices. The landowner made loans to sharecroppers, at high interest. Although the sharecropper was supposed to receive one half of the proceeds of the whole enterprise, “the landowner then deducted cash advances which because of high interest and dishonest accounting left the cropper with very little. This system of tenenat farming continued into the Depression, but dwindled after World War 2 with the advent of better jobs for African Americans“(Reconstruction: Sharecropping). Lane, a northern journalist traveling to the New South, records his observations of the conditions. One conclusion he reaches is that the New South “ is just in its paper stage and will require militant action by both whites and Negroes to advance beyond that” (Lane, 1939, P.207). Among hopeful developments, he describes WPA literacy classes and federal housing projects that are building good quality houses for African Americans. In addition, he talks about Delta Cooperative Farms in Mississippi, where white and black sharecroppers are working together to overcome the system (Lane, 1939, P.207). Lane describes the South he sees in 1939. In his opinion, relief given to poor African Americans at this time was “inadequate”. He also documents the roadblocks faced by African Americans in the South in terms of attaining a better job and standard of living: “Prejudice classifies skilled Negro labor as unskilled in order to keep Negroes from earning a higher wage or a chance for any supervisory positions (Lane, 1939, p208). He says that African Americans are kept out of labor unions that had been strengthened by the New Deal. This view from a northerner illustrates the stranglehold of white supremacy still in place in the South of the 1930’s, and explains the Great Migration. THE GREAT MIGRATION In the years between Reconstruction and the enactment of the Civil Rights Laws, a great migration of African Americans out of the south occurred. Tired of living under the repressive regime of the white supremacists, African American families made the decision to emigrate to the north and west in search of true freedom. 1915 marked the start of the movement. Yet, this movement was without a leader, and was comprised of the individual actions of families under pressure in their own land. The advent of World War One produced a need for labor in the north: “Northern labor agents fanned out across the rural south to recruit young African Americnas, while black newspapers like the Chicago Defender summoned them north to the ‘Land of Hope” (Davidson, et al, 2010, p. 677). Almost half a million young African Americans came north to work in steel mills, war plants and brickyards. According to Davidson, the U.S. Employment Service eventually stopped their program of aiding this migration (p.677). But the Black Codes of the South may have had an influence. In researching her book The Warmth of Other Suns; The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, author Isabel Wilkerson spoke to 1,000 people in the northern and western United States in senior centers, and in clubs in big cities. One example of such a group is the Greenwood Mississippi club in Chicago, with all its members coming originally from that town. Wilkerson found that those who migrated faced a decision: to remain in the racial caste system of the South, or to head north and west to find opportunities that were undeniably denied to them in their own towns (Wilkerson, 2010). The conditions in the South before the Civil Rights Act were deplorable. The Black Codes, or Jim Crow Laws were in full effect, in which “methods of separation [of the races] were devised and codified in the South” (Wilkerson, 2010). Examples of such codification include: white and colored telephone booths, white and colored entrances, and the absurd statute that it was illegal for whites and colored to play checkers together in Birmingham, Alabama. Noticing that African Americans were leaving, southern white supremacist leaders made laws to prevent this. They reenacted slavery codes, and made new laws to prevent northerners from recruiting black laborers from the south. Fines and licensing fees were charged. One such licensing fee amounted to $25,000,. which was indeed an incentive for northerners to cease recruitment. The southerners reinstated peonage laws that allowed white authorities to prevent blacks from leaving on northbound trains. All of this was done “to protect the caste system that was so important to maintain in order to preserve the labor” (Wilkerson, 2010). According to the author, individual precipitating events caused blacks to migrate on an individual basis. In the case of Ida Mae Gladny, a sharecropper’s wife in Mississippi, her husband’s cousin was beaten almost to death by whites. The white landowner accused the cousin of stealing turkeys. The whites came to her house, demanding she hand over the cousin. She did not, but they found him, and beat him severely. Ida’s husband came