African American

 Some of the most vicious racial violence in

American history took place between 1917 and
1923.
 Black workers left the South and migrated to
urban centers.
 black veterans returned from World War I
insisting on the civil rights.
 In Chicago, Ill., Longview, Texas, Omaha, Neb.,
Rosewood, Fla., Tulsa, Okla., and Washington,
D.C., white mobs burned and killed in black
neighborhoods.
 The violence erupted after a 19-year-old
African American bootblack was arrested
for supposedly assaulting a white, female
teenager working as an elevator operator.
Police later concluded that the young man
had stumbled into the woman as he was
getting off the elevator. An inflammatory
newspaper article that helped touch off
the violence was headlined "To Lynch
Negro Tonight."
1960

1962 movie – story takes place

in 1932 Alabama.
 http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/who.htm
 http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm
On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks,
age 42, refused to obey bus driver's order that she give
up her seat to make room for a white passenger. It ignited
the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Rosa Parks in 1955, with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the background.
 In 1910, three out of every four black
Americans lived on farms, and nine out of
ten lived in the South. World War I
changed that profile. Hoping to escape
tenant farming, sharecropping, and
peonage, 1.5 million Southern blacks
moved to cities. During the 1910s and
1920s, Chicago's black population grew by
148 percent; Cleveland's by 307 percent;
Detroit's by 611 percent.
 Access to housing became a major source
of friction between blacks and whites
 Many cities adopted residential
segregation ordinances to keep blacks out
of predominantly white neighborhoods. In
1917, the Supreme Court declared
municipal resident segregation ordinances
unconstitutional. In response, whites
resorted to the restrictive covenant, a
formal deed restriction binding white
property owners in a given neighborhood
not to sell to blacks.
 Confined to all-black neighborhoods,
African Americans created cities-within-
cities during the 1920s. The largest was
Harlem, in upper Manhattan, where
200,000 African Americans lived in a
neighborhood that had been virtually all-
white fifteen years before.
 In World War I, a higher proportion of
black soldiers than white soldiers had lost
their lives
 The federal government denied black
soldiers the right to participate in the
victory march down Paris's Champs-
Elysees boulevard--even though black
troops from European colonies marched.
 Ten African American soldiers were among
the 70 blacks lynched in 1919. Twenty-
five anti-black riots took place that year.
Marcus Garvey
 A flamboyant and charismatic figure from
Jamaica, Garvey rejected integration and
preached racial pride and black self-help.
He declared that Jesus Christ and Mary
were black; he exhorted his followers to
glorify their African heritage and revel in
the beauty of their black skin. "We have a
beautiful history," he told his followers,
"and we shall create another one in the
future."
 In 1917, Garvey moved to New York and
organized the Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA), the first mass movement in
African American history.
 In the mid-1920s, Garvey was charged with mail
fraud, jailed, and finally deported. Still, the "Black
Moses" left behind a rich legacy. At a time when
magazines and newspapers overflowed with
advertisements for hair straighteners and skin
lightening cosmetics, Garvey's message of racial
pride struck a responsive chord in many African
Americans.
Stereotypes
 Mammy – “wet-nurse”

 Transformation of the black woman into a

caricature – non-threatening, homely,
domesticated, non-sexual.
Famous Mammy from Gone with the
Wind
Mammy Two Shoes, the black housemaid who made many appearances in the 1940s a
nd early 1950s
Tom and Jerry shorts, as seen in 1947's Old Rockin' Chair Tom. Over the years,
Tom and Jerry
cartoons featuring Mammy have been edited, modified, or withheld from broadcast in
various ways.
Mammy Two Shoes, in a scene from the Tom &
Jerry short Saturday Evening Puss.
Mammies became Aunt Jemimas
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
 “A round, black, shiny face is hers, so glossy as to
suggest the idea that she might have been washed
over with the whites of egg, like one of her own tea
rusks. Her whole plump countenance beams with
satisfaction and contentment from under a well-
starched checkered turban, bearing on it; however, if
we become the first cook of the neighborhood, as
Aunt Chloe was universally held and acknowledged
to be.”(p.31)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
 “she would station herself in the kitchen, and wait till it was
dished, and then spit in all the kettles and pans that had been
used for cooking. She did this to prevent the cook and her
children from eking out their meagre fare with the remains of
the gravy and other scrapings. The slaves could get nothing to
eat except what she chose to give them. Provisions were
weighed out by the pound and ounce, three times a day. I can
assure you she gave them no chance to eat wheat bread from
her flour barrel. She knew how many biscuits a quart of flour
would make, and exactly what size they ought to be. (p.15)
References:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_and_Jerry_(MGM
 http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Image:JemimasWeddingDay.jpg
 http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/
database/article_display.cfm?HHID=445
 STOWE, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New
York: New American Library, 1966.
 JACOBS, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl. Peguin, 2000.