One of the major components of these Jim Crow laws was disenfranchisement which was "largely the work of rural and urban white elites who sought to reassure" whites in the south that white supremacy was the law of the land. As a result, lynching and other forms of violence against blacks were endorsed, encouraged and rationalized in the minds of most southern whites (Rabinowitz, 168). A prominent spokesman against African-American rights and equality was Benjamin Tillman, governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894. Tillman greatly aided in the disenfranchisement of blacks in the south by requiring Jim Crow laws and in 1990, he proudly announced "We have done out best to prevent blacks from voting and how we could eliminate every one of them... We stuffed ballot boxes and shot them. We are not ashamed of it" (Rabinowitz, 172).
By 1912, a number of black activists, writers and poets had arrived on the scene, creating protests and disruptions in American society...
One of these was James Weldon Johnson whose book the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man created two very distinct responses -- first, it represented the image of the "new Negro" who emerged to challenge the standard stereotypes of the Negro as "either a passive Uncle Tom or a vicious criminal" which not surprisingly upset many white Americans for its audacity for placing African-Americans as equal to whites, and second, it served as the forerunner of the Harlem Renaissance, "a remarkable flowering of Negro letters and arts that continued until the onset of the Great Depression" in 1929 (Rabinowitz, 188).
Bibliography
Blue, Jennifer. "An Analysis of Jim Crow Laws and Their Effect on Race Relations." Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Internet. Retrieved at http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum / units/1996/1/96.01.01.x.html.
Rabinowitz, Howard N. The First New South, 1865-1920. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1992.
