The Columbia Documentary History of Race and Ethnicity in America

Myriad symbols and practices of racial exclusion and hierarchy pervaded the ideas of nation and world embodied by the Columbian Exposition, themes that captured and unified the trends of race and nationalism in the late nineteenth century. The fair’s governing boards excluded African Americans, prompting black leaders to protest and boycott the event. Of the few African American exhibits, the most popular was the living advertisement of Aunt Jemima, performed by a former slave, for the RT Davis Milling Company’s pancake mix. The fair’s Department of Anthropology displayed living American Indians from various reservations making and selling handicrafts. The popularity of that exhibit seemed to indicate white Americans’ desire to situate Indians in the past as an exotic, backward race.

These representations of African Americans and American Indians underscored their exclusion from the mainstream of American society and from the fair’s notions of national progress and achievement. Indeed, the dream of the White City could be understood only as it stood in relation to the exposition’s other major feature, the Midway Plaisance, a mile-long row that combined honky-tonk entertainments with an encyclopedic exhibition of the world’s races. Living “ethnological villages” set out a racial order from barbarism to civilization—starting at the far end with American Indians, Africans and Dahomeyans, the latter considered by white fair goers as the most savage and threatening, then proceeding to East Asia, West Asia, and the Islamic world (with exotic Orientalist themes) and then, finally, nearest to the gates of the White City, German and Irish villages, representing the Teutonic and Celtic races. Because China boycotted the exposition in protest of the Chinese exclusion laws, the presentation of Chinese civilization was reduced to a Midway display described by the Chicago Tribune as “Freaks of Chinese Fancy at the Fair.”

The White City and the Midway were designed as an object lesson for the masses in the evolutionary path of humankind, which marked the racial identity and “place” of the world’s peoples. The obsession with anthropology and ethnology at the Columbian Exposition reflected the emergence and influence of scientific racism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The “scientific” ordering of civilization according to race not only explained cultural difference and Anglo-Saxon superiority, it justified both the extreme economic exploitation and the second-class political status of peoples who had been marked as colored races. Racial segregation in the South, the conquest of American Indian and Mexican lands in the West, Chinese exclusion, and the colonial possession of Hawai‘i, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico—these policies were integral to American national development during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In many ways these policies may be understood as a continuation of old practices. The Old South, of course, haunted the new; and the conquest of the West and the acquisition of new colonies bore a family resemblance to European colonialism in the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But race and colonialism were not simply reproduced; they were constructed anew out of the demands of changing economic and political conditions, out of dynamic processes of national territorial consolidation, rapid industrial development and economic growth, and projections of United States power abroad.

The Columbian Exposition narrated those processes as an inevitable march of scientific and cultural progress, in which material abundance held the key to democracy. Indeed if the Civil War and the expansion of the railroads had established the national market, technological and business innovations in the decades following the war—electrical power, telegraph and telephone, hard steel, precision machine and tool making, and modern corporate management—propelled a vast expansion of the nation’s productive capacity. By 1880 American manufacturing output exceeded that of Germany and France combined.

Yet while American economic growth was phenomenal, it was neither linear nor smooth. Between 1873 and 1896 nearly all industrial nations in the world, including the United States, experienced a prolonged economic depression plagued by chronic overproduction and falling prices. In the United States recurrent cycles of boom and bust characterized the economy; the rise to power of the great “robber baron” industrialists like Carnegie, Frick, and Rockefeller took place along with business failures, tightening credit, and the impoverishment of small farmers and workers. The tensions of industrial life were expressed most forcefully in the growing number of labor strikes, involving hundreds of thousands of workers in the peak years of 1877, 1886, and 1892–1893.

The expanding economy had a voracious appetite for labor, especially of the unskilled variety. Immigrants from capitalism’s rural peripheries, from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Mexico, supplied the needed muscle and dramatically diversified the nation’s population.” Not every foreigner is a workingman,” observed a Chicago clergyman in 1887, “but every workingman is a foreigner.” The new immigrants confronted both the disdain of elite Anglo-Americans, who welcomed their brawn but questioned their racial fitness for citizenship, and native-born white workers, who often blamed immigrants and blacks for depressing wages or for strikebreaking. The great antimonopolist agrarian movement of the 1880s and 1890s, led by the People’s Party (Populists) and militant labor organizations like the Knights of Labor, which fought for the eight-hour day, were inconsistent at multiracial solidarity. They sometimes organized blacks in segregated units and at worst practiced racial exclusion of nonwhites. Thus in this period of national consolidation, economic growth and class conflict, race and ethnicity complicated and cut across the meanings of citizenship and national identity. To understand the patterns of race and racism that emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, we must first turn to the South.

The Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, established national citizenship, and extended the principle of democracy to all Americans. In the South, Reconstruction (1867–1877) brought about profound changes and hopes for African Americans. The former slaves established the autonomy of their personhood and of their families and built churches, schools, and other community institutions. They resisted working on the old plantations as waged gang labor, preferring the semiautonomous work of sharecropping and tenant farming. And with the vote, they won office—sixteen seats in Congress and more than six hundred in state legislatures.

Reconstruction was not, however, a period of steady advance, but rather one of constant and often bloody conflict. By 1876 most state governments in the South had been “redeemed” by white southern Democrats. Only four states—North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida—remained under the control of Republicans. Just as important, by the mid-1870s, federal commitment to black equality had foundered. Northern opinion wearied of it, especially after the economic depression of 1873, and Republicans in Congress became increasingly divided over the efficacy of continued federal intervention in the South.

The elections of 1876 assured the reversal of Reconstruction and completed Redemption. As a black southerner sadly stated, “The whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves.” Under “home rule,” white supremacy retook the South. The Redeemers included both traditional planters and new commercial and industrial interests that championed a “New South.” But while politically and socially diverse, Redeemers agreed on a new southern order of racial subordination based on fiscal retrenchment, labor control, and reduced black political power.

In the name of efficiency, Redeemers dismantled the Reconstruction state, slashing state budgets and property taxes. The Mississippi state budget was cut in half between 1875 and 1885. Across the South, public hospitals, asylums, and penitentiaries were closed. Texas imposed fees for schooling and Alabama abolished state-wide school taxes. The crippling of public education—for both black and poor white southerners—was perhaps the most enduring consequence of fiscal retrenchment. New laws asserted firmer control over black labor. Vagrancy and anti-enticement laws limited black people’s mobility. Laws prohibiting the sale of unginned cotton and other farm products after dark cut directly into black farmers’ ability to make a living. Most important were the crop lien laws, which, by giving the landowner first rights to the sharecropper’s crop, shifted the entire burden of risk to the latter. Black farmers fell into permanent debt and impoverishment as sharecropping turned into debt peonage, which some called a new form of slavery.

Perhaps the cruelest form of coerced labor was convict leasing. During the 1880s southern prisons were filled with young black men, who were incarcerated as a result of new laws that punished blacks severely for crimes against white property. (On the other hand, states repealed Reconstruction laws that had been passed to restrict Klan violence.) Mississippi’s notorious “pig law,” for example, made theft of any farm animal or any other property valued at ten dollars or more a felony punishable by five years in jail. Convict laborers hired out to private contractors laid three thousand miles of new railroad track across the South; they worked on cotton plantations in Mississippi, on turpentine farms in Florida, and in iron foundries and coal mines in Alabama. Working in shackles and beneath the whip, in water and muck and under the blazing sun, convict laborers were sometimes literally worked to death. During the 1880s not a single leased convict in Mississippi lived long enough to serve out a sentence of ten years.

In Louisiana and South Carolina, where sugar and rice plantations employed waged workers, labor militancy continued from the Reconstruction period, in some areas into the late 1880s. The former slaves in the bayou parishes in Louisiana had a history of worker organization, strikes, and armed defense of the right to vote. In 1886 sugar workers in Terrebonne Parish joined the Knights of Labor, forming an integrated local. Their efforts suggest the possibilities that existed for cross-racial alliances. But a region-wide strike in 1887 was brutally crushed by the planters’ use of mass evictions, armed force, and the mobilization of white racism.

Changes in social relations and politics were relatively slower than in the economic sphere. Segregation, which began almost immediately after the Civil War in public schools, proceeded unevenly throughout Reconstruction and into the 1880s and 1890s. During the 1880s blacks and whites increasingly withdrew from each other, but segregation was not absolute and southern race relations were still somewhat flexible. Black people still entered theaters, bars, and some hotels and could get equal seating on streetcars and railway cars.

The process of narrowing black political rights was also uneven and contested. During the 1880s Democratic state governments gerrymandered districts to dilute black voting strength and committed wholesale ballot fraud in counties with black majorities. Yet in other states, where whites had large majorities, such as Arkansas and Texas, black voting continued during Redemption. A few blacks continued to serve in state legislatures and pockets of black political power endured in some plantation counties. It was not until the 1890s that complete racial segregation and legal disfranchisement took place.

Historian C. Van Woodward has argued that while extreme racism had always existed in the South, it had been checked by the conservative paternalism of the old planter class, northern liberal opinion, and southern white radicalism. But in the latter decades of the century, the influence of these elements waned. Northern liberalism had retreated in the 1870s, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in 1883 overturning the Reconstruction civil rights acts sealed federal abandonment of black rights. The Populists’ support for a class-based alliance of black and white farmers against monopoly proved to be short-lived. Under pressure of the agricultural depression and bitter political battles with white conservative Democrats, white Populists turned against their black allies in the 1890s.

The policy of strict racial segregation—nicknamed “Jim Crow” after a minstrelsy character—took hold and consolidated during the 1890s as a concession to poor white people, a bid to rebuild a “solid South” unified across class lines by white racism. The Jim Crow laws reached into every nook and cranny of southern life. Their relentless logic created not only separate railroad cars, building entrances, and drinking fountains, but also separate Bibles for swearing witnesses in the courtroom, separate streets for prostitutes, even separate gallows for hanging condemned men.

The chief aim of white supremacy was not so much racial separation, although that was its form, but racial subordination. Jim Crow was a system of countless daily humiliations intended to remind black people of their inferior position. Middle-class blacks were special targets of white resentment, indicating both the progress that black people had made since slavery and the precariousness of lower-class whites’ racial confidence. These white southerners resented “uppity,” independent-minded Negroes in general and economically successful blacks in particular, described by one white southerner as “that insolent class who desired to force themselves into first-class coaches.”

In fact, streetcars and trains were contested public spaces because they were among the very few places in the South where blacks and whites came together on equal footing. An observer explained, “In their homes and in ordinary employment, [whites and blacks] meet as master and servant; but in the street cars they touch as free citizens, each paying for the right to ride; the white not in a place of command, the Negro without an obligation of servitude. Streetcar relationships are, therefore, symbolic of the new conditions.”

During the 1880s and 1890s many blacks refused to observe the new rules segregating streetcars and railroad coaches. The transportation companies were also not always keen on assuming the additional expense and responsibility for policing the color line. In 1887 a black newspaper in Georgia encouraged black passengers who purchased first-class tickets to stand their ground. “When a conductor orders a colored passenger from the first-class car it’s a bluff, and if the passenger goes to the forward or smoking car, that ends it; should he refuse, it ends it also, for the trainman will reflect seriously before he lays on violent hands.”

While some blacks successfully called the trainman’s bluff, others were not as fortunate, including a young Ida B. Wells who, while traveling from Memphis in 1884 was dragged from her seat in the first-class ladies car after she refused to move. Wells got off the train at the first stop rather then sit in the smoking car, and then successfully sued the railroad. A few others won similar judgments. But in 1896 Homer Plessy, a light-skinned Negro from Louisiana who sued over his ejection from the first-class car, lost his case before the U.S. Supreme Court. In Plessy v. Ferguson the court legitimized racial segregation with the “separate but equal” doctrine. The court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the rights of black people only in narrow terms of formal political equality. “If one race be inferior to the other socially,” it said, “the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.”

