EPILOGUE

The northern black struggle for full citizenship rights continued through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New leaders, such as Timothy Thomas Fortune, publisher of the New York Age, and W. E. B. DuBois, a prominent intellectual and activist, emerged as forceful advocates for black civil and political rights. Moreover, African American women collaborated more actively with men in the cause and established the women’s club movement to agitate for suffrage and other rights for all blacks. But the movement also drew heavily on the Reconstruction-era cause for leadership, organizational structure, and inspiration. Douglass, Langston, and many other veterans of the post–Civil War crusade for equal rights remained active into the 1890s and, in some cases, beyond the turn of the century. In addition, the Afro-American League, the Afro-American Council, the Niagara Movement, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—created by black activists between the late 1880s and 1910—were, in many ways, modeled on the National Equal Rights League. Finally, these activists were inspired by the core principles and objectives of the earlier struggle for political and legal equality. Thus, northern Reconstruction remains essential to understand how the postwar black crusade for equal rights shaped and influenced the later civil rights movement.1

Northern blacks’ efforts to protect the fundamental rights of African Americans during the post-Reconstruction years encountered enormous obstacles. While the southern Jim Crow system was far more brutal and rigid than the system that took root in the North around the turn of the century, racial segregation increased significantly in the North due in part to whites’ hostile reaction to the large-scale northern migration of southern blacks. The U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned such segregation by invoking the doctrine of “separate but equal” in its Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896. At the same time, the Republican Party became the dominant political force in much of the North between the 1890s and the 1930s; with fewer close elections in which blacks could determine the outcome, the party’s leadership felt little need to consider the black vote—and with it blacks’ interests—in their political calculations.2 In this hostile environment, black civil rights organizations enjoyed far less success than the Reconstruction-era equal rights movement. Indeed, with few resources and white allies and little political leverage, they were largely unable even to stem the rising tide of segregation and oppression.3

Only with the New Deal, World War II, the growth of a postwar black middle class, changing white racial attitudes, and other significant developments did the modern civil rights movement emerge in the mid-twentieth century. This movement was, like the Reconstruction-era cause, national in scope, with northern black activists playing important roles from its inception. Both movements emerged during a time of sweeping social and economic change that, following decades of unrelenting white oppression, held out the hope of a brighter future for African Americans. Both sought to take advantage of these propitious developments by launching a vigorous assault on deeply rooted patterns of racial discrimination. Both also enlisted widespread support within the black community. Their relentless pressure on the white power structure produced impressive gains in the areas of civil and political rights, though both movements encountered white opposition and indifference that ultimately limited their accomplishments. The Reconstruction-era equal rights movement and the modern civil rights movement represent defining moments in the longstanding African American struggle to pressure white Americans to give real meaning to the ideals of equality, justice, and democracy they so often celebrated.4