How Black Citizenship Was Won, and Lost

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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November 18, 2018

By Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times

The exhibition opens with a portrait of Dred Scott, whose legal case prompted the infamous 1857 Supreme Court ruling saying that African-Americans, free or enslaved, could never be citizens. Credit – Glenn Castellano/New-York Historical Society

“Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow,” an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, traces the gains, and reversals, of the post-Civil War struggle over racial equality.

The post-Civil War Reconstruction era — which saw the dramatic expansion of rights for African-Americans, followed by their violent rollback — is one of the most poorly understood periods in American history. “Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow,” an exhibition about Reconstruction and its aftermath at the New-York Historical Society through March 3, doesn’t draw explicit parallels to today’s politics. But perhaps it doesn’t have to.

“The struggle over who has the right to citizenship and who belongs has been at the heart of American life over centuries,” Marci Reaven, vice president of history exhibitions at the museum, said on a recent afternoon. “This was a period that had incredible strides forward in equality for everyone,” Ms. Reaven, who curated the exhibition with Lily Wong, assistant curator, continued. “But it was also a story of incredible strides backwards.”

The exhibition, which fills three small upstairs galleries here, covers the legal and political landmarks, but it also includes poignant artifacts that show how ordinary people fought the battle for — and against — racial equality on the ground, in what Ms. Reaven called “a constant push and pull.” The show chronicles the many ways African-American organizers, activists and artists resisted Jim Crow, even after electoral politics were closed to them. And a section on the post-Civil War growth of the prison system prompts associations with today’s analogy of mass incarceration as “the new Jim Crow,” raising questions about the way its legacy lingers, even 50 years after the civil rights movement dismantled Jim Crow as a formal legal system…

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