Many black people made individual decisions to walk rather than ride on segregated cars. Efforts were made at collective action as well, although these were difficult to sustain. Between 1890 and World War I, black people staged boycotts of streetcars in twenty-five cities in every southern state. “Do not trample on our pride by being ‘jim crowed’—WALK!” exhorted the Savannah Tribune.

The street, too, could be contested terrain. Historian Glenda Gilmore found evidence of street altercations between black and white women in the late 1890s in North Carolina towns where black power had not yet been completely displaced. In Wilmington, where blacks held local office until 1898, a black woman refused to yield the sidewalk to a group of white women. When one of the white women tried to push her aside, the black woman retaliated with her umbrella. “That’s right, damn it, give it to her,” a black male observer reportedly shouted. Incidents such as these suggest that the generation born in freedom did not easily acquiesce to the reassertion of white supremacy.

But, while it is important to acknowledge resistance to Jim Crow, it should not be overstated. In the main the weight of white supremacy was enormous, and black people lacked political leverage to reverse the trend of racial oppression. Open confrontation invited swift punishment and retribution. Choosing to walk rather than ride segregated cars was an act of indirect resistance; grabbing the opportunity to steal a quick jostle on the street a spontaneous way to assert one’s pride; but even such assertions were risky. Indeed, black people were lynched for as much.

Lynching was an old form of extralegal justice that had been practiced for many years, mainly against whites in the West and South; but in the 1890s it became both more widespread and increasingly aimed at black people. Between 1890 and 1917 at least two to three black southerners were hanged, burned at the stake, or otherwise murdered every week.

Lynching evolved as a sadistic and public ritual that involved death by prolonged torture, such as mutilation and burning, dismemberment, and the distribution of severed body parts as trophies and souvenirs. It was a gruesome public spectacle, a kind of cathartic blood sport that involved hundreds, even thousands, of cheering witnesses from all strata of southern white society. Mary Church Terrell called modern lynching a “wild and diabolical carnival of blood.”

The extremity of the punishment was justified by the nature of the alleged crimes committed, notably the rape of white women by black men. During the era of segregation a climate of sexualized race hysteria engulfed the South, which imagined pure white southern womanhood under siege by the “black beast rapist.” In truth, most lynching was not in response to sexual assault. Of nearly three thousand blacks lynched between 1889 and 1918, only 19 percent were accused of rape (and of these, many were falsely accused). Journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, who conducted the first in-depth investigation of lynching, pointed out that sexual liaisons between black men and white women were often consensual and initiated by the latter. If there was rape between the races, she said, it was the age-old practice of white men taking black women. Economic competition and resentment against the black middle class, argued Wells, was the real reason for lynching. White southerners cried the “beast,” but lynching revealed more about the savagery of white racism than it did about the character of its victims.

Disfranchisement was the last, but by no means the least, major means of racial oppression to be imposed at the end of the nineteenth century. Enacted throughout the South between 1890 (Mississippi) and 1910 (Tennessee), disfranchisement was achieved mostly by state constitutional amendments that imposed property and literacy qualifications on the vote or by other devices, such as the poll tax.

Concern over widespread corruption in elections was the principal rationale for disfranchisement. Particularly in the black-belt areas, white minorities used myriad tactics to hold power, including vote purchasing, ballot stealing, bribery, intimidation, and violence. These tactics were used not only against black voters but between white factions as well. Many southern political leaders believed cheating at elections disgraced and demoralized southern politics.

Disfranchisement might seem like a paradoxical solution that punished the victims of voting fraud. But its logic was consistent with the view commonly held among white elites that black people were not intelligent enough to hold the franchise responsibly. At another level, some white leaders frankly argued for the economy of disfranchisement. “We are not begging for ‘ballot reform’,” explained an Alabama Democrat, “but we want to be relieved of purchasing the Negroes to carry elections. I want cheaper votes.”

Conservative Democrats in the South believed that restoring power to the “intelligent and virtuous” propertied classes was also a solution to the expanding democratic vote of poor white people. White power per se was not threatened; at issue, rather, was which whites would have power. Disfranchisement was thus a strategy in diverse political calculations. Conservatives saw it as a solution to Populist challenges; in some states, white majority counties were willing to sacrifice universal manhood suffrage for better advantage against white-controlled black-belt counties.

Disfranchisement virtually eliminated black voting in the South. Although blacks had already been informally disfranchised in most states by intimidation, violence, and the gerrymandering of districts, the institutionalization of disfranchisement set in place a durable legal structure that would last for more than a half-century. In Louisiana, the number of black registered voters dropped from 130,000 in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904. In Alabama only 2 percent of eligible black men were registered to vote by 1906.

Southern lawmakers attempted to exempt poor white people from disfranchisement by creating various loopholes in the law. These included the “understanding clause,” which allowed illiterates to vote if they could “understand” any section of the state constitution read to them, and the infamous “grandfather clause,” which protected the franchise of all those who had been eligible to vote on January 1, 1867, as well as their sons and their grandsons. Nevertheless, the disfranchisement of whites was significant, owing in large part to the poll tax. In Louisiana, adult white male voter registration dropped from 96.3 percent in 1896 to 52 percent in 1904. Forrest G. Wood has estimated that from 97,000 to 108,000 white voters were disfranchised throughout the South.

For African Americans, Jim Crow was a dark period. An Alabama woman remarked, “There is no wonder that we die. The wonder is that we persist in living.” Yet black people persevered and found ways to eke out a living, to school their children, to maintain their self-respect. Many avoided white people wherever possible, in order to avoid humiliation or trouble.

African Americans learned to “wear the mask,” to act with deference in the presence of whites while hiding their true thoughts and feelings. As a blues refrain described, “Got one mind for white folks to see, ’nother for what I know is me.” Accommodation to white supremacy was necessary for daily survival, but it did not mean submission. Resentment burned inside, especially among the “New Negroes,” the generation born in freedom. Black people found ways to subvert the system passively, performed small acts of resistance, and occasionally challenged racism openly. Armed self-defense was rare but not unheard of, and at times even openly advocated in the black press. The Montgomery Weekly News advised blacks to “die like men [and] take two or three white devils along.”

But in truth, the options were few. While during Reconstruction black people struggled for both political and economic independence, in the 1890s political action became impossible and the impulse for economic self-sufficiency turned inward, becoming individualized, even conservative. Jim Crow spurred the growth of a black middle class comprising businessmen, professionals, and clergy, who serviced the segregated community and market. In the 1880s and 1890s a conservative leadership that advocated accepting the Negro’s subordinate status in the South emerged out of this stratum.

The most forceful and successful spokesman for this approach was Booker T. Washington, who founded the Tuskegee Institute, an agricultural and vocational school, in Alabama. Washington preached racial uplift through economic self-help and vocational education and counseled accepting segregation with “patience, forbearance, and self-control.” While during the Reconstruction era, uplift meant the full rights of citizenship, in the 1890s, uplift ideology emphasized winning white people’s acceptance by promoting the “better sort” of middle class Negro and blaming the lower classes of black people for their backward condition. Washington’s strategy appealed to some African Americans as practical and realistic, even hopeful. But his leadership was also the creation of white society. Washington’s message of quiescence and economic self-help resonated with the climate of industry, commerce, and laissez-faire that suffused both North and South and brought him white recognition and financial support.

Not all African Americans subscribed to the strategy of moderation and accommodation. In the early 1890s dissidents such as Ida B. Wells and T. Thomas Fortune, a Florida journalist, formed the Afro-American Council. The council condemned lynching, segregation, and disfranchisement and encouraged economic boycotts. W. E. B. DuBois openly broke with Washington in 1903 because, he said, Washington “apologizes for injustice, … does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of cast distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds.”

Yet, while Washington’s critics hit at many truths, they too recognized that African Americans had few choices in the South. The Afro-American Council advocated out-migration; Wells herself went into exile in the North after racists burned down her Memphis newspaper, Free Speech. In fact, for many black people, leaving the South seemed to be the only alternative. Some sixty thousand black farmers migrated to the West during the 1870s and 1880s, and urban professionals, like Wells, began going north in the 1890s. As much as Du Bois emphasized political and civil rights, the thrust of his work in founding the Niagara Movement and the NAACP appealed to northern conscience to restore the nation’s commitment to black political rights.

If southern race policy succeeded in disempowering black people and forcing them into conditions of near servitude, it failed to deliver on its promise to elevate poor whites. A new upper class of white planters, industrialists, and merchants thrived, of course. But for the lower classes of white southerners, the price of racial pride was high, including disfranchisement and the highest rates of illiteracy and poverty in the nation. Small white farmers fell into tenancy and debt, their decline feeding the growth of a low-wage labor force for the burgeoning southern textile industry. Thus while the New South built industries and became integrated into the national market, it remained a backward region based on a colonial economy and repressive labor relations for black and white laborers alike.

The nation’s abandonment of racial equality and full citizenship for African Americans had implications beyond the South. The color line cast a long shadow across America, for it also radically foreshortened the possibilities for equality for other nonwhite peoples. Indeed, as white supremacy retook the South, race and racism were also reproduced in the Far West through campaigns of war and assimilation against American Indians and through the dispossession of Mexican-owned land.

After the Civil War cheap land offerings by the government and the railroads and opportunities in mining and cattle ranching drew white settlers to the Great Plains. During the 1870s the white population west of the Mississippi grew from 7 million to 11 million. Increasingly, white settlers coveted American Indian land, both reservations and non-reservation (unceded) lands recognized and protected by treaty with the United States. Indeed, settlement and the integration of the West into the national market rendered impossible the old policy based on the isolation of Indians from whites and their removal to remote storage areas in the West. In the 1870s and 1880s Indian-white armed conflict reached its final and most desperate stage.

In 1874 George Armstrong Custer, a U.S. Army officer, led an illegal military expedition into unceded Sioux lands in the Dakotas that confirmed the presence of gold in the Black Hills. With white miners flocking to the area, the government moved against the Sioux. Although the treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 had recognized unceded lands in the Powder River area as Sioux hunting grounds, in 1875 the government declared its intention to round up all nonreservation Sioux and bring them in by military force. Three military columns from the Missouri division of the U.S. Army launched a full-scale attack against the Sioux and their Cheyenne allies in the spring of 1876. But the Sioux were a formidable foe. Their most stunning victory took place at Little Big Horn, where four thousand warriors led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull annihilated the entire Seventh Cavalry commanded by Custer. The Indians were defeated only after a prolonged U.S. military campaign of pursuit. Crazy Horse surrendered in 1877 and was immediately killed. Sitting Bull, who had gone to Canada with a small band, returned in 1881 and acquiesced, finally, to reservation life. But he, too, was murdered in 1890, as part of the massacre of the Lakota Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee.

On the southern plains, the Comanche and Kiowas also resisted and lost. Although they had agreed to live on reservations in the Medicine Lodge Treaties, they were unhappy there. They frequently left and conducted raids into Texas and Mexico for livestock. As depredations increased in the 1870s, the government declared all Indians not on the reservations to be hostile. During the Red River War of 1874–1875, five army divisions pursued the Indians until they gave up in exhaustion. In the Southwest, the Apache also went off the reservations for raiding and resisted military control by guerrilla warfare into the 1880s. Geronimo was one of the last American Indian chiefs to accept defeat in 1886.

