Jim Crow Organized Crime

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Cooley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Drug Trafficking ◽  
Illicit Drugs ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Underground Economy ◽  
Street Gangs ◽  
Historical Evolution ◽  
Games Of Chance

This chapter examines the historical evolution of Chicago’s African American underground economy. During the first decades of the twentieth-century games of chance associated with cards and dice were the primary source of gambling revenue in black Chicago. By the early 1930s, this facet of the underground economy had been surpassed by policy, also referred to as “the numbers game.” An important linkage between these two periods was that gambling proprietors funneled some of their profits back into the larger community. Later in the twentieth century, gang-controlled drug trafficking became the primary manifestation of black Chicago’s underground economy. Unlike the earlier period’s relatively violence-free focus on games of chance, the selling of illicit drugs by street gangs turned black Chicago into a battleground.

Cultural Motifs Persist

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-31
Author(s):  
Jenny M. Luke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
General Overview ◽  
Lay Midwifery ◽  
National Perspective ◽  
Jim Crow South

After a general overview of childbirth’s shift to hospital in the early decades of the twentieth century from a national perspective, the chapter narrows its focus to the Jim Crow South. The cultural motifs established during slavery are highlighted as features of African American lay midwifery. A religious calling, an intergenerational female connectedness, and authority to practice were inherent characteristics of the midwife’s role.

“The Crusade Is Now Begun in Philadelphia”: Municipal Reformers, Southern Moderates, and African American Politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-168
Author(s):  
Julie Davidow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Corruption ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The Body ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Political Machine ◽  
Full Participation

As the twentieth century dawned, social and political reformers increasingly identified the growing black population in Philadelphia as an important underpinning of the city’s corrupt Republican political machine. This article explores the ways in which Philadelphia’s urban political corruption narrative, with its pointed attacks on black partisanship and electoral participation, developed in dialogue with white southerners’ campaigns to frame Reconstruction as a perversion of democracy. Rather than simply solidifying Jim Crow in the South, northern reformers and southern moderates borrowed from each other to shape and articulate an emerging national consensus that African Americans were unfit for full participation in the body politic.

The Making of the Modern Death Penalty in Jim Crow North Carolina

2019 ◽  
pp. 192-214
Author(s):  
Seth Kotch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Convictions ◽  
The Impact

focuses on the transition from local public hangings to state-controlled electrocutions in North Carolina in the early twentieth century. The chapter addresses the impact of this shift on African American communities. Although the death penalty had long served as an instrument of racial control, the ritual of a local hanging nevertheless had allowed the condemned and black witnesses a public space to express religious convictions and honor the condemned’s suffering. Once the state seized control of this ritual, African Americans were largely excluded as witnesses. The modern death penalty thus came to represent the racial subjugation of Jim Crow, indeed having more in common with lynchings than legal hangings had.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Tyrone McKinley Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
White Male ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Black Women's History ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

The Introduction presents the book’s main argument that Madam C.J. Walker was not simply a charitable entrepreneur, but rather a great African American and American philanthropist who practiced a distinctive racialized and gendered approach to giving that simultaneously relieved immediately felt needs in her community and thwarted the systemic oppression of the Jim Crow system. The chapter begins by articulating Walker’s embodied philosophy of philanthropy as a “gospel of giving” that started in her twenties when she was a poor, suffering migrant in St. Louis and expanded as she gradually acquired wealth and other resources over time. Her model of giving contrasted greatly with prevailing contemporary approaches by elite white male and female philanthropists who waited until late in their lives to give after accumulating or acquiring wealth. The chapter explores reasons for the absence of Walker and African American donors from major historical fields that have examined philanthropic giving in America. It uses black women’s history to overcome this omission by situating Walker within the larger context of the activism, community work, and fundraising of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black clubwomen, churchwomen, and educators. The chapter constructs generosity as a framework for naming and reclaiming black women as philanthropists. It concludes by noting how Walker, as an example of black women’s giving, challenged core assumptions about the relationship between philanthropy and wealth, women, African Americans, and business. The result is a presentation of black women’s generosity as a long-standing, deeply rooted historical tradition of philanthropy that is alive and well today.

