an, and Theodore Roosevelt.
Racism opened the door to American imperialism.

The new racism could not depend on the existence of slavery in order to
reinforce white superiority. Instead, it drew on racial stereotypes and
flimsy scientific opinion. The conquest of Africa by Europe and the
American acquisition of lands in the Caribbean and Pacific which were
inhabited by darker peoples, were taken as clear evidence of racial
inequality even in the land which had been founded on the belief in the
equality of all men.

Second-class citizenship for blacks had become a fact which was accepted
by Presidents, Congress, the Supreme Court, the business community, and
by labor unions. Segregation was universal. In the North it was rooted in
social custom, but in the South it had been made a matter of law.
Separate facilities were inferior facilities. The basic political and
civil rights of the Afro-American were severely limited in almost every
state.

Perhaps the clearest and cruelest index of the lowest state to which the
black had been relegated was the large number of lynchings which occurred
at the end of the century, In the 1890s lynchings of both blacks and
whites were common. In that decade one black was lynched almost every two
days. It became universally accepted that the American principles of
justice, liberty, and equality did not have to be applied equally to
whites and blacks.

CHAPTER 7

Racism and Democracy

Fighting Jim Crow

RAYFORD W. LOGAN, in his book The Betrayal of the Negro described the
turn of the century as the low point in Afro-American history. After
Emancipation, he contended, the hopes of the Negroes were betrayed.
Again they were pushed down into second-class status. It appeared that
democracy was for whites only. Actually, the increasing growth of racism
and of segregation as well, led inevitably to the development of
opposition groups bent on destroying this discrimination. Segregation
promoted the creation of Negro institutions which then became the center
for this counterattack.

The most prominent of these Afro-American institutions was the Negro
church. Like the white church, it was fragmented into many separate
denominations. There was the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Colored Methodist Episcopal
Church, the National Baptists, and a host of denominational organizations.

However, integrated congregations within the ma