0.1 The progressive era (part ii)  (Page 5/11)

Black men were disenfranchised through the use of poll taxes or literacy tests. If you could not pay the tax or could not pass the literacy examination, then you were prohibited from voting. Overwhelmingly, blacks were the targets of these new laws.

The Supreme Court declared the constitutionality of many southern laws that created separate living areas, work areas, and educational opportunities for white and black citizens. Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896, established the “separate but equal” clause of the U.S. Constitution when the Supreme Court sided with the state of Louisiana, which had laws prohibiting blacks and whites from traveling on the same trains. As Justice Henry Brown wrote, “The object of the [Fourteenth A]mendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” In other words, states were not discriminating if states provided for separate facilities in regards to non-political matters based on racial ideas because of the Supreme Court’s use of the term “equal.” For Americans today, “equal” means the same. For the Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century, “equal” meant similar but not the same. For example, today your professors are prohibited from mandating exams based on race or gender (all female students will take one exam while all male students take another exam), yet for Progressive era Americans you were being treated equally as long as both groups were allowed access to educational opportunities.

Progressive presidents tended to ignore the plight of African Americans as well as their calls for equality. Roosevelt did invite Booker T. Washington to a White House dinner. A Memphis newspaper called Roosevelt’s decision to eat with a black man a “damnable outrage.” Roosevelt, like his progressive presidential colleagues, tended to emphasize his connections to the South, even going so far as to send flowers to the widow of the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. Wilson was from the South (born in Virginia). As president, Wilson hosted a White House screening of the film Birth of a Nation , which was based on the novel “The Klansmen,” in which the Klan was shown to be heroes to the South and protectors of southern women’s purity while also portraying blacks as alcohol-fueled, sex-crazed, people unwilling, unable, and uninterested in working for a living.

Another reason why Progressive reforms failed to reach most African Americans was the popularly-held notion of “White Man’s Burden.” Rudyard Kipling, a British subject who was born and worked in imperial India, wrote often acknowledging the trials and tribulations of the British imperial system, however, his poem while also extolling the necessity of Britain’s empire because of the good being performed around the world in bringing western political, social, economic, and very importantly, religious ideas to the heathens of the world. He penned this 1899 poem, entitled "White Man’s Burden" in part, to give support to the American efforts in the Philippines, as if to poetically assure Americans that their cause was just and noble: