Encyclopedia

This interactive encyclopedia offers teachers and students access to terms, people, and events related to the history of Jim Crow. Many entries include reference material and some of the biographies on prominent figures contain suggestions for teaching as well as links to related sections of this site. The encyclopedia will continue to grow throughout the course of this project.

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Central State University: An educational institution that began as the Combined Normal and Industrial Department for teacher training within Wilberforce University in 1887. Established by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Wilberforce University had been providing educational opportunities for the local black population since 1856. In a highly unusual arrangement, the Ohio Legislature provided the financial backing for the Department, which would offer teacher training while Wilberforce University provided the physical plant and resources. The Department would be administered separately from the larger university and have its own board of trustees. In 1941, it expanded to become Central State College, then formally separated from Wilberforce University in 1951. With the addition of a liberal arts curriculum, it was renamed Central State University in 1965. While a devastating 1974 tornado leveled much of the university's original buildings, a massive rebuilding campaign resulted in numerous new facilities, including a communications center named for comedian and backer Bill Cosby.

Charles Sumner High School: The first high school for black students in Missouri, was established in 1875 in St. Louis. It moved to its present location, 4248 Cottage Avenue, in 1910. The school was established as a normal school, for the training of black students to enter the teaching profession, and underwent major physical additions to its campus in 1922, 1955, and 1968.

Charleston, South Carolina: Eight English proprietors established the first permanent settlement along the southeastern seaboard in 1670. They named the village Charleston and the colony Carolina, after King Charles I, who had granted them land from Virginia to Florida. (In 1710, Carolina was divided into North Carolina and South Carolina.) Land, opportunity, and religious freedom attracted not only English settlers, but also French Huguenots, Jewish merchants, and other Europeans to the colony. They established profitable rice, indigo, and cotton plantations in the low country using Native American (Catawba, Creek, and Cherokee) and African slave labor to raise their crops. By 1720, Charleston’s population was majority African or African American. The port of Charleston grew into an important center for the trade of slaves, planters’ crops, and luxury products. By the American Revolution, Charleston was the fourth largest city in 13 colonies, and its people were the richest per capita. The city continued to prosper until the outbreak of the Civil War, which occurred in Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861, when South Carolina secessionists fired on Fort Sumter. Wracked by war, a freak east-coast earthquake in 1886, and hurricanes, Charleston declined. Too poor to tear down their historic city, Charlestonians established one of the first historic preservation districts in the United States in 1931. Tourism and military bases have helped to revitalize the city’s economy, although modern Charleston continues to suffer urban blight.

Chesnutt, Charles: (1858-1932) An essayist, folklorist, and novelist who was recognized as a major innovator in African-American fiction and an important contributor to post-Civil War southern literature. His books, The Conjure Woman, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition and The Colonel's Dream won him the Spingarn Medal in 1928 from the NAACP for his pioneering work on the behalf of the African-American struggle.

Cheyney University: A school that came into being in 1832, when Richard Humphreys, a wealthy Quaker born in the British Virgin Islands, bequeathed $10,000 to a group of fellow Quakers to build a school dedicated to instructing the descendents of the African Race. The African Institute (later renamed the Institute for Colored Youth) opened its doors on the corner of Seventh and Lombard Streets in Philadelphia on February 27, 1837, making it the first institution in the United States to offer elementary and high school instruction to African Americans. In 1903, the growing co-educational school moved 24 miles outside of Philadelphia to a farm formerly owned by George Cheyney. Andrew Carnegie donated $10,000 toward a library for the new campus, which opened in 1909 and is still standing. In 1914, the Institute for Colored Youth was renamed Cheyney Training School for Teachers, and, by 1922, the school was a State-funded normal school. It has attracted numerous illustrious African Americans as speakers, such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Mary McLeod Bethune, and John Hope Franklin. The school became Cheyney State Teachers College in 1951, Cheyney State College in 1959, and, finally, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania in 1983. The university currently enrolls over 2,000 students and offers degrees in numerous fields, including education (still the university's most popular discipline), mathematics, computer science, social science, business, and fine arts.

