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1896: Racial and Religious Prejudice
1896, a collection of political cartoons from the watershed presidential campaign that marked America's transition to the twentieth century. Cartoons from around the country and from three parties in the election--Republican, Democratic, and Populist--with party platforms, contemporary comment, and explorations of campaign themes.
 Racial PrejudiceIn the 1890s the U.S. was approaching what historians would later call the 'nadir' of race relations between whites and blacks. The number of lynchings peaked in 1892, at 230, and continued at rates of over 100 murders per year. Southern states invented new measures to disfranchise black voters.On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its famous ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. In a vote of 8 to 1, the justices ended three decades of struggle over keeping public spaces integrated, ruling that states could force railroad companies to exclude African-Americans from first-class, or "ladies," cars. The lone dissenting vote was cast by Justice John Marshall Harlan--who was, interestingly, the only southerner on the Court and a former slaveholder. "The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race," he argued, "while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution." Nevertheless, 'separate but equal' segregation--hardly equal in any sense--had won the Court's approval. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Northern newspapers had begun to depict blacks in positive terms, especially black soldiers who had fought bravely for the Union. Such descriptions and images probably helped build support for the enfranchisement of black men, but by the 1890s, they had again become rare. In advertisements, fiction, theater, and political debates, white Americans encountered images of blacks as ignorant buffoons and ignored the severe problems facing black Americans. Though historians today view Plessy v. Ferguson as a landmark decision in the rollback of civil rights guarantees, political leaders and editors completely ignored it in the presidential campaign. National magazines also provided little or no coverage of lynching in 1896, though these murders were reaching a zenith. In 1900, a delegation of African-American leaders asked President McKinley to speak out against lynching, but he merely congratulated black men on their "progress" over the previous decades. The Republican platform did make a brief statement against lynching, but little reference was made to it during the campaign. Of course, prejudices against blacks was not the only form of political and social discrimination in the U.S. Antisemitism figured prominently in campaign rhetoric, debates around immigration centered on anti-Chinese sentiment, and depictions of events in Turkey also drew on white prejudices against Turks as a " dark and heathen race." The full text of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision and Justice Harlan's dissent is available at Bowdoin College. See also the Supreme Court page. African-American Responses1896 was a year of transition in African-American leadership. In the previous year one of the nation's greatest black leaders, Frederick Douglass, had died at age 77. In the same year Booker T. Washington gave his famous address at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, September. He advised black Southerners to "cast down your bucket where you are," seeking friendship with white Southerners and success in business. In a pointed reference to labor activism in the North, Washington advised white Southerners to "cast down their bucket" also, "among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, .... those people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities."Democracy and EducationWith the Atlanta address, Washington emerged as the nation's most prominent African-American spokesman. In September 1896, a few months after Plessy and in the midst of the presidential campaign, Washington gave this address in Brooklyn stating his views on black political and social rights. The lives of other black leaders were in transition in 1896. Ida B. Wells, a black journalist who had been the nation's most effective anti-lynching crusader in the early 1890s, was living in Chicago in 1896. She had married civil-rights activist Ferdinand Barnett in 1895 and subsequently limited her public work in order to devote time to her family. In the meantime W.E.B. DuBois, who would later dispute Washington's strategies for black advancement, had just finished his Ph.D. at Harvard. In 1896 he published his first book, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade. The following year he accepted a teaching position at the University of Atlanta.  Ida B. Wells Barnett, investigative journalist, civil rights leader, and anti-lynching activist The Library of Congress American Memory Project includes a large collection of African-American Pamphlets, 1880-1920. At this site you can read works by Ida B. Wells and sit in on an 1898 meeting of the National Afro-American Council in Washington, D.C., where participants discussed strategies for opposing lynching, segregation, and disfranchisement. The full text of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision and Justice Harlan's dissent are available online through Touro Law School. |
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![[Men eating watermelon]](watermelon.gif) A Watermelon-Eating Contest Between Two Colored Serving Men. Puck, 21 September, 1891
OBJECTED TO THE NEGRO. ...Among the crowds at Mr. Cockran's speech Tuesday night was a well-dressed negro. He stood close to the lower tier of boxes near the Madison Avenue entrance, and listened attentively to the orator. --New York World, 20 August 1896 |
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© 2000, Rebecca Edwards, Vassar College