Race Relations in the Gilded Age

Resistance and Repression

• After Reconstruction, most African Americans were sharecroppers

• Many of them joined the Populist Party, which angered white Democrats who turned to racist tactics to win the support of poor whites

• By 1890 election officials in the south began using methods to make it difficult for Blacks to vote

Disfranchising African Americans

• Southern states used loopholes to impose voting restrictions on Blacks– Poll taxes– Literacy tests– Grandfather clause

• Southern states passed laws that enforced segregation in public places– Called “Jim Crow Laws”

Disfranchising African Americans

• In 1883 the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875

• The Supreme Court ruling in Plessey vs. Ferguson legalized “separate but equal” facilities

• Violence against Blacks increased– Between 1890 and 1899, hundreds of lynchings

took place in the south.

Disfranchising African Americans

African American Response

• In 1892 Ida B. Wells began an anti-lynching crusade– She wrote newspaper articles and a book

denouncing lynchings and mob violence against Blacks

• Booker T. Washington urged fellow African Americans to concentrate on achieving economic goals rather than political ones.– He explained his views in a speech known as the

Atlanta Compromise

African American Response

African American Response

• W. E. B. duBois challenged the Atlanta Compromise

• He believed that African Americans had to demand their rights, especially voting rights in order to gain full equlaity