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Enforcement Act of 1870
Passed by the United States Congress between 1870 and 1871. They were criminal codes which protected African Americans' right to vote, to hold office, to serve on juries, and receive equal protection of laws. -
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African American Progress
This era in African American history, beginning during Reconstruction and ending a little after America's entrance into the First World War, consists of progress that was made by African Americans as well as European Americans who contributed greatly to their cause. -
Civil Rights Act of 1875
The Act guaranteed that every person, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was entitled to the same treatment in "public accommodations" (i.e. inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement). However, this law was hardly enforced. -
United States v. Reese
United States Supreme Court upholds the poll tax, the literacy test, and the grandfather clause. All three were created in Southern states to disenfranchise African Americans. The ruling weakened the Enforcement Act of 1870 -
Knights of Labor Officially Welcome African Americans
The Knights of Labor issued their first detailed statement of policy on blacks in 1880. Replying to a member's query, the official newspaper explained that black workers were welcomed in the Order. No man earning his living by honest labor was to be excluded. -
Civil Rights Cases
The Supreme Court held that Congress lacked the constitutional authority under the enforcement provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals and organizations, rather than state and local governments. Also, the Court held that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional. -
Founding of the Colored Farmers' Alliance
The organization promoted economic self-sufficiency and racial uplift through vocational training, at the expense of demand for political equality. -
National Afro-American League
Founded by T. Thomas Fortune to help fight for the rights that were denied them. The organization became defunct in August 1893 due to a lack of funds and support. It re-emerged in 1898 with virtually the same platform and renamed the National Afro-American Council. It dissolved again in 1908. -
Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases
Written by Ida B. Wells-Barnett. After examining many cases on lynching, Wells-Barnett came to the conclusion that Southerners used accusations of rape as an excuse for lynching, hiding the truth that they in fact felt threatened with black economic progress, which did not reflect ideas about black inferiority. -
Ida B. Wells Goes to Britain
Wells thought that if she could get the British to think of lynchers as uncivilized, than Southerners would be embarrassed and she would finally capture their attention. -
Founding of the National Association of Colored Women
Founded initially by African American middle class women who believed in the cult of domesticity and who wanted to improve the reputation of black women. They eventually took on a progressive agenda and expanded their attacks on all oppressed black people, not just women. -
Plessy v. Ferguson
The Supreme Court rejected Homer Plessy's suit against the state of Louisiana for its laws segregating whites and blacks on railways. The Court upheld the Louisiana statute. -
Founding of the Constitution League
This was an interracial civil rights organization founded by John Milholland. It favored the Platt Bill which would have reduced congressional representation in states disenfranchising African Americans illegally. -
Clyatt v. United States
Sustained the application of the 1867 Peonage Act to private individuals who used physical force, not contract-labor laws, to coerce workers. -
Niagara Movement
Founded by W.E.B. Du Bois and a group of anti-Washington (Booker T. Washington) intellectuals as a militant organization that would fight for racial equality. From the beginning of the organization's founding, T. Thomas Fortune accused Du Bois of stealing his principles which were framed in the Afro-American League. Washington sought to undermine the organization by putting spies in its ranks, influencing the black press against it, and persuading white philanthropists not to support it. -
United States v. Shipp
Noah Walter Parden, a black lawyer from Chattanooga, Tennessee, took a case to the Supreme Court that stayed the execution of a black man falsely accused of rape and established an important legal precedent for fair trials. -
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Founded by a group of white persons. Bishop Walters, president of the National Afro-American Council and W.E.B. Du Bois from the Niagara Movement were two of the six African Americans who joined in signing the call for the new organization. At the national conference on the Negro which met in New York City 1909 and took the preliminary steps in the establishment of the NAACP, resolutions similar to those of T. Thomas Fortune were adopted. -
The Crisis
The magazine of the NAACP created by W.E.B Du Bois. The first issue, published in November 2010, sold out all 1,000 copies although some NAACP leaders doubted that the magazine would survive. Sales only multiplied thereafter: 6,000 by March 1911, and 25,000 by November 1912. -
Founding of the National Urban League
The National Urban League helped ease the process of poor, uneducated black migrants. It offered social services and help in finding jobs, the same kind of assistance that European immigrants might have gotten in the settlement houaes. -
World Almanac Begins Reprinting Monroe Work's Annual Lynching Count
Monroe Work reaffirmed Ida B. Wells's research that only a third of all lynchings involved allegations of rape. Some whites had claimed that a black propensity to rape justified lynchings. -
Guinn v. United States
The NAACP won a Supreme Court case, with the help of Moorfield Storey, that outlawed the grandfather clause. -
W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson Lead Protest
Du Bois and Johnson lead a silent march down Fifth Avenue to protest the race riot in East St. Louis, Illinois. -
Buchanan v. Warley
NAACP, with the help of Moorfield Storey, wins Supreme Court case that outlawed statutes requiring residential segregation.