Childress, Alice Carroll: (1920-1994) A tireless champion of the poor and marginalized underclass, Alice Childress was an actress, playwright, and novelist whose writing focused on life's losers and "those who come in second." After spending her earliest years in South Carolina, Childress moved to Harlem to live with her grandmother, Eliza Campbell. A promising student and voracious reader, financial difficulties forced Childress to leave high school before graduation. She joined the American Negro Theatre in Harlem when she was twenty and appeared in a number of productions before writing her first play, Florence, in 1949. Gold Through the Trees followed in 1952, the first play written by an African-American woman performed on an American stage. In 1956 Childress's play Trouble in Mind, depicting the travails of black actors straining to break free of old stereotypes, won her an Obie award for the best original Off-Broadway play, the first such award ever won by a woman. Childress gained national attention for her 1966 play, The Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, about an interracial marriage in South Carolina during World War I. The entire state of Alabama banned Wine in the Wilderness, her play about the black revolution when National Educational Television aired it in 1969. Controversy continued to follow her after the 1973 publication of her novel chronicling the life of a thirteen-year-old heroin addict, A Hero Ain't Nothing But a Sandwich. Cited by the New York Times as an Outstanding Book of the Year, the book was banned from school libraries in Savannah, Georgia, until 1983 when it was reinstated by court order. After completing several more novels and plays, and garnering numerous awards, Childress died in New York in 1994.

Civil Rights Act of 1866: The law bestowing citizenship upon African Americans and passed over President Andrew Johnson's veto. It spelled out the civil rights granted to all persons born in the U. S. (except Native Americans), including the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue and give evidence, and to inherit, purchase, and convey real and personal property. It did not apply, however, to state segregation statutes. Nor did it mention the state rights of blacks regarding public education or public accommodations. Due to the racial violence, the Ku Klux Klan, and the political upheaval of the era, it failed to protect the civil rights of the formerly enslaved people of the South.

Civil Rights Act of 1875: A law passed on March 1, 1875, that guaranteed equal rights for blacks in public places and made illegal the exclusion of African Americans from jury duty. However, the Supreme Court declared this act invalid in 1883 because it protected social rather than political rights. The Court also argued that the 14th Amendment prohibited the states from depriving individuals of their civil rights but did not protect the abuse of individuals' civil rights by other individuals. This ruling ended Federal protection of African Americans against discrimination by private persons.

Civil War: (1861-1865) With the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency in 1860, eleven southern slaveholding states seceded from the United States, triggering a long and bloody civil war. After four years of brutal fighting, the Confederacy was defeated. In the process of war, nearly 600,000 Americans died from battlefield wounds and disease. Although historians argue about the causes of the war, most agree that the South left the Union because they feared that the federal government under Lincoln would move to end the institution of slavery. In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), which freed all enslaved people within the Confederacy. Nearly 185,000 African Americans, mostly enslaved people in the South, joined the U. S. army and navy to fight for their freedom and to defeat the Confederacy. Of this number, almost 40,000 died during the war. At war's end, the nation ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which ended slavery everywhere in the United States.

Claflin College: A school born from the recognition among Members of the South Carolina Mission Conference of the Methodist Church that African Americans needed access to education. In a building owned by the Baker Biblical Institute in Charleston, South Carolina, they sowed the beginnings of what would become Claflin University in 1866. With the help of the Massachusetts philanthropist Lee Claflin and his son William (also a former governor of Massachusetts and founder of the Free Soil Party of Massachusetts), a school opened in 1869. From 1875 to 1896, the South Carolina State Legislature combined Claflin with the South Carolina State Agricultural and Mechanical Institute. During those years, the school was partly financed from Federal funds for agricultural and mechanical education. In 1896, however, the two schools split again. Primarily a school for teacher education that graduated its first normal school student in 1879, Claflin currently enrolls 920 students and offers 24 different majors.

Clark Atlanta University: A school that was formed in 1988 by combining Clark College and Atlanta University, and that, today, enrolls over 5,000 students and is the United Negro College Fund's largest affiliated institution. Clark College was established in 1869 by the Freedmen's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church and provided undergraduate instruction, primarily in the liberal arts. Atlanta University, established in 1865 by the American Missionary Association, had been the nation's oldest African-American graduate institutions. It was affiliated also with Morehouse and Spelman Colleges, and the three schools comprised the Atlanta University System, later joined by Morris Brown College and Interdenominational Theological Center. One of Atlanta University's most famous professors of economics and history, W.E.B. Du Bois, taught at Atlanta University from 1869 to 1910. During his tenure, he organized a series of conferences on the problems facing American blacks and began a discourse countering Booker T. Washington's accommodationist position on educating African Americans.

Clark, Septima: (1895-1987) A teacher and active member of the NAACP in Charleston, South Carolina, who, inspired by the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, founded the Citizenship Schools of St. John's Island. The schools emphasized the education of informed citizens, focusing on issues of democracy, power and freedom. Eventually Citizenship Schools spread across the South, hosting voter registration campaigns and creating strong local leadership.