Historian Richard White has observed that the Indians nearly always won battles with U.S. military forces. They ultimately lost the war, however, because the U.S. Army practiced a kind of reverse guerrilla warfare, in which they pursued the Indians relentlessly, scattering and starving them until they surrendered. In 1877, after the government reduced the size of the Nez Perce reservation in Washington Territory, Chief Joseph attempted to lead his people to Canada, resisting U.S. Army attacks for months along a 1,321-mile-long flight. When he finally surrendered he said, “I am tired of fighting. The old men are all dead. … It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

The military campaigns of the 1870s and 1880s were accompanied by legal moves against American Indian sovereignty and tribal lands. In 1871 Congress formally abandoned the treaty system, declaring that the United States would no longer recognize or deal with Indians as sovereign nations. Indian policy shifted to an assimilationist strategy, which would last until 1930. Once the Indians had been militarily defeated, many white Americans pitied their destitute lives on the reservations. These included well-meaning reformers, who believed the Indians were ill served on reservations, which they likened to “pen[s] where a horde of savages are to be fed with flour and beef … [and] furnished with paint and gee-gaws by the greed of traders.” The reformers believed that the Indians, small in number and widely dispersed, would become extinct unless they “flow[ed] in with the current of the life and ways of the larger [people].” Assimilation would thus “save” the Indians from extinction. But this was inherently a contradictory strategy because assimilation, which required extinguishing the Indians’ way of life, was itself a kind of extinction.

One of the central features of assimilation was the cessation of Indian land according to a new federal policy called “allotment by severalty.” This policy provided that Indians be “allotted” a fraction of their lands while the government and private interests assumed control of the rest. While the government had previously recognized Indian land as their birthright, it now regarded it as part of the public domain, to be used for the “permanent prosperity” of the West. Allotment was implemented on a tribe-by-tribe basis in the 1880s and in 1887 by the General Allotment Act (the Dawes Act), which committed the government to the allotment of all Indian lands.

The ostensible purpose of allotment was to induce Indians to become farmers on individually owned plots of land. By making Indians into yeoman farmers, allotment aimed to assimilate them into American society. As Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz explained in 1881, allotment would “fit the Indians for the habits and occupations of civilized life, by work and education, to individualize them in the possession and appreciation of property.” Of course, the Anglo-American method of farming required far less land than did the traditional Indian usufruct economies of hunting and casual farming. Anything more than 160 acres per household was surplus.

Assimilation also required the suppression of American Indian religious practices. In 1884 Congress banned the Sioux Sun Dance, and in 1888 it prohibited bundling, a ritual of preserving the spirits of the dead. These prohibitions hurt Indians deeply. A Blackfoot Indian said, “I do not understand why the white men desire to put an end to our religious ceremonials. What harm can they do to our people? If they deprive us of our religion, we will have nothing left. … We believe the Sun God is all-powerful, for every spring he makes the trees bud and the grass to grow. We see these things with our own eyes, and, therefore, know that all life comes from him.”

Reformers also attempted to convert Indians to traditional Anglo-American gender roles and family structure. They believed the matrilineal kinship structure of many Indian tribes was evidence of sexual promiscuity and the foundation of Indians’ supposed savagery. Elevating Indian women to the ideal of white middle-class womanhood, they believed, was central to civilizing the Indians. The Women’s National Indian Association was founded by veteran women reformers and modeled on the “women’s work for women” of the Protestant women’s missions, which emphasized domestic work and Christian values of sexual and moral purity.

Finally, reformers sought to assimilate Indians through education. Between 1879 and 1895 the federal government increased its annual spending for native schooling from $75,000 to $2 million. It built some two hundred day schools on the reservations and twenty boarding schools. The most well-known institution was the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania, a boarding school founded by Henry Pratt in 1878. Pratt had experimented first with a program for American Indian students at the Hampton Institute, the first Negro college established after the Civil War and the alma mater of Booker T. Washington. Pratt’s evangelical style, which emphasized instruction in reading, writing, manual skills, and Protestant values, so that the Indians would “rise to civilization,” typified the approach to Indian education in the 1870s and 1880s.

If cultural arrogance marked the evangelical approach, it was tempered by an idealistic belief in the humanity—and the ultimate equality—of the Indian. By the 1890s, however, race pessimism had displaced idealism. The boarding school strategy had always been too expensive to be adopted as general policy, and critics questioned its efficacy, observing that the students “regressed” when they returned to the reservations by growing their hair long and wearing native clothing. The critique was part of a general view that doubted the Indians’ racial capacity for civilization. Government officials and reformers, influenced by scientific race theories that arose in late nineteenth-century anthropology and ethnology, considered the Indians a hopelessly backward race, frozen in time and space. The American Indian was “an adult child,” according to the commissioner of Indian education, Francis Leupp, who might be trained for a life of manual labor, but little more. By the turn of the century vocational schooling was the exclusive focus of Indian education. Indian policy makers invoked Booker T. Washington’s model of limited education in the context of racial subordination. Washington, said Leupp in 1902, was successful because “the black man [was] to him a black man, and not merely a white man colored black.”

Assimilation thus produced dubious results; just as education policy abandoned the goal of integrating Indians into American society as equal citizens, allotment failed to transform Indians into family farmers. That was a difficult goal to achieve in any event, since by the late 1880s the monopolization of agricultural land was well under way in the West. But the dispossession of the American Indians proceeded apace. Indian land ownership fell from 155,632,312 acres in 1881 to 77,865,373 acres in 1900. By the turn of the century the premise of the Dawes Act, that tribal land was American Indian private property, and the act’s provisions requiring Indians’ approval of the sale of their unallotted lands, were rendered moot. In 1900 the Jerome Agreement, a land cession rejected by the Kiowa and Comanche, was approved by Congress and then upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1908) the Court declared that Congress held the “plenary [absolute] power” “to abrogate the provisions of an Indian treaty.” All pretenses that recognized Indian sovereignty were gone. The American Indians were no longer nations, not even dependent nations. They were now individual wards of the state.

Yet it took several decades to consolidate American rule over the Southwest. In part this was because not Mexico but American Indians actually controlled large parts of it. The Mexican population in the Southwest—Californios, Tejanos, and Nuevomexicanos, and others descended from Spanish colonialists and Indians—numbered only about eighty thousand in 1848. Most lived and worked in a subsistence economy as small producers or on ranches characterized by patron-peon relations of mutual dependence and obligation. Sixty-one percent of the Californio population were landowners, although only 3 percent owned large ranchos.

The process of white settlement to the Southwest was uneven. In some areas white settlers rapidly outnumbered Mexicans. A rate war between rival railroads drove the cost of a ticket from the Missouri Valley to southern California down from $125 in 1886 to $1 in 1887; white migration to southern California skyrocketed, and whites soon outnumbered Mexicans ten to one. In other areas, however, Mexicans continued to dominate the population. Congress delayed statehood for New Mexico and Arizona until 1912 because the white population of those territories remained small through the early 1900s. Mexicans also continued to dominate the South Texas border region, between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers. Still, racial suspicion and tension, dating to the founding of the Texas Republic and the Mexican American War and stoked by intruding Anglo-dominated market relations, suffused the border area. Historian David Montejano states that the border region remained “untamed” for fifty years after conquest, as local whites and the frontier battalion of the Texas Rangers, acting as a “military police of occupation,” strived to consolidate Anglo power.

On occasion violent conflict erupted, as in the 1877 “salt war” in the El Paso area and the 1871–1876 “skinning wars” in South Texas. Both involved competition over economic resources. In the first instance, Mexicans resorted to arms when Anglos attempted to take over the salt lakes in the foothills of the Guadalupe Mountains, from which locals had developed a salt trade in northern Mexico. The skinning wars grew out of intense competition for cattle, whose hides carried a high market price. For over five years there were organized raids and counterraids on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border and armed conflict between Mexican cattle raiders and Anglo vigilance committees.

The old Spanish and Mexican land grants—some 15 million square miles of land theoretically protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—posed an obstacle to white American settlers who sought opportunities in ranching and farming in the southwestern territories. From the 1850s to the 1890s, Mexicans were dispossessed of land through myriad strategies, including Anglo marriage into the families of elite Californios and Tejanos, fraud, and theft, as well as through legal means. Both California and Texas required all land titles from the Spanish and Mexican eras to be authenticated according to Anglo-American property law. Many members of the landed elite, whose deeds delineated property according to such markers as “a clump of trees” or whose deeds were long ago misplaced, lost their land. Still others simply could not afford the legal fees required to defend their claims. As a result of the California Land Act of 1851 Californios lost 40 percent of the land they had held in 1846. In Texas, some whites occupied Mexican-owned land and then made legal claim based on their rights as squatters. Tejano-owned land ordered sold by county courts to settle tax arrears went to Anglos for suspiciously low bids. In June 1877, for example, the Hidalgo County sheriff auctioned three thousand acres of the Hinajosa land grant for $15. In New Mexico, a Court of Private Land Claims established in 1891 granted 80 percent of the Mexican land grants to Anglos.

The transfer of the land base to whites and the commercialization of the economy reduced most Mexicans in the Southwest to the status of landless wage labor. No longer could they work as small producers or find sympathetic patrons to attach themselves to. But there was plenty of work for Mexican laborers, dirty and difficult work that whites refused to do, such as railroad construction, copper and quicksilver mining, and “grubbing brush,” which cleared the way for commercial agriculture. The changes in the nature of the labor market were oppressive to traditional Mexican family and life styles. Among the lower classes, traditional gender roles in the patriarchal household came under pressure, as women often had to do work intended for men. Dangerous and itinerant seasonal work created early widowhood or abandonment; by the 1880s nearly one-third of Mexican American households in California were headed by women.

In the context of conquest and the concomitant shifts in economic and political relations of power, Mexicans in the Southwest underwent a process of ethnic redefinition. Many Mexican Americans, especially among the working classes, withdrew into their own communities, both in towns and in isolated rural areas not yet dominated by Anglo settlers. In these spaces they developed what historian David Gutiérrez describes as a “distinct, if syncretic, variant of Mexican culture in what had become part of the United States.” They spoke Spanish and sustained their own cultural and religious practices much in the same ways that they had before conquest. The extended family and the mutualista, or mutual aid association, provided networks of support and sustenance. On the other hand, many Californio, Tejano, and Nuevomexicano elites sought to distance themselves from the idea of being “Mexican” because that label carried increasingly negative racial connotations. Denying their mestizo heritage, these elites chose instead to identify as “Spanish” or “Castilian”—that is, white—in order to salvage their social status as the indigenous gente de razón, “people of reason.” The strategy had limited success, however, for by the turn of the century the old upper classes, dispossessed of land and power, had dwindled in size and influence. But the impulse to claim whiteness remained strong. In part this was a sign of their diminished status. The appeal of whiteness derived also from the bifurcated black-white racial order of American society. Claiming whiteness was believed to be a way of avoiding the degradation of blackness. In fact, Mexicans were perceived in ambiguous racial terms; while some considered them a mixed race of two undesirable elements (Latin and Indian), comparisons to the Negro were also common. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted U.S. citizenship to the inhabitants of the ceded territory, which led a federal court to rule (In re Rodriguez, 1897) that Mexicans were “white” for purposes of naturalization, even if ethnologists considered them to be “Indian.” Particularly in Texas, positioned geographically where the South and the Southwest intersect, Mexicans came to occupy an ethno-racial space in between white and black.

That trend was augmented when immigration from the Mexico interior to the Southwestern United States began in the 1880s and 1890s. Coincident with a labor shortage in the southwestern United States, the Mexican government of Porfirio Diaz was engaged in an aggressive campaign of modernization. That process opened the country to foreign capital and disrupted the traditional system of land tenure. In 1883 new land laws expropriated the ejidos (common lands), which would displace some five million people from their means of subsistence over the next twenty years.

