(dramatic blues music)
- [Man] Major funding for The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities,
expanding America's understanding for more that 30 years
of who we were, who we are, and who we will be.
And by support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
a private corporation funded by the American people.
Additional funding is provided by the John D.
and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Corporate support is made possible by New York Life.
- [Woman] With vision and determination,
one generation dreamed of creating a better world
for the next.
New York Life is proud to bring you remarkable stories
of dedication, struggle, and triumph.
(grand orchestral music)
♪ Come listen all you gals and boy ♪
♪ I'm just from Tuckahoe ♪
♪ I'm going to sing a little song ♪
♪ My name's Jim Crow ♪
♪ Wheel about and turn about and do just so ♪
♪ Every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow ♪
♪ I went down to the river ♪
- [Narrator] In 1836, Jim Crow was born.
He begins his strange career as a malicious
minstrel caricature of a black man,
created by a white man to amuse white audiences.
(laughing) (applause)
Jim Crow would come to symbolize one of the most
tragic eras of race relations in American history.
A time deeply rooted in promise and contradiction.
1865, four million Americans, slaves simply because they
were born black, were now free.
But in little over a decade,
that promise was gone.
Replaced by a rigid system of laws designed to keep
blacks from experiencing any of their
newly achieved rights.
It would be known as the era of Jim Crow,
the American form of racial apartheid.
- I tried to lean inside and get me a cup of water.
And those white people beat me until I was unconscious.
They thought I was dead.
- My dad said, "As long as you are living
"in this South, you're going to have to go
"through the back door, in this South.
"And you just settle for that."
He said, "Well one thing I want you to swear
"and promise to me, is that you will never
"get used to it."
- I'm not ashamed of the segregated and Jim Crow experience.
All because, we were able to devise techniques
for survival
that permitted us to bide our time
and to wait until our change comes.
- [Narrator] As most blacks were willing
to bide their time, some began to fight back.
In the last 1880s and 90s, they embarked on an
uncertain campaign to secure voting rights,
build their own communities, schools, businesses,
and churches, and to demand redress against
mob violence and lynching.
The white supremacists fought back.
By 1919, the Ku Klux Klan, which had been
a southern idiosyncrasy, became a national ideology.
White supremacy, the power behind Jim Crow,
appeared invincible.
And over the next decade, the violence against blacks
would grow even more horrific.
But black Americans continued to battle,
using the power of the press, and ultimately
the power of the courts to pursue their quest
for freedom and equality against racism.
The rise and fall of Jim Crow is their story.
The story of strong men and women who would never
accept the demeaning, threatening, and perilous world
of Jim Crow.
The rise and fall of Jim Crow is a story of those who,
in the face of unending terror, achieved triumphs.
Triumphs that would in time make America a better place.
Not just for themselves, but for all of us.
(gun fire) (dramatic music)
Conflict over black emancipation is as
old as the nation.
In 1861, the south left the Union
rather than remain part of a country that restricted
the expansion of slavery.
At first, Abraham Lincoln saw the struggle
as simply a war to save the nation,
but in time, he would recast the Civil War
as a war to end slavery.
On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation
freeing all slaves in the Confederate states.
Six months after the south surrendered,
Congress ratified the 13th Amendment,
abolishing slavery.
The federal government had made a promise
to the former slaves.
These newly freed men and women, who knew what they wanted,
education, and a right to vote,
equal rights in the courts, and mostly, land.
- What is it that your people need
now that you're free?
Our people need land.
And they need tools to work the land.
So there we began to see the priority to own
our own land.
- [Man] "Every colored man would be a slave
"and feel himself a slave, until he can raise
"his own bale of cotton and put his own
"mark upon it and says, 'This is mine.'
"With our independence, and self employment,
"freedom would be meaningless."
Peter Hall.
- [Narrator] On Edisto Island, off the coast
of South Carolina, thousands of newly freed
blacks were making that dream come true
on land abandoned by their former masters,
and given to them by the Union army.
They had built schools and churches.
Established family, and community life.
But they had heard rumors that their future was at risk.
Lincoln had been assassinated and a southerner,
Andrew Johnson, was president.
Johnson fought to save the Union,
but not to free slaves.
"This is a country for white men," he said.
"And as long as I'm president, it will be
"a government for white men."
♪ Sometimes ♪
♪ I feel ♪
♪ Like a motherless ♪
♪ Child ♪
On October 19, 1865, a board carrying a deeply
troubled Union general, Oliver O. Howard,
slowly made its way toward Edisto.
Howard was know as the Christian general.
A deeply religious man who hated slavery.
