"The Tripartite System of Racial Domination" (Aldon Morris, Sociologist, Author of The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement)

• 1) Economics
• Job Discrimination: 75% black urban male workers were unskilled, a 50-75 % of black women workers were domestic servants
• Lack of Legal Protection: Black workers, landowners, and business owners lacked basic protections: no labor law, hard to find credit or insurance; easily removed if you stepped out of bounds
• Sharecropping and Debt Peonage: Sharecropping: a system of agriculture labor established in the years after the civil war in response to the refusal of former slaves to work for wages on white-owned plantations. Croppers (tenant farmers) receive seed and supplies from the landlord in return for a portion of the crop (anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3). Debt Peonage emerged when the croppers' share of the crop left them unable to repay the landlord for loan of seed ans supplies. Sharecropping laws required that indebted croppers remain on landlords' land until all debt was paid off. Without effective legal protections, political representation or decent educational opportunities, croppers become vulnerable to landowner fraud (i.e. landlords charge exorbitant interest rates for supplies and/or fail to give croppers' their full share of the value of the harvest in order to keep them in debt.) As in the era of slavery, running away becomes the only option for many sharecropping families.
• 2) Politics
• Disfranchisement and Political Intimidation: Challenges to the racial system could lead to loss of job, credit, housing, physical and sexual brutality, lynching. Without political rights, there were no due process protections.
• 3) Segregation: denial of humanity; mark of inferiority
• Differences in Rural versus Urban Life: The isolation of rural life makes resistance to segregation difficult. In contrast, anonymous urban life allows for the establishment of relatively autonomous (and class integrated) black institutions and communities, many of which come to form the base of the African-American civil rights movement.

• Booker T. Washington

* Up From Slavery: Born a slave, Washington worked his way through Hampton Institute.

• From Hampton to Tuskegee-- The Industrial Education Model: The Institute's industrial arts curriculum sought to train grammar school teachers to teach agricultural skills, not liberal arts as part of a strategy of African-American self-help. After leaving Hampton, Washington founded Tuskegee Institute in 1880
• The Atlanta Compromise Speech of 1895: Washington was invited to speak at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895. IN his speech, he rejected political activism and social equality in favor of a policy of self-help and self-reliance. Rather than struggle for citizenship rights, Washington urges blacks to demonstrate their fitness for citizenship through entrepreneurial initiative and self-reliance. An earned citizenship strategy.
• The Washington-DuBois Debate: W.E.B. DuBois, a professor at Atlanta University and founder of the NAACP, rejected Washington's accomodationism, argues that blacks need political rights in order to protect their economic achievements and that blacks need a talented tenth of liberal arts-trained professionals to lead the struggle for full citizenship.
• The National Negro Business League: Washington-founded, largest national black organization during the era of White supremacy.

• The Era of Segregation Reaffirmed the One Drop Rule: Any black ancestry and you are black. Both white segregationists and black and mulatto political leadership reject the possibility of a racial system in which biracial people occupy a middle-ground between white and black.
• Plessy and other mulatto activists embraced the Identity and Cause of Blackness: 19th century uplift novels written by black women activists promoted the commitment of elite mulattos to aiding the poor and the black. For example, activist and author Frances Ellen Harper Watkins's novel Iola LeRoy, which told the story of young mulatto woman from the North who went South following the Civil War to aid the freedpeople, was premised on the notion that blacks could only rise in society by uplifting all members of the race
• The Blue-Vein Society: Still, Colorism emerged as a key issue in post-Reconstruction black communities as Middle class black elites tended to see light skin as a mark of beauty and status.
• The Passing Alternative: In response to the one-drop rule. Some light-skinned blacks chose to pass over into the white community.

• "We Are Not What We Seem": Wearing the Mask of Segregation (Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem "We Wear the Mask" begins "We Wear the Mask that Grins and Lies…" and discusses the ways in which black performances of deference to whites and satisfaction with one's subordinate status served as a mask for black hatred of segregation and determination to maintain racial pride and self-esteem.) In the tradition of resistance studies, Kelley's essay argues that a broad range of black behavior during segregation (from efforts to organize collective protests to poor work habits and lives built around the pursuit of spiritual or secular pleasures, i.e. religious worship, dancing in nightclubs, etc.) should be seen as part of a tradition of black resistance to racial degradation and humiliation.
• Was the Pursuit of Pleasure an Act of Resistance? Or was it Simply an Escape from an Oppressive Racial System that Could Not Be Challenged Directly?
• From Individual Resistance to Collective Protest: Challenging Segregation on the Buses. Kelley has described in detail the vast array of ways in which individual African-Americans (from adolescents and military personnel to grandmothers) sought to resist the everyday humiliations of segregation on urban bus systems in the South-- from verbal complaints and refusals to give up one's seats to physical resistance to efforts to eject individuals from the bus.

• The Washing Society and the Atlanta Washerwoman’s Strike of 1881-- During the Summer of 1881, black "laundresses" in Atlanta organized a successful strike to raise the prices they could charge for their laundering. Their demandsd was for a uniform rate of $1 per 12 lbs. of wash. The city's white newspapers called them "The Washing Amazons." Their strike tactics included threats and harassment of scabs taking in laundry for lower prices. By the Fall, the Washing Society was threatening to organize a general strike of black workers during a business convention to promote industrial development in the Atlanta area, though there is no evidence that the general strike ever took place.
• The Southern Tenants’ Farmers’ Union-- An interracial union of tenant farmers that had its largest membership in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and southern Missouri. Sought to defend tenant farmers from evictions that resulted from New Deal Agricultural policies that paid landowners Not to grow crops in order to raise prices in farm markets. After a number of successful protests, the union collapsed as a result of government and KKK repression.
• The Communist Party USA-- During the 1930's, the Communist Party also had success organizing black and white industrial workers in cities like Birmingham and Memphis and black tenant farmers in rural Alabama and Georgia. While the industrial organizing laid the groundwork for the establishment of trade unions in southern steel and tobacco factories, the farmers' organizations were forced to disband after they used arms to prevent the evictions of their members.
• World War II and the Growth of the NAACP
• Ella Baker and the NAACP Field Department: NAACP becomes a mass organization During WWII, the NAACP undertook a major organizing effort to establish it as a mass organization in the South, the first time in the organization's 30 + year history that it had formally acknowledges the potential role of the masses in its efforts to end segregation through the courts. During the 1940's and 1950's, the organization emerged as a prime training ground for emerging civil rights leaders in the South, despite the efforts of segregationists to use both legal and extra-legal (night-riding) means to suppress the organization.
• The Role of Military Veterans: Central to these efforts was the presence of military veterans who came back from the war determined to win the democratic rights at home that they had fought for abroad. Veterans were particularly active in the growth of the National Progressive Voters League. Founded in ‘44, the league sought to encourage black voter registration in the South, despite the restrictive practices of southern voter registration. In 1946, 100 vets marched for voting rights in Birmingham and, in Winston-Salem, NC, a black-white coalition led by the Tobacco Workers Union and the local NAACP elected the first black city councilman in the South since Reconstruction. In Mississippi, Black Voter Registration in Mississippi rose from 2500 to 5000 between 1946 & 47 (still, only 1% of eligible black voters in the state.)