Although the high tide of Mexican immigration would not occur until the 1920s, migration to the United States trebled during the Porfiriato. Anglo growers and employers favored Mexican labor because they seemed more tractable than black labor and because many returned home after one or two seasons of work. As an official of the U.S. Bureau of Labor explained in 1908, Mexican farm workers “do not occupy a position analogous to that of the Negro in the South. They are not permanent, do not acquire land or establish themselves in little cabin homesteads, but remain nomadic and outside of American civilization.” Conquest had not only “thrown [Mexicans] among those who were strangers” but made them foreigners in their homeland.

Just as Mexican laborers were perceived as outsiders, so too were the Chinese who came to the Pacific coast during the second half of the nineteenth century. Americans who believed the West was a God-given gift to white civilization loathed sharing it with anyone else. Thus in 1850 California imposed a foreign miner’s tax, which was aimed at excluding miners who came from Sonora, Mexico, and China to participate in the gold rush. But the labor needed to develop the West was considerable, and white labor was in short supply, especially for unskilled work that was dirty or dangerous. Employers thus recruited Chinese and Mexicans for railroad construction, for clearing and reclaiming land for agricultural production, and for other work critical to the early development of the West. But white Americans—themselves migrants from the eastern and midwestern U.S. and from Europe—welcomed neither group as permanent settlers or citizens. While Mexicans were tolerated to the extent that they were seasonal workers, Chinese soon earned the dubious distinction of being the only group to be legally excluded by name from the United States.

Chinese migration to the Pacific Coast was part of a larger exodus of some two million people from southern China in the nineteenth century. The “push” for emigration derived from a combination of factors that included population pressures and natural disasters, domestic political strife, and economic and social dislocations caused by Western intrusions. China’s loss to Great Britain in the Opium War (1839–1842) was particularly damaging, as it was forced to open five ports to foreign commerce, to pay a $ 21 million indemnity, and to grant Westerners immunity from Chinese law.

In the mid-nineteenth century some 150,000 Chinese indentured laborers, or coolies, were recruited to replace African slaves on plantations in South America and the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery. Coolie labor was a form of semislavery. Chinese were often kidnapped or tricked into signing contracts and endured harsh conditions akin to slavery. Coolies who harvested guano off the coast of Peru, for example, did not always live long enough to finish their contracts.

By contrast, Chinese migration to North America and Australia was voluntary. Some half-million Chinese immigrated to these areas in the nineteenth century. With milder climates and waged labor—not to mention the discovery of gold deposits—they were favored destinations for Chinese migrants whose families were of modest or moderate means. Many Chinese laborers came to the United States on the credit ticket system and had to pay back the money advanced for their passage, but they were not bound by contracts and were not coolies. Admittedly, the difference may have seemed slight in practice. For example, the thirty thousand Chinese recruited to build the western portion of the transcontinental railroad from 1867 to 1871 faced arduous conditions and earned wages one-third less than that of white workers building the eastern section. An untold number of Chinese died in the high Sierras, some from working through the freezing winters, others from blasting dynamite while hanging from baskets suspended over the side of the mountain.

Yet, even as Chinese were a highly exploited labor force in the American West, the essentially voluntary nature of their migration had important consequences that encouraged the formation of communities. Because they were not coolies, Chinese more readily entered a range of occupations. As mining gave out, some Chinese became agricultural workers and tenant farmers. Chinese reclaimed the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and introduced the production of labor-intensive fruits and vegetables. Others came as or became merchants, who sold provisions and services to their coethnics, or commissioned and sold agricultural products in the general market. Still others became urban artisans and factory workers in San Francisco’s nascent manufacturing economy.

Some Chinese started families in America, although relatively few women immigrated. Those who did comprised wives of merchants and, to a lesser extent laborers, servant girls, and prostitutes. As was the case with migrants from Mexico and Europe in the late nineteenth century, Chinese migrants were predominantly men of the laboring classes whose families sent them abroad to work and send money home. Approximately half of the two hundred thousand Chinese who came to the West Coast between 1874 and 1890 returned to China. Among those who stayed in the United States, many continued to maintain households in China. Most huaqiao (overseas Chinese) were not, in fact, bachelor sojourners but were members of extended transnational families. Outside of San Francisco, working couples were not uncommon in nineteenth-century fishing, farming, and small western towns. Despite the hardships facing many immigrants, Chinese wives improved their status in America. Free from the domination of their parents-in-law, many worked alongside their husbands and were, in effect, joint heads of household.

By 1870 the Chinese population in California numbered nearly fifty thousand; in San Francisco, Chinese accounted for one-quarter of the city’s population in 1870 and 30 percent by 1880. Excluded by white skilled workers from high-wage markets (construction, transportation, metal work), Chinese worked in manufacturing, particularly in sectors where new methods had shifted work from skilled labor to mass production and lowered wages, such as cigar making and shoe making. Economic competition spurred whites’ resentment, especially after the depression of the 1870s, but more than jobs and wages were at stake. Race hostility against the Chinese drew from the ideological traditions of Manifest Destiny and free labor. White labor depicted Chinese as coolies, whom they characterized as representing a racially based condition of servility, as well as disease, moral depravity, and unchecked reproduction. The first federal legislation restricting immigration, the 1875 Page Law excluding prostitutes, was aimed at Chinese. In July 1877 a sandlot rally of the San Francisco Workingmen’s Party turned into a three-day rampage against Chinese residents; later that year the party, running on the slogan “the Chinese must go,” swept the municipal elections. Anticoolieism became a staple of Democratic Party politics on the Pacific Coast and Chinese exclusion the West’s principal demand in Congress. In 1882 Congress suspended Chinese immigration for ten years. Exclusion was renewed in 1892 and 1902 and made permanent in 1904. Although Chinese ineligibility to citizenship was already implicit in the nation’s naturalization laws, which provided the right to “free white persons” in 1790 and to “persons of African nativity or descent” in 1870, the exclusion laws explicitly barred Chinese from naturalization.

Exclusion, which legitimated the undesirability of Chinese, encouraged greater violence and discrimination. The worst violence in the 1880s occurred in the Mountain states and in the Pacific northwest, where Chinese miners and railroad workers had settled. In 1885 and 1886 a string of riots and “deportations” took place in Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland, in part in response to the depressed economic conditions that followed the completion of the northern rail lines. In 1885 in Rock Springs, Wyoming territory, a dispute between Chinese and white coal miners led to a full-scale race riot. A mob of whites burned down the Chinese quarter, shot and killed twenty-eight Chinese, wounded fifteen, and drove the rest from town. Chinese were lynched or violently expelled from other towns throughout the West. Few whites ever faced criminal charges for their actions. In California, where the vast majority of Chinese resided, Chinese were pushed to the margins of society. They were driven out of manufacturing and farming and segregated residentially, their children segregated in a separate “Oriental School.” Exclusion also gave rise to illegal immigration, through smuggling and through the use of fraudulent documents. Chinatown developed as a segregated and insular community, with surname and place-of-origin associations and other protective societies adapted from China dominating its social organization. In a sense the marginalization of Chinese fulfilled nativist claims about Chinese difference and unassimilability.

Excluded from citizenship and the polity, Chinese challenged racial discrimination in the courts. A number of test cases organized by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (also known as the Six Companies) went to the U.S. Supreme Court. These cases not only delineated the boundaries of Chinese and Chinese Americans’ rights in America but also decided important constitutional questions dealing with immigration and citizenship. These include Congress’s plenary (absolute) power over immigration (Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 1889) and deportation (Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 1893), the applicability of the Fourteenth Amendment to all persons including noncitizens (Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 1886), and the universality of birthright citizenship (United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 1898).

As Chinese immigration declined in the 1890s, Japanese began coming to the West Coast. Some 118,000 Japanese immigrated between the mid-1880s and 1925. A large number came from Hawai‘i, where they had worked as contract laborers on sugar plantations. In California and in other Western states Japanese labor replaced Chinese in farming and in railroad construction. Learning from the experience of the Chinese, some Japanese tried to deflect white hostility by demonstrating a commitment to join American society: they wore Western clothes, bought property, started families, joined Christian churches, and patronized white businesses. Nevertheless, by the turn of the twentieth century, Pacific Coast nativists began agitating for Japanese exclusion, invoking many of the Orientalist tropes that had been used against the Chinese. But anti-Japanese hostility differed in some important respects. Japan was not a backward, semicolonial nation like China but a modern imperialist nation that inspired both respect and anxiety in the West. If the Chinese “yellow peril” was imagined as an endless horde of coolies, the Japanese peril lay in imperialist Japan’s alleged designs to take over America. In 1905 Japanese protests over the segregation of their children in San Francisco’s Oriental School prompted a diplomatic crisis, which led to the negotiation of the “Gentleman’s Agreement” in 1907. In an effort to forestall statutory exclusion, Japan agreed to restrict the emigration of laborers voluntarily. In a companion piece, President Roosevelt issued an Executive Order in 1908 that effectively barred the migration of Asians from Hawai‘i—by then a United States territory—to the mainland. Thus by the first decade of the twentieth century Asiatic exclusion was established as national policy.

The political and territorial consolidation of the South and West into United States speeded the completion of the country’s industrial transformation. The same dynamic growth of capitalism that marked the United States was also evident in Europe, creating conditions there for emigration. As railroads and the capitalist market extended into rural areas, cheaper manufactured goods undercut the livelihoods of local artisans. The demand for agricultural produce in the cities encouraged the growth of large-scale commercial agriculture and the production of cash crops, threatening subsistence farming and small producers. These processes had shaped immigration from Europe to the U.S. since the 1820s, but in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when these dynamics reached deeper into Southern and Eastern Europe, a so-called new immigration began. While older migrant streams continued to flow to the U.S. (Germans were the third largest group of immigrants in this period), most immigrants were as yet unfamiliar to Americans. Italians and Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe were the largest groups, comprising 17 and 14 percent, respectively, of the total immigration from 1880 to World War I. In the decade before the war, the foreign-born comprised nearly 15 percent of the total population, the highest proportion in the nation’s history.

Historian John Bodnar has argued against the image of the new immigrants as victimized peasants fleeing poverty. Rather, he describes emigration as a pragmatic choice made by families confronted with rapidly changing economic realities. In Italy, for example, the break up of the feudal land tenure system—which put nearly three hundred thousand parcels of land up for sale between 1861 and 1899—had different regional effects. In areas where farmers competed to buy small properties, as in southern Italy, emigration was a means for generating cash to buy land. In central and northern Italy, where land remained in the hands of large estates and was not for sale, peasant militancy, not emigration, was the strategy for improving one’s condition.

In the late nineteenth century Italian migrants maintained strong ties to their home communities. They resisted the idea of permanent settlement in the United States; the annual return migration rate was greater than 45 percent. Few Italians were interested in buying land in America. “This [Italy] is the only true land,” explained a Consenzan peasant. “We can live somewhere else for a while. But we can only buy land here.”

In central and Eastern Europe, emigration was spurred by economic change as well as by religious persecution and political repression. Throughout the nineteenth century, Tsarist Russia isolated and oppressed Jews, requiring them to live in segregated communities (shtetls) within a “Pale of Settlement” along Russia’s western border, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, encompassing present-day Byelorussia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine. Barred from owning or renting land outside of towns and cities, Jews worked as merchants and small craftsmen. Yet their occupational positions also came under pressure from increased competition from former serfs, who were emancipated in 1863. In the 1880s and 1890s Jews in Russia faced increased repression. They were expelled from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev, and faced frequent pogroms, or government-sponsored and inspired mob attacks. From 1880 to 1924, some 2.4 million Jews migrated to the United States.

A diverse population of Slavic peoples also migrated to America at the turn of the century. These included Ukrainians, Poles, Bohemians (Czechs), Slovaks, Slovenians, Croatians, and others who, for the most part, lived under Russian, German, or Austro-Hungarian rule. Most were Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic. Emigration became an option for Slavs in areas where landholdings were too small to be successful and alternative employment in industry was lacking. Many also chafed under political and ethnic repression. In the 1870s and 1880s, for example, many Poles left Prussia in response to chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s forced assimilation policies, which included mandatory use of the German language and a state takeover of parochial schools.

