Populism, Jim Crow, and the fight against segregation

In the late 1800s, struggling farmers, squeezed by falling crop prices, debt, and high railroad rates, organized the Populist (People's) Party, which called for government regulation of railroads, a graduated income tax, and more money in circulation. At the same time, after Reconstruction ended in 1877, Southern states built a system of legal segregation known as Jim Crow. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence stripped most Black men in the South of the right to vote, and in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court upheld segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal," though Black schools and facilities were almost always worse. Thousands of African Americans were lynched, murdered by mobs without trial, in the decades around 1900, and journalist Ida B. Wells documented and campaigned against these killings. Black leaders debated strategy: Booker T. Washington urged economic self-help and vocational education, while W. E. B. Du Bois demanded full civil and political rights and helped found the NAACP in 1909.

This explanation is AI-generated and can occasionally be wrong. 🚩 Report