At the turn of the century the group of black women most subject to sexual exploitation and abuse were those who lived under the system of quasi-slavery known as "peonage."Under contract labor laws, which existed in almost every southern state, a laborer who signed a contract and then quit his or her job could be arrested. The horrors of this system of forced labor (as well as the equally horrific system of convict labor) are detailed in this stark, turn-of-the-century personal account of life under the "peonage" system in the South, published in the Independent magazine in 1904. Although this account by an African-American man did not focus especially on the sexual exploitation suffered by his wife and others, his report described how his wife was forced to become a mistress to the plantation's owner.

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. The grim statistical record almost certainly understates the story. Many lynchings were not recorded outside their immediate locality, and pure numbers do not convey the brutality of lynching. 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. Lynching was especially prevalent in areas of low population density, recent increase in black population, and high rates of transiency, where strangers feared one another and whites judged legitimate law enforcement weak. As the following testimony by a Birmingham, Alabama, newspaper reporter to a 1949 House subcommittee shows, acts of violence by vigilante groups in the South were directed not only toward blacks. The virulently anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-foreigner Ku Klux Klan of the 20th century violently attempted to impose its code of morality on men, women, and children who violated their beliefs of community norms.

This video segment, adapted from NOVA, chronicles the education of leading chemist Percy Julian. Although Julian began his elementary school years in the Deep South under Jim Crow laws, he became one of the few African Americans of his time to earn a Ph.D.

As U.S. soldiers returned from Europe in the aftermath of World War I, scarce housing and jobs heightened racial and class antagonisms across urban America. African-American soldiers, in particular, came home from the war expecting to enjoy the full rights of citizenship that they had fought to defend overseas. In the spring and summer of 1919, murderous race riots erupted in 22 American cities and towns. Chicago experienced the most severe of these riots. On Sunday, July 27, white bathers attacked several black youths swimming near one of Lake Michigan's white beaches, resulting in the death of an African-American boy. Five days of intense racial violence followed, claiming the lives of 23 black and 15 white Chicagoans, with more than 500 others wounded and thousands of black and white citizens burned out of their homes. A plethora of news reports and editorials offered instant analysis and helped shape local and national attitudes. Like white newspapers, the city's leading black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, helped foment the escalating racial violence that gripped the city. An August 2 Defender article recounted the unsubstantiated beating of an "unidentified [black] woman" and her baby. On a daily basis, the black press rivaled the mainstream white press in its efforts to offer the most gruesome and sensational accounts of the riot.

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. Many black Americans not only voted for Roosevelt; they made him into a hero. "Franklin," "Eleanor," "Delano," and even "Roosevelt" became popular first names for black children in the 1930s. And many African Americans hung the president's picture on their walls beside those of Christ and Lincoln. Another indication of the powerful impression that Roosevelt made in the black community was Big Joe Williams' recording of a blues tribute on the occasion of Roosevelt's death in 1945, "His Spirit Lives On."

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Great Migration. 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.

These two pieces appeared in the Farmer's Register, a periodical of practical information for farmers, in 1837. Yet they go far beyond the simply practical to convey a great deal about the culture of slavery in the antebellum south--perhaps more than the authors intended. Two unnamed Virginia slaveholders debated the advantages and disadvantages of employing overseers; opined about the best types of food, housing, and clothing for slaves; and weighed the relative benefits of kindness and severity in their treatment of slaves. They also speculated about the characters of the enslaved African Americans they compelled to work for them. While these slaveholders confidently related their methods of control over their enslaved work force, their own words told quite another story about slaves' resistance through trickery and theft. And their insistence that slavery was a humane and necessary system was belied by their own descriptions of slaves who were ill, exhausted, and undernourished. Such innate contradictions weakened and ultimately damaged the institution of southern slavery.

Hundreds of writers and artists lived in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s and were part of a vibrant, creative community that found its voice in what came to be called the "Harlem Renaissance." Vigorous debate also characterized the Harlem Renaissance. Rejecting stereotypical depictions of African-American life that had dominated all the arts, Alain Locke urged black artists to incorporate the themes and styles of African art into sophisticated, genteel, modern works. But journalist George Schuyler denied that there was such a thing as "black art" or a black sensibility. In this 1926 article, "The Negro Art Hokum," Schuyler argued that black artists in America were equally as diverse as white artists, and that to expect a uniform style or subject matter was as insulting as the stereotypes that were being rejected. In a scathing response, Langston Hughes argued that for black artists to paint anything but images of African Americans was tantamount to wanting to be white.