He was in charge of the new Freedman's Bureau,
established by Congress that year,
to protect the confiscated lands given
to the former slaves.
Howard was revered second only to Lincoln
by freed blacks.
- They got the message from the Freedman's Bureau that
the general was coming back, General Olive O. Howard,
who, they were expecting to hear nothing but good news
from him because was the man who had told them
about how this land, now, was transferred to them
and that they owned it and that they didn't
have to worry about "massa" no more and everything.
He asked them to gather together at their church
on Edisto.
So over 2,000 people came from all amongst the oak trees
and all back off in the woods and from their shacks
and their dirt roads to meet there at the church
to hear this new discussion about their land.
- [Man] "I have been sent by the president to tell you
"that your old masters have been pardoned
"and their plantations are to be given back to them.
"That they would hire blacks to work for them.
"Lay aside your bitter feelings, and be reconciled to them."
General Oliver O. Howard.
- So people were enraged and people started hollering out,
"No, no, it aint no way.
"No, no, that aint what you tell us before.
"No, sir, no, sir."
- [Man] "General Howard?
"Why'd he take away our lands?
"You take them from us who are true,
"always true to the government.
"You give them to our all time enemies.
"The man who gave me 39 lashes
"and who stripped and flogged my mother and sister.
"Who keeps land from me well knowing
"I would not have anything to do with him
"if I had land of my own.
"That man I cannot well forgive."
A Freedman.
- Some went into
♪ Nobody know ♪
♪ The trouble we see ♪
And some went into "Motherless Child,"
and all those things rippled off the sea.
♪ Feel ♪
♪ Like a motherless child ♪
♪ A long way ♪
♪ From home ♪
- [Narrator] One year later in 1866,
Congress, recognizing continued southern resistance
to black emancipation, passed the 14th and 15th amendments,
guaranteeing blacks the right to vote
in due process of law.
The time of reconstruction had begun.
But many whites did not plan on fulfilling
the intentions of the new laws.
Mississippi passed their Black Code, giving courts
the right to apprentice former slaves,
with preference to their former owners.
- [Man] "The negro is free whether we like it or not.
"For the purity and progress of both races,
"They must accept their place in the
"lower order of things.
"That place is the cotton fields of the south.
"Such is the rule of the plantation,
"and the law of God."
Governor Benjamin Humphreys.
- [Narrator] But blacks did not see themselves trapped
in the cotton fields.
They used their vote to elect black representatives,
sat on juries, and sent their children to school.
- What had alarmed the white south during
reconstruction was not evidence of black failure,
but evidence of black success.
Evidence of black assertion.
Evidence of black independence.
Evidence of black advancement.
And evidence that black men were learning.
They used this as political power.
- [Narrator] If intimidation would not keep blacks in
their place, then violence might.
In the same year that reconstruction began,
Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general,
founded the Ku Klux Klan.
The image of the Klan in white hoods killing
blacks by the lights of burning crosses
would forever be etched in the American mind.
- The way white supremacists made sure
that ex slaves would fall back into place,
or nearly back into place, was terror.
Beating people up,
burning down their houses,
shooting them,
just the usual physical mayhem of personal violence.
(slow, dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Although they were beaten into
submission and retreat, 1869 offered a glimmer of hope
with the election of Civil War hero,
Ulysses S. Grant to the presidency.
And Grant delivered.
He sent federal troops to the south
to counter groups like the Klan.
But for the black community, even federal intervention
was not enough.
- The question of, "Should we stay at home in the south,
"should we stay at home in the United States,
"should we move somewhere else to the north,
"should we move to the west,
"or should we leave the United States entirely?"
- [Narrator] Feeling trapped and helpless,
and in need of answers, some turned to an unlikely source,
an old man who had been born in slavery.
- [Man] "We needed land for our children.
"That caused my heart to grieve in sorrow.
"Pity for my race caused me to work for them.
"Confidence is perished and faded away.
"We are going to leave the south."
Pap Singleton.
(soft gospel music) (water wading)
- [Narrator] In 1874, Pap Singleton, a former slave,
would lead a group of 300 blacks through Kansas.
John Brown struck his first blow against slavery there.
God must be in Kansas,
and black people wanted to go where God was.
No one spoke this cause stronger
than Sojourner Truth.
- [Woman] "I have prayed so long that my people
"would go to Kansas, and that God would make straight
"the way before them.
"This colored people is going to be a people.
"Do you think God has them robbed and scourged
"all the days of their life for nothing?"
- Many of the people saw their promise land.
They saw their Jordan River, being those places
that they had to cross over into
where freedom would be away from those
who had basically had their feet on their necks
all this time, just like the Pharaoh had done
in the Bible.
