[Music] [Music] Major funding for the rise and fall of Jim Crow is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. expanding America's understanding for more than 30 years of who we were, who we are, and who we will be. And by support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people. [Music] Additional funding is provided by the John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Corporate support is made possible by New York Life. With vision and determination, one generation dreamed of creating a better world for the next. New York Life is proud to bring you remarkable stories of dedication, struggle, and triumph. [Music] As the 20th century approached, innovation, expansion, and optimism seemed passwords to America's future. In 1898, America flexed its muscles as a world power, declaring war against Spain. White regiments and black regiments fought shouldertosh shoulder. It was glorious. We officers could have taken our black heroes in our arms. Lieutenant John Persing. Black Americans embraced the war with optimism. We left our homes, wives, mothers, sisters, and friends to break down that infernal race prejudice and to have a page in history ascribed to us. But fighting infernal race prejudice would be far more difficult than fighting Spain. In 1898, the United States Supreme Court, having already allowed southern states the right to segregate blacks, now approved denying them the vote. [Music] In the same year, most of the blacks living in the South work the white man's land, averaging less than a dollar a day. [Music] In 1898, 101 black men were lynched in the South. [Music] But one southern city nestled comfortably along the Capefir River of North Carolina seems to have escaped the worst excesses of the Jim Crow years. Wilmington seemed to be a racially moderate city, a condition brought about by economic prosperity and a strong black and white middle class. The best feeling among the races prevailed in Wilmington. The Negro and his white brother walked their beats on the police force. White and black committeemen sat down together in the same council. White and black teachers taught in the same school. David Fulton. It was a booming place for African-Americans. They simply felt as if they were making a contribution to society 33 years after they were freed through emancipation proclamation. It was a prospering African-American community in the largest city of the state. They had attained some success in the middle classes. There was a growing merkantile class. What happened was a number of blacks were able to transfer skills that they learned in slavery to private enterprise on the plantation. They were blacksmiths, they were carpenters, they were teamsters. They had all these different skills that they learned in slavery which they weren't being compensated for. But now they were able to take those skills and transfer them into business. And that's what happened. that first generation out of slavery sort of bought the dream. They thought that they would get education, they would rise, they would be successful, and that that kind of performance would prove their manhood and womanhood. One successful Wilmington African-American was Alex Manley, publisher of the Wilmington Daily Record, the only black daily newspaper in North Carolina. He says his relationship with whites is good and there's every reason to believe that white merchants advertise extensively in the daily record. But he clearly sees the future place of black people as being full equality. There's no question about that. And he's constantly encouraging them to become equals economically, politically, socially, culturally. And there were many whites who were povertystricken. But there were many blacks who had very good paying jobs. Of course, they had their carriages and their nice dress and they would shop and they felt as if they had come a long way and they were beginning to feel themselves in a prideful sort of way and I I think to a degree in an arrogant sort of way. So there we had much tension created. How dare you think that you are so much better than I am? It's partly economic competition, but it's also a a a grave concern that black people are beginning to feel the equals to white people. White people became quite alarmed because if they were going to subjugate black people, they had to prove that no black person was capable of the things that these people were doing. Blacks had attained a good deal of power in Wilmington in 1898. They were the majority of the population and of the voting population. Many of the blacks at that time held elected positions and very prominent municipal positions. They were appointed by the Republicans. Most of the Republicans at that time were black justices of the peace, aldermen, magistrates, firemen, public health workers. Even though these might not appear to be very high prestige positions, at least they were examples to the black community and particularly to the youth of what black people could be. Whites were fearful that the African-Americans would begin to control the city of Wilmington since they were in the majority. We have to look at two very basic issues. You have to look at politics and you have to look at economics. And whoever controls those two are in power. And it was all about power, about political power and economic power. In the statewide and local elections of 1898, the Democratic Party, the Party of White Supremacy, was determined to end black political power in North Carolina. It will be the meanest, vilest, dirtiest campaign since 1876. The slogan of the Democratic Party, from the mountains to the sea, will be but one word. [ __ ] Daniel Shank, Democrat. They argue that only the Democrats can save North Carolina from what they call negro rule. Fernold Simmons who would go on to be a United States senator, Charles Aok, who would go on to