home from cleaning his cousin’s wounds in prison, and said to her that they were leaving the south. This was in 1937. George Starling, who picked oranges in Florida to support his college education, left in 1945 due to reprisals he got for arguing with the woners for better wages. The grove owners planned a lynching for him. A friend overheard their plans and told George, who left. Conversely, the northern blacks who were there to receive the southern blacks, were threatened by the influx. Up until that time, African Americans had not been perceived as a threat to the northern whites due to their small numbers. The new influx caused competition for jobs. Black men fared better than black women in terms of new jobs, as they could get work in factories, slaughterhouses and foundries. The newly arriving black women often had to endure a new “slave market” where they would show up at a location and wait to be picked by a white housewife who needed them for domestic work at low wages (Wilkerson, 2010). ZORA NEALE HURSTON: THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD Hurston’s novel is set in the South of the 1930’s and tells the story of Janie, a mixed race daughter of an African American school teacher who was raped by a white man. Janie is abandoned by her mother and raised by her grandmother, a former slave who wants something better for her granddaughter than the physical labor and abuse she received during slavery. Her grandmother’s view of life’s perils for a young woman, and the desirability of an upper class, secure life, lead her to force Janie into an arranged marriage to Logan Killicks, a much older man with sixty acres of land. This marriage ended badly: “…Logan dropped his shovel and made two or three clumsy steps towards the house… ‘Don’t you change too many words wid me dis mawnin’, Janie, do Ah’ll take and change ends wid yuh! Heah, Ah just as good take you out de white folk’ kitchen and set you down on yo’ royal diasticutus and you take and low-rate me! Ah’ll take holt uh dat ax and come in dere and kill yuh!…Ah’m too honest and hard-workin’ for anybody in yo’ family, dat’s de reason you don’t want me!” (Hurston, 1939, p.53). Janie left with Joe Starks, who became a businessman in a new town. He expected Janie to work in his store, and promoted himself through her beauty. Janie kept ending up with men that conformed to her grandmother’s view on life: “honey, de white man is de ruler of everything…de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.” (Hurston, 1939, p.29). In her forties, Janie sets out to find her own vision of life and love. She finds it with a man named Tea Cake. Although their relationship ends with his tragic death, Janie is able to return home with a vision of what real love can be, and with the independence she has longed for all her life: “The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room…Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking… his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace” (Hurston, 1939, p.286). Janie’s journey to self-realization takes place in the American South of the 1930’s, and embodies the views, the conflicts and the redemption found in the African American Experience. In conclusion, I have found that African Americans have shown a tremendous amount of resourcefulness and resilience. They came from being sold on the slave block, to being sold out by the federal government during Reconstruction. Persecuted and reviled by whites at the time, especially the Southern whites, African Americans developed their own culture, with its own leaders, standards and traditions. They fought and won their civil rights, but all gains were gotten at great cost. They migrated north and west, in search of a life denied to them by the caste system, and they succeeded. They formed clubs in the big northern and western cities, and greeted with surprise Ms. Wilkerson’s observation that they had been part of a great movement. In the words of Janie: “It’s uh known fact…yuh got to go there to know there. Yo’ papa and yo’ mama and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves” (Hurston, 1939, p.285). References: Born in Slavery: Slave narratives for the federal writer’s project, 1936-1938 Retrieved from: Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Web Site: http://memor.loc.gov.cgi-bin Davidson, J. et al. Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic. New York: McGraw Hill Humanities Fresh Air Interview: Isabel Wilkerson: The Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North. Web Site: http://www.npr.org/templates/s Fresh Air Interview: Isabel Wilkerson Audio Portion. Web Site: http://www.npr.org/template/s Lane, L. (1939) Land of the Noble Free. The Crisis, July 1939. Web Site: http://books.google.com/books Hurston, Z., (1978). Their Eyes Were Watching God. Chicago, University of Illiois Press. Reconstruction: Sharecropping. Web Site: http://www.histoclo.com/essay/war/cw Read More