The new immigrants were mostly unskilled workers—laborers, farm laborers, and domestic servants—with the exception of Jews, for whom tailoring was the largest occupational group. As with Mexicans and Chinese, a large percentage were unattached males—as many as 90 percent of Bulgarian and Serbian migrants, 87 percent of the Greeks, and 74.5 percent of the Italians. Those groups with a high percentage of males had a correspondingly high rate of return migration. Jews had a more balanced sex ratio and a lower rate of return because their migration tended to be family-based and because political repression in their homelands precluded return.

The many millions of laboring men who poured into the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth fed an explosive growth of urban construction and industrial production. Immigrant laborers erected the modern urban infrastructure: they built roads, dug sewers and subway tunnels, and laid streetcar tracks. They provided unskilled labor in mass production industries, creating and filling a new stratum in the workforce. For example, at the turn of the century the Carnegie steel plants in Pittsburgh employed some fourteen thousand common laborers, of whom more than eleven thousand were from Southern and Eastern Europe. The average wage was $ 12.50 a week, less than what a family needed for subsistence, and the accident rate averaged nearly 25 percent a year.

Immigrants’ old-world cultures clashed with the requirements of factory discipline. Employers complained that workers frequently missed work for religious occasions and festivals—for example, the Greek Orthodox church had more than eighty festivals a year, and a Polish wedding could last from three to five days. Collective behavior in the workplace and in immigrant communities was often articulated in the language and rituals of premodern village culture like religious oaths, peasant parades, and food riots. Immigrant workers sometimes staged strikes for higher wages, but they were also used to break the strikes of native-born workers, as employers were adept at exploiting ethnic difference. Some labor unions reached out to immigrants, but others, particularly among the craft unions, remained suspicious of them. Among the latter were Irish Americans and German Americans, whose immigrant ancestors had toiled at the bottom rungs of the work force and faced ethnic and religious prejudice in the early and middle nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, however, these older immigrant groups had achieved a measure of economic and social incorporation, if not respectability. Irish Americans, for example, were prevalent in some of the skilled trades and in urban political “machines,” which emerged in the late nineteenth century, such as New York’s Tammany Hall and the Boston organization of Mayor James Curley.

The influx of immigrants in the 1890s and their concentration in poor urban communities elicited a variety of responses among Americans of older immigrant stock. New England elites as well as native-born craft workers considered the new immigrants to be unassimilable backward peasants from the “degraded races” of Europe, lacking the characteristics necessary for economic independence or self-government. The American Protective Association, formed in 1887, was anti-immigration and anti-Catholic, and boasted 2.5 million members at its peak in the mid-1890s. The Immigration Restriction League formed in 1893 with the goal of restricting immigration by means of a literacy test.

Anti-immigrant sentiment was not confined to politics. One of the most brutal anti-immigrant incidents involved the lynching of eleven Italians in New Orleans in 1891. Native-born whites blamed a growing population of Sicilian immigrants and a rumored Italian Mafia for the murder of the New Orleans police chief David Hennessy. After a jury acquitted nine Italians for the crime, a mob that included public officials and businessmen gathered to mete out “justice” on its own terms. Jewish immigrants experienced a growth of anti-Semitism, in Northern cities and in the South. Some of the first anti-Semitic demonstrations in the United States took place in the 1880s in the lower South, against Jewish supply merchants. By 1893 nightriders were burning farmhouses belonging to Jewish landlords. In northern cities, Jewish bankers and immigrants were scapegoated for the 1890s economic depression.

While some native-born Americans expressed hostility toward the new immigrants, others were more sanguine about the possibilities of assimilation. A new generation of college-educated middle-class Protestant women lobbied for factory reforms, formed settlement houses in immigrant neighborhoods, and promoted Americanization. Yet both the nativists and the social reformers condescended to immigrants and failed to appreciate the richness of their cultures. In fact, immigrant communities were not only sustained by ethnocultural and religious traditions but also comprised diverse political and ideological trends that were part of larger diasporas of exile. Polish immigrants, whose migration was inextricably linked to the division of Poland by its Great-Power neighbors, were keenly nationalist. Among Jews, religious orthodoxy, socialism, and Zionism were all prominent and divergent trends.

At the turn of the century European immigrants occupied an ambivalent and vexatious position in America’s racial hierarchy, their place complicated by the demands of other racial categories under construction. While legally defined as “white” for purposes of naturalization, the native-born and older immigrants did not necessarily perceive the newer immigrants as “white,” at least not as fully white as the “Anglo-Saxon race.” Historians James Barrett and David Roediger have described the new immigrants as “in-between peoples, situated above African and Asian Americans but below ‘white’ people.” Many immigrant workers, perceiving the disadvantage of being black in America, embraced whiteness as a strategy for economic and social advancement. But others, having experienced the sting of discrimination and group hostility both in their homelands and in America, identified with nonwhites. At the same time, Eastern and Southern European immigrants constructed their identities in ways that were not racial but ethnic, expressing national and religious ties. Over time, however, the process of becoming “American” was inextricably bound up with race.

Of course, expansion and conquest had been part of the nation’s history and identity since its inception. Many of the arguments supporting earlier expansions were reiterated: commerce and trade, an outlet for class tensions, geopolitical considerations with regard to European nations, and providential design. But there were also important differences. Until the late nineteenth century, the nation had expanded into contiguous territory. (The exceptions were Alaska and the Midway islands, both acquired in 1867.) New territories were incorporated into the nation as areas for white settlement and for statehood. But could noncontiguous territories become states? What would it mean to make their colored inhabitants citizens? Could the United States, a democratic republic born of an anticolonial revolution, have colonies?

At the time of contact in the late eighteenth-century, Hawai‘ian society, which dated to the second century c.e., comprised highly stratified agricultural chiefdoms. Kinship groups worked the land for subsistence and for tribute to a hierarchy of lords and chiefs (ali’i). The “discovery” of the islands in 1778 by British sea Captain James Cook introduced Hawai‘i to a market economy and into the nexus of the Euro-American trade in the Pacific and Asia.

In 1820 the first Christian missionaries arrived from the United States, strict Puritan Protestants from New England. In 1825 they converted Queen Ka’ahumanu and several high-ranking ali’i. The missionaries gained enormous political influence through their close relationship with Hawai‘ian royalty. During the 1830s and 1840s American missionaries and lawyers wrote a Hawai‘ian constitution and laws (the criminal code was virtually copied from Massachusetts law books) and even administered the state. The missionaries also pressured the Hawai‘ians to change the system of land tenure, as they believed that individual land ownership would civilize the Hawai‘ians by promoting industriousness and the nuclear family. The Great Mahele (land division) of 1848–1850 divided Hawai‘i’s land between the crown, the government, and the ali’i, and gave commoners the right to hold land in fee simple. By 1852 nonnaturalized foreigners were allowed to buy land.

The Hawai‘ian elite has been called naive and passive for seemingly handing control of their sovereign nation over to foreigners. But in the context of rapid economic change and Western economic and military advantage, their actions may be better understood as efforts to stem the erosion of their power. For example, some anthropologists have argued that the ali’i may have seen Christianity as a countervailing force against the spread of the merchants’ influence. Similarly, the Hawai‘ian monarchy acceded to private property interests in the belief that economic prosperity would preserve the kingdom’s political independence. The Mahele also attempted to keep land under Hawai‘ian control, even as it made it alienable. However, few commoners held title to land and many were thrown off the estates, “left to wander in tears on the highway,” according to a Hawai‘ian contemporary, when ali’i leased their land to foreigners.

The passage of land to foreigners was the critical element for developing the plantation sugar industry. The other necessity was labor, which was in short supply because the native Hawai‘ian population was dwindling and, moreover, was averse to the arduous labor of cutting and hauling cane. The planters turned to imported contract labor, first from China and then Japan and Portugal; and, in the early twentieth century, from Korea, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. By far the greatest number came from Japan in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Between 1875 and 1910, land devoted to sugar cultivation increased from 12,000 to 214,000 acres.

Indeed, sugar made the haole (white) elite ever more powerful. In 1876 the planters won a reciprocity agreement between Hawai‘i and the United States, which gave their sugar duty-free access to the American market. Increasingly, haole leaders pressed for annexation by the United States. Annexation also had support among American military leaders, who coveted Hawai‘i’s strategic position in the Pacific Ocean and the deepwater port at Pearl Harbor. In 1893 members of the haole elite, including missionary descendents Stanford Dole and Lorrin Thurston, staged a coup, overthrowing Queen Lililuokilani (landing American Marines to face her down), and proclaimed a “Republic of Hawai‘i.” By any standard of international law it was an illegal takeover of a sovereign kingdom. President Grover Cleveland, however, resisted calls to annex Hawai‘i, in large part because he believed it would exacerbate the Asiatic race problem. In 1898, when imperialist sentiment ran high in the United States, Congress approved the annexation of Hawai‘i by a simple majority resolution, violating the two-thirds Senate ratification required by the U.S. Constitution. The colonization of Hawai‘i may have been obscured by its territorial status, but the process of incorporation resonated with other processes of dispossession and conquest. Recognition by the United States of white territorial government over the sovereign Hawai‘ian kingdom was analogous to its ignoring American Indian tribal governments in favor of the white-dominated Oklahoma Territory.

A proimperialist trend in the United States had grown since the 1880s, suffused with the language of Manifest Destiny and Anglo-Saxonism. The evangelical Reverend Josiah Strong declared expansion to the Pacific was part of the inexorable westward march of Christian civilization. Naval Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan argued in the language of Social Darwinism, applying the concept of “survival of the fittest” to international competition among nations.

The sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor in February 1898 gave the United States reason to declare war against Spain. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, American troops rather quickly defeated the already weakened Spanish. The “splendid little war” was won nearly too quickly, in fact, as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge instructed Theodore Roosevelt to prolong the fighting until Admiral Dewey’s fleet reached the Philippines. In the Treaty of Paris in 1899, Spain ceded its colonial possessions to the United States for $20 million. The transfer of colonies was not so simple, however, because in liberating themselves from Spain, both Cuba and the Philippines had declared themselves independent republics.

Opinion in the United States was deeply divided. A contentious debate over the Senate’s ratification of the Treaty of Paris raised questions about America’s foundational beliefs. Anti-imperialist sentiment involved two lines of thinking. One view was overtly racist. Pointing to the nation’s Negro and Asiatic race problems, this view opposed incorporating additional backward colored races into the nation. The other view opposed the acquisition of colonies as antithetical to American principles; as William Jennings Bryan stated, “Our nation must give up any intention of entering upon a colonial policy, such as is now pursued by European countries, or it must abandon the doctrine of consent of the governed.” The expansionists argued that the inhabitants of Spain’s former colonies were backward races incapable of self-rule, and that the United States had a moral duty to civilize and to protect them from European colonizers. Thus they claimed American interests were noble, unlike old-world colonialism. Alfred Beveridge, Jr., one of the most ardent expansionists in the Senate, declared expansion was “for the Great Republic, not for Imperialism.” Many proimperialists frankly saw no problem, constitutional or moral, in ruling backward races without their consent, citing American Indian policy as precedent. A University of Chicago political scientist argued in 1899 that “uncivilized nations under tribal relations [in the Philippines] would occupy the same status precisely as our own Indians. They are, in fact, ‘Indians’-and the fourteenth amendment does not make citizens of Indians.”