The “Delaware Horror”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis B. Downey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The Other ◽  
The North ◽  
North And South ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter provides a case study of a lynching at the other end of the northeastern seaboard: the mass mob execution by burning of George White, an African American, in Wilmington, Delaware, in June 1903. Delaware had been a slave state that did not join the Confederacy, and while it implemented a Jim Crow system similar to those in neighboring lower Mid-Atlantic states Maryland and Virginia, the state experienced less lynching. Delaware's evolving economy and social relations were strongly tied to the rapidly urbanizing regions of southeastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The chapter's analysis of the role of white and black Protestant ministers in the Wilmington mob execution and its aftermath offers significant insight into a well-publicized early-twentieth-century lynching that occurred somewhere between the North and South.

Confronting Jim Crow in the ‘Lone Star’ capital: the contrasting strategies of African-American and ethnic-Mexican political leaders in Austin, Texas, 1910–1930

2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-169
Author(s):  
JASON J. McDONALD
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Impact

Focusing upon the interaction between ethnic political elites in Austin, Texas, during the early twentieth century, this study examines (1) the impact of migration upon the dominant white elite's attitudes towards and dealings with the city's subordinate nonwhite ethnies, and (2) the agendas adopted by local African-American and ethnic-Mexican leaders. The article explains why in their efforts to improve conditions for their respective ethnic communities, the African-American and ethnic-Mexican leaderships pursued very different strategies from each other – the former concentrating upon the attainment of more universalist goals, the latter on more multiculturalist ones – and evaluates the effectiveness of these contrasting policies.

Book Faces

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-165
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Goldsby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Black Literature ◽  
Ethics Of Reading ◽  
The Face

Across the first half of the twentieth century, author portraits migrated from the frontispiece inside of books to the exterior covers of dust jackets; at the same time, while Jim Crow segregation reached its repressive heights in the United States, African-American literature enjoyed unprecedented circulation in the mainstream literary marketplace. This chapter traces this convergence to explore the cultural work performed by the “face” of a book—frontispieces, dust jackets, and author portraits. Examining these lays bare the signal development that distinguishes mid-twentieth-century African-American authorship from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precedents: namely, the turn away from writing as corroboration of black humanity to writing as expressive of black pluralities or personae. By setting alterity, not authenticity, as the threshold where readers meet and interpret black literature as works of art, the migration of author portraits also functions as a trope for the ethics of reading.

Climbing the Hilltop

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Treva B. Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
Howard University ◽  
Dean Of Women

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Howard University emerged as the premier institution for higher learning for African Americans. Using the life of Lucy Diggs Slowe, a Howard alumnus and the first Dean of Women at Howard, this chapter discusses the experiences of African American women at Howard during the early twentieth century to illustrate how New Negro women negotiated intra-racial gender ideologies and conventions as well as Jim Crow racial politics. Although women could attend and work at Howard, extant African American gender ideologies often limited African American women’s opportunities as students, faculty, and staff. Slowe was arguably the most vocal advocate for African American women at Howard. She demanded that African American women be prepared for the “modern world,” and that African American women be full and equal participants in public culture. Her thirty-plus years affiliation with Howard makes her an ideal subject with which to map the emergence of New Negro womanhood at this prestigious university. This chapter presents Howard as an elite and exclusive site for the actualization of New Negro womanhood while simultaneously asserting the symbolic significance of Howard University for African American women living in and moving to Washington. Although most African American women in Washington could not and did not attend or work at Howard, this institution was foundational to an emergent sense of possibility and aspiration that propelled the intellectual and cultural strivings of African American women in New Negro era Washington.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lucander
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Second World

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the March on Washington Movement (MOWM). MOWM was arguably the most effective African American protest organization during the Second World War, and in some ways this period represented the zenith of A. Philip Randolph's power. By creating MOWM, Randolph gave local activists and organizers a platform on which they could fight against Jim Crow in innovative and sometimes powerful ways. This organization stands at a critical junction between the Roosevelt era and the years traditionally associated with the Civil Rights Movement, a chronological crossroads that makes it something of a generational interstice. Occupying this unique place in the chronology of twentieth-century campaigns by African Americans to attack Jim Crow segregation makes MOWM something of an anomaly. Its roots were firmly planted in Depression-era activism, but its branches spread through the next three decades and reached into the Civil Rights Movement.

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