So many of them followed their leaders so that
they could have their life to themselves
however they wanted that to be built.
- They also believed in the god of Daniel
who was an avenging god.
This is the god of the apocalypse,
the god of the second coming,
the god of the decision of who was going to
go to heaven and who was going to go to hell.
- [Narrator] But as much as Kansas loomed as a
promise land for many blacks, getting there could
become a journey through hell.
Many would perish from starvation and exposure.
One group fell victim to Yellow Fever,
and there was always the fear of murderous whites.
- [Man] "I saw colored men and women cast themselves
"to the ground in despair.
"Heard them grown and shout their lamentations.
"What is to become of these wretched people?
"God only knows.
"There were nearly half a thousand scattered all
"along the banks of the mighty Mississippi.
"Without shelter, without food.
"With no hope of escaping from their present surrounding,
"and hardly a chance of returning from whence they came."
Riverboat captain.
- [Narrator] For those who survived to make it
to Kansas, they found a land of hard winters,
torrential rains, and violent tornados.
But through spiritual and emotional conviction,
they sustained themselves and within a few years,
over 20 towns would be built.
But not all blacks thought the answer
was to leave the south.
Frederick Douglass, a former slave who had become
the leading black voice for abolition,
opposed any mass exodus.
- [Man] "The country will be told of the hundreds
"who go to Kansas, but not of the thousands
"who stay in Mississippi.
"They will be told of the destitute who require
"material aid but not of the multitude
"who are bravely sustaining themselves where they are.
"If the people of this country cannot be protected
"in every state of the Union,
"the sovereignty of the nation is an empty one
"and the power in individual states is greater than
"the power of the United States."
Frederick Douglass.
- [Narrator] In 1877, Republican president
Rutherford B. Hayes, who had won the election
by making a deal for electoral votes
from southern Democrats,
pulled federal troops from the south.
The party of Lincoln had betrayed the former slaves.
Reconstruction was over.
Whites began to reassert their power over blacks,
politically, legally, and economically.
And no where was this change more crushing
than for those blacks who were farmers,
most of whom were sharecroppers.
- Owners controlled their little worlds.
So there was no police power,
there was no federal power, there was no state power
that actually made a difference on the ground.
So you had relations of dependency
built around obedience and submission.
That was the ideology of the culture of slavery.
Obedience and submission.
- Here was the black man, having very limited education,
not knowing how to figure and to read.
With the books being kept by the white man
who is giving him his supplies
to start a crop, and likewise, own the land.
When the black man ended up at the end of the year,
and brought his crop in,
the white man immediately arranged to out figure him,
- The man would take your cotton,
and then the man that had stole you had credit,
he'll run the books up on you,
so you didn't have nothin'.
You work a whole year and handpick 40 bales of cotton,
and come out with nothin'.
- [Narrator] Frustrated by the unfulfilled promise
of emancipation, blacks turned to the next generation.
To their children.
They believed education would be the key to overcome
white dominance.
One man would come to symbolize this hope.
Booker T. Washington.
Born into slavery, Washington has managed to learn
to read and write and at nine he worked in salt mine.
But within in 25 years, Washington had been a student
and a teacher at the Hampton Institute,
and was invited to be principal of a new school
in Alabama.
That school, was Tuskegee.
Arriving in a community of farms and sharecroppers,
where attending school was rare, if at all,
Washington faced a great challenge:
to build a school, attract students, recruit teachers.
Only July 4, 1881, in the Zion Hill Baptist Church,
the Tuskegee Institute was born.
Washington and his 30 recruits
believed the only way to one day have their own buildings,
would be to build them themselves.
- The reason that it started as an industrial school
was because they had nothing,
and so they had to build, grow, and make everything.
Like harness making, because they needed
to have harnesses for the farm animals.
Carpentry because they needed to build the building.
Brick masonry because they needed to make the bricks.
These kinds of trades,
printing, shoemaking, tailoring, carpentry,
all of these things were things that they could use
to build a business.
- [Narrator] One student who found opportunity at Tuskegee,
was a young man named William Holtzclaw.
His parents, especially his mother, Addie,
were passionate about getting an education
for their children.
They even built their own school.
(hitting)
- [Man] "I remember my parents went into the forest
"and cut pine poles eight inches in diameter.
"Split them in half, carried them on their shoulders,
"to a nice, shady spot, and built a schoolhouse,
"There were no floors, no chimneys,
"and the benches were made of the same material."
- [Narrator] Addie Holtzclaw would provide schemes
that allowed William and his brother to get an education
for most of the year.
