African Americans & The Gilded Age

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African Americans & The Gilded Age

Advantages

  • Literacy Improved (1865=5% 1895=50%)
  • Rise in African American religious organisations, banks, insurance schemes, societies & companies
  • By 1900 47,000 African American proffesionals: doctors, lawyers, teachers & artists

Disadvantages

  • Growth of segregated transport from 1881. Beginning in Tennessee railcars. Booker T. Washington approved as means to boost black identity
  • Plessy v. Ferguson supported segregation legally
  • Segregated districts common in North and South, Chicago 5,000 African Americans, Harlem 23,000
  • Exclusion from voting through registration qualifiers, 'grandfather clauses' and tax
  • 1901, last black congressman George H. White retired leaving no african americans in Congress
  • Mob rule grew in the South, violence and lynchings ignored by authorities
  • Most African Americans lacked expertise and capital necessary to emigrate West, 40,000 still did
  • Number of false arrests and imprisonments, disproportionate number of African Americans in chain gangs and labour camps, seen by many as a means of controlling

Evaluation

Very negative period for African Americans, little development, often ending up in a position almost akin to slavery

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