Hundreds of writers and artists lived in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s and were part of a vibrant, creative community that found its voice in what came to be called the "Harlem Renaissance." Alain Locke's 1925 collection The New Negro --a compilation of literature by and essays about "New Negro" artists and black culture--became a "manifesto" of the movement. Some of black America's foremost writers contributed stories and poems to the volume. The work of these artists drew upon the African-American experience and expressed a new pride in black racial identity and heritage. Zora Neale Hurston--novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist--was known during the Harlem Renaissance for her wit, irreverence, and folk writing style. She won second prize in the 1925 literary contest of the Urban League's journal, Opportunity, for her short story "Spunk," which also appeared in The New Negro.

Pressures for abolition of slavery increased in the Revolutionary era; five northern states abolished slavery between 1780 and 1804. Pennsylvania was the first in 1780 when its legislature passed a gradual abolition bill. However, no one was actually freed; all those enslaved when the law went into effect remained enslaved, and all those born after that date were required to provide their mothers' masters with twenty-eight years of servitude before they could obtain their freedom. Despite the law's extreme gradualism, the following year a more conservative legislature attempted to repeal it. Newly freed African Americans petitioned the Assembly to reject such a move. Cato, newly freed with his children, wrote to Philadelphia's Freeman's Journal, an African-American newspaper, in 1781, making his case by using the legislature's own words about the promise of universal civilization while adding his own views of the meaning of the Revolution. The legislature voted against repealing the gradual abolition act.

The rise to prominence in the 1930s of legendary black sports figures--the heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis and the Olympic track and field star Jesse Owens--challenged the barriers that separated white and black American athletes and their fans. Louis's boxing prowess had excited black fans as early as 1934, and he quickly worked his way through the heavyweight ranks, dispatching white and black opponents alike with brutal efficiency. Louis's one defeat before attaining the title came at the hands of the German fighter and ex-champion Max Schmeling, who knocked Louis out in twelve rounds at Yankee Stadium in 1936. Two years later, Louis faced Schmeling in a rematch, this time not only with the championship belt on the line but bragging rights among nations lurching toward war. Louis knocked out Schmeling in two minutes and four seconds of the first round. The radio announcer's call of the fight, including the knockout punch, conveyed the drama, as did a postfight radio interview with the Champ.

The struggle for woman suffrage lasted almost a century, beginning with the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, and including the 1890 union of two competing suffrage organizations to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA and other organizations campaigned diligently for the vote in a variety of ways, but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. This prolonged struggle entangled female activists in other important political and moral issues that divided the nation along racial, ethnic, and class lines, and debates over the vote for women often took a divisive tone. In this 1891 speech to the National Council of Women, African-American abolitionist, lecturer, and writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper answered the racist charges of white suffragists who saw the vote for (white) women as a way to maintain white supremacy. The vote for African-Americans, both men and women, Harper argued, was a matter of "justice, simple justice."

In 1870, the Boston firm of Louis Prang and Company published a chromolithograph (an inexpensive type of color print) portrait of the first African-American United States senator. One prominent admirer of the portrait was Frederick Douglass: "Whatever may be the prejudices of those who may look upon it," he wrote to Prang, "they will be compelled to admit that the Mississippi senator is a man, and one who will easily pass for a man among men. We colored men so often see ourselves described and painted as monkeys, that we think it a great piece of good fortune to find an exception to this general rule."

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) enlisted young people and local leaders to register and encourage southern African-Americans to vote during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's. Because the young organizers faced tremendous risks by challenging segregation and encouraging people to vote, the group earned a reputation as the "shock troops" of the Civil Rights Movement. Hollis Watkins joined SNCC in the early 1960's and canvassed potential voters in the area of McComb, Mississippi. He also participated in direct actions, for which he served time in jail. Watkins remembered the risks SNCC organizers faced when working alone and in pairs, and the support they received from the African-American community.