- [Man] "The landlord wanted us to pick cotton,
"but mother wanted me to remain in school.
"So she used to out general him by hiding me
"behind skillets, ovens, and pots.
"Then she would slip me to school the back way,
"pushing me through the woods and underbrush
"until it was safe for me to travel alone."
- Whenever someone had wanted to go to school,
they would make sure that one of them went
and that one stayed at home.
Because if they didn't, if both of them were gone,
the overseer would come around and would say,
"Where are those boys?"
And he would get upset, so, in order to make sure
that didn't happen, she'd sent one to school
and leave one at home to do the work
so when the overseer came around and needed someone,
he would call 'em, and they would be there.
(thunder and lightening)
(disembodied chattering)
- [Narrator] But the limited education was never
going to propel the Holtzclaw children
beyond the bondage of sharecropping,
where if the land owner didn't teach you,
the weather might.
(disembodied chattering)
William Holtzclaw heard about Tuskegee.
He wrote Booker T. Washington a letter.
- [Man] "Dear Book,
"I want to go to Tuskegee to get an education.
"Can I come?"
- [Narrator] The letter found its way.
"Come," Washington replied.
- [Man] "When I walked out on campus,
"I was startled at what I saw.
"There before my eyes was a huge pair of mules,
"drawin' a machine plow which, to me, at the time,
"was a mystery.
"There were girls cultivating flowers,
"and boys erecting huge brick buildings.
"Some were hitching horses and driving carriages,
"while others were milking cows and making cheese.
"I found some boys studying drawings
"and others hammering irons.
"Each with an intense earnestness that I had
"never seen in young men."
- When he first got to Tuskegee, he was really amazed
that there were so many things that he didn't know.
He was also amazed as to how they organized
the students in the dormitory setting,
particularly himself, because he had never slept
between two sheets.
And when he went to the dorm, he was sleeping,
as they say, ready roll.
He had all of his clothes on and someone had to come in
and tell him that you have such a thing as a night shirt
and a shirt that you wear during the day.
- [Man] "My plan was for them to see not only
"the utility of labor, but its beauty and dignity.
"They will be taught how to lift labor up
"from drudgery and toil, and they will learn
"to love work for its own sake.
"We wanted them to return to the plantation districts
"and show people there how to put new energy
"and new ideas into farming, as well as the intellectual,
"and moral and religious life of the people."
Booker T. Washington.
- [Narrator] Washington's vision would bear fruit.
In less than a decade, Tuskegee had over a thousand
acres of land, 14 buildings,
a farm, and a dozen shops, from a laundry to a blacksmith,
with enrollment of 400 students
and 28 teachers.
Washington wanted his students at Tuskegee to learn
to work and work hard, no matter how menial the task.
He also wanted to keep southern whites
from feeling threatened.
- That's why they thought Booker T. Washington was
the great godsend.
That somehow he'd come forward with an
educational philosophy which said said in the fact
that you can educate a people and still keep
them subordinate.
And he once gave a talk and a speech, and I think it's
the most concrete example.
While he was giving the talk,
and actually he was asked this question by a white farmer.
He says, "Why should I sent Mandy to Tuskegee to
"learn how to cook when she can spit in a skillet
"and know when it's hot?"
And Washington's response was,
"The purpose of industrial education is to teach her
"not to spit in the skillet.
"Not to teach her to be something other than a cook,
"but to be a better cook.
"To be a better sharecropper.
"To be a better mind worker."
And so whites really thought, "This is a god send.
"We've now come up with a philosophy of education
"that can keep people in their place
"and even teach them to be better within their place."
And they thought that that was possible.
They learned very quickly that that was not possible.
- [Narrator] At the Haines School in Augusta, Georgia,
its founder, Lucy Laney, would expand Washington's
philosophy of teaching and take it in a different direction.
She insisted upon developing her children's full potential.
Her students studied English, mathematics, history,
chemistry, physics, psychology, sociology, French,
and German.
"What we need to develop," Laney said,
"Is mind is not hands.
"Race leaders, not followers."
Laney was especially interested in training
young black women to be teachers.
- [Woman] "The educated negro woman is needed
"in the schoolroom.
"Not only in the kindergarten and primary school,
"but in the high school and the college.
"She may give advice and knowledge that will change
"a whole community and start its people
"on the upward way."
- African American women were playing
a much more critical role than what was common
in American education generally.
They were critical as educational leaders,
but even within the trenches of local communities,
in terms of fundraising and teaching and support groups,
that you cannot really understand the development
of African American education without really appreciating
the leadership of African American women.
