With Jim Crow dominating the landscape, education increasingly under attack, and few opportunities for black college graduates, the Great Migration of the 1920s saw a significant migration of educated blacks from the South, spurred by publications such as The Chicago Defender, which encouraged black Americans to move north. Black codes were strict local and state laws that detailed when, where, and how former slaves were allowed to work, and for how much compensation. Codes emerged throughout the South as a legal way to enslave black citizens, disenfranchise them, control where they lived and how they traveled, and confiscate children for labor. The first collection of spirituals of the Fisk Singers was published in 1872. An enlarged and reset collection appeared in 1875 as an appendix to a history of the Jubilee Singers. These editions, which were sold as souvenirs at concerts, disseminated the spirituals in printed form, as the Jubilee Singers themselves distributed in the performance. This publication contains only one spiritual song sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, although the library`s music collections contain many recordings of the singers as well as published music. Of all the crops grown in the South before the Civil War, including sugar, rice, and corn, cotton was the main source of money. Millions of hectares were used for cotton production after the invention of cotton ginning in 1793.
As more and more cotton land was cultivated, especially in Mississippi and Texas, the demand for slaves exploded. In 1860, a mature male slave cost between $1,000 and $2,000. A mature woman would sell a few hundred dollars less. An ordinary working day costs two hundred pounds. The hands should be in the cotton field as soon as it is daylight in the morning, and except for ten or fifteen minutes given to them at noon to swallow their amount of cold bacon, they should not remain inactive for a moment until it is too dark to see. The day`s work finished in the field, the baskets are “toted”, that is, transported to the ginning house, where the cotton is weighed. It doesn`t matter how tired and tired he may be. A slave never approaches the gin house with his cotton basket, but with fear. If it has too little weight. He knows he has to be whipped. And if he has exceeded it by ten or twenty pounds, his master will, in all likelihood, measure the task of the next day accordingly.
The adoption of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments was partly responsible for the growing attention paid by women`s rights activists to the right to vote. Asians, Irish, and other American immigrants were also excluded from public life, isolated in separate schools, and discriminated against in terms of employment and housing. They have also suffered from the ban on intermarriage and restrictions on ownership. Unlike blacks, Chinese were excluded from immigration after 1882, while many other Asians were limited in numbers who could immigrate legally, and none were allowed to become citizens. Native Americans fought against the tide of boundary and western expansion and broke treaty obligations. He identified as African-American, but had a complexion so bright that he could pass for white. He infiltrated violent mobs in the South and witnessed numerous lynchings. In 1931, he succeeded Johnson as secretary of the NAACP and led the organization through its most dynamic decades of growth. Under his leadership, the NAACP launched a sustained legal campaign against segregation and disenfranchisement in the South, developed an alliance with unions, and established a strong lobbying presence in the nation`s capital that would prove crucial to the passage of civil rights laws. A native of Baltimore, Thurgood Marshall graduated from Howard Law School in 1933 and joined the NAACP as an assistant counsel in 1936. Marshall established his Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. in 1939 to litigate cases and raise funds exclusively for the legal program.
Marshall`s legal team, Robert L. Carter, Jack Greenberg, Constance Baker Motley and Franklin Williams, led the legal campaign against discrimination from 1938 to 1961. The NAACP won twenty-seven of the thirty-two cases heard by the Supreme Court. Marshall`s greatest victory was the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. School Board. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court. The positive publicity generated by the Pink Franklin case attracted new supporters for the NAACP. Among them were Joel E. Spingarn (1875-1939), chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and his brother Arthur (1878-1971), a lawyer. In January 1911, with Joel`s help, the NAACP organized its first branch in Harlem.
The branch established a vigilance committee, which became the National Law Committee, to deal with “injustice in the courts, as far as the Negro is concerned.” Arthur worked pro bono because the NAACP could not afford to hire lawyers on a regular basis, and often persuaded other prominent lawyers to volunteer. He was chairman of the committee until 1939. Among the committee members were future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and prominent black lawyer Charles Houston. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt`s New Deal offered African Americans more federal aid than at any time since Reconstruction. Nevertheless, New Deal laws and policies continued to permit significant discrimination. In the mid-thirties, the NAACP launched a legal campaign against de jure segregation (by law), focusing on inequities in public education. By 1936, the majority of black voters had abandoned their historical loyalty to the Republican Party and joined with unions, peasants, progressives, and ethnic minorities to secure President Roosevelt`s overwhelming re-election. The election played an important role in shifting the balance of power within the Democratic Party from its southern bloc of white conservatives to this new coalition. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, two more years of war, the service of African-American troops, and the defeat of the Confederacy, the nation was still unprepared to address the issue of full citizenship for its newly liberated black population. Congressional reconstruction, which lasted from 1866 to 1877, was aimed at reorganizing the Southern states after the Civil War, providing the means for their readmission to the Union, and defining ways in which whites and blacks could live together in a non-slave society. The South, however, viewed reconstruction as a humiliating, even vengeful imposition and did not welcome it.
Charles Hamilton Houston was the chief strategist of the NAACP`s legal campaign, which culminated in Brown v. Board of Education. Born in Washington, D.C., he earned a JDS degree from Harvard in 1923, where he studied with Felix Frankfurter. As associate dean of Howard Law School, Houston trained a generation of civil rights lawyers. In 1934, the Joint Committee of the NAACP and the American Fund for Public Service commissioned Houston to conduct a legal campaign against discrimination in interstate education and transportation.