African Americans were faced with an almost insurmountable number of obstacles
in 1900. Any way you look at it, in terms of the educational system,
particularly considering the fact that the majority of them, the large majority
are still in the South. And as far as education is concerned,
African Americans are given almost no avenue of education on the lower level,
which makes it difficult for them to aspire to higher education because they
don't have the rudiments to get to that point. Public schools are open to
African Americans only in very small communities.
Any way you look at it, socially, politically, economically, education,
African Americans were kept out of society. And they had to scratch and bite
to get whatever advantages that they did get. And the majority could not get
those advantages. If you look at education for instance in 1900 and take for
example, Mississippi, which is a state that spends about three dollars a year
on the education of a black child and sixty on the education of a white child,
then if you look at the whole economic structure in the states of the South
which are primarily cotton states, which depend on a sharecropping, crop lien
system for the production and the profit of this cotton, which
African Americans are the main labor force for, then black children are forced
to work rather than go to school. So even if there was money in the family for
shoes and clothing which often there was not, the children were needed in the
labor force. So that was a constraint on African Americans. Politically
African Americans have for the most part lost whatever political situation they
had had as a result of Reconstruction. And it was done very brutally and it
was done very systematically. First it was done without the law, it was done
extralegally through terrorism, through creating these various kinds of laws,
informal ways of keeping African Americans from voting. But by the 1890s all
the way up past 1900, it became legal, because the various states formed new
constitutional conventions which legally disfranchised African Americans. So
the political process was closed. And then of course the striking down of the
civil rights act meant that all of the gains that had been made about equality
and public accommodations, all of that was dead. So everywhere we looked as a
people the doors seemed to be closed to us.