- Teaching was a very important profession
for black women in this period of time.
It was not just a profession,
but it was a mission to uplift African Americans,
to teach people to read.
To also teach them the ways of this world
as free people.
- [Narrator] But black teachers had to show
real ingenuity.
Black schools were often barren affairs with few books,
maps, pencils, or pens.
- [Woman] "We had students draw the national flag
"on the blackboard.
"These flags were assigned a place of honor on the board
"and became a permanent picture in the room for years.
"Pupils were careful not to erase the flag when
"they erased the blackboard."
(soft gospel music)
- [Narrator] The positive image of Laney and others
was hopeful, but the reality for most blacks
was hard, back breaking work and servitude.
- [Man] "I've been a factory hand, janitor,
"importer, and butler, and wiping engines
"on the railroad.
"I worked as a helper for a carpenter
"laying bricks for masons.
"I've been a driver of teams,
"a pick and shovel man,
"and drove steel for a section boss.
"I was a hand on the Mississippi, and working in
"a steel foundry, and it seemed like I did a hundred
"more jobs."
- My grandma would work in the tub washing the
clothes of the prominent white people of our city.
And for all of that washing, for the whole white family,
washing, and then ironing, she got a dollar and a half
for the whole family laundry, at the end of it.
So there was several families that she had,
but it was just a dollar and a half
for all of that work.
- [Woman] "White folks didn't have no feelin' for ya.
"They pretended they did.
"They had nannies to give they child comfort.
"That was my name, nanny.
"They would teach their children they were better than you.
"You was giving them all that love, and you'd hear
"them say, 'You're not supposed to love nanny.
"'Nanny's a nigger.'
"And they would say it so nasty, until it cut
"your heart out almost,
"and you couldn't say a mumbling word.
"A woman knows how to shift a smile
"when the burden is so heavy.
"Know how to smile when she want to cry.
"Smile when sorrow done touched her so deeply.
"So that's I feel black women in the field
"had to pray and had to moan and had to cry.
"Them prayers went a long way
"and protected a lot of people.
"And God wiped away those tears.
"And the next morning, we had the strength to go on."
Dorothy Bolden.
- [Narrator] But despite all the obstacles,
blacks began to rise.
More blacks were being educated.
There was now a growing black middle class.
And the children of the former slaves
were not to quick to bow down to the white man
as their parents had.
- Whites perceived a new generation of black southerners.
The sons and the daughters and the grandsons
and granddaughters of the former slaves,
who had not been disciplined by slavery,
who had never known slavery,
who were perceived as much more restless and obviously
much more threatening because unlike some of their
parents and grandparents, they seemed less afraid of whites.
- [Man] "We are not the negro from whom
"the chains of slavery fell a quarter of a century ago.
"Most assuredly not.
"We are now qualified as being the equal of whites,
"and should be treated as such.
"Every time we see a negro physician, it does us good.
"When we see a negro pharmacist,
"it goes still better.
"When we see the lawyers, professors,
"bank presidents, inventors, machinists, mechanics,
"we grin as much as our mouth will allow,
"and shout, 'The negro is coming!'"
Editor, Richmond Planter.
- [Narrator] Many whites feared, since the end of slavery,
that blacks would come to feel they were
equal to whites.
Now that fear seemed realized.
- [Man] "The colored race is getting more unreliable.
"Freedom has ruined them in every way.
"Only the old timey darkies can be trusted.
"The young ones are sullen and grow more insolent
"every day."
- [Woman] "They don't sing as they used to.
"You should've known the old days of the plantation.
"Every year it seems they're losing more and more
"of their own confessed good humor.
"I sometimes feel I don't know 'em anymore.
"They've grown so glum and serious.
"I'm free to say, I'm scared of 'em."
- [Narrator] Nowhere was this fear more pronounced
than in Memphis, Tennessee,
where in the 1880s, 40% of the population was black.
Faced with this growing black presence,
whites demanded that the informal practices,
which has segregated the races since 1865,
became legalized and strictly enforced.
- The laws were intended to accomplish
what is was clear the conventions were not
going to accomplish, which was again,
to make African American act inferior.
Again, if white people couldn't make African Americans
be inferior, they couldn't prevent some of them
from attaining a kind of middle class status
despite the violence and despite the discrimination,
then they could make them act inferior.
(train whistle blowing)
- [Narrator] These forced acts of humiliation
began to manifest themselves on
the southern railroad lines.
Special Jim Crow cars were set aside on trains,
for black men and women,
and for those white men who wanted to smoke and drink.
In 1884, Ida B. Wells, a young teacher from Memphis,
was quietly reading in a first class car
when a conductor ordered her to move
to the Jim Crow car.
