Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 22: Southern Horrors Summary & Analysis

In 1890, a new colonization bill proposes paying for Black Americans to move to Africa. Proponents of colonization argue that God’s purpose for slavery was to civilize Black people so that they could return and “redeem Africa.” Walter Vaughan, a Nebraska Democrat who was born into a family of Alabama enslavers, argues that the federal government should provide a pension to the formerly enslaved, which would help stimulate the struggling Southern economy. In 1891 a formerly enslaved woman named Callie House founds the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association partly inspired by Vaughan’s pamphlet. This is the beginning of the reparations movement, which attracts little interest from the Black elite. House condemns this lack of support, arguing that “The most learned negroes” actually seem to be “fighting against the welfare of their race.” 

In 1890, Du Bois graduates from Harvard and gives another graduation speech in which he praises Jefferson Davis and expresses racist ideas about the superiority of Europeans to Africans, whom he characterizes as weak and submissive. In the fall, Du Bois begins his Ph.D. in history at Harvard. With study abroad funding from former president Rutherford B. Hayes, Du Bois travels to the University of Berlin, at this point “the most distinguished university in the European world.”

Meanwhile, Massachusetts congressman Henry Cabot Lodge propose a bill allowing voters to be granted election supervision if they request it from the federal government. Southern segregationists call this anti-discrimination bill “hateful.” Many Southern states introduce literacy tests and other methods to prevent Black people voting. Ultimately, Lodge’s bill does not pass anyway. Du Bois is not particularly concerned by voter suppression, arguing, “When you have the right sort of Black voters, you will need no election laws.” At this point, a wave of segregationist laws are passed in the South, dividing almost every aspect of life along the color line and creating a society that is “separate but (un)equal.”

Black people mount protests to this segregation movement; white people respond with a massive escalation in lynching, all while blaming the increase in lynching on a supposedly growing rate of Black crime. Both Du Bois and the elderly Frederick Douglass accept this false excuse, but journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells does not. In 1892, Wells publishes a pamphlet entitled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, and the following year, she travels to England for an “anti-lynching tour.” In 1896, the National Association of Colored Women is founded, with the motto “Lifting as We Climb.”

Du Bois returns from Germany in 1894 after his request for funding extension is denied. In 1895, he becomes the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, which invites racist mockery from many, including future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (at this point a Harvard freshman). Du Bois’s time in Germany gave him experience of relating to white people as equals. His first professorial job is at a Black college in Ohio, Wilberforce. At this point Du Bois still believes in the uplift suasion principle that “racism could be persuaded and educated away.”

Booker T. Washington is an influential educator who takes over as the nation’s most prominent Black leader following Douglass’s death in 1895. He encourages Black people to accept a lower status in life in exchange for tolerance from white people in his famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Du Bois sends Washington a telegram expressing his admiration for the speech. In 1896, the Supreme Court rules 7-1 in favor of upholding segregation in Plessy vs. Ferguson. Even the sole dissenting opinion insisted that white supremacy will and should always exist in America. At this point, the segregationist policies that already exist throughout the South are confirmed to be legal.