The Curriculum

Sustaining a Living

While the Union army brought the end of enslavement to occupied territories in the South, there was no centralized plan for a system of free labor for Black Americans. A piecemeal arrangement of different experiments emerged, ranging from independent Black-led subsistence farming in South Carolina to White-dominated and exploitative sharecropping agreements in Virginia. Black land...

Plessy v. Ferguson

By establishing the doctrine of “separate but equal,” the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) led to more than a half-century of legalized segregation and racial discrimination. Segregation stoked racial violence and was tangibly harmful for Black Americans and other people of color, who couldn’t access quality public services such as education...

Hopes and Obstacles to Family Life

Emancipation brought both opportunities and new obstacles to formerly enslaved Black Americans in the Reconstruction South. Black Americans worked hard and against many odds to reunite families torn apart by enslavement, and to create a new relationship with a government that now recognized their humanity. In some cases the freedpeople were supported in their efforts...

The Legacy of Booker T. Washington

During the Jim Crow era, Black intellectuals had differing ideas on what constituted racial uplift. Booker T. Washington believed that self-reliance and a practical, vocational education for Black students would lead to eventual progress and acceptance for Black Americans, in contrast to the views of other leaders like W.E.B. DuBois who demanded political action and...

The Breakdown of Justice: Lynching and the Scottsboro Case

Lynching was a form of racial terrorism in the post-Reconstruction South and one means of maintaining power in the hands of White supremacists.  For decades individuals and organizations worked to end it. However, even in courts of law, Black men, women, and children were often failed by the legal system. The case of the Scottsboro...

Moving North

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, millions of Black Americans left the South for new homes and new lives in the North, creating a major demographic and cultural shift that led to the creation of new Black communities in Northern cities. While Black migrants experienced better economic, political, and social outcomes in the...