- [Woman] "I refuse, saying the forward car was a smoker,
"and I was in the ladies' car.
"I proposed to stay.
"He tried to drag me out of my seat,
"but the moment he caught hold of my arm,
"I fastened my teeth on the back of his hand."
Ida B. Wells.
- They are able to get her out of the seat,
but she refuses to go into the accommodation car.
And she gets off the train,
walks back to town with her dress torn,
with her hat now askew.
She will sue the Chesapeake and Ohio railway.
She takes this mighty corporation to court,
and she does prevail in the end
because the judge does say that indeed she was a lady.
She's a school teacher,
she was dressed the way she was supposed to dress,
she acted accordingly.
- [Narrator] But the victory was short lived.
The verdict was overturned
by a Tennessee appeals court.
- [Woman] "I had firmly believed all along
"that the law was on our side and would give us justice.
"I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged.
"If it were possible, I would gather the race is my arms
"and fly away with them.
"God, is there no redress, no peace nor justice, for us?
"Teach us what to do, for I am sorely, bitterly, disgusted."
- She said, "I wanted so badly to do something
"great for people, and I thought I had.
"But now with this, I feel that justice
"is no longer on our side."
- [Narrator] Inspired by her personal confrontation
with Jim Crow, Wells decided to fight for the rights
of all black people.
She taught school by day, and at night,
wrote newspaper articles under the pen name Iola.
In the late 1880s, when the Tennessee legislature
ruled to take the vote away from blacks,
Wells attacked.
- [Woman] "The dailies of our city say that whites
"must rule this country,
"but this is an expression without a thought.
"The old southern voice that made the negros jump
"and run to their holes like rats,
"is told to shut up, for the negro of today
"is not the same as negros were 30 years ago."
♪ Swing low ♪
♪ Sweet chariot ♪
♪ Coming for to carry me home ♪
♪ Swing low ♪
♪ Sweet ♪
- [Narrator] But a black man, or woman,
standing up for equal justice in 1892, was taking
a serious risk.
On the night of March 9, when Wells was out of town,
her friend, Tom Moss, and two others,
were jailed for defending themselves against
several white men who had attacked Moss' grocery store.
Masked vigilantes dragged Moss and his two friends
from their cells to a deserted railroad yard.
(gunshots) (dramatic music)
Before he died, Moss cried out,
"Tell my people to flee.
"There is no justice here.
This lynching, a term that came to be applied
to any mob killing of blacks,
disheartened Wells.
- When she had come back to Memphis,
she saw that the community was absolutely devastated,
and so was she.
No one knew quite what to do.
But when she read those words,
she said this is going to be her mission as well.
And she begins to talk, begins to tell black Memphians,
there is no justice for you here.
This system is not working for us.
No one is trying to get these killers of our young men,
and we should go.
- [Narrator] And go they did.
At least 6,000 black Memphis residents would heed
Wells' call to leave.
It was the beginning of an exodus that in
the coming decade, would number in the millions.
The murder of her friend also opened her eyes
to who the true targets of the lynch mob were.
- When her three friends were lynched,
she began to realize that even middle class black people
could be victims of that.
And she talks about how, until that happened,
she had believed that, what she had called
excesses against the race, were only directed against
those people who had perhaps done something
to deserve it.
- [Woman] "This opened my eyes to what lynching really was:
"an excuse to get rid of negros who were
"acquiring wealth and property, and thus,
"keep the race terrorized, and keep the niggas down."
- Ida Wells is one voice that says that
these assumptions of black people,
that we can actually come to some negotiated settlement
with whites in this period, is a false assumption.
And that you have to fight.
That the only way we're going to do it is to fight.
- [Narrator] Ida B. Wells would eventually leave
Memphis for Chicago.
There she began her crusade against the murder
of southern blacks which she would continue
for the rest of her life.
But across the south,
lynching continued.
Edward White,
Vance McClure,
Link Wagner,
Robert Williams,
George King,
Scott Sherman,
John Fry,
Ovard Belzer,
William Smith,
Felican Francis,
A.L. Smart,
Mr. And Mrs. Morris,
Patrick Morris,
Gilbert Francis,
Bird Love,
Isaac Pizer,
Louis Senagall,
Joeseph Dizel,
Frank James,
Louis Munn,
Hyram Whiteman,
Desano Luciano,
Angelo Mongoso.
- The tragedy today I think is a lot of people
think they just hung somebody.
But a ritualized lynching was a part of the culture
of the south with even religious
and patriotic connotations.
