[IfasehunReincarnated]

By the end of the century, however, the cultural perspectives of Jim Crow had congealed in forms such as poll taxes, "grandfather clauses," white primaries to insure that African Americans would receive neither the credit nor the ability to enjoy the contributions they had made economically and culturally to the nation. White "scientists" led the popularization of the notion that African Americans were biologically inferior and fated for extinction, a scientific notion which found its American roots in the early 19th century but which extended into European Enlightenment figures such as Carl von Linne and J.F. Blumenbach, among others . While African Americans were being stereotyped and caricatured, continental Africans were being portrayed as bloodthirsty savages by the very Europeans who were violently assaulting them in texts such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness .
The entire period stretching from the end of Reconstruction to the end of the century was labeled "The Nadir" by African-American historian Rayford W. Logan, who traced the history of racist attitudes toward African-Americans in the presidential administrations and mass media of the period. Logan writes that the period represented "a succession of weak Presidents, between 1877 and 1901, [which] facilitated the consolidation of white supremacy in the South, and Northern acceptance of victory for 'The Lost Cause'" . As early American imperial interests expanded through the Caribbean, Pacific and Central American spheres, the coming of European World War I saw the increasing exclusion of Africans from U.S. political life .
The primary reason for U.S. imperial interests, namely the regional expansion of markets for American goods and services, prefigured the coming globalization of economic ventures and the generation of identity markers which would protect and expand middle and late capitalist superstructures. Cultural icons which helped to generate public opinion which supported U.S. foreign and domestic policy became important. European ethnic and cultural groups who immigrated to the U.S. during this period sought to assimilate and used "whiteness" as a catch-all common ground . The voices of groups which were discriminated against or oppressed began to be more widely portrayed as "anti-patriotic." Among these voices were the political activists in African America, many of who came into prominence during the first of the great phases of migration as African-Americans left the Southern U.S. for the North and West in the late 19th century and during and after World Wars I and II.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, African-Americans continued their push for rights at home and their advocacy of the interests of African people globally. On the African continent, the "partition" of African lands among European nations which began in earnest at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 was meeting with the unabated resistance of African ethnic and political groups such as the Ashanti and Ethiopians. Already having established a long record of commenting of injustices across the African world , African leaders in the Western hemisphere met with other Africans at the First Pan-African Congress, held in Westminister, England in 1900. Among those present were Anna Julia Cooper, James T. Holly, Alexander Walters and W.E.B. DuBois from the United States.
Domestically, the lynching of African Americans had reached epidemic numbers. Ida Bell Wells, a journalist from Holly Springs, Mississippi, investigated and wrote against lynch violence and was driven from the South for 30 years after her Memphis, Tennessee newspaper office was burnt to the ground by a white mob. By the end of the decade, race violence had spread to other cities and, in the wake of a white vs. African-American battle in Springfield, Illinois in August, 1908, white liberals initiated a meeting between prominent African-American leaders and themselves which led to the founding of the predominantly white National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.
By the 1920s, Civil Rights organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League (founded 1911) spearheaded national drives for African-American equality while African-Americans participated in these organizations as well as in exclusively African-American organizations such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League of the World (founded 1914), the largest organization of African people devoted to political, cultural and social solidarity that has ever existed, before or since. The UNIA and ACL attracted a wide range of Africans, including participation from a number of African-American scholars such as John E. Bruce, Arthur A. Schomburg, Carter G. Woodson and William Ferris, who were prominent in African-American scholarly organizations such as the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1916) and The American Negro Academy (1897) .
By the 1930s, the increasing industrialization of the U.S. economy had greatly spurred the rise of labor union solidarity in the white working class. African-Americans, excluded historically from the largest unions and resident by now in great numbers in the Northern and Midwestern industrial centers such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, organized groups such as A. Phillip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids and made alliances with radical groups such as the Communist Party in order to protect their emerging labor and social interests. Groups such as the Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple filled the Africana nationalist vacuum left by the fragmentation of the UNIA, which also nevertheless continued to operate in the wake of Garvey's deportation in 1927.
The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President in 1932, an election made possible by the wholesale defection of African-Americans from the Republican Party in the wake of the Great Depression, brought the "New Deal," a package of social reform initiatives and entitlements aimed at providing social and economic support for all Americans. African Americans, whose interests were represented in part by a "kitchen cabinet" of advisors to Roosevelt which included educator Mary McCleod Bethune and economist Robert C. Weaver, benefited greatly from the New Deal social programs.
