Sociology 3330:Worksheet--"The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow: Don't Shout Too Soon"

1. At the end of World War I, W.E.B. DuBois wrote in "The Crisis," "The country is yet a shameful land," and he called upon blacks returning from the war to take up the fight for their rights. "We return from fighting. We return fighting." How do the following incidents reinforce his point about a shameful land?

a. lynching of Mary Turner in 1918 in Georgia

b. Chicago race riot of 1919

c. White response to efforts to form a black tenants' union in Elaine, Arkansas

d. Tulsa, Oklahoma riot

2. Identify the following?

Walter White

Fisk University

Harlem Renaissance

Ned Cobb

Charles Hamilton Houston

3. What was the basis for the split between W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP in the 1930s?

Sociology 4949: Groups--"The Rise and Fall and Jim Crow: Don't Shout Too Soon."

1. In the introduction to this series, the narrator says: "Domestic terrorism was the might behind Jim Crow." I don't think there can be any question about this, but it may be worth trying to analyze it more closely. What constitutes terrorism? How does the terrorism used against African Americans in the Jim Crow era differ from the terrorism used against Shiites and Kurds by the Sunni government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or the terrorism used by Milosevic and the Serbs and the Croats and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia? Do you think armed insurrection by black Americans would have been morally justified at that time? How about intervention by the military of an outside government?

2. In the General Social Survey for 1994, a random sample of adult Americans were asked: . How proud are you to be an American? Their options were: . extremely proud, very proud, somewhat proud, or not very proud. The overwhelming majority said they were extremely proud or very proud? What do you think that means? How do you think Americans deal with the really negative aspects of our history relating to race? (This might be a good point at which to mention Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 book, An American Dilemma.)

3. The Jim Crow system was primarily, though not entirely, a feature of life in the Southern states. Why do you suppose the majority of Americans, living outside the south, never intervened in that system in an effective way during the Jim Crow years? Or, to put it a slightly different way, why did it take almost a hundred years after the Civil War before the federal government again took any strong action to provide civil rights to black Americans?

4. Why was Franklin Delano Roosevelt unwilling to support federal anti-lynching legislation during the 1930s, and why did that legislation ultimately fail in Congress in 1938?