Think about this:
some white folk, if they had the time,
dressed up in their old army garb,
their old army uniform,
to come out to a lynching.
Racism reached a point it was so dramatized,
and so ritualized and codified in the laws,
in the practices, that it was a most normal,
patriotic, and most religious thing
that you could do, is to worship segregation.
(slow country music)
- [Narrator] But in the sea of violence,
there were islands of hope.
One was in the Mississippi Delta,
a town called Mound Bayou.
- There was no other place for me
other than Mound Bayou.
To me it was the greatest place around.
We had our own officers.
I didn't have to walk down the street afraid.
- This was something that was unbelievable
and that was a very racial conscious era.
Where there was so few opportunities other than
manual labor for black people.
- We had everything in Mound Bayou
that a heart could desire.
We had oil, meals, we had stores,
we had bottle works.
We had hospitals, we had zoos,
we had swimming pools.
We had a lot of things that people would enjoy.
- [Narrator] Mound Bayou was founded in 1887
by black businessman Isaiah T. Montgomery,
a southern man with a simple philosophy:
it's a white man's country.
Let them run it.
- Isaiah Montgomery is a true American
in the sense he was extraordinarily opportunistic.
Isaiah Montgomery had the ability to identify
those individuals who had goods and services
and political power and esteem in the community and
ingratiate himself with those persons.
- [Narrator] Following the lead of men like Pap Singleton,
Montgomery planned to create a safe harbor for blacks.
- [Man] "It was not easy to find settlers in the early days.
"The task of clearing a wild country seemed hopeless
"to men with so few resources and so little experience."
Isaiah Montgomery.
- The Delta of Mississippi in the mid 1880s
was nothing more than a wilderness.
These black people who came to the Mound Bayou area
had to cut down trees, had to drain bayous,
had to build up the land,
had to fight off wild animals and snakes
and they lived as frontiersmen lived throughout
the world.
- [Narrator] Day by day, a town began to take shape.
Churches, a post office, and schools
replaced the forest.
- My grandmother was Aida Simmons.
She came here from Virginia.
She wanted other than what she had been doing, the slavery.
And the people telling them what to do.
She had in her mind that there must be something else.
There must be something that was better than
what she was living under.
- Unlike some black communities,
the whites did not come in and destroy the community
like some instances of other black communities.
I believe, because there was a notion
that a separation of the races,
was an answer to the race problem.
- [Narrator] By 1890, Mound Bayou was on its way to becoming
one of the most prosperous black communities in the country.
"The jewel of the Delta," as it would later be called.
That year, Mississippi assembled a convention to pass
its new Jim Crow constitution.
The only black delegate was Isaiah T. Montgomery.
- Black people were looking for somebody
that whites would accept and so they elected Isaiah
to go to this convention.
(soft piano music)
- [Man] "My mission is to offer an olive branch of peace
"to bridge a chasm that has been developing
"and widening for a generation that threatens
"destruction to you and yours
"while it promises no enduring prosperity
"to me and mine."
- [Narrator] Isaiah Montgomery, burning with desire
to protect Mound Bayou from white intervention,
agreed to vote in favor of an amendment
to keep illiterates from voting.
The law's real meaning was clear.
- [Man] "There is no use to equivocate or lie
"about the matter.
"Mississippi's constitutional convention was held
"for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger
"from politics.
"Not the ignorant, but the nigger."
James Vardaman.
- [Narrator] Mississippi whites cheered,
but to black leaders, Montgomery was a traitor
and a turn coat.
- [Man] "He has virtually said to the nation,
"'You have done wrong in giving is this great liberty.'
"He has surrendered part of his rights to an enemy
"who will make this surrender a reason
"for demanding all of his rights.
"He is not a conscious traitor,
"but his act is an act of treason.
"Treason for the cause of the colored people
"not only of his own state, but of the United States."
Frederick Douglass.
- [Narrator] Montgomery claimed the black vote
was lost anyway.
He hoped he had won a measure of safety for his people.
"Mound Bayou is the ship," he said.
"All else is an open, raging, tempestuous sea."
While many black leaders, like Douglass,
were outraged by Montgomery's vote,
Booker T. Washington was not.
By the 1890s, Washington's reputation as a spokesperson
and fundraiser for Tuskegee was growing.
- Booker T. Washington spoke in a language
that everyone could understand.
He had something for working class blacks,
he had something for middle class blacks.
He was able to therefore control black businessmen.
He was able to control black churchmen
who admired the gospel success that he was articulating.
And he was able to win the admiration of
working class blacks who
saw that other alternatives had now been
essentially exhausted.
- Booker was nobody's fool.