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. In the late 1930s writers employed by the Federal Writers Project in Texas interviewed more than 400 cowboys, providing some of the only firsthand sources about late 19th-century cowboys. In this interview, cowboy Richard Phillips offered a firsthand glimpse of the hard life that awaited the men who trailed cattle to market.

Four million workers—one fifth of the nation's workforce—went out on strike in 1919, seeking to consolidate and expand the gains they had achieved during World War I and to make real the war's rhetoric of democracy. The most important of these strikes began in September, when 350,000 steel workers walked off the job. Steel companies responded with a reign of terror, aided by local governments. Strikers were beaten, arrested, shot, and driven out of steel towns. Management brought in African-American and Mexican-American strikebreakers to split workers along racial and ethnic lines and tried to portray the conflict as an attempted revolution by foreign-born radicals. Eventually, the strike was broken. This strike ballot distributed by the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers—printed in English, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Polish—indicated the range of nationalities composing the industry's workforce in 1919.

In 1940, Congress passed the Smith Act making it illegal to support the overthrow of state or national governments. In 1949, 11 Communist Party leaders were convicted under this Act. The attorneys for the accused were themselves convicted of contempt of court and half served prison terms. Subsequently, most lawyers refused to represent suspected Communists unless they themselves were members of the Communist Party. In the following testimony before a House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearing investigating Communist activities in the San Francisco area, radical attorney Robert E. Treuhaft (1912-2001) described his unsuccessful attempts to hire respected lawyers--who privately disapproved of HUAC--to represent him. Treuhaft, an Oakland-based lawyer who had represented labor unions and African-Americans deprived of civil rights, had joined the Communist Party in the 1940s. Subsequently, he became the unpaid counsel for the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a trust fund that supplied bail money for Communists arrested under the Smith Act. The Justice Department included the CRC on their official list of subversive organizations, and following his appearance before HUAC, the Committee listed Treuhaft among the 39 most dangerous subversive lawyers in their pamphlet, "Communist Legal Subversives: The Role of the Communist Lawyer." Jessica Mitford, Treihaft's wife, wrote in her memoir, A Fine Old Conflict, that the San Francisco HUAC hearing targeted did serious damage "in destroying livelihoods and muzzling political dissent at the grass-roots level."

Realizing that their best chance of emancipation lay with the British army, as many as 100,000 enslaved African Americans became Loyalists during the War for Independence. They risked possible resale by the British or capture by the Americans, and many became refugees when the British withdrew at the end of the war. Born near Charleston, South Carolina, Boston King fled his owner to join the British. He escaped captivity several times and made his way to New York, the last American port to be evacuated by the British. King was listed in the "Book of Negroes" and issued a certificate of freedom, allowing him to board one of the military transport ships bound for the free black settlements in Nova Scotia. There, King worked as a carpenter and became a Methodist minister. He moved to Sierra Leone in 1792 and published his memoirs, one of a handful of first-person accounts by African-American Loyalist refugees.

James Meredith (b. 1933) served in the U.S. Air Force from 1951 to 1960, then attended Jackson State College in Mississippi. Inspired by President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, Meredith applied to the all-white University of Mississippi believing, as he later wrote, that he had "Divine Responsibility to break White Supremacy in Mississippi." After his application was denied, he sued the university with legal help from the NAACP. In June 1962, a Federal court ruled that the school must admit Meredith. Although accompanied by Federal officials, Meredith encountered repeated resistance in his efforts to register from Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. In a move modeled on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's response to the similar situation in Little Rock, Arkansas, six years earlier, Kennedy sent Army troops to quell mob violence that had resulted in two deaths. In the following Look magazine article, Meredith assessed the situation at "Ole Miss" following his first semester and expressed the view that all African Americans had a responsibility "to do their part to bring about the changes necessary to equalize opportunity."

Fannie Lou Hamer, the last of 20 children and a Mississippi tenant farmer, leapt to national prominence during the 1964 Democratic National Convention, when she eloquently challenged Mississippi's segregated Democratic primary on national television. In 1962, she had become a leader of the African-American voting rights movement in Mississippi that culminated in 1964's Freedom Summer. Forced off her land when her landlord demanded that she take her name off the voter registration list, Hamer was repeatedly jailed and beaten during her voting rights activities. "The only thing they could do to me was kill me," Hamer said, "and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember."