Course Evaluation

In the still-popular Civil War film Glory, a black soldier named Tripp (played by Denzel Washington) asks his commanding officer, a white man, "What about us? What do we get?" His C/O answered, "Well, you won't get anything if we don't win." The North DID "win" the Civil War. But what, indeed, did the freed slaves get?

The war ended in 1865. The southern economic system and social structure ended with it. For a brief period after the war, blacks in some areas of the South made progress in voting rights, education and land ownership. With the end of Congressional Reconstruction, however, came the end of progress for the freed black. For the next several decades, African-Americans, especially the majority of whom still lived in the South, lived under a system of legalized segregation and intimidation called Jim Crow.

Reconstruction would be a failure, for the most part, a victim of governmental indifference and deep-seated racism. Blacks emerged from the shadow of war as disenfranchised, dependent laborers. Sharecropping was little better than slavery. Black folks were routinely denied access to education. They were born, lived, and died in debt. Ignorance and poverty became inextricably linked with race in the mindset of the dominant white culture of the time. By the turn of the twentieth century, these racist attitudes pervaded this nation's culture and politics.

The legal capstone of this system of injustice came from the nation's capital city in 1896. The Supreme Court legitimized racism with its landmark decision, Plessy v. Ferguson. The courts' "separate but equal" doctrine dominated the national legal view of segregation for the next fifty-eight years. Henceforth, segregation would not only be practiced, it would be perfectly legal. America was, apparently, not ready to embrace the "new birth of freedom" as set forth by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address.

 

(A) Quiz: Jim Crow Segregation

 

(B) Clarksdale.

Read Chapter 44 of the Flyover Text. Answer these in ONE essay: Why was Clarksdale the perfect sharecropping area? Why did many black people refer to Chicago as the "Promised Land"? What were the realities of sharecroppers' lives in the Delta? Define the following: "furnish", "seed money", "chopped", "take up", "the settle", and "soak". How did planters cheat sharecroppers? How did planters explain the poverty experienced by sharecroppers? After the demise of slavery much of the cotton lands in the South were "sharecropped"

Read A Sharecrop Contract (1882). How was sharecropping "a trap"? What other choices did poor, illiterate people have in the post-Civil War South?

 

 

(C)

Blacks in the South were told by whites to stay "in their place". This meant, among other things, don't expect an education, don't ask for a decent living standard, don't "mix" with whites in any way - and especially do not look at white women. Blacks who dared to speak out, who dared to assert their humanity in an inhuman environment, were struck down severely. Sometimes, often times, they were murdered.

Without Sanctuary: The Horror of Lynchings in America
First, find out the meaning of the word "lynching". Then, after clicking on this web page, click on "gallery of photos", look over the photographs. Read the captions. Here, I want students to raise questions, then pose their own answers. (Viewers of this website, be advised: The content here is extremely troubling.)

Lyrics to the song, Strange Fruit, by Ms. Billie Holiday
What was Ms. Holiday trying to get the listener to see? What was happening to African-American males? Why?

(Watch Billie Holiday perform her signature song Strange Fruit on You Tube)

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Additional Resources:

The Day My God Died: A Film About The Slave Trade of Young Women In India
Warning: This is a very troubling subject, but tragically true. It concerns the slave trade of young women in India. This web site supports a PBS film done by Independent Lens.

Lost Delta Found: A Chronicle of Mississippi Music

 

 

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