In the end the expansionists won the day. President McKinley eschewed a formal annexation of Cuba, in part to avoid adding more black people to the nation and in part because the Cuban nationalist movement had gained considerable legitimacy in its fight against Spain. The Platt Amendment, passed by Congress in 1899 and added to the Cuban Constitution, made Cuba a “protectorate,” an independent nation under the military protection of the United States.

Puerto Rico and the Philippines were annexed as “unincorporated territories”—that is, territories without the prospect of statehood—and organized as “insular (island) possessions” under the War Department. Puerto Ricans and Filipinos were given the status of “nationals”—that is, they owed allegiance exclusively to the United States but were not U.S. citizens. Each had a junior sort of republican government—for purposes of tutelage—but their affairs were subject entirely to approval by a Governor General appointed jointly by the president and by Congress. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Insular Cases (1901) that the Constitution did not necessarily have to follow the flag. (The Jones Act of 1917 made Puerto Ricans citizens of the United States, although they had no representation in Congress and their affairs remained under U.S. authority.)

Notwithstanding President McKinley’s claims of an American policy of “benevolent assimilation,” Filipinos were wary about trading in one colonial oppressor for another. The Philippine revolution had militarily defeated Spain well before the Americans arrived and in 1898 had proclaimed an independent republic. When Spain transferred title to the islands to the United States, they occupied only the city of Manila. Thus, the United States had to impose benevolent rule by means of force. The Philippine American War (1899–1902) was brutal and bloody. The United States committed two-thirds of the Army to a guerrilla war that was led by generals with experience in the American Indian wars of 1870s and 1880s. U.S. troops committed atrocities, including burning villages, killing noncombatants, and torturing prisoners, which shocked Americans when details of the war leaked into the press. The Filipinos fought tenaciously before succumbing to the Americans’ superior military force as well as their own internal divisions. Some seven thousand Americans and twenty thousand Filipinos were killed or wounded in the war, and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos—some estimates are as high as 1 million—died of war-related disease or famine.

In both Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the United States combined the use (or threat) of force with a policy of suasion that coopted native elites by giving them economic advantages, including protected access to the American market, political power over their own lower classes, and promises of eventual self-rule. Yet, like Indian assimilation, the strategy of civilizing uplift and self-rule was inherently contradictory, as cultural critic Vicente Rafael has explained, “the ‘self’ that rules itself can only emerge when the subject has learned to colonize itself.”

The policies of subordination and conquest that had developed as solutions to the Negro and Indian questions, America’s oldest race problems, provided templates for race policy towards the nation’s new immigrants and the inhabitants of its new territorial acquisitions in the late nineteenth century. When congressional leaders and other elites debated taking the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish American War, they often made reference to slaves and American Indians to make the argument that democracy was not for everyone. They understood that while various race policies differed in the specifics there were certain important commonalities.

Most significant was the view that the “colored races” lagged far behind whites on civilization’s evolutionary scale. The doctrine of “consent of the governed,” central to the Declaration of Independence did not apply, it was argued, to “races of people adjudged incompetent for self-government.” A journalist asked in 1900, “Were the Negro slaves canvassed and their consent obtained to their condition of slavery? Were the Indians…? For that matter,” he added, “has there been, until today, any real opportunity given the … 35,000,000 of the female sex to ascertain their opinion concerning the laws under which they live?” Thus during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, American politics and culture infantilized former slaves, Indian wards, Chinese and Mexican laborers, and Hawai‘ian, Puerto Rican, and Filipino colonial subjects in order to justify their exclusion from full citizenship.

At the same time, the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution had abolished slavery and established national citizenship and civil rights. Racism had to be squared with these principles. Hence we see the emergence of myriad legal fictions like “separate but equal” and “unincorporated territory” and pronouncements of Congress’s “plenary power” over immigration, Indian treaties, and insular policy. America’s “colored races” confronted a deep chasm between the formality of equality and the reality of inequality. During the late nineteenth century, policies and practices of race evolved that would ensure, as W. E. B. DuBois observed in 1903, that the most pressing question of the twentieth century would be that of the color line.

On the transition from Reconstruction to the “New South,” see C. Van Woodward, Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951). On Jim Crow segregation, see C. Van Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957); Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998); Glenda E. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). On convict labor, see David Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996). On black politics, see Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

On Hawai‘i, see Sally E. Merry, Colonizing Hawai‘i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). On the Philippines, see Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) and Vicente Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) discusses the imperial self-image of the American nation as expressed at late nineteenth-century world’s fairs.

I am a negro and was born some time during the war in Elbert County, Ga., and I reckon by this time I must be a little over forty years old. My mother was not married when I was born, and I never knew who my father was or anything about him. Shortly after the war my mother died, and I was left to the care of my uncle. All this happened before I was eight years old, and so I can’t remember very much about it. When I was about ten years old my uncle hired me out to Captain——. I had already learned how to plow, and was also a good hand at picking cotton. I was told that the Captain wanted me for his house-boy, and that later on he was going to train me to be his coachman. To be a coachman in those days was considered a post of honor, and young as I was, I was glad of the chance. But I had not been at the Captain’s a month before I was put to work on the farm, with some twenty or thirty other negroes—men, women and children. From the beginning the boys had the same tasks as the men and women. There was no difference. We all worked hard during the week, and would frolic on Saturday nights and often on Sundays. And everybody was happy. The men got $ 3 a week and the women $2. I don’t know what the children got. Every week my uncle collected my money for me, but it was very little of it that I ever saw. My uncle fed and clothed me, gave me a place to sleep, and allowed me 10¢ or 15¢ a week for “spending change,” as he called it. I must have been seventeen or eighteen years old before I got tired of that arrangement, and felt that I was man enough to be working for myself and handling my own wages. The other boys about my age and size were “drawing” their own pay, and they used to laugh at me and call me “Baby” because my old uncle was always on hand to “draw” my pay. Worked up by these things, I made a break for liberty. Unknown to my uncle or the Captain I went off to a neighboring plantation and hired myself out to another man. The new landlord agreed to give me 40¢ a day and furnish me one meal. I thought that was doing fine. Bright and early one Monday morning I started for work, still not letting the others know anything about it. But they found it out before sundown. The Captain came over to the new place and brought some kind of officer of the law. The officer pulled out a long piece of paper from his pocket and read it to my new employer. When this was done I heard my new boss say:

“I beg your pardon, Captain. I didn’t know this nigger was bound out to you, or I wouldn’t have hired him.”

“He certainly is bound out to me,” said the Captain. “He belongs to me until he is twenty-one, and I’m going to make him know his place.”

So I was carried back to the Captain’s. That night he made me strip off my clothing down to my waist, had me tied to a tree in his backyard, ordered his foreman to give me thirty lashes with a buggy whip across my bare back, and stood by until it was done. After that experience the Captain made me stay on his place night and day—but my uncle still continued to “draw” my money.

I was a man nearly grown before I knew how to count from one to one hundred. I was a man nearly grown before I ever saw a colored school teacher. I never went to school a day in my life. To-day I can’t write my own name, though I can read a little. I was a man nearly grown before I ever rode on a railroad train, and then I went on an excursion from Elberton to Athens. What was true of me was true of hundreds of other negroes around me—’way off there in the country, fifteen or twenty miles from the nearest town.

When I reached twenty-one the Captain told me I was a free man, but he urged me to stay with him. He said he would treat me right, and pay me as much as anybody else would. The Captain’s son and I were about the same age, and the Captain said that, as he had owned my mother and uncle during slavery, and as his son didn’t want me to leave them (since I had been with them so long), he wanted me to stay with the old family. And I stayed. I signed a contract—that is, I made my mark—for one year. The Captain was to give me $3.50 a week, and furnish me a little house on the plantation—a one-room log cabin similar to those used by his other laborers.

During that year I married Mandy. For several years Mandy had been the house-servant for the Captain, his wife, his son and his three daughters, and they all seemed to think a good deal of her. As an evidence of their regard they gave us a suit of furniture, which cost about $25, and we set up housekeeping in one of the Captain’s two-room shanties. I thought I was the biggest man in Georgia. Mandy still kept her place in the “Big House” after our marriage. We did so well for the first year that I renewed my contract for the second year, and for the third, fourth and fifth year I did the same thing. Before the end of the fifth year the Captain had died, and his son, who had married some two or three years before, took charge of the plantation. Also, for two or three years, this son had been serving at Atlanta in some big office to which he had been elected. I think it was in the Legislature or something of that sort—anyhow, all the people called him Senator. At the end of the fifth year the Senator suggested that I sign up a contract for ten years; then, he said, we wouldn’t have to fix up papers every year. I asked my wife about it; she consented; and so I made a ten-year contract.

Not long afterward the Senator had a long, low shanty built on his place. A great big chimney, with a wide, open fireplace, was built at one end of it, and on each side of the house, running lengthwise, there was a row of frames or stalls just large enough to hold a single mattress. The places for these mattresses were fixed one above the other; so that there was a double row of these stalls or pens on each side. They looked for all the world like stalls for horses. Since then I have seen cabooses similarly arranged as sleeping quarters for railroad laborers. Nobody seemed to know what the Senator was fixing for. All doubts were put aside one bright day in April when about forty able-bodied negroes, bound in iron chains, and some of them handcuffed, were brought out to the Senator’s farm in three big wagons. They were quartered in the long, low shanty, and it was afterward called the stockade. This was the beginning of the Senator’s convict camp. These men were prisoners who had been leased by the Senator from the State of Georgia at about $200 each per year, the State agreeing to pay for guards and physicians, for necessary inspection, for inquests, all rewards for escaped convicts, the cost of litigation and all other incidental camp expenses. When I saw these men in shackles, and the guards with their guns, I was scared nearly to death. I felt like running away, but I didn’t know where to go. And if there had been any place to go to, I would have had to leave my wife and child behind. We free laborers held a meeting. We all wanted to quit. We sent a man to tell the Senator about it. Word came back that we were all under contract for ten years and that the Senator would hold us to the letter of the contract, or put us in chains and lock us up—the same as the other prisoners. It was made plain to us by some white people we talked to that in the contracts we had signed we had all agreed to be locked up in a stockade at night or at any, other time that our employer saw fit; further, we learned that we could not lawfully break our contract for any reason and go and hire ourselves to somebody else without the consent of our employer; and, more than that, if we got mad and ran away, we could be run down by bloodhounds, arrested without process of law, and be returned to our employer, who, according to the contract, might beat us brutally or administer any other kind of punishment that he thought proper. In other words, we had sold ourselves into slavery—and what could we do about it? The white folks had all the courts, all the guns, all the hounds, all the railroads, all the telegraph wires, all the newspapers, all the money, and nearly all the land—and we had only our ignorance, our poverty and our empty hands. We decided that the best thing to do was to shut our mouths, say nothing, and go back to work. And most of us worked side by side with those convicts during the remainder of the ten years.

But this first batch of convicts was only the beginning. Within six months another stockade was built, and twenty or thirty other convicts were brought to the plantation, among them six or eight women! The Senator had bought an additional thousand acres of land. and to his already large cotton plantation he added two great big saw-mills and went into the lumber business. Within two years the Senator had in all nearly 200 negroes working on his plantation—about half of them free laborers, so called, and about half of them convicts. The only difference between the free laborers and the others was that the free laborers could come and go as they pleased, at night—that is, they were not locked up at night, and were not, as a general thing, whipped for slight offenses. The troubles of the free laborers began at the close of the ten-year period. To a man, they all wanted to quit when the time was up. To a man, they all refused to sign new contracts—even for one year, not to say anything of ten years. And just when we thought that our bondage was at an end we found that it had really just begun. Two or three years before, or about a year and a half after the Senator had started his camp, he had established a large store, which was called the commissary. All of us free laborers were compelled to buy our supplies—food, clothing, etc.—from that store. We never used any money in our dealings with the commissary, only tickets or orders, and we had a general settlement once each year, in October. In this store we were charged all sorts of high prices for goods, because every year we would come out in debt to our employer. If not that, we seldom had more than $5 or $10 coming to us—and that for a whole year’s work. Well, at the close of the tenth year, when we kicked and meant to leave the Senator, he said to some of us with a smile (and I never will forget that smile—I can see it now):

“Boys, I’m sorry you’re going to leave me. I hope you will do well in your new places—so well that you will be able to pay me the little balances which most of you owe me.”

Word was sent out for all of us to meet him at the commissary at 2 o’clock. There he told us that, after we had signed what he called a written acknowledgment of our debts, we might go and look for new places. The storekeeper took us one by one and read to us statements of our accounts. According to the books there was no man of us who owed the Senator less than $100; some of us were put down for as much as $200. I owed $105, according to the bookkeeper. These debts were not accumulated during one year, but ran back for three and four years, so we were told—in spite of the fact that we understood that we had had a full settlement at the end of each year. But no one of us would have dared to dispute a white man’s word—oh, no; not in those days. Besides, we fellows didn’t care anything about the amounts—we were after getting away; and we had been told that we might go, if we signed the acknowledgments. We would have signed anything, just to get away. So we stepped up, we did, and made our marks. That same night we were rounded up by a constable and ten or twelve white men, who aided him, and we were locked up, every one of us, in one of the Senator’s stockades. The next morning it was explained to us by the two guards appointed to watch us that, in the papers, we had signed the day before, we had not only made acknowledgment of our indebtedness, but that we had also agreed to work for the Senator until the debts were paid by hard labor. And from that day forward we were treated just like convicts. Really we had made ourselves lifetime slaves, or peons, as the laws called us. But, call it slavery, peonage, or what not, the truth is we lived in a hell on earth what time we spent in the Senator’s peon camp.

I lived in that camp, as a peon, for nearly three years. My wife fared better than I did, as did the wives of some of the other negroes, because the white men about the camp used these unfortunate creatures as their mistresses. When I was first put in the stockade my wife was still kept for a while in the “Big House,” but my little boy, who was only nine years old, was given away to a negro family across the river in South Carolina, and I never saw or heard of him after that. When I left the camp my wife had had two children by some one of the white bosses, and she was living in fairly good shape in a little house off to herself. But the poor negro women who were not in the class with my wife fared about as bad as the helpless negro men. Most of the time the women who were peons or convicts were compelled to wear men’s clothes. Sometimes, when I have seen them dressed like men, and plowing or hoeing or hauling logs or working at the blacksmith’s trade, just the same as men, my heart would bleed and my blood would boil, but I was powerless to raise a hand. It would have meant death on the spot to have said a word. Of the first six women brought to the camp, two of them gave birth to children after they had been there more than twelve months—and the babies had white men for their fathers!

The stockades in which we slept were, I believe, the filthiest places in the world. They were cesspools of nastiness. During the thirteen years that I was there I am willing to swear that a mattress was never moved after it had been brought there, except to turn it over once or twice a month. No sheets were used, only dark-colored blankets. Most of the men slept every night in the clothing that they had worked in all day. Some of the worst characters were made to sleep in chains. The doors were locked and barred each night, and tallow candles were the only lights allowed. Really the stockades were but little more than cow sheds, horse stables or hog pens. Strange to say, not a great number of these people died while I was there, though a great many came away maimed and bruised and, in some cases, disabled for life. As far as I remember only about ten died during the last ten years that I was there, two of these being killed outright by the guards for trivial offenses.

It was a hard school that peon camp was, but I learned more there in a few short months by contact with those poor fellows from the outside world than ever I had known before. Most of what I learned was evil, and I now know that I should have been better off without the knowledge, but much of what I learned was helpful to me. Barring two or three severe and brutal whippings which I received, I got along very well, all things considered; but the system is damnable. A favorite way of whipping a man was to strap him down to a log, flat on his back, and spank him fifty or sixty times on his bare feet with a shingle or a huge piece of plank. When the man would get up with sore and blistered feet and an aching body, if he could not then keep up with the other men at work he would be strapped to the log again, this time face downward, and would be lashed with a buggy trace on his bare back. When a woman had to be whipped it was usually done in private, though they would be compelled to fall down across a barrel or something of the kind and receive the licks on their backsides.

The working day on a peon farm begins with sunrise and ends when the sun goes down; or, in other words, the average peon works from ten to twelve hours each day, with one hour (from 12 o’clock to 1 o’clock) for dinner. Hot or cold, sun or rain, this is the rule. As to their meals, the laborers are divided up into squads or companies, just the same as soldiers in a great military camp would be. Two or three men in each stockade are appointed as cooks. From thirty to forty men report to each cook. In the warm months (or eight or nine months out of the year) the cooking is done on the outside, just behind the stockades; in the cold months the cooking is done inside the stockades. Each peon is provided with a great big tin cup, a flat tin pan and two big tin spoons. No knives or forks are ever seen, except those used by the cooks. At meal time the peons pass in single file before the cooks, and hold out their pans and cups to receive their allowances. Cow peas (red or white, which when boiled turn black), fat bacon and old-fashioned Georgia corn bread, baked in pones from one to two and three inches thick, make up the chief articles of food. Black coffee, black molasses and brown sugar are also used abundantly. Once in a great while, on Sundays, biscuits would be made, but they would always be made from the kind of flour called “shorts.” As a rule, breakfast consisted of coffee, fried bacon, corn bread, and sometimes molasses—and one “helping” of each was all that was allowed. Peas, boiled with huge hunks of fat bacon, and a hoe-cake, as big as a man’s hand, usually answered for dinner. Sometimes this dinner bill of fare gave place to bacon and greens (collard or turnip) and pot liquor. Though we raised corn, potatoes and other vegetables, we never got a chance at such things unless we could steal them and cook them secretly. Supper consisted of coffee, fried bacon and molasses. But, although the food was limited to certain things, I am sure we all got a plenty of the things allowed. As coarse as these things were, we kept, as a rule, fat and sleek and as strong as mules. And that, too, in spite of the fact that we had no special arrangements for taking regular baths. And no very great effort was made to keep us regularly in clean clothes. No tables were used or allowed. In summer we would sit down on the ground and eat our meals, and in winter we would sit around inside the filthy stockades. Each man was his own dish washer—that is to say, each man was responsible for the care of his pan and cup and spoons. My dishes got washed about once a week!

To-day, I am told, there are six or seven of these private camps in Georgia—that is to say, camps where most of the convicts are leased from the State of Georgia. But there are hundreds and hundreds of farms all over the State where negroes, and in some cases poor white folks, are held in bondage on the ground that they are working out debts, or where the contracts which they have made hold them in a kind of perpetual bondage, because, under those contracts, they may not quit one employer and hire out to another except by and with the knowledge and consent of the former employer. One of the usual ways to secure laborers for a large peonage camp is for the proprietor to send out an agent to the little courts in the towns and villages, and where a man charged with some petty offense has no friends or money the agent will urge him to plead guilty, with the understanding that the agent will pay his fine, and in that way save him from the disgrace of being sent to jail or the chain-gang! For this high favor the man must sign beforehand a paper signifying his willingness to go to the farm and work out the amount of the fine imposed. When he reaches the farm he has to be fed and clothed, to be sure, and these things are charged up to his account. By the time he has worked out his first debt another is hanging over his head, and so on and so on, by a sort of endless chain, for an indefinite period, as in every case the indebtedness is arbitrarily arranged by the employer. In many cases it is very evident that the court officials are in collusion with the proprietors or agents, and that they divide the “graft” among themselves. As an example of this dickering among the whites, every year many convicts were brought to the Senator’s camp from a certain county in South Georgia, ’way down in the turpentine district. The majority of these men were charged with adultery, which is an offense against the laws of the great and sovereign State of Georgia! Upon inquiry I learned that down in that county a number of negro lewd women were employed by certain white men to entice negro men into their houses; and then, on a certain night, at a given signal, when all was in readiness, raids would be made by the officers upon these houses, and the men would be arrested and charged with living in adultery. Nine out of ten of these men, so arrested and so charged, would find their way ultimately to some convict camp, and, as I said, many of them found their way every year to the Senator’s camp while I was there. The low-down women were never punished in any way. On the contrary, I was told that they always seemed to stand in high favor with the sheriffs, constables and other officers. There can be no room to doubt that they assisted very materially in furnishing laborers for the prison pens of Georgia, and the belief was general among the men that they were regularly paid for their work. I could tell more, but I’ve said enough to make anybody’s heart sick. This great and terrible iniquity is, I know, widespread throughout Georgia and many other Southern States.

But I didn’t tell you how I got out. I didn’t get out—they put me out. When I had served as a peon for nearly three years—and you remember that they claimed that I owed them only $ 165—when I had served for nearly three years, one of the bosses came to me and said that my time was up. He happened to be the one who was said to be living with my wife. He gave me a new suit of overalls, which cost about 75¢, took me in a buggy and carried me across the Broad River into South Carolina, set me down and told me to “git.” I didn’t have a cent of money, and I wasn’t feeling well, but somehow I managed to get a move on me. I begged my way to Columbia. In two or three days I ran across a man looking for laborers to carry to Birmingham, and I joined his gang. I have been here in the Birmingham district since they released me, and I reckon I’ll die either in a coal mine or an iron furnace. It don’t make much difference which. Either is better than a Georgia peon camp. And a Georgia peon camp is hell itself!

The information filed in the criminal District Court charged in substance that (Homer) Plessy, being a passenger between two stations within the state of Louisiana, was assigned by officers of the company to the coach used by the race to which he did not belong. Plessy refused to move and was arrested for violation of the law. A suit was filed by Plessy in Louisiana State Court that questioned the constitutionality of the Louisiana law, judge John Ferguson denied the Plessy contention and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court as Plessy v. Ferguson.

The lawyer for the defense summed up the case in one sentence. “Instead of being intended to promote the general comfort and moral well being, this act is plainly and evidently intended to promote the happiness of one class by asserting its supremacy and the inferiority of another class.”

In the majority opinion of the Court, “separate but equal” accommodations for blacks constituted a “reasonable” use of state police power. Furthermore, it was said that the Fourteenth Amendment “could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color, or to enforce social … equality, or a co-mingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”

Justice John Marshall Harlan delivered a dissenting opinion in this case which proved to be a prophetic one:

“The judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case. The thin disguise of equal accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead anyone nor atone for the wrong this day done.”

In effect, at the time, the Supreme Court had effectively reduced the significance of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution which were designed to give blacks specific rights and protections. The ruling was termed the “separate but equal” doctrine of the Supreme Court and paved the way for segregation of blacks in all walks of life. The decision stood until the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

This case turns upon the constitutionality of an act of the General Assembly of the state of Louisiana, passed in 1890, providing for separate railway carriages for the white and colored races …

The constitutionality of this act is attacked upon the ground that it conflicts both with the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution, abolishing slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits certain restrictive legislation on the part of the states.

1. That it does not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, is too clear for argument. Slavery implies involuntary servitude–a state of bondage; the ownership of mankind as a chattel, or at least the control of the labor and services of one man for the benefit of another, and the absence of a legal right to the disposal of his own person, property, and services. …

A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races—a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color—has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or reestablish a state of involuntary servitude. Indeed, we do not understand that the Thirteenth Amendment is strenuously relied upon by the plaintiff in error in this connection.

2. By the Fourteenth Amendment, all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are made citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside; and the states are forbidden from making or enforcing any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, or shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or deny to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. …

The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which has been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of states where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced. …

So far, then, as a conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment is concerned, the case reduces itself to the question whether the statute of Louisiana is a reasonable regulation, and with respect to this there must necessarily be a large discretion on the part of the legislature. In determining the question of reasonableness it is at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and good order. Gauged by this standard, we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable or more obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment than the acts of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia, the constitutionality of which does not seem to have been questioned, or the corresponding acts of state legislatures.

