Urbanization

Lacked money to buy farms Lacked education Remained in the cities with factory

jobs Rural Americans also moved to the

city

Americans Migrate to the Cities

Skyscrapers

Louis Sullivan Mass Transit

Horse car Cable car Electric trolley car

New Urban Environment

High Society Middle-Class Gentility

Doctors, lawyers, managers, teachers

“streetcar suburbs” Working Class

Tenements – crowded multi-family apartments

Industrial workers

Separation by Class

The intersection of Orchard and Hester Streets on New York’s Lower East Side, photographed ca. 1905. Unlike the middle classes, who worked and played hidden away in offices and private homes, the Jewish lower-class immigrants who lived and worked in this neighborhood spent the greater part of their lives on the streets. SOURCE:Oil over a photograph.The Granger Collection (4E534.23).

This picture of Bohemian immigrant cigar makers at work in a New York City tenement first appeared in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), a pathbreaking work of “exposure journalism.” Apartments like these, owned and rented out by cigar manufacturers, served as both living quarters and workshops, leading to filthy and unhealthy conditions. Note how the entire family works together to roll as many cigars as possible. SOURCE:Bohemian Cigar Makers at Work in Their Tenement ,ca.1890. Museum of the City of New York,The Jacob A.Riis Collection, (#147.90.13.1.150).

A tenement room, 1900

By 1900, cities had begun early regulation of tenement housing. Here, two officials of the New York City Tenement House Department inspect a cluttered basement room that had been inhabited by shoemakers. (Note the "cobbler’s bench," the shoemaker’s tools, and materials such as leather for soles and uppers on the floor.)

Crimes, disease Jacob Riis “How the Other Half

Lives”

Urban Problems

Political Machine – informal political group Party bosses – ran the political machine

George Plunkitt – Irish NYC most powerful Graft & Fraud

Graft is getting money through dishonest means

Tammany Hall New York political machine William M. “Boss” Tweed

Thomas Nast

Urban Politics

Exodus to Kansas

Benjamin “Pap” Singleton Organized mass migration of African Americans

from rural south to Kansas

Voting Issues

15th amendment prohibits states from denying citizens the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous conditions of servitude”

Loopholes Poll tax

Required to pay in order to register to vote in MS Literacy tests Grandfather clause

In Louisianan any man allowed to vote if had ancestor on voting roles in 1867.

Legalizing

Segregation Segregation

Separation of the races Jim Crow Laws

Statutes enforcing segregation Supreme Court overturns Civil Rights Act of

1875 Prohibited keeping people out of public places

based on race Result is now private organizations &

businesses were free to practice segregation

Plessy v. Ferguson

Homer Plessy African American in Louisiana Arrested for riding on a “whites only” car

Case goes to Supreme Court Ruling upholds Louisiana law and set new

doctrine of “separate but equal”

Racial Violence

Ida B. Wells Launched fearless crusade against lynching Spoke out against lynching of African American

grocers Lynching is execution without proper court

proceedings

Mob Violence and Lynching Racial violence escalated. Between 1882 and 1900 lynchings usually

exceeded a hundred each year. They were announced in newspapers and became

public spectacles. Railroads offered special excursion prices to people

traveling to attend lynchings. Postcards were often printed as souvenirs.

Ida B. Wells launched a one-woman anti-lynching crusade. She argued that lynching was a brutal device to

get rid of African Americans who were becoming too powerful or prosperous.

African American Response

Booker T Washington W.E.B. Bois

Racism and Accommodation The turn of the century was an intensely racist era.

Segregation was institutionalized throughout the South. Violent attacks on blacks were supported by vicious

characterizations in popular culture. Racism was based on the assumed innate inferiority

of blacks. Racial Darwinism justified a policy of neglect and

repression. Southern progressives pushed for paternalistic uplift.

Booker T. Washington emerged as the most prominent black leader. Washington advocated black accommodation and urged

that blacks focus on self-reliance and economic improvement.

In July 1905, a group of African American leaders met in Niagara Falls, Ontario, to protest legal segregation and the denial of civil rights to the nation’s black population. This portrait was taken against a studio backdrop of the falls. In 1909, the leader of the Niagara movement, W. E. B. Du Bois (second from right, middle row) founded and edited The Crisis, the influential monthly journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. SOURCE:Photographs and Print Division,Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,The New York Public Library,Astor,Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Racial Justice, the NAACP, Black Women’s Activism

W. E. B. Du Bois criticized Booker T. Washington for accepting “the alleged inferiority of the Negro.” Du Bois supported programs that sought to attack

segregation, the right to vote, and secure city equality. He helped found the interracial organization

known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Black women became a powerful force for social services. They organized settlement houses, campaigned for suffrage,

temperance, and advances in public health.

FIGURE 20.1 African American Representation in Congress, 1867–1900 Black men served in the U.S. Congress from 1870 until 1900. All were Republicans.

Nativism and Jim

Crow Chart: African American Representation in Congress Neither McKinley nor Bryan addressed the increased racism and nativism throughout the nation. Nativists blamed foreign workers for hard times and considered them unfit for democracy. The decline of the Populist party led to the establishment of white supremacy as the political force in the South.

Southern whites enacted a system of legal segregation and disenfranchised blacks, approved by the Supreme Court. Reformers abandoned their traditional support for black rights and accepted segregation and disenfranchisement.