The Practice of Freedom

The Reconstruction Amendments rebuilt the Constitution after slavery: the Thirteenth (1865) abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, the Fourteenth (1868) established birthright citizenship and equal protection and overturned Dred Scott, and the Fifteenth (1870) banned denying the vote on account of race. Black men voted in large numbers, and nearly 2,000 African Americans held public office during Reconstruction, from local posts to the US Senate.

The Freedmen's Bureau (1865–1872) gave formerly enslaved people food and clothing, legalized their marriages and set up schools. Freed people searched for relatives sold away during slavery, placing 'information wanted' ads in Black newspapers for decades, formalized their marriages and chose new names, and today's family reunions grew out of these searches.

Southern states passed Black Codes in 1865 and 1866 to control freed people's labor and movement, forcing them into labor contracts, punishing 'vagrancy' and even taking children into unpaid apprenticeships. General Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15 set aside 40-acre plots for freed families, but President Andrew Johnson reversed it, leaving most freed people in sharecropping and crop-lien debt, while convict leasing forced arrested Black men into unpaid labor.

After the disputed election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction, Southern states rewrote their constitutions to segregate public life and block Black voting with poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses, backed by Ku Klux Klan terror and lynching. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court approved 'separate but equal,' giving segregation legal cover until Brown v. Board of Education began to dismantle it in 1954.

Jim Crow laws, protected by the Plessy decision, segregated schools, hospitals, transportation and even cemeteries and kept Black men from voting. Scholars call the years from the end of Reconstruction to World War II the 'nadir' of American race relations; journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett exposed the lies used to justify lynching, and Black communities fought back with tactics like boycotts of segregated streetcars.

Racial violence surged from 1917 to 1921: in the 'Red Summer' of 1919, more than 30 race riots broke out as white mobs attacked Black communities amid competition for jobs, a flu pandemic and hostility toward returning Black World War I veterans. In 1921 a white mob, joined by city officials, destroyed Tulsa's prosperous Greenwood district ('Black Wall Street'), and Black Americans answered with activism, writing like Claude McKay's poem 'If We Must Die' and armed self-defense.

W.E.B. Du Bois named the 'color line,' the barrier of segregation and discrimination, as the central problem of the twentieth century, and described double consciousness: the strain of always seeing yourself through the eyes of a society that looks down on you. Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem 'We Wear the Mask' (1895) and Du Bois's image of 'the Veil' in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) both show how racism kept African Americans from full belonging, yet double consciousness also fueled insight and resistance.

After slavery, Black leaders debated how to achieve racial uplift: Booker T. Washington urged industrial education and economic progress before pushing for political equality, while W.E.B. Du Bois demanded full civil rights and higher education. Black women such as Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs argued that the race could rise only with Black women's education and rights, and they built the club movement, including the National Association of Colored Women (1896), whose motto was 'Lifting as We Climb.'

Shut out of much of American life, Black communities built their own businesses, banks, newspapers and churches. The Black press spread news and protest, and Black churches, such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the first Black denomination (1816), became centers of worship, culture and leadership. Entrepreneurs like Madam C.J. Walker, often called the first self-made woman millionaire in the United States, built hair-care businesses and funded community causes.

Facing exclusion from most colleges, African Americans built historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), most after the Civil War; early ones were private schools often funded by white philanthropists and churches, and others were land-grant colleges created after the Second Morrill Act of 1890. HBCUs weighed liberal arts education (as at Fisk) against vocational training (as at Tuskegee), trained generations of Black professionals and fostered Black Greek-letter organizations, and Fisk's Jubilee Singers brought spirituals to audiences around the world.

The New Negro movement urged African Americans to define themselves, take pride in their heritage and speak up politically, even during the violence of the nadir. Its best-known part, the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, produced a flowering of literature, art and music like jazz and blues, and works such as Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (1925) and Langston Hughes's essay 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' (1926) called for proud, distinctly Black art.

Black scholars, artists and activists used photography to counter the racist images used to justify segregation. During the New Negro movement, Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee portrayed Black families, couples, athletes and Garveyites with elegance, showing the beauty, dignity and pride of everyday Black life.

Harlem Renaissance poets explored what Africa meant to them generations after the slave trade: some used rich, proud images of Africa to counter stereotypes, while others reflected on feeling both connected to and cut off from an African heritage they had never seen. The two key poems are Gwendolyn Bennett's 'Heritage' (1922) and Countee Cullen's 'Heritage' (1925).

In the 1930s and 1940s, records and radio carried Black music across the country. The blues grew out of the songs of enslaved people and went electric after the Great Migration, and jazz, born in New Orleans, is often called America's most original art form. Duke Ellington, dancer Katherine Dunham, Ethel Waters and many others starred in cabarets, on Broadway and in film, including Cabin in the Sky (a 1940 Broadway show and a 1943 all-Black Hollywood musical). In 1939 Waters became the first African American to headline her own TV show.

New Negro writers and educators argued that schools taught Black students they had no history, so Black people needed to research and teach their own past. Carter G. Woodson started what became Black History Month and wrote The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), Arturo Schomburg's collection became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Du Bois's sociology and Zora Neale Hurston's studies of Black folk culture laid groundwork for African American Studies.

Between the 1910s and the 1970s, about six million African Americans moved from the South to the North, Midwest and West, pushed by lynching, Jim Crow, poverty and crop disasters like the boll weevil, and pulled by factory jobs during both world wars. Trains and the Black press made the move possible, the National Urban League helped migrants find jobs and housing, and the migration turned African Americans into a mostly urban people and spread Southern Black culture to cities like Chicago and New York.

More than 140,000 Afro-Caribbean immigrants came to the United States between 1899 and 1937, mostly settling in New York and Florida, driven by struggling island economies during World War I and growing US power in the Caribbean, such as the Panama Canal. Their arrival caused some tensions with African Americans but also blended cultures, added religious and language diversity, and brought radical thinkers who shaped Black politics, such as the Jamaican-born writer Wilfred A. Domingo.

Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey led the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest pan-African movement in African American history, with members across the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. Garvey preached Black pride, economic self-reliance and 'Africa for the Africans,' launched the Black Star Line shipping company, and his red, black and green flag and ideas inspired later Black nationalist movements.