In 1954, the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education dramatically changed American society. The Court reversed the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that racially segregated public facilities were not inherently discriminatory. After the 1954 ruling, states could no longer apply "separate but equal" to public schools, in part because of segregation's psychological effects on children. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Court's decision that the separation of Negro children "from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." In 1955, the Court ordained that desegregation of public schools should proceed "with all deliberate speed." As the South reacted to these rulings, two Atlanta fathers, both professionals, related for a popular magazine their experiences discussing race relations with their young sons.

In some ways, emancipation and Reconstruction broke the power of white southern planters over their labor force. Freedpeople negotiated with planters over how the land would be cultivated and how they would be compensated. African-American families worked small plots independently, sometimes obtaining land for cash or, more commonly, for a fixed share of the year's crop; this latter practice was known as sharecropping. By 1870, sharecropping was the dominant means by which African Americans could gain access to land in the South. Still, freedpeople desired independent proprietorship. In this interview, African-American farmer Henry Blake recalls how black land ownership became an elusive goal as unequal power relations between white and black hardened and the Ku Klux Klan's terrorist campaigns increased. Blake's narrative and many others were recorded during an ambitious New Deal (1936-38) program of interviews with ex-slaves. Despite unfamiliar interviewers and distant memories, these first person accounts are an unparalleled resource.

In the early 20th century, large-scale commercial agriculture displaced family farms, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. Hand labor, however, remained more cost effective for harvesting certain fruits and vegetables. Farmworkers under this new system were hired only for seasonal work and had to travel frequently. The migratory experience left these workers--primarily Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos÷permanent outsiders and vulnerable to exploitation, low wages, and wretched working and living conditions. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 established rights of industrial workers to unionize. The Act omitted farmworkers, though, due in part to fears that the powerful farm growers' lobby would prevent passage. Organized efforts by unions and others to rescind the exemption failed in subsequent years. In the 1960s, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez, started a strike and boycott of table grapes that gained nationwide support. Although California enacted the first state legislation to protect farm labor union organizing in 1975, other states did not follow, and many union gains in California have since been lost. In the following testimony from a 1969 Senate hearing, two migrant African-American farmworkers from North Carolina presented their version of a strike. Since 1970, fresh fruit consumption in the U.S. has risen sharply increasing the demand for hand labor. Living and working conditions for migrants remain poor in much of the country.

Founded in 1915 and inspired by the Reconstruction-era organization of the same name, the second Ku Klux Klan shared with its nineteenth-century namesake a deep racism, a fascination with mystical regalia, and a willingness to use violence to silence its foes. It also professed anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism as strongly as it affirmed racism. The secret" society had 3 million members during its heyday in the early 1920s; roughly half its members lived in metropolitan areas

This collection uses primary sources to explore the impact of women blues performers. 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 South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1895 completed the process of disenfranchising African-Americans (and many poor whites). The state's restrictive policies began with the election law of 1882 that used an intricate system of eight ballot boxes to discourage illiterate white and black residents from voting. The 1895 convention added a poll tax and literacy test, thereby ensuring that a coalition of remaining black voters and disaffected whites could not unite to challenge Democratic Party rule in South Carolina. Black delegates to the Convention raised their voices against this disenfranchisement, among them Civil War hero Robert Smalls. Born a slave in South Carolina, Smalls became a Congressman during Reconstruction and the leading political figure in Edgefield County, South Carolina. Although disenfranchisement destroyed his local political machine, he remained a prominent figure through federal patronage, serving as the customs collector for the port of Beaufort for many years.

Although many Northerners, including Abraham Lincoln, initially hoped to prosecute the war without interfering with slavery as it existed, pressure from slaves who fled to Union lines, abolitionist sentiment in the North, and a deteriorating military situation pushed Lincoln to consider abolishing slavery. In September 1862 Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. He signed the final edict on January 1, 1863. In this caricature by Baltimore pro-South Democrat Adalbert Johann Volck, an inebriated Lincoln, surrounded by symbols of Satanism and paintings honoring John Brown and slave rebellions, trod on the Constitution as he drafted the proclamation.

The harsh brutality of race relations in the late nineteenth-century South was sometimes best expressed through small incidents. For William Robinson, the story that best encapsulated his own experience growing up African-American in rural Georgia in the 1880s involved three peaches. He was interviewed by oral historian Charles Hardy in 1983 when Robinson was 103 years old. Apparently, some ninety-five years earlier when he was eight years old, three black boys sneaked into a peach orchard on the way home from church and stole some peaches, three of which they gave to young Robinson. The white orchard owner caught Robinson and threatened him with the chain gang. He forced Robinson's father to pay $21 for the three peaches--a sum that could well have been a year's cash income for a sharecropping family in this period.

Many African-American witnesses subpoenaed to testify at the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings in the 1950s were asked to denounce Paul Robeson (1888-1976) in order to obtain future employment. Robeson, an All-American football player and recipient of a Phi Beta Kappa key at Rutgers, received a law degree at Columbia. He became an internationally acclaimed concert performer and actor as well as a persuasive political speaker. In 1949, Robeson was the subject of controversy after newspapers reports of public statements that African Americans would not fight in "an imperialist war." In 1950, his passport was revoked. Several years later, Robeson refused to sign an affidavit stating that he was not a Communist and initiated an unsuccessful lawsuit. In the following testimony to a HUAC hearing, ostensibly convened to gain information regarding his passport suit, Robeson refused to answer questions concerning his political activities and lectured bigoted Committee members Gordon H. Scherer and Chairman Francis E.Walter about African-American history and civil rights. In 1958, the Supreme Court ruled that a citizen's right to travel could not be taken away without due process and Robeson' passport was returned.

John Brown was a staunch abolitionist and a veteran of guerrilla warfare in Kansas who alarmed even free soilers with his forceful assertions of African-American equality. On October 16, 1859 Brown, three of his sons, and 19 associates raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Planning to seize arms stored at the arsenal and set up a base to encourage and assist further slave insurrections, Brown and his men were trapped by U.S. marines, tried for treason, and hanged. Southerners saw in Brown's raid the violent intentions of northerners, while many in the North mourned Brown's death as a revolutionary martyr. A Harper's Weekly artist sketched Brown and his co-conspirators as they were charged with treason and murder in a Charlestown, Virginia courtroom.

In this photograph, battle flags captured by northern troops during the Civil War are returned to aged Confederate veterans in a 1927 ceremony in front of the Capitol supervised by President Calvin Coolidge. Such rites of reconciliation between the Blue and the Gray represented a rapprochement between whites and ignored the central importance of slavery to the war, as well as the contribution of black troops. More damaging, this attitude of reconciliation obscured the repressive state of race relations in the South during the 1920s.

An 1867 Harper's Weekly illustration features three figures symbolizing black political leadership: a skilled craftsman, a sophisticated city dweller, and a Union Army veteran.

The back of a Louisiana slave named Gordon, photographed in 1863 after he escaped to the Union forces. Whipping was the most common form of punishment on plantations, and slaveowners and overseers whipped slaves with frightening regularity. Slaves could be whipped for almost any pretext: for "not picking cotton," "or not picking as well as he can," for picking "very trashy cotton," and so forth. One overseer gave twelve lashes to eight women for "hoeing bad corn." While punishments were often work related, whipping was also used to humiliate slaves and instill deference, obedience, and servility. Slaves could be whipped for answering back to overseers or appearing in any way "insolent."

Planters romanticized life on the plantation, often representing themselves as stern but loving parents who had to look after their slaves, who were depicted as childlike and in need of disciplined guidance. The plantation as the perfect extended family was a common theme of pro-slavery prints both before and after the Civil War. This postwar lithograph by the popular firm of Currier and Ives portrayed the slave quarters as a carefree world, basking in the glow of the planter's benevolence. In reality, of course, the harsh life of a slave bore little resemblance to this romanticized image.

By 1919, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization founded in 1909 to advocate for political and social equality for African Americans, had 91,000 thousand members. From its earliest years, the NAACP lobbied Congress to pass a federal law against lynching, the violent and public murder of African Americans still carried out by mobs in many southern states in the early twentieth century (and indeed into the 1950s). During November, 1922, the NAACP ran this full-page advertisement in the New York Times and other newspapers, pressing for passage of the Dyer anti-lynching bill. Passed in the House of Representatives by a two-to-one majority, the anti-lynching bill was subsequently filibustered and defeated in the U.S. Senate. Despite the NAACP's vigorous efforts through the 1930s and the introduction of several subsequent anti-lynching bills, the U.S. Congress never outlawed lynching.