Hard-Working People in the Depth of Segregation

The late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries saw the movement of tens of thousands of rural African Americans into town seeking education and opportunities for employment and business ownership. They found businesses and laid the foundations of a largely separate economy. They created a culture that the majority of Americans later--much later-- came to appreciate.

The text talks about African Americans working hard after the post reconstruction era and shows a comparison between blacks and whites in proportion of their women, children and old people in the workforce. By the turn of twentieth century, most of the African Americans worked in low paying, non- union jobs, more than half in agriculture, a third in domestic service. By contrast the native whites were more heavily employed in trade, manufacturing and professional jobs.

Majority of Black farmers did not own land. Credit financing and its attendant debt were a constant feature of their lives. In return for farming supplies and consumer goods tenant farmers and sharecroppers

mortgaged their crops. They cleared few hundred dollars per family per year but often ended each year in debt. They were imprisoned for debt or for the crimes of the poor. In the nineteenth century the southern states engaged in convict leasing and earned thousands of dollars. The convicts had to work in brutal conditions with no pay. The appalling working conditions, diseases, injuries and deaths of convict workers ended this system in early twentieth century.

Education was a priority on the list of what African Americans for

themselves, during this period small but growing number gained access to education. The schools were underfunded whether segregated by law or custom. Pupils seeking more than an elementary education had to leave home or forego further school. In the North and West, young African Americans usually attended integrated high =schools. However, poverty sent most out to work before they reached high school.

Higher education for African Americans was practically unheard of until after the civil war. It’s surprising to me that only twenty-two V men had graduated from college with the creation of colleges of black men and women after the war, however, the numbers of college graduates steadily increased. American professional organizations such as the American Medical association and the American Bar Association refused admittance to V on the basis of race. This motivated Black professionals to form their own associations, including the National ,Medical Association in 1895, the National Association of colored graduate Nurses in 1908, and the National bar Association in 1925.

The abomination of lynching came to symbolize a whole range of

oppressive practices that made the era of the turn of the twentieth century little better than slavery.

Black men in the south lost their right to vote, and all over the United States, men, women, and children found themselves barred from public places. After the relatively hopeful era of reconstruction, racial oppression made many African Americans despair of their future in the US. In the depths of the era of Jim Crow, however, African Americans squeezed through every opening freedom afforded, to gain autonomy and education. Musicians laid the foundations of American pop culture. Black people succeeded against massive odds.

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