CHANGING CULTURAL RULE SYSTEMS AND RACE RELATIONS

This essay compares the changes in cultural rule systems regulating race relations in Chicago and the strategies used by white and black groups to alter those relations between 1890 and 1920 and in the American South between 1954 and 1968. In Chicago during this period, a pattern of de facto segregation of and discrimination against the black population was largely in place by 1890. It intensified during the succeeding thirty years, as whites responded hostilely to the growing migration of blacks from the South, especially during the wartime boom of 1915-1918. In contrast, a de jure system of segregation and discrimination had been in place for more than 75 years in the South at the time the civil rights struggles there erupted after 1953. The strategies employed by blacks in Chicago varied, reflecting ideological struggles within the black leadership there, and the growing size and changing socioeconomic composition of the black population, but gradually moved toward greater black solidarity and control over its own affairs. That movement, despite some gains, failed to alter the eliminate the isolation of the Southside ghetto. In the South, a new generation of civil rights leaders, many of them younger, wrested control of the black movement for liberation away from previous quiescent leaders and led a partially successful struggle for the realization of black civil rights.

Creation of the Black Ghetto in Chicago's South

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This "civil rights crowd" favored cooperation with the white power structure, but it advocated civil rights legislation, which it pushed through its political contacts, law suits and indignation meetings (Spear 51-53). By 1900, a new generation of black leaders came to the fore. They were greatly influenced by the teachings of Booker T. Washington, who favored black self-help and racial solidarity. They were led by well-educated middle class blacks such as surgeon Daniel Williams, who with other such leaders and the support of white philanthropists, founded the interracial Provident Hospital in 1891. Their point of view was challenged after 1905 by followers of W. E. B. Dubois and his Niagara movement, which attacked Washington's assimilationist tendencies and favored black separatism. Ida Wells-Barnett had been instrumental in the formation of the Afro-American Council in 1898. She said "we must educate white people out of 250 years of slave history" (Spear 59). While the Niagara movement fought accommodationism, its ultimate goal was racial integration and it eschewed racial violence. Black nationalism espoused by Marcus Garvey after 1915 had limited appeal. Politically, blacks had largely been pawns of the Republican politic
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Approximate Word count = 1828
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)