Prince Edward County, became one of five that comprised the Brown v. Moton High School staged a strike to protest the poor facilities at their school. Led by Barbara Johns, black students at Robert R. In 1951, an equalization case arose in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Between 19, many localities in Virginia were under court order to make separate educational facilities equal. These suits often focused on teacher salaries because these were the easiest disparities to prove. They also sought to equalize facilities in public high schools and elementary schools. Although the Renaissance may have been centered in Harlem in New York City, the growth of black cultural life emerged in urban communities throughout Virginia as well.īeginning in the 1930s, black plaintiffs filed lawsuits to break down segregation at the graduate and professional school level. In Richmond, the most important of these mutual-aid societies was the Grand Fountain of the United Order of True Reformers.Īlthough African Americans were confined to the lowest-paying industrial jobs, the need to provide services to other African Americans led to the emergence of a black middle class that included physicians, lawyers, funeral parlor directors, teachers, and ministers. Luke Penny Savings Bank, however, was part of a larger network of businesses that both served and employed African Americans who would otherwise have been left outside the economic mainstream. Maggie Lena Walker is widely known as the first woman to found and become president of a chartered bank in the United States. Hotels, restaurants, theaters, and retail shops all existed in segregated urban areas. In every major city in the state, black businesses sprang up. Two years later, in the wake of protests and boycotts organized by African Americans in almost every major city in the state, the assembly enacted legislation that required racial segregation on streetcars.Įxcluded from the whites-only economic system, black Virginians relied on each other. In 1904, the General Assembly gave streetcar companies the power to segregate passengers by race. Although Virginia public schools were racially segregated from the beginning, the Constitution of 1902 was the state's first constitution to require segregation. Virginia's Constitution of 1902 instituted poll taxes and literacy tests and mandated separate schools. In all of the former Confederate states, constitutions were rewritten or amended to conform to Plessy. In Plessy, the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation under the doctrine of separate-but-equal. White attempts to reinstitute control culminated in the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Many owned land, although often their farms were so small that they had to augment their incomes by working as laborers, either on other farms or in rural industries. In other rural areas, African Americans were more likely to work as farmers or farm laborers. In Virginia, sharecropping was most prevalent in areas where major cash crops, such as cotton, tobacco, and peanuts, were raised. Under sharecropping, landowners provided tenants with a portion of the crop in exchange for labor. The bureau established schools and enforced contracts between former slaves and former slaveowners. Also as a part of Reconstruction, the former Confederate states were occupied by federal troops under the auspices of the Freedmen's Bureau. Congressional Reconstruction replaced Presidential Reconstruction as Congress required southern states to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. The United States Congress thwarted President Andrew Johnson's attempts to readmit the southern states into the Union quickly. Black codes were enacted throughout the South. Returning to power in the fall elections of 1865, white leaders enacted a series of laws known collectively as "black codes." These laws, which made a crime of vagrancy and turned such misdemeanors as petty theft into felonies, were designed mainly to ensure the availability of black labor. This migration, along with the uncertain status of those black Virginians who remained in rural areas, worried white landowners. In the immediate aftermath of the war, many fled the countryside and moved to urban areas. Following the Civil War, black Virginians struggled to assert their independence and make freedom meaningful.
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