After the Civil War, southern African Americans exercised their new freedom in many ways; one of them was traveling where and when they chose. Thousands of newly freedpeople took to the roads at war's end, most of them trying to reunite with family members sold away or displaced during the war. In some cases, freedmen and women walked hundreds of miles in search of parents, children, siblings, or spouses. This engraving was published in Edward King's The Great South, one of many postwar surveys of southern life that fed northerners' curiosity about the region that they had defeated in war.

The cowboy of Western mythology rode the range during the heyday of the long cattle drives in the l860s and 1870s. Despite the individualism emphasized in myth, most cowhands were employees of Eastern and European capitalists who raised cattle as a corporate enterprise to serve a growing appetite for beef in the U.S. Cowboys were overworked hired hands who rode in freezing wind and rain or roasted in the Texas sun; searched for lost cattle; mended fences; ate monotonous and bad food; and suffered stampedes, quicksand, blizzards, floods, and drought. The work was hard, dangerous, and often lonely; pay averaged from $25 to $40 a month. Many became cowboys for lack of other job opportunities; one of every three cowboys was an African American or Mexican. Black cowboy Will Crittendon recounted his experiences as a cowboy in Texas in this interview conducted by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s.

Spirituals and work songs, rooted in both the slavery era and the West African societies from which most African-American slaves were originally taken, provided cultural sustenance to African Americans in the midst of intense racial oppression. Folklorists first began collecting traditional southern music in the late-19th century. In the 1920s and 1930s, John Lomax (and other members of his family) recorded southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. "Trouble So Hard," sung by Dock Reed, Henry Reed, and Vera Hall in Livingston, Alabama, in 1937, was reminiscent in style of the slavery era, when the congregation sang without hymnbooks or musical accompaniment. The style of singing--the lead singer's call and the congregation's increasingly loud and forceful response--had its roots in African religious practice.

U.S. marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. By 1919, Haitian Charlemagne Pralte had organized more than a thousand cacos, or armed guerrillas, to militarily oppose the marine occupation. The marines responded to the resistance with a counterinsurgency campaign that razed villages, killed thousands of Haitians, and destroyed the livelihoods of even more. American organizations such as the NAACP opposed the U.S. occupation of Haiti. They sent delegations that investigated conditions and protested the blatant racism and imperialism of U.S. policy in Haiti in the early 20th century. An article from 1920, by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson, countered the standard justifications for U.S. occupation of Haiti.

Over the course of two days in August 1831, a slave named Nat Turner led a massacre of white families in Southampton County, Virginia. By the time Turner and his confederates were stopped by local militias they had murdered fifty-nine men, women, and children. Turner managed to hide in a nearby cave for almost two months, but on October 30 he was captured. He made this confession in jail. He was subsequently tried and hanged. Nat Turner's insurrection was only the most dramatic of a series that alarmed white Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Others included the Stono rebellion in South Carolina in 1739; the so-called Negro Plot in New York in 1741; Gabriel's rebellion near Richmond, Virginia in1800; the 1792-1804 revolution on St. Domingue that resulted in the creation of the Haitian republic; and the revolt planned by Denmark Vesey in South Carolina in 1822. In each case the plotters sought to free themselves while wreaking violence on those who had enslaved them. In response, southern whites, alarmed by the possibility of further revolts, turned away from thoughts of abolition and toughened laws that restricted the movements of blacks.

Just as the question of race divided the Southern Populist movement, so has it divided historians. Some scholars point to the uniquely interracial qualities of the Populist movement, while others emphasize the ways that racial divisions limited the success of southern agrarian radicals. Part of the difficulty in resolving the dispute is the complexity and ambiguity of race relations in Southern Populism. In his famous essay on "The Negro Question in the South," published in 1892, Tom Watson, a Southern Populist who was elected to the U.S. Congress from Georgia in 1890, made one of the strongest cases for an alliance of black and white farmers. Yet Watson was calling for a strategic political alliance, not a fully integrated society, and his commitment to interracialism did not survive the defeat of the Populist movement. After the turn of the century, Watson led efforts to disfranchise African Americans, publishing demagogic attacks on them as well as on Catholics and Jews.

