Racial Problems for Progressives

• Make-up of the movement.- Mostly white, middle-class and urban

• Jim Crow Laws- 1880’s in South, begins legalized segregation

• Sharecropping- Conditions little different from slavery

• Plessy v. Ferguson- 1896, Supreme Court decision- “Separate is equal”

• Birth of a Nation

Washington v. DuBois

Booker T. Washington• Born in 1856 as a slave in Virginia• 1881, Founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial

Institute in Alabama.• 1901, wrote autobiography, Up from Slavery• 1901, 1st African-American invited to dinner at

White House.• Believed social equality would follow economic

equality.• "In all things purely social we can be as separate

as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."

W.E.B. DuBois• Born in 1868, in Mass.• First African-American to receive Ph.D.

from Harvard University.• Believed that the “Talented Tenth” should

pull the rest of the race up to equality.• 1903, wrote Souls of Black Folk• 1905, founded Niagara Movement, which

becomes the NAACP.• Believed that economic equality was

impossible without social equality first.

I, Too, Am American

I, too, sing AmericaI am the darker brother.They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh,And grow strong.   Tomorrow,I'll be at the table When company comes, Nobody'll dare Say to me, "Eat in the kitchen", Then. Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed~ I, too, am America.

By: Langston Hughes

"If We Must Die" If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Source: Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” in Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922).