be governor of North Carolina, and Josephus Daniels, who was editor of the Raleigh News and Observer. The three of them got together in a hotel and hatched a campaign that would talk about white women being endangered by black men holding office. The white press portrayed blacks as monsters, representing them as an incubus, a mythical figure that raped women while they slept. White women appeared in parades, on floats, in white dresses, holding up signs saying, "Protect us." deliberately fueling racial fires. A white newspaper published an inflammatory speech given by a leading Georgia feminist Rebecca Felton. If it requires lynching to protect women's dearest possession from ravening drunken human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand negroes a week if it is necessary. Manley's blood boils and he dashes off his own editorial that conservative black people in Wilmington considered to be a truth unwisely said. Our experience with poor white women in the country teaches us that the women of that race are not any more particular in the manner of clandestine meetings with colored men than white men with colored women. You leave your goods out of doors and then complain because they are taken away. Alex Manley. The crowning thing that hit the white psychic nerve center was the very last sentence of the editorial where he says, "If white men continue to initiate sex with black women, sooner or later, white women are going to start to do the very same thing with black men." And that was not the political thing to say. Uh that just drove white men absolutely crazy. A former Confederate officer, Alfred Wadell, called for violence. We are resolved to change the conditions under which we live if we have to choke the Cape the River with carcasses. White men appeared in rallies all over the state wearing red shirts, which uh was sort of a prefascist kind of outfit that they had borrowed from South Carolina. White employers are threatening to fire black employees who register to vote. So, there's massive economic intimidation going on. An organization of black women urge black men to vote or risk disgrace. Every negro who refuses to register this next Tuesday in order that he may vote. We shall make it our business to deal with him in a way that shall not be pleasant. He shall be branded as a white- livered coward who would sell his liberty. Blacks meant to win by legal means, whites by any means. We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with guns. If we have not the votes to carry the election, we must carry it by force. If you find a negro voting, tell him to leave the poll. If he refuses, kill him. Alfred Wadell. Despite all the intimidation, many, many black voters were turning out and were voting. So, the word goes out from Democratic headquarters that if we can't intimidate the black votes and get a majority that way, we will simply stuff the ballot boxes. And that's exactly what they do. Every black candidate in North Carolina was defeated. But in Wilmington, the political victory did not satisfy white anger. A mob set Manley's newspaper on fire, and every black official was driven out of office. They could not wait until it was time for the change of office to take place. They decided to take control of everything. It was basically a coup. They just took the offices away from the duly elected office holders. So there are no longer any black officials in Wilmington city government. The coup was followed by a massacre. Firing began and it seemed like a mighty battle in wartime. They went on firing. It seemed at every living negro poured volleys into fleeing men like sportsmen firing at rabbits in an open field. The shrieks and screams of children, of mothers and wives, caused the blood of the most inhuman person to creep. Men lay on the street dead and dying while members of their race walked by unable to do them any good. Reverend Alan Kirk. They went after uh business owners. They went after voters. They went after doctors and black lawyers. Those are the people they ran out of town because those are the people they saw as getting out of their place and therefore encouraging other black people to get out of their places. Despite the odds against them, some blacks fought back. Others protested to the federal government. Blacks from all over the United States wrote letters to the president of the United States begging him to intervene and to stop the violence and the killing in Wilmington. President William McKinley remained silent. I think it showed that the national government had lost its commitment to protecting the civil and political rights of blacks, especially in the south. Charles Francis Bourke, a northern reporter, witnessed blacks fleeing from the city. In the woods and swamps, hundreds of innocent, terrified men and women wander about, fearful of the vengeance of whites, fearful of death. Without money or food, insufficiently clothed, they fled from civilization and sought refuge in the wilderness. In the night, I hear children crying and the voice cruning a mournful song. And those of us who were left found our places and stayed there. [Music] The destruction of black political power in North Carolina unleashed a wave of racial discrimination triumphantly announced in newspapers and printed on postcards. Facilities that were once integrated were now legally segregated. Public transportation and parks, restaurants and theaters, jobs and juries. The relative oasis that North Carolina had been for blacks was now a desert of white supremacy. But 18-year-old Charlotte Hawkins Brown was one young woman who refused to accept this way of life. Jim Crow was a challenge to be overcome, not an obstacle to prevent her from fulfilling her mission. I sit in the Jim Crow car, but my mind is rejuvenated to strive harder, to build a race that will someday rise in majesty and