The Carnegies and the other benefactors
of Tuskegee would not have contributed a dime
if he, at that moment, had offered a threat
to the existence that these wealthy white men
were perpetuating.
- [Narrator] Across the south, black improvement seemed
to be thwarted at every turn,
and violence continued as a daily threat.
Booker T. Washington's searched for a compromise
that might bring racial peace.
His opportunity came in 1895 when he was invited
to speak at the Cotton Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia.
September 25 was proclaimed Negro Day,
but the black press tried to discourage blacks
from attending.
- [Man] "If negros wish to feel that they are inferior
"to other American citizens,
"if they want to see all signs,
"signs that say, 'For Whites Only,'
"or, 'No Niggers Or Dogs Allowed.'
"If they want to be humiliated and have their man
"and womanhood crushed out, then come."
Editor, Atlanta Voice.
- [Narrator] James Creelman, a correspondent
for the New York World, observed the crowd
turned hostile when Washington mounted
the speaker's platform.
- [Man] "When a colored man appeared on stage,
"a sudden chill fell on the whole assemblage.
"One after another asked, 'What's that nigger doing
"'on the stage?'"
James Creelman.
- [Narrator] But when Booker T. Washington
criticized his own people for seeking political
and economic power during reconstruction,
the crowd listened.
- [Man] "Our greatest danger is that in the great
"leap from slavery to freedom,
"we may overlook the fact that the masses of us
"are to live by the production of our hands.
"The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory
"just now is worth infinitely more
"than to spend a dollar in an opera house."
Booker T. Washington.
- [Man] "And when he held his dusky hand
"high above his head with the fingers stretched apart,
"and said to the white people of the south,
"on behalf of his race, 'In all things that are
"'purely social, we can be as separate as the finger,
"'yet one as the hand.
"In all things essential to mutual progress,
"a great sound wave resounded from the walls,
"and the whole audience was on its feet
"in a delirium of applause.
"When the negro finished, such an ovation followed
"as I had never seen before,
"and never expect to see again.
"White southern women pulled flowers from
"the bosom of their dresses and rained them
"upon the stage.
"Tears ran down the face of the many blacks
"in the audience."
- [Narrator] As news of Washington's speech
began to spread, many in the black community wondered,
had Washington chosen to compromise their human rights
in exchange for racial peace and economic stability?
This generated overwhelming feelings of confusion,
disappointment,
even anger.
But the white press across America rushed to embrace
Washington's views.
Former abolitionists, railroad tycoons,
political leaders, even President Grover Cleveland,
wired their congratulations.
No black leader had ever before so eloquently
defended Jim Crow.
The speech would be celebrated as the Atlanta Compromise.
- I think Booker Washington's idea of
getting civil rights was if you look, act like,
achieve like, work like, own businesses like,
support the government like,
pay taxes like everybody else,
that the civil rights that you
are entitled to will be given to you.
- [Narrator] The south had demonstrated this
was not the case.
Only 12 months after the Atlanta Compromise,
the highest court in the land would agree.
Three years before the Washington speech,
a Louisiana shoemaker named Homar Plessy
was fined $25 for refusing to leave
a whites only car, on the Louisiana railway.
Plessy was only one eighth black,
but under Louisiana law, he was black.
By 1896, the case appeared before
the United States Supreme Court.
The court upheld the Louisiana law stating that,
"Separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites
"did not violate the constitutions new guarantee
"of equal protection."
♪ Sometimes I feel ♪
Only three decades earlier, the end of slavery
had been the promise of a new day for black Americans,
in which they could earn their livelihood
by their own freely chosen labor.
Educate their children,
participate in government,
and receive equal justice under the law.
But despite the remarkable advances,
those hopes were now dashed.
Jim Crow was the law of the land,
north and south.
And so it would remain for half a century.
Abandoned by the north, without allies in the south,
blacks continued to struggle for their freedom,
relying on their families, churches, schools,
and other organizations to sustain them.
For black Americans, no time since the end of slavery
seemed so dark.
♪ From home ♪
- [Man] The tragic era of Jim Crow comes to life
at PBS Online, with interactive activities
and firsthand accounts.
Find details on key people, events, and more
at PBS.org.
(upbeat music)
Major funding for The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities,
expanding America's understanding for more than 30 years
of who we were, who we are, and who we will be.
And by support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
a private corporation funded by the American people.
Additional funding is provided by
the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Corporate support is made possible by New York Life.
- [Woman] Today should be better than yesterday.
Tomorrow should be even greater.
This idea inspired a movement,
and New York Life salutes the vision and bravery
of those who improved our nation, and our world.