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FREEDOMWAYS                             SECOND QUARTER 1973

tional facilities but wanted them primarily for whites. Education for Blacks was to be elementary and vocational, calculated to make the mass of Blacks content with their situation. White and black labor would not compete; there would be segregation in work: skilled highly paid white jobs and unskilled black jobs on the farm, in industry and domestic service. Skills in construction and repairs for Blacks would, in some areas, be the exception. To the support of this program came Booker T. Washington in 1895.

  Between 1900 and 1915 eleven hundred men, women and children were strung up, shot down, roasted alive, lynched and not one of the murderers punished. Almost all southern states provided for white primaries. According to the Populist leader, Tom Watson, Blacks could still vote in Georgia only because the whites who controlled the Democratic machine in Georgia did not dare disenfranchise Blacks whom they needed in order to beat the hostile white majority. By 1904 Blacks had been disenfranchised in nearly every southern state. The United States Supreme Court refused to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments-neither the President nor the Congress would lift a finger.

  Between 1890 and 1900 there were over fifty strikes by white workers who demanded the discharge of black employees and an end to their hiring. Between 1880 and 1915 southern black labor was an industrial reserve for many basic industries. This reserve was not chiefly agricultural as is often thought, for already in the eighties Blacks had begun a Back-to-Africa movement beginning in 1878. They began to move gradually from the rural sections to the cities of the South; to the Southwest where they set up all-black towns in Kansas and Oklahoma, westward in the nineties; to northern industrial centers during and after World War I.

  Between 1895 and the Atlanta Riot of 1906, Booker T. Washington reached his zenith. There was little question of Washington's undisputed leadership of Blacks in the United States. Harvard and Darmouth conferred honorary degrees; he was received with extraordinary honors abroad. Although Washington minimized political activities among Blacks he was political referee in all federal appointments and action involving Blacks and in some instances the white South. Carnegie in 1903 gave Tuskegee $600,000 and he and other philanthropists consulted Washington with reference to most financial gifts of any size to Blacks, Black intellectuals were increasingly rejecting Washington's leadership; his placing the blame for the condition of Blacks on Blacks themselves; they refused

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