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it. The argument necessarily assumes that if, as has been more than once the case, and is not unlikely to be so again, the colored race should become the dominant power in the state legislature, and should enact a law in precisely similar terms, it would thereby relegate the white race to an inferior position. We imagine that the white race, at least, would not acquiesce in this assumption. The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation and that equal rights cannot be secured to the Negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits, and a voluntary consent of individuals. … Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.

It is true that the question of the proportion of colored blood necessary to constitute a colored person, as distinguished from a white person, is one upon which there is a difference of opinion in the different states, some holding that any visible admixture of black blood stamps the person as belonging to the colored race … others that it depends upon the preponderance of blood … and still others that the predominance of white blood must only be in the proportion of three-fourths … But these are questions to be determined under the laws of each state and are not properly put in issue in this case. Under the allegations of his petition it may undoubtedly become a question of importance whether, under the laws of Louisiana, the petitioner belongs to the white or colored race.

The judgment of the court below is therefore, Affirmed.

In respect of civil rights, common to all citizens, the Constitution of the United States does not, I think, permit any public authority to know the race of those entitled to be protected in the enjoyment of such rights. Every true man has pride of race, and under appropriate circumstances when the rights of others, his equals before the law, are not to be affected, it is his privilege to express such pride and to take such action based upon it as to him seems proper. But I deny that any legislative body or judicial tribunal may have regard to the race of citizens when the civil rights of those citizens are involved. Indeed, such legislation, as that here in question, is inconsistent not only with that equality of rights which pertains to citizenship, national and state, but with the personal liberty enjoyed by everyone within the United States.

The Thirteenth Amendment does not permit the withholding or the deprivation of any right necessarily inhering in freedom. It not only struck down the institution of slavery as previously existing in the United States, but it prevents the imposition of any burdens or disabilities that constitute badges of slavery or servitude. It decreed universal civil freedom in this country. This Court has so adjudged. But that amendment having been found inadequate to the protection of the rights of those who had been in slavery, it was followed by the Fourteenth Amendment, which added greatly to the dignity and glory of the American citizenship, and to the security of personal liberty, by declaring that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside,” and that “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” These two amendments, if enforced according to their true intent and meaning, will protect all the civil rights that pertain to freedom and citizenship. Finally, and to the end that no citizen should be denied, on account of his race, the privilege of participating in the political control of his country, it was declared by the Fifteenth Amendment that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

These notable additions to the fundamental law were welcomed by the friends of liberty throughout the world. They removed the race line from our governmental systems.

It was said in argument that the statute of Louisiana does not discriminate against either race but prescribes a rule applicable alike to white and colored citizens. But this argument does not meet the difficulty. Everyone knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks, as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons. Railroad corporations of Louisiana did not make discrimination among whites in the matter of accommodation for travelers. The thing to accomplish was, under the guise of giving equal accommodation for whites and blacks, to compel the latter to keep to themselves while traveling in railroad passenger coaches. No one would be so wanting in candor as to assert the contrary. The fundamental objection, therefore, to the statute is that it interferes with the personal freedom of citizens. If a white man and a black man choose to occupy the same public conveyance on a public highway, it is their right to do so, and no government, proceeding alone on grounds of race, can prevent it without infringing the personal liberty of each.

It is one thing for railroad carriers to furnish, or to be required by law to furnish, equal accommodations for all whom they are under a legal duty to carry. It is quite another thing for government to forbid citizens of the white and black races from traveling in the same public conveyance, and to punish officers of railroad companies for permitting persons of the two races to occupy the same passenger coach. If a state can prescribe, as a rule of civil conduct, that whites and blacks shall not travel as passengers in the same railroad coach, why may it not so regulate the use of the streets of its cities and towns as to compel white citizens to keep on one side of a street and black citizens to keep on the other? Why may it not, upon like grounds, punish whites and blacks who ride together in streetcars or in open vehicles on a public road or street? Why may it not require sheriffs to assign whites to one side of a courtroom and blacks to the other? And why may it not also prohibit the commingling of the two races in the galleries of legislative halls or in public assemblages convened for the consideration of the political questions of the day? Further, if this statute of Louisiana is consistent with the personal liberty of citizens, why may not the state require the separation in railroad coaches of native and naturalized citizens of the United States, or of Protestants and Roman Catholics?

The answer given as the argument to these questions was that regulations of the kind they suggest would be unreasonable and could not, therefore, stand before the law. Is it meant that the determination of questions of legislative power depends upon the inquiry whether the statute whose validity is questioned is, in the judgment of the courts, a reasonable one, taking all the circumstances into consideration? A statute may be unreasonable merely because a sound public policy forbade its enactment. But I do not understand that the courts have anything to do with the policy or expediency of legislation. The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights, as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land, are involved. It is, therefore, to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a state to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race. …

The sure guarantee of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, national and state, of every right that inheres in civil freedom, and of the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States without regard to race. State enactments, regulating the enjoyment of civil rights, upon the basis of race, and cunningly devised to defeat legitimate results of the war, under the pretense of recognizing equality of rights, can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible, and to keep alive a conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned. …

The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.

If evils will result from the commingling of the two faces upon public highways established for the benefit of all, they will be infinitely less than those that will surely come from state legislation regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race. We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow-citizens, our equals before the law. The thin disguise of “equal” accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead anyone, nor atone for the wrong this day done. …

I am of opinion that the statute of Louisiana is inconsistent with the personal liberty of citizens, white and black, in that state, and hostile to both the spirit and letter of the Constitution of the United States. If laws of like character should be enacted in the several states of the Union, the effect would be in the highest degree mischievous. Slavery, as an institution tolerated by law, would, it is true, have disappeared from our country, but there would remain a power in the states, by sinister legislation, to interfere with the full enjoyment of the blessings of freedom; to regulate civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race, and to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens, now constituting a part of the political community called the People of the United States, for whom, and by whom through representatives, our government is administered. Such a system is inconsistent with the guarantee given by the Constitution to each state of a republican form of government, and may be stricken down by congressional action, or by the courts in the discharge of their solemn duty to maintain the supreme law of the land anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

For the reasons stated, I am constrained to withhold my assent from the opinion and judgment of the majority. …

The whites of Montgomery, Ala., knew J. C. Duke sounded the keynote of the situation—which they would gladly hide from the world, when he said in his paper, “The Herald,” five years ago: “Why is it that white women attract negro men now more than in former days? There was a time when such a thing was unheard of. There is a secret to this thing, and we greatly suspect it is the growing appreciation of white Juliets for colored Romeos.” Mr. Duke, like the “Free Speech” proprietors, was forced to leave the city for reflecting on the “honah” of white women and his paper suppressed; but the truth remains that Afro-American men do not always rape (?) white women without their consent.

Mr. Duke, before leaving Montgomery, signed a card disclaiming any intention of slandering Southern white women. The editor of the “Free Speech” has no disclaimer to enter, but asserts instead that there are many white women in the South who would marry colored men if such an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law. The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.

The “Cleveland Gazette” of January 16, 1892, publishes a case in point. Mrs. J. S. Underwood, the wife of a minister of Elyria, Ohio, accused an Afro-American of rape. She told her husband that during his absence in 1888, stumping the State for the Prohibition Party, the man came to the kitchen door, forced his way in the house and insulted her. She tried to drive him out with a heavy poker, but he overpowered and chloroformed her, and when she revived her clothing was torn and she was in a horrible condition. She did not know the man but could identify him. She pointed out William Offett, a married man, who was arrested and, being in Ohio, was granted a trial.

The prisoner vehemently denied the charge of rape, but confessed he went to Mrs. Underwood’s residence at her invitation and was criminally intimate with her at her request. This availed him nothing against the sworn testimony of a minister’s wife, a lady of the highest respectability He was found guilty, and entered the penitentiary, December 14, 1888, for fifteen years. Some time afterwards the woman’s remorse led her to confess to her husband that the man was innocent.

These are her words: “I met Offett at the Post Office. It was raining. He was polite to me, and as I had several bundles in my arms he offered to carry them home for me, which he did. He had a strange fascination for me, and I invited him to call on me. He called, bringing chestnuts and candy for the children. By this means we got them to leave us alone in the room. Then I sat on his lap. He made a proposal to me and I readily consented. Why I did so, I do not know, but that I did is true. He visited me several times after that and each time I was indiscreet. I did not care after the first time. In fact I could not have resisted, and had no desire to resist.”

When asked by her husband why she told him she had been outraged, she said: “I had several reasons for telling you. One was the neighbors saw the fellow here, another was, I was afraid I had contracted a loathsome disease, and still another was that I feared I might give birth to a Negro baby. I hoped to save my reputation by telling you a deliberate lie.” Her husband horrified by the confession had Offett, who had already served four years, released and secured a divorce.

There are thousands of such cases throughout the South, with the difference that the Southern white men in insatiate fury wreak their vengeance without intervention of law upon the Afro-Americans who consort with their women.

In Natchez, Miss., Mrs. Marshall, one of the creme de la creme of the city, created a tremendous sensation several years ago. She has a black coachman who was married, and had been in her employ several years. During this time she gave birth to a child whose color was remarked, but traced to some brunette ancestor, and one of the fashionable dames of the city was its godmother. Mrs. Marshall’s social position was unquestioned, and wealth showered every dainty on this child which was idolized with its brothers and sisters by its white papa. In course of time another child appeared on the scene, but it was unmistakably dark. All were alarmed, and “rush of blood, strangulation” were the conjectures, but the doctor, when asked the cause, grimly told them it was a Negro child. There was a family conclave, the coachman heard of it and leaving his own family went West, and has never returned. As soon as Mrs. Marshall was able to travel she was sent away in deep disgrace. Her husband died within the year of a broken heart.

From this exposition of the race issue in lynch law, the whole matter is explained by the well-known opposition growing out of slavery to the progress of the race. This is crystalized in the oft-repeated slogan: “This is a white man’s country and the white man must rule.” The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law. The raids of the Ku-Klux and White Liners to subvert reconstruction government, the Hamburg and Ellerton, S.C., the Copiah County Miss., and the Lafayette Parish, La., massacres were excused as the natural resentment of intelligence against government by ignorance.

Honest white men practically conceded the necessity of intelligence murdering ignorance to correct the mistake of the general government, and the race was left to the tender mercies of the solid South. Thoughtful Afro-Americans with the strong arm of the government withdrawn and with the hope to stop such wholesale massacres urged the race to sacrifice its political rights for sake of peace. They honestly believed the race should fit itself for government, and when that should be done, the objection to race participation in politics would be removed.

But the sacrifice did not remove the trouble, nor move the South to justice. One by one the Southern States have legally (?) disfranchised the Afro-American, and since the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill nearly every Southern State has passed separate car laws with a penalty against their infringement. The race regardless of advancement is penned into filthy, stifling partitions cut off from smoking cars. All this while, although the political cause has been removed, the butcheries of black men at Barnwell, S.C., Carrolton, Miss., Waycross, Ga., and Memphis, Tenn., have gone on; also the flaying alive of a man in Kentucky, the burning of one in Arkansas, the hanging of a fifteen year old girl in Louisiana, a woman in Jackson, Tenn., and one in Hollendale, Miss., until the dark and bloody record of the South shows 728 Afro-Americans lynched during the past 8 years. Not 50 of these were for political causes; the rest were for all manner of accusations from that of rape of white women, to the case of the boy Will Lewis who was hanged at Tullahoma, Tenn., last year for being drunk and “sassy” to white folks.