The passage and enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law meant that no escaped slave was safe, since even those living in the free North could be arrested and reenslaved. After passage of the Law, escaped slave women living in the North sometimes wore veils when they appeared in public to avoid identification by slave-catchers.

This collection uses primary sources to explore visual art during the Harlem Renaissance. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

The most influential public critique of Booker T. Washington's policy of racial accommodation and gradualism came in 1903 when black leader and intellectual W.E.B. DuBois published an essay in his collection The Souls of Black Folk with the title "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others." DuBois rejected Washington's willingness to avoid rocking the racial boat, calling instead for political power, insistence on civil rights, and the higher education of Negro youth.

The relationship between African Americans and Franklin D. Roosevelt presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, Roosevelt never endorsed anti-lynching legislation; he accepted segregation and disenfranchisement; and he condoned discrimination against blacks in federally funded relief programs. On the other hand, Roosevelt won the hearts and the votes of African Americans in unprecedented numbers. African Americans who supported left-wing parties, however, were more likely to be critical. Langston Hughes, a playwright, poet, and novelist, became a socialist in the 1930s. Although he did not join the Communist Party, he spent a year in the Soviet Union and published his works in magazines sympathetic to liberal, socialist, and Communist causes. In Hughes's "Ballad of Roosevelt," which appeared in the New Republic in 1934, the poet criticized the unfulfilled promises that FDR had made to the poor. Hughes's style in this poem showed his distinctive merging of traditional verse with black artistic forms like blues and jazz.

The War Labor Board (WLB) and its predecessor, the National Defense Mediation Board, had a profound impact on relations between employers and unions during World War II. The WLB--made up of representatives from government, labor, and management--provided protection for unions from hostile bosses, increased the wages of the lowest-paid workers, helped set industry-wide wage patterns, and established methods of resolving shop floor disputes. Although the WLB operated in routinized and bureaucratic ways, its decisions could also carry powerful ideological messages. That became clear in the following document, which insisted upon the policy of equal pay for equal work--a seemingly self-evident principle that was not standard practice in American industry. This board decision mandated equal pay for African-American workers.

In folklore the black nursemaid was seen as a dutiful, self-sacrificing black woman who loved her white family and its children every bit as much as her own. Yet the popular images of the loyal, contented black nursemaid, or "mammy," were unfortunately far from the reality for the African-American women who worked in these homes. In 1912 the Independent printed this quasi-autobiographical account of servant life, as related by an African-American domestic worker, which dispelled the comforting "mammy" myth.

California had a few thousand Chinese immigrants in 1850. By 1852, the number swelled to 20,000, constituting almost a quarter of California's work force. Chinese who toiled in mines and worked as shopkeepers were welcomed, even recruited, at first. But nativist sentiment to curtail Chinese immigration grew as the number of immigrants increased. John Bigler, the state's first Governor, called for immigration restriction in 1852, citing Chinese immigrants' inability to assimilate as European immigrants had. Norman Asing, a restaurant owner and leader in San Francisco's Chinese community, assailed the governor for his anti-Chinese stance and utilized the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution against Bigler's claims of the danger of Chinese immigration. But Asing's argument also embraced some of the era's racist assumptions about African Americans and Native Americans.

Between 1882 and 1964, nearly five thousand people died from lynching, the majority African-American. The 1890s witnessed the worst period of lynching in U.S. history. Lynchings, often witnessed by large crowds of white onlookers, were the most extreme form of Southern white control over the African-American population, regularly meted out against African Americans who had been falsely charged with crimes but in fact were achieving a level of political or economic autonomy that whites found unacceptable. The history of failed attempts to pass federal antilyching legislation goes back to 1894, when a House bill to set up a committee to investigate lynchings failed. In 1922, the House passed a bill to make lynching a Federal crime, but despite President Warren G. Harding's support, Southern senators filibustered and defeated it. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt failed to support an antilynching bill proposed by the NAACP, fearing that key Southerners lawmakers would retaliate and interfere with his New Deal agenda. In February 1948, President Harry S. Truman asked Congress for federal antilynching legislation. In the following testimony to a House subcommittee, four Southern Congressmen discussed their reasons for opposing what they deemed federal interference in state judicial responsibilities and defend segregation and the "peaceful relations now existing between white man and Negro" in the South. Congressman Charles E. Bennett (Florida) also offered his historical explanation for lynching. None of the bills under consideration by the subcommittee passed.

