Springfield, Illinois, [a] mob rioted for two days, the militia of the entire state was called out, two men were lynched, hundreds of people driven from their homes, all because a white women said a Negro assaulted her…Later after the police had found that the woman’s charge was false, she published a retraction, the indictment was dismissed, and the intended victim was discharged. But the lynched victims were dead, hundreds were homeless, and Illinois was disgraced. (Wells-Barnett 23)
From this account, Wells demonstrated that discrimination is omnipresent in false accusations of African Americans, which would often lead to lynching. She also portrayed a common aftermath of lynching in the common dismissal of the widespread effects on African Americans’ lives and the lack of action in the pursuit of justice for African Americans. Furthermore, she contended that lynching African Americans was a “blight upon our nation” (Wells-Barnett 24) that “[mocked] our laws” (Wells-Barnett 24). Besides claiming that African Americans endured negative repercussions from lynching, she also assessed that lynching and its unequal aftermaths harmed the image and contradicted the ideals of the United States. Thus, African Americans dealt with many obstacles that hindered their movement for social equality.
Due to growing animosity, white southerners imposed standards that limited the political freedoms of African Americans. For example, even though African Americans earned the “reputation of law-abiding and law-respecting people” (Washington 20), black disfranchisement occurred by intimidation and terror, which was upheld by the Ku Klux Klan, and the establishment of labor contracts, which included clauses that limited African American’s suffrage. Although the implementation of the Fifteenth Amendment gave all male citizens the right to vote, white southerners also instituted literacy tests and the grandfather clause, which excused anyone whose ancestor had voted in 1860. Since many freedmen were illiterate due to a lack of education that they received as slaves and the grandfather clause did not apply to African Americans, white southerners succeeded in creating an oppressive political environment for many African Americans as portrayed in Du Bois’s speech where he exclaimed that “the work of stealing the black man’s ballot has progressed, and the fifty and more representatives of stolen votes still sit in the nation’s capitol” (Du Bois 18). Since the general opinion of white Southerners supported Redemption, a movement that symbolized Democrats return to power in the South, Democrats soon become the dominant party. In return, Democrats created a large black labor work force that reestablished the racial hierarchy from the times of slavery between blacks and whites. Due to the condescending political climate and its negative consequences, many African Americans advocated suffrage as an important asset in their movement for equality as exemplified in Du Bois’s speech where he claimed that “with the right to vote goes everything: freedom, manhood, the honor of your wives, the chastity of your daughters, the right to work, and the chance to rise” (Du Bois 18). In this excerpt, Du Bois promoted that suffrage was not only the right to vote, but also an important right that would help African Americans establish their identity through the expression of their views in a political atmosphere. Thus, African Americans underwent many incidents that violated their political freedoms due to a spreading idea of white supremacy in the South.
Finally, African Americans confronted many economic complications in the South due to the exploitation of their labor. For example, an agrarian labor experiment called sharecropping formed as a compromise in order for landowners to receive a type of labor and for freedmen to receive their land, which signified a movement toward independence. This formation of labor led to the implementation of a crop-lien system, which was a system where merchants loaned supplies to sharecroppers in return for a claim on their next crop. Furthermore, merchants exploited the needs of many illiterate African American sharecroppers, which in return bounded them to staple production and prevented crop diversification. As a result, many African American sharecroppers faced poverty due to soil depletion and land erosion. Due to African Americans’ recognition of education as an intrinsic aspect for economic prosperity, they began to emphasize its importance in economic developments as shown in Du Bois’s speech where he revealed that “[African Americans] believe in work- [African Americans] are workers- but work is not necessarily education. Education is the development of power and ideal” (Du Bois 19). As Du Boise pointed out, even though work can sometimes result in economic prosperity, work does not guaranteed economic equality. Whereas education not only ensured economic equality, but also created minds, which would bring peace and pursue justice for the African American community. Thus, African American experienced ramifications due to the lack of education, which therefore hindered their economic development.
In conclusion, at the close of the nineteenth century, African Americans encountered a growing malice that resulted into social difficulties, political restraints, and economic predicaments. As a result, distraught African Americans throughout the United States reacted to the injustices to their race by forming a crusade to object to the discrimination of African American citizens. Hence, African Americans dogmatically pursued the simple freedoms advocated by Du Bois, Washington, and Wells-Barnett.