break down every wall of segregation in American life. Charlotte Hawkins Brown leaving Massachusetts where she had been educated, she returned to her home state of North Carolina to teach. When Charlotte Hawkins got off the train, there was no station. So, she had no idea where she was. It was in the middle of the woods. So, I think it was a little fear. You know, this is not New England. I'm in a different place. Where am I? I'm in this state. I have no idea. I don't remember. Yes, it's my home state, but where do I go from here? I think she adjusted well. In 1901, she converted an old blacksmith shed into a schoolhouse and opened the Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute. For the next two decades, she struggled to raise money to build her school into an outstanding educational institution. Because white donors were reluctant to support a school that developed minds rather than domestic skills. Brown had to use subtifuge. When Brown begins teaching there, uh, she has to say that she has a vocational school. I think the reason that whites wanted African-Ameans to continue the agriculture and domestic skills was it kept them at a certain level. I mean, it didn't it did not give them the education to in you know, inspire them to do more. Her teachers said that you would pretend to have a vocational school on the outside and then you would go in your classroom and teach them French or Latin or anything that you knew. As people said, she had high fallutin ideas and and high aims for her students. and she was teaching the three Rs when she was also uh in intent on teaching them leadership qualities. During the early years, in order to raise money for the school, Dr. Brown had to come up with some type of um fundraising solution and she came up with letter writing, writing to all of the northerners, telling them what they've learned at the school, what they were doing, writing and requesting support, anything. I mean, anything that they could give at that time. Dear Mrs. Worth, I have worried your patients, no doubt, but I have delivered the message of my soul to you. It is not the message of an individual, but the cry of a struggling race. Please make all checks payable to the treasurer, Charlotte Hawkins Brown. I am sending you $10 for your school, which I hope will be put to good use. I advise you to instruct your girls to be virtuous, for moral looseness is an unfortunate quality of many young women of your race. Her life was a balancing act. her life was an act of trying to uh appease white people, white liberals who would give the school money and who would try to help the school in other ways and then on the other hand to try to work in an African-American freedom struggle that she clearly saw as ongoing that she clearly saw herself as part of. She fought fights that people didn't usually fight in those days. They just went along with the system. But I think that it if at any time she could go against the system, that's what Dr. Brown did. She took them to the movie theater where she would have special showing so they didn't have to sit up in the balcony. She was, of course, as we always said, a woman ahead of her time. She was smart enough to use every opportunity to to develop the students. Yeah. She always taught us that you can be as good as anybody else regardless of what what your color is. She taught us that and and and and we appreciated that cuz when you know you go around thinking that you can't do this and you can't that you you will never be nothing or something like that. She made it told us it was wasn't true. We could be anything we wanted to be. Recognizing the need of a cultural approach to life, I have devoted my life to establishing for negro youth something superior to Jim Crowism. Sometimes the prejudice is so great I feel that I can't stand it a day longer. But then I look into the delicate faces of the children and determined to stick it out no matter what the cost. Charlotte Hawkins Brown. She never accepted that she was going to have to live like this and she never accepted the fact that her students were going to have to live like this. Charlotte Hawkins Brown tried to shelter her children from the racial storms raging about them. [Music] Others did not escape. Like 12-year-old Sai Williams, sentenced to 20 years on a convict lease gang for taking a horse he was too small to ride. 8-year-old Will Evans, who received two years for stealing change off a store counter, and Mary Gay, sentenced to 30 days for taking a hat. She was 6 years old. By the turn of the century, tens of thousands of Americans, one quarter of whom were children, had been condemned to hard labor in convict lease camps. Convict leasing was slavery's replacement. It has been described as worse than slavery and in every respect it really was. What typically would happen is that some land owner, somebody who needed workers for the mines, someone who was going to build a railroad would come into a community and say, "I need, you know, 600 uh men." And uh these companies would pay the states a certain amount of money for this labor. And it was a very profitable system for economic development in the deep south. To supply the demand for convict labor, sheriffs arrested blacks for misdemeanor and vagrancy. Judges sentenced them to far harsher terms than whites charged with the same crime. For petty theft, a white man might receive 90 days in jail. A black man 2 years on a convict lease gang. to get the quota. Uh, law enforcement would not think twice about finding any able-bodied person, including 9, 10, 11, 12y old kids. They cleared snake and alligator swamps, dug coal and gas fil mines, built railroads, and tapped tarpentine trees in 100° plus heat. Men work 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week in conditions that one convict described as nine kinds of hell. Sometimes housed in rolling iron cages like those used for circus animals, fed the worst of food, denied medical treatment, men died from malaria, scurvy, frostbite, sunstroke, dysentery, snake bite, and shackle poisoning. They were blown to bits in tunnel explosions, buried in mountain landslides, drowned in swamps and rivers. Others were shot or tortured to death. There was no need to clothe. There was no need to feed. There was no need to protect the lives of these men and women and children. your life didn't have that sort of economic value, long-term economic value that plantation owners assigned to slaves. At a time when over 100 men a year were lynched, thousands more were dying in convict lease camps. Death rates in some camps were as high as 45%, seldom below 15%. And while the poor were its main victims, no black person was safe. This was about sustaining the dynamics of slavery through another mechanism. Instead of calling you a slave, you were called a criminal, a convict. And what that status meant is that people in power could do with you whatever they wanted. It defined a period in American history that in my judgment is still the most brutal and the darkest periods for African-American people. [Music] John Darlard, a psychologist and student of the South, observed, "Every negro knows that he is under a kind of sentence of death. He does not know when his time may come. [Music] It may never come, but it also may be any time. Violence is really essential to this whole system of segregation. [Music] It's the signal that whites are sending that says you're not safe even if you go by the rules. You're never safe. Even your body isn't your own space. We we can take everything and we we can dominate everything. Oh freedom. Oh freedom. [Music] You cannot confront something as horrific as Jim Crow, something as traumatizing as lynching without some broader vision, uh without some transcendental vision. [Music] And the church gave people that vision and the music in the church allowed that vision to find expression. You know, you get so beat down without any hope at all that someone's going to protect you, that's going to save you. And music obviously became uh a way to signal to yourself that you are still a human being even if you're being treated as something less than human. And to signal to others that you cannot take away the core of this creative, living, breathing spirit. and go home to my Lord and be free. [Music] In the period after the Civil War, New Orleans was considered the most racially liberal city in the South. In the period of reconstruction, New Orleans uh basically chartered freedom for black people here. Liberty, infranchisement, interracial marriage, public education, improved literacy, uh to some extent economic opportunity had all been made available to them. You had integration, not only race integration, but integration by class. wellto-do whites living in close proximity to poor whites, working-class blacks living in close proximity to blacks and whites who were better off than they was. In the 1890s, Jim Crow came to New Orleans. Public transportation was legally segregated. Omar Pie, a creole of color, challenged the law all the way to the United States Supreme Court. PI was not an accident. There were activists in New Orleans who were very determined to challenge uh Jim Crow laws in that city. And when they passed the Railway Separation Act and required that black people sit in the back of railway cars, there were people who thought that this was illegal and and immoral and they sought out to challenge it. He was purposely chosen to be a plaintiff in the case because he looked white and he had been mistakenly seated in the white section of the train. The whole argument was that until he identified himself as black, there was no problem. Only when he told him that he was colored was the problems and he was told either he sat in a section reserved for color or he had to leave the train. Pie like Rosa Parks uh uh was in the first class car of that railway to challenge uh this law. It's really startling when you think about that because here 35 years after slavery is a very organized political movement led entirely by African-Americans aimed at confronting Jim Crow through the legal procedures through the legitimate procedures that change in American society. [Music] In 1896, the court in a landmark case known as Pie versus Ferguson sanctioned segregation as long as the separate facilities were equal. PI was an extraordinarily significant case. It legalized Jim Crow. It legalized separate but equal. This was the court that spoke not just for the South, but for the whole of the United States. It could have been an opportunity for America to move up the timeline for racial reform and civil rights in this country. Instead, it was a ter terrific setback. What pie basically says is that whatever the state is doing, the federal government is not going to get involved. They're going to let the state legislate segregation if they want to. Two years later, the court allowed states to legally disqualify blacks from voting. [Music] In Louisiana alone, the black vote dropped from 130,000 to 5,000. By 1899, 1900, it was becoming apparent African-Amean rights and opportunities would be eroding from this point on. As political possibilities were taken away, vehicles for self-expression became all the more important in the black community, many people who could not express themselves politically found that music was a perfect vehicle for doing something individual, a different kind of self-determination, if you will. Taking the rules of 19th century music making, which was all about reading music, and tossing them and saying, "I'm going to do this music my way instead." Jazz burst forth like a trumpet sound. The kings and princes of jazz like Sydney Basher, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong would pour forth wave after wave of joyous sound. What music did was to challenge the prevailing racial biases that black people were inferior, that they didn't have the qualities of thought and creativity and and mind that would allow them to ever evolve into a race that could be treated fairly and equally. And what music did was to challenge that because here was this enormously creative and quite compelling art form evolving in a way that was quite captivating to anyone who heard it, black or white. It gave strength to the idea that black people were capable of all kind of greatness. And it challenged the lie. There was over the course of the first years of the 20th century a rising negrophobia as it was called. A negrophobic attitude would look at a black individual and only see beneath whatever middle class exterior might be there. Deep down there is a savage. And only the control and the discipline and the surveillance of whites was able to keep that black individual in check. Almost all facets of American society had given in to that notion of racism. History, biology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, all talked about African-Americans as being inferior, as as being not equal, as being not worthy of equal treatment. One of the things that's happening at the same time is national advertising and all of those things that are associated with inferiority are being attached to the black race. The message in the image was that African-Americans were criminals or on the on the edge of criminality. These images often are distorted African-Americans. They're not real human beings. There's something out of kilter. There's something not right about them. Large heads, often with big lips, bulging eyes. Something's wrong. All of these things are working to make real the notion of African-Americans as inferior beings, as an inferior race, as people not like white people, but as people separate from them. But one man won respect from whites because he publicly advised blacks to work within the system of Jim Crow. He was Booker T. Washington. By the turn of the century, Washington had become one of the most popular figures in America. He journeyed up and down the country preaching the gospel of material wealth, moral virtue, and Christian character while warning his audiences to avoid agitating for political and civil rights. He said that the best thing to do about civil rights was to let them alone and work at making a businessman of the Negro. He started the National Business League while he was in Tuskegee so that people could learn how to start a business, make a business develop and prosper. When I went to high school, they explored all the trades. The girls explored cooking, sewing, and handiccrafts. The first two years, and the last two years, they specialized. The last two years of my high school, I specialized in advanced dress making. so that when I graduated, my high school diploma, like your college degree, shows that I have a skill in advanced dress making. But Washington's optimism and his passion for industrial education was not shared by all. At Atlanta University in Georgia, the highly respected Harvard educated sociologist and scholar of black life, Dr. Web Duboce saw that despite Washington's consiliatory efforts, racial terror continued to rage across the South. [Music] Although Deoce had once supported Washington's program, he decided the time had come to challenge him. In 1903 he wrote the souls of black folk with a chapter Mr. Booert. Washington and others. It was just this wonderful attack on all those who supported Jim Crow including Booert Washington and saying in a very forthright way we cannot give up the right to vote. We cannot give up civil and political equality. We cannot accept being an unequal subordinate race in America. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil, and social. And until we get these rights, we will never cease to protest and to assail the ears of America. Web Duboce. By the early 1900s, Washington was the most influential black man in America. His critics called him King Booker. He received financial support from powerful industrialists including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. He was embraced by President Theodore Roosevelt. All of them enthusiastically endorsed his program of black economic uplift within the framework of black subordination and Jim Crow. As Washington's power increased, De Boyce's criticism became sharper, more personal. He has accepted revised constitutions. He has acquiesed in the Jim Crow car policy. He has kept dumb as an oyster in regard to peage. He has even discovered that colored people can better afford to be lynched than white people can afford to lynch them. Web Duboce In 1906, Washington visited Atlanta, a city in which blacks had achieved success. Atlanta was a boom town, one of the most prosperous cities in the country. In fact, the only city that exceeded Atlanta for rate of growth was Los Angeles. Booker T. Washington did look at Atlanta as a model for the kind of philosophy that he used about what were considered ideal race relations. Atlanta was considered the most progressive city in the south. And what they could point to uh was concrete evidence. More negro colleges than any other city in the United States. more African-American publication than almost any other city. And people took real pride in the accomplishments of black people. It made us uh feel vindicated and and and validated. My dad was so proud when he had visitors come to our home. He would take them on a tour of all of the schools, drive through the neighborhoods. so and so built that house and he'd show them how blacks lived in Atlanta. Booker T. Washington took a few success stories and tried to use that to show that in fact African-Americans if you played by the rules