Cobb, Ned: A tenant cotton farmer who was born in Alabama in 1885 and who fought against unfair treatment of tenant farmers by forming a tenant farmers union. According to James R. Grossman, in the opening decades of the 20th century, Cobb clawed his way up the ladder from wage laborer to sharecropper, cash renter, and, finally, land owner. Grossman explains that, at the time, the value of the farmland in Alabama was often less than the value of the crops grown on it--in Cobb's case, the crop was cotton. When farmers had to borrow money to pay for expenses, bankers or merchants loaned money based on the value of the crop rather than the land. So, once the crop was sold after harvest, bankers and merchants took payment out of the cash produced by the crop. As a result, farmers were often forced to grow cash crops on all their land rather than using part of it to grow food for their own families. This forced them to go back to the same merchants to borrow more just to feed their families. The resulting cycle made it nearly impossible for them to ever rise above the poverty level.

Cobb, whose real name is Nate Shaw, was the son of slaves and struggled throughout his life to gain independence. His struggles are portrayed in the poem "In Egypt Land" by John Beecher and in the book All God's Dangers by Theodore Rosengarten. In his book, which is based on 1500 pages of oral history as told by Shaw, Rosengarten portrays Shaw in the 1930s, joining a sharecroppers union and coming to the aid of a neighbor whose land is about to be possessed by deputies. After exchanging shots with the sheriff, Shaw was sent to spend 13 years in prison. Upon his release in 1945, Shaw was almost 60.
Ned Cobb Lesson Activity Suggestions.

Coffee: Word derived from Kaffa, region in Ethiopia.

Color Line: A barrier or non-physical wall, usually created by custom or economic differences, to separate nonwhite persons from white persons. In the 1890s, this customary barrier in the southern states of America became a legal line of separation with laws stating clearly where blacks could and could not go in public spaces. By the turn of the century, African Americans were confronted with "colored" signs on doors, water fountains, bathrooms, and waiting rooms in bus and train stations designating their places for standing, sitting, eating, and using the facilities. The "colored" sign was the most visible mark of inferiority imposed upon African Americans by the Jim Crow laws. The color line also existed in the mid-western and eastern states of the nation, but it was not so clearly marked, and was seldom enforced by law.

Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union: (1866-1892) A black farmers' cooperative that formed in 1866 in Lovejoy, Texas, and joined with white farmer groups from the Midwest and South in a protest movement against the power of planters, railroad monopolies, and merchant creditors. By 1891, the Alliance had more than a million members in 12 states. The white and colored alliances maintained strict segregation policies, however, and met at separate conventions. In 1891, black cotton pickers in Arkansas participated in a strike against white planters. Whites responded by lynching some of the strikers, and a white backlash against the Colored Alliance destroyed it as an organization.

Compromise of 1877: A deal regarding the presidency in the election of 1876. In the election, neither of the two presidential candidates, Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican) and Samuel J. Tilden (Democrat) won the required majority of the Electoral College vote. Tilden held the majority of the popular vote (4, 282,020 to 4,036,572) as well as a 20-vote lead in the Electoral College (184 to 165). Twenty votes were in dispute because of fraud and violence in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. (Oregon's electoral eligibility left that State's vote uncounted as well.) Tilden needed one vote and Hayes needed 20 to achieve the necessary majority. In absence of a constitutional provision for resolving the dilemma, Congress created an Electoral Commission consisting of five members each from the House, Senate, and Supreme Court. Behind the scenes negotiations produced congressional approval of an eight to seven vote (along party lines) in favor of Hayes. According to the informal terms of the deal, the South would accept Hayes as President; the appointment of Republican James A. Garfield as Speaker of the House; protection of black civil rights in return for Federal aid to create internal improvements in the South; the patronage appointment of Democrats to Federal offices; and the return of home rule to the white South ... meaning the end of Reconstruction. Although Garfield was defeated as Speaker of the House, all Federal troops were withdrawn from the former states of the Confederacy. In a brief time, all the remaining Republican governments in the South collapsed and the "Solid Democratic South" emerged--allowing, thereafter, for the disfranchisement of black voters by means of law and violence.

