7.

4 The Progressives

Directions: Your task is to write a THESIS STATEMENT in response to the prompt and then
CAPP each document. You only need to use 1 element of CAPP for each document, but all
elements of CAPP must be used at least once.

Prompt: Evaluate the extent of change in the goals and strategies of reform
movements that sought to improve the lives of African Americans between 1895 and
1922.

C- Context
A- Audience
P- Purpose
P- Point of View (Author)

As you read each of the seven documents that accompany this prompt, remember to ask yourself
the following questions:

● What is the document about? What historical situation does it describe or

reference? What background information do you need to better understand it?
● Who was the intended audience for this document? How might that have impacted
how the document was created or presented?
● What was the author’s purpose in writing this document? Go beyond the basics;
what did the author want the audience to do as a result of having this information?
● What point of view does the author of this document express?
● How does this document relate back to the prompt?
● Does this document remind you of any other historical developments?
● Can you connect this document to others, either as a corroborating or contradictory
perspective?
● Does your CAPP analysis answer the question “so what?” and identify the
relevance of that information with regards to the prompt?
7.4 The Progressives

DOCUMENT 1

Source: Booker T. Washington, The Atlanta Exposition Address, 1895

“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is
the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come
to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.
No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree
ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly
more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges. The opportunity
to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to
spend a dollar in an opera house….

I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid
at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my
race; only let this be constantly in mind that, while from representations in these
buildings of the product of field, of forest, of mine, of factory, letters, and art, much good
will come, yet far above and beyond material benefits will be that higher good, that, let us
pray God, will come, in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and
suspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience
among all classes to the mandates of law. This, coupled with our material prosperity, will
bring into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth.”

DOCUMENT 2

Source: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Talented Tenth, 1903

“You misjudge us because you do not know us. From the very first it has been the
educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass, and the
sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for
what is slavery but the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of
natural internal leadership? Negro leadership therefore sought from the first to rid the
race of this awful incubus that it might make way for natural selection and the survival of
the fittest. In colonial days came Phillis Wheatley and Paul Cuffe striving against the bars
of prejudice; and Benjamin Banneker, the almanac maker, voiced their longings…. Can
the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly raised than by the
effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and character? Was there ever a nation on
God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be
from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are
worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of human progress….”
7.4 The Progressives

DOCUMENT 3

Source: Ida B. Wells, “The Negro Problem from the Negro Point of View,” World Today, 1904

“Industrial education for the Negro is Booker T. Washington’s hobby. He believes that
for the masses of the Negro race an elementary education of the brain and a continuation
of the education of the hand is not only the best kind, but he knows it is the most popular
with the white South. He knows also that the Negro is the butt of ridicule with the
average white American, and that the aforesaid American enjoys nothing so much as a
joke which portrays the Negro as illiterate and [shortsighted]; a petty thief or a happy-go-
lucky inferior….

Does this mean that the Negro objects to industrial education? By no means. It simply
means that he knows by sad experience that industrial education will not stand him in
place of political, civil and intellectual liberty, and he objects to being deprived of
fundamental rights of American citizenship to the end that one school for industrial
training shall flourish. To him it seems like selling a race’s birthright for a mess of [thick
soup].”

DOCUMENT 4

Source: Committee on the Negro “Call” for a National Conference, Founding Document of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 1909

“If Mr. Lincoln could revisit this country in the flesh, he would be disheartened and discouraged.
He would learn that on January 1st, 1909, Georgia had rounded out a new confederacy by
disenfranchising the negro after the manner of all other Southern states. He would learn that the
Supreme Court of the United States, supposedly a bulwark of American liberties, had dodged
every opportunity to pass squarely upon this disfranchisement of millions, by laws avowedly
discriminatory and openly enforced in such manner that the white men may vote and black men
be without a vote in their government; he would discover, therefore, that taxation without
representation is the lot of millions of wealth-producing American citizens, in whose hands rests
the progress and welfare of an entire section of the country…. In many States … Lincoln would
find justice enforced, if at all, by judges elected by one element in a community to pass upon the
liberties and lives of another. He would see black men and women, for whose freedom a hundred
thousand soldiers gave their lives, set apart in trains, in which they pay first-class fares for third-
class service, in railway stations and in places of entertainment, while State after State declines
to do its elementary duty in preparing the negro through education for the best exercise of
citizenship.”
7.4 The Progressives

DOCUMENT 5

Source: The Crisis, September 1912

“At the convention of the Progressive party Negroes from the South were denied seats. In
Mississippi the delegates had been elected in a convention which was confined to white men. In
most of the other Southern States Negroes were excluded. In the case of Florida both the White
and colored delegations were excluded. South Carolina was not represented because only colored
men offered to organize the party. A plank was laid before the convention affirming the right of
the Negro to take part in government. This, after long debate, the platform committee refused to
adopt. A few colored delegates sat for the Northern States and made a hard fight for justice.
Three directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Mr. J. E.
Spingarn, Mr. Henry Moskowitz and Miss Jane Addams, worked strenuously, but without avail,
to change the attitude of the convention.

In the September election, Ohio will vote on two proposals touching the colored people.
Proposal number 23 is to enfranchise women and to strike from the constitution the prohibition
against voting by other persons than white men. Proposal number 24 does not enfranchise
women, but does drop the word ‘white.’

The question of Negroes voting in Southern ‘white’ primaries continually comes to the fore. In
Virginia, the new Byrd law apparently does not exclude the colored people from primary
elections. In Texas the State attorney-general has landed down an opinion that Negroes may be
prohibited from voting in such elections.”

DOCUMENT 6

Source: Congressional Anti-Lynching Bill, 1918 (Defeated in the Senate in 1922)

“SEC. 3. That any State or municipal officer charged with the duty or who possesses the
power or authority as such officer to protect the life of any person that may be put to
death by any mob or riotous assemblage, or who has any such person in his charge as a
prisoner, who fails, neglects, or refuses to make all reasonable efforts to prevent such
person from being so put to death, or any State or municipal officer charged with the duty
of apprehending or prosecuting any person participating in such mob or riotous
assemblage who fails, neglects, or refuses to make all reasonable efforts to perform his
duty in apprehending or prosecuting to final judgment under the laws of such State all
persons so participating except such, if any, as are to have been held to answer for such
participation in any district court of the United States, as herein provided, shall be guilty
of a felony, and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by imprisonment not
exceeding five years or by a fine of not exceeding $5,000, or by both such fine and
imprisonment.”
7.4 The Progressives

DOCUMENT 7

Source: NAACP, The Shame of America (a full-page advertisement in the New York Times),
1922
7.4 The Progressives

Analysis

Complex Thesis Statement

Document CAPP Skill Analysis