that I've established that in fact you too could be successful. That was of course not the reality. The reality was that Atlanta was one of the most racially segregated cities in the south. Web de Boyce is one of the most intelligent, eloquent figures in the country. He's a t-shirt Atlanta University, a dignified man. He always wears a suit. If he has an appointment with an attorney in the Candler building, he can't just go in and get in the elevator, no matter what individual merits he has. He has to wait for the freight elevator or walk up the stairs. the white elevator operator is not going to take him upstairs. That's a place where do the boyce leaves the affluent black community, goes into the white community and has to respect forms of segregation of Jim Crow hierarchy where his affluence, his intelligence, his education means nothing. Racial tensions were intensified when Thomas Dixon's melodramatic play, The Clansmen, opened in Atlanta. Dixon's play presented in stark contrast the two strongest images in the South at this time. One image is of the innocent, virginal, defenseless 18-year-old Anglo-Saxon female. The other is the dark-skinned, learing, lustful, criminal, degenerate black man. And the latter is praying upon the former. And for him, there was only one solution to this, the clansmen. The plague glorified the Ku Klux Clan and denigrated blacks. Throughout the week of September 17th, the press reported incidents of rape, almost all of which later proved to be false. By Saturday the 22nd, white tempers were at the boiling point. The streets were swelling with people. Extras were flooding the street corners. Second assault, third assault. At one point, a man got up on a box and started delivering a speech. We've got to do something to protect our white women. Packs of white men and boys began rushing from the train stations, from the hotel lobbies, from the theaters to the spot. You have by now about 5,000 people. The cries of revenge, of anger, of white retaliation against blacks increase. A black messenger boy rides by on a bicycle. Someone knocks him down. He gets up and tries to defend himself. 10 people swarm in upon him and beat him senseless, leave him bleeding in the gutter. This only excites greater blood lust. So the mob begins to spread out. Packs of 100, 200 begin marching up and down the alleyways, trying to find black men and women working in the shops, dragging them outside and beating them. Street cars bringing black citizens into the city. Mobs surround the car. If a black man or woman didn't fight back, he would be knocked down, kicked around, and then usually left alone. If he fought back, he was dead. This was downtown Atlanta. This was a few blocks from the police station. The state capital was a few blocks up on the hill. The governor is up there. As the mob rampaged, 13-year-old Walter White and his postman father, who were often mistaken for Caucasian, were driving through downtown Atlanta. Their fair complexion allowed them to safely pass through the riers. Later, White would recall how they prepared to defend their home as the mob approached. In a voice as quiet as if he were asking me to pass the sugar, my father said, "Son, don't shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn. And then don't you miss." In that instant, there opened up in me a great awareness. I knew then who I was. I was a negro. A person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in poverty and ignorance. It made no difference how intelligent or talented my millions of brothers and I were, nor how virtuously we lived. A curse like that of Judas was on us. Walter White's experience would eventually lead him to become one of the foremost civil rights leaders in America. The militia finally arrived in Atlanta to restore order. After the riot, Washington came to the city and he tried to find a silver lining to what had happened. But in truth, this time Washington's consiliatory attitude, it just didn't hold water for for many people. This was Atlanta. This was supposedly the experiment that would prove what you projected in terms of racial uplift. We would cooperate with the white community economically. We wouldn't agitate too much politically. We wouldn't demand the vote that much. We would try to follow a good Protestant work ethic, buy a little property, gain a little capital. We did that in Atlanta. And look what happened. The riot reinforced the voice's growing resolve to exchange his scholars's life for an agitators. And in fact, uh, the Atlanta riot convinced him more than anything else that the Atlanta or the South was not going to change anytime soon. But if the South would not change, the boys would. He moved to New York in 1910 to join forces with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, a newly formed interracial organization that would become the driving force in a civil rights movement. Appointed the editor of the NAACP's journal, The Crisis, The Voice was determined to forge the magazine into a weapon against Jim Crow. The crisis battled racial discrimination, exposed atrocities and outrages against blacks, supported women's rights, and promoted race pride in the arts and literature. Within 4 months, the number of subscribers jumped from 1,000 to 6,000 and eventually soared to over 100,000. Dubo startled his readers in 1912 when he supported Woodro Wilson for president. Even though Wilson was a Democrat and a southerner, Wilson, he said, had promised fairness and justice for blacks and he seemed a man of his word. But the boyce warned Wilson what blacks expected from him. We want to be treated as men. We want to vote. We want our children to be educated. We want lynching stopped. We want no longer to be herded as cattle on street cars and railroads. We want the right to earn a living and own property. Be not untrue, President Wilson, to the highest ideals of American democracy. Immediately after his election, Wilson gave the green light to three southern cabinet members to segregate their departments. One white supervisor boasted, "There are no government positions for Negroes in the South. A negro's place is in the cornfield. De Boyce attacked Wilson. The federal government has set the colored apart as if mere contact with them were contamination. Behind screens and closed doors, they now sit as though lepous. How long will it be before the hateful epithets of [ __ ] and Jim Crow are openly applied? Web de Boyce. [Music] In 1915, The Clansmen was made into a motion picture, Birth of a Nation. The NAACP launched a major campaign to ban it as violence erupted in several cities where the film played. In Lafayette, Indiana, a white man killed a black teenager after seeing the movie. Elsewhere, gangs of whites attacked blacks on the street and the Ku Klux Clan was reborn. One thing about the birth of a nation and its link to Klux Clan recruiting is not so much the numerical quality of it, but rather that ideologically it gave northerners some form of rhetoric uh that helped them understand the racism they were already believing. Anyway, in the midst of the battle against Birth of a Nation, Book T. Washington died. Duboce praised Washington for the good he had done, but said black people had made little progress under his leadership. Duboce's battle with Washington was over. But his quarrel with Wilson continued. Wilson declared war on Germany in 1917. Although he supported the president, the boys did so reluctantly. He knew black soldiers would suffer in America's Jim Crow army. In 1917, black soldiers of the famed 24th Infantry Third Battalion were assigned to Fort Logan outside of Houston, Texas. Houston had the largest black community in the state of Texas at the time. And that was a threat to to many white people. The police uh force there was very aggressive in enforcing the laws in that community. And the target of that enforcement strategy was frequently people of color. There was no commitment to law when black people were brutalized and tortured and murdered and assaulted by mobs and uh and uh through racial violence. The law was never there to protect you. And into that troubled environment was a black battalion. And these were very proud soldiers who had fought for the country who were not prepared to be subjected to the indignation and uh oppression who had been taught to fight when their rights were in question when their liberty was in question when their survival was in question. You cannot brutalize an individual who has some self-respect, who believes that their life has meaning and dignity and persecute that individual and marginalize that individual without at some point that individual standing up and saying, "You have threatened my life. You have challenged my life and I'm now going to fight back." For months, black soldiers had suffered non-stop harassment from the Houston police. On August 23rd, their anger boiled over. Dear brother, I write you for the last time in this world. I am to be executed tomorrow morning. I know this is shocking news, but don't worry too much as it is God's will. I was convicted at the general court marshall held here last month, tried for mutiny and murder. It is true that I went downtown with the men who marched out from camp, but I am innocent of shedding any blood. Goodbye and meet me in heaven. Your brother, Charles Baltimore. Charles Baltimore was one of 13 men condemned to die on the morning of December 11th, 1917. Four months earlier, after being arrested without cause and beaten by police, Baltimore and 100 of his fellow soldiers marched into the city and opened fire. When the shooting stopped, 16 whites and four black soldiers were dead. 19 men were sentenced to death. The first 13 to die were not told of their sentence nor the date of their execution until shortly before they were taken to the gallows on a morning of December the 11th, 1917. They were denied their right to appeal to the president. The men requested to be shot as soldiers. The army refused their request. Houston was not an ordinary outburst. They were not young recruits. They were not wild and drunkarded wastils. They were disciplined men who said, "This is enough. We'll stand no more." They broke the law against their punishment. If it were legal, we cannot protest. But we can protest. And we do protest against the shameful treatment which these men and which we their brothers receive all our lives and which our fathers received and which our children await. And above all, we raise our clenched hand against the hundreds of thousands of white murderers and rapists and scoundrels who have oppressed, killed, ruined, and robbed and debased their black fellow men and fellow women. and yet today walk scot-free, unwhipped of justice, unconddemned by millions of their white fellow citizens, and unrebuked by the president of the United States, Web Duboce. [Music] The tragic era of Jim Crow comes to life at PBS online with interactive activities and firsthand accounts. Find details on key people, events, and more at pbs.org. [Music] Oo [Music] [Music] in the morning. Yeah. [Music] Say [Music] Major funding for the rise and fall of Jim Crow is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. expanding America's understanding for more than 30 years of who we were, who we are, and who we will be. And by support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people. [Music] Additional funding is provided by the John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Corporate support is made possible by New York Life. Today should be better than yesterday. Tomorrow should be even greater. This idea inspired a movement. And New York Life salutes the vision and bravery of those who improved our nation and our world.