Concordia College: A school founded in 1912 as the Alabama Lutheran Academy and Junior College by Rosa Young, the daughter of a Methodist circuit rider. Beginning with seven students, Young began teaching in a Methodist Church in Rosebud, Alabama. Within a few years, Young's student body had grown to 215, but, with mounting financial problems, the future of her school was precarious. Help came from the Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America, which adopted her school, creating a Christian Bible college to train church workers. The school relocated to 22 acres of property outside Selma in 1919, adding buildings and expanding its Christian curriculum. In 1994, the school received accreditation as a four-year liberal arts college.

Congressional Reconstruction: (1866-1876) A plan imposed on southern states by the U. S. Congress out of anger over white attacks on African Americans, the passage of so-called "Black Codes" limiting freedom for blacks, and President Andrew Johnson's mild program of Reconstruction. According to this plan, Congress refused to accept senators and representatives elected from southern states; passed the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, granting citizenship to African Americans and ensuring that they were counted in the population for representation in the House of Representative; restricted supporters of the Confederacy in state and Federal government from holding office; and made accepting the 14th Amendment a prerequisite to congressional recognition of a state's representatives and senators. Initially, all the southern state legislatures except Tennessee voted against the Amendment, but it finally passed in 1868. To enforce its authority, Congress placed military commanders with Federal troops in charge of the former Confederate states. It also required the former Confederate states to rewrite their constitutions so as to protect the civil rights of blacks, and it passed the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed suffrage for African-American males. This amendment was ratified by the states in 1870.

Convict Lease System: (1880-1948) An arrangement in many southern states, especially Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, under which prisoners were leased out to planters who used them as convict labor on plantations, in tobacco factories, and in coal mines. Eighty to 90 percent of these prisoners were African Americans.

Convict Leasing/Chain Gangs: Practices used by the states to put prisoners to work and, at times, save money. Toward the end of Reconstruction, nearly every state in the former Confederacy turned to leasing out prisoners convicted of property crimes to private business, such as railroads, planters, mine owners, lumber yards. These unregulated convict farms and gangs were the scenes of horrible inhumanity towards the prisoners. And, the barbarities in such camps were tolerated principally because those who were abused were black men, and some women. The death rate in the camps was staggering. Historian Joel Williamson notes that in Texas, the rate of death per 1,000 prisoners stood at 250 in the timber camps, compared to 25 per 1000 in the nation as a whole. In some states, the county and state governments worked the convicts in chain gangs on roads, bridges, and other public projects. This system provided the state with the maximum amount of punishment at the lowest possible cost--any black person who crossed the color line might be lynched, jailed, or put to work in convict chain gangs.

Cook, Coralie: (1942 - ) Very little is known about the childhood of Coralie Franklin Cook, noted civic leader, activist, and educator, except the names of her parents, Albert and Mary. She married a former slave, George Cook, whose interest in attaining a college degree was encouraged by Henry Highland Garnet, a famous abolitionist and religious leader. In 1880, Cook graduated from Storer College and taught there between 1882 and 1893. She also attended the National School of Oratory in Philadelphia and Emerson College. She became a professor of English at Howard University and held the chair of oratory there. As a leading member of Washington D.C.'s Colored Women's League, Cook was among those who formed the National Association of Colored Women in 1896. The NACW professed the twin goals of demonstrating the power of black women by example and striving to ameliorate the conditions of millions of destitute blacks. A feminist, Cook befriended Susan B. Anthony and strongly supported women suffrage. But over time she separated from Anthony, feeling that the National Woman Suffrage Association had "turned its back on women of color." Coralie Cook also served on the District of Columbia Board of Education, the Board of Public Welfare, and the National District Social Hygiene Association. She died in Washington D.C. on August 15, 1942.

Cook, Mary: (1862-19??) Born a slave in Kentucky, Cook was an influential activist for African-American and women's rights. A graduate of the Normal Department of the State University at Louisville, she became a member of the American National Baptist Convention and with Virginia Broughton and Lucy Wilmot Smith organized separate Baptist women's conventions. She spoke frequently in the male-dominated organization in defense of women's rights.

Coon: A derogatory term referring to black people and principally used in the minstrel shows of the 19th century. It was most associated with so-called coon songs that parodied black language, attitudes, and manners. Titles, such as "All Coons Look Alike to Me," were typical. Over 600 coon songs were published between 1886 and 1900, and many of them, paradoxically, were written by black composers and performed by black entertainers.

Cooper, Anna J.: (1858-1964) Born a slave in North Carolina, Anna Julia Cooper dedicated her life to education. She served as a teacher, a high school principal, and president of Frelinghuysen University in Washington, D.C. She was also an organizer and active participant in numerous organizations representing African-American interests.

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