Question

1. Describe how Ida B. Wells challenged segregation and what was the outcome.

2. Describe how the sharecropping system was oppressive.

3. Describe the convict leasing system and how it impacted both men and women.

4. According to the film, what was considered "the Promise Land"?

5. How did African Americans create a Black world in a White world?

6. According to the film in the 19th century, Republicans walked away from what group of people? What group of people had Democrats walked away form?

7. In the 19th century African American males voted for what political party?

8. Why was hanging used instead of burying African Americans?
9. What does Ida B. Wells discover about lynching?
10. What happened after Ida B. Well publish her investigative reporting on lynching?

Answer 1

1. Ida B Wells moved to Chicago where she worked with Frederick Douglassand a local lawyer and editor, Frederick Barnett, in writing an 81-page booklet about the exclusion of black participants from most of the events around the Colmbian Exposition.

2. Sharecropping was a kind of farming in which families rented small plots of land from a landowner and in return for a portion of their crop was to be given to the landowner at the end of each year. Many kinds of sharecropping have been practiced worldwide for centuries. In the rural South it was carried out by former slaves. But with the southern economy in chaos after the abolition of slavery and the devastation of the Civil War, disputes came to light during the reconstruction era between many white landowners trying to restore a labor force and freed blacks seeking economic independence and autonomy. Despite giving African Americans the rights of citizens, the federal government and the Republican-controlled state governments formed during this phase of reconstruction took little action to help freed blacks in the pursuit to own their own land. Instead of receiving wages for working an owner’s land and having to submit to supervision and harsh discipline, most freedmen preferred to rent land for a fixed payment rather than receive wages.

3. The act of leasing out convicts isn’t anything new as the government had no interest in caring for convicts. The convicts were leased out to companies. While this may have helped prisons get convicts off their hands, they made no extra revenue from it. After the Civil War, such leasing began to pick up steam as corporations had access to almost free labor. Convict laborers were often dismally treated, but the convict lease system was highly profitable for the states and the employers.

4. During the Great Migration, African Americans began to build a new place for themselves in public life, actively confronting racial prejudice as well as economic, political and social challenges to create a black urban culture that would exert enormous influence in the decades to come.

7. The African American males voted for the Democratic Party.

9. Lynching in that time had become one common means by which African Americans were intimidated. Nationally, in about 200 lynchings each year, about two-thirds of the victims were black men, but the percentage was much higher in the South. In Memphis in 1892, three black businessmen established a new grocery store, cutting into the business of white-owned businesses nearby. After increasing harassment, there was an incident where the business owners fired on some people breaking into the store. The three men were jailed, and nine self-appointed deputies took them from the jail and lynched them. One of the lynched men, Tom Moss, was the father of Ida B. Wells' goddaughter, and Wells knew him and his partners to be upstanding citizens. She used the paper to denounce the lynching, and to endorse economic retaliation by the black community against white-owned businesses as well as the segregated public transportation system. She also promoted the idea that African Americans should leave Memphis for the newly-opened Oklahoma territory, visiting and writing about Oklahoma in her paper. She bought herself a pistol for self-defense.

10. Ida B Wells wrote against lynching in general. In particular, the white community became incensed when she published an editorial denouncing the myth that black men raped white women, and her allusion to the idea that white women might consent to a relationship with black men was particularly offensive to the white community. Wells was out of town when a mob invaded the paper's offices and destroyed the presses, responding to a call in a white-owned paper. Wells heard that her life was threatened if she returned, and so she went to New York, self-styled as a "journalist in exile."