In January, 1863--the month of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the second year of the Civil War--the United States began allowing black soldiers to enlist in the Union army. The army needed more manpower or, as African-American soldier James Henry Gooding put it with bitter eloquence, "more food for its ravenous maw." By 1865 approximately one tenth of all Union soldiers and sailors were African-American, and about eighty percent of these came from the slave states. Black soldiers fought with notable valor. When captured they faced much greater brutality from Confederate soldiers than did their white comrades. Union service, however, was no guarantee of equal treatment. Black soldiers in the Union army served in segregated troops, often faced menial assignments, and received lower pay--$10 per month to white soldiers' $13. In this letter to President Lincoln, Gooding, writing on behalf of himself and his fellow black soldiers, protested these conditions.

In June 1966, the national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Stokely Carmichael, first voiced the slogan "Black Power" during a march in Mississippi. James Meredith initiated the march to protest white resistance, in defiance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to black voter registration. Meredith was shot and wounded, but other black leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Carmichael, continued the march. In conflict with King's nonviolent philosophy, Carmichael told marchers in Greenwood, Mississippi, "We have got to get us some black power." He later explained that the slogan was "a call for black people in this country to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations." Carmichael's rhetoric, influenced by Malcolm X, signified a growing divide in the civil rights movement between those who encouraged interracial collaboration and those who advocated black separatism. Carmichael himself left SNCC in 1967 and joined the Black Panther Party. The following testimony by Carmichael before a Senate subcommittee investigating internal security includes an interview Carmichael recorded during a visit to Cuba in 1967. Although he advocated an international struggle to end capitalism, the following year Carmichael announced that "Communism is not an ideology suited for black people." Carmichael moved to Guinea in 1969, where he changed his name to Kwame Ture and formed the Pan-Africanist All-African People's Party. He died in 1998.

During the Great Migration, which peaked between 1916 and 1921, some 5 percent of all southern African Americans headed north. What were their experiences like in their new homes? Beginning in 1917, Charles Johnson, research investigator for the Chicago Urban League, began interviewing migrants in Chicago and Mississippi. Going door to door, Johnson questioned recent southern black migrants to Chicago about their histories and current thoughts about their experiences. Johnson's summaries of his interviews conveyed a sense of migrants' diverse response to life in Chicago.

Fountain Hughes was born a slave in 1848 in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1944 (or 1949) he was interviewed in Baltimore by Hermond Norwood, a representative of the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Song. The Federal Writer's Project, a Depression-era program, had initiated the government's effort to capture the memories of the, by then, very elderly former slaves. Hughes recalled not only life under slavery but also the difficulties many slaves faced in making the transition to freedom in an antagonistic white society that worked hard to impede their efforts. Conditions for the Hughes family under freedom were materially not much better than they had been under slavery. In this interview Hughes recalled how his widowed mother supported her family by binding, or contracting, her children out to work. Still, Hughes asserted, he far preferred freedom to slavery.

This 1866 news engraving showed a chaplain marrying an African-American couple in the offices of the Vicksburg Freedmen's Bureau. Because marriages between slaves before emancipation had no legal standing, many couples rushed to have their marriages officially registered and made solemn during Reconstruction. Marriage was only one way of exercising the new freedom. For many former slaves, freedom meant choosing a new name for themselves, dressing as they pleased, learning to read, or refusing to be deferential towards their former owner.

During World War II, housing construction came to a virtual standstill. The return of millions of servicemen to civilian life in 1945 set off a national housing crisis, followed by a construction boom. Although other New Deal and wartime housing programs emphasized rental apartments in close proximity to workplaces, the post-war building boom focused on single residence suburban development. Prodded by builders like William Levitt, the government underwrote low-interest loans that made it possible for working people to own their own homes in the suburbs, once a domain reserved for the well-to-do. Those Federal Housing Authority loans, however, deepened racial and class divisions across metropolitan America, since the FHA refused to write mortgage loans in cities and allowed its loan holders to enforce restrictive covenants barring Jews and African Americans from buying homes in certain areas.