African-American cultural interests also continued to inform United States popular culture. The aesthetic contributions of the "New Negro Renaissance" which stretched from the mid 1890s to the 1930s, symbolized by Alain Locke's 1925 anthology entitled The New Negro, had captured part of the cultural perspectives of African-America. This era, commonly referred to as the "Harlem Renaissance" era, actually involved African-American cultural workers across the country and congregated in cities such as Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, New York, Philadelphia and Atlanta, among other places . Anthropologists Melville Herskovitz and Franz Boas wrote about what African-American scholars such as DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Benjamin Mays and Arthur Huff Faucet had identified as the African essence of African-American culture. The last generation of African-Americans who experienced enslavement were interviewed and their recollections preserved as a result of the efforts of young interviewers for the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program .
The advent of World War II and the subsequent technological revolutions in first radio and then television spelled the end of expensive travelling big bands. The subsequent explosion in sales of recordings meant that the huge influence on American popular music wielded by figures such as Scott Joplin in ragtime and Bessie Smith in the blues literally built recording giants such as Columbia Records, who capitalized eventually upon the "rhythm and blues" and subsequent "rock and roll" genres developed by the smaller touring groups of the 1940s and 1950s. Simultaneously, motion pictures used the racist caricaturization of African-American images to solidify notions of whiteness and turn racial prejudice into a profitable tool for the movie industry. Signature films such as "Birth of A Nation" (1915), "Gone With the Wind" (1939) and the entire series of Shirley Temple films highlighted offensive racial stereotypes. Ironically, even as independent African-American filmmakers fought racial stereotyping, African-American actors in white films such as the Academy Award-winning Hattie McDaniel, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson devoted off-camera time to working for Civil Rights.
Jazz, "America's classical music," merged the complex compositions of Edward Kennedy Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane with the more accessible but no less complex stylings of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington to lead America through phases of musical cultural innovation which still echo through the rhythmic structure of the best of contemporary hip hop music.
The years after World War II saw the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and the decline in independent African-American social institutions. An African-American population heartened by wartime prosperity was undeterred by the advent of the "Cold War," which saw the demonization of African-American radicals such as DuBois, Charlotta Spears Bass, the pioneering African-American editor of the California Eagle and the first woman to run for vice president of the U.S., and the first American international superstar entertainer, Paul Robeson. Organizations such as the Council for African Affairs continued to press the United States on issues of Pan-Africanism while domestic activism escalated in the wake of the 1954 Brown decisions. Subsequent national attention focused on the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the emergence of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a major voice in Civil Rights, and the desegregation of public education represented by the integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957 and the sit-in movement symbolized by African-American college students at North Carolina A&T in 1960.
The Civil Rights Movement was helped immensely by the global decolonization movement. David Birmingham notes that "the decolonization of Africa was one of the turning points in the history of the post-war worldThe liberation of Africa from European rule followed on the heels of the independence gained by India and other colonies in Asia. The struggle for political freedom by the peoples of Africa also helped to open the way for the civil rights movement in North America. " On the African continent, many of the leaders of African independence movements in what became known as "the decade of Africa" had been exposed to the writings of African-Americans, including Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, Nigeria's Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta. Nkrumah and Azikiwe both lived and studied in Philadelphia during their early years.
The first half of the 1960s was the most intense and effective period of the movement to end legal apartheid in the United States Social protests in southern cities such as Birmingham, Montgomery, Nashville, New Orleans and Jackson were supported by organizing in and financial and personnel support from the North. Young people, organized into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at the urging of Ella Baker, Secretary to King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, launched an interracial attack on segregation and, through efforts such as "Freedom Summer" in 1964, helped empower thousands of southern African-Americans, including the major public intellectual from Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer. By 1965, however, the youth of SNCC, radicalized by their southern campaigns, the death of Nation of Islam spokesperson and Pan-African nationalist El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) and the seeming ineffectiveness of integrationist strategies, broke with the mainstream Civil Rights leadership and pursued more nationalist strategies.
The 1960s marked the watershed of the Civil Rights Movement of the post-war period and the escalation of the ongoing Africana nationalist efforts of previous generations. By the late 1960s, the major political and legal reforms attributable to the Civil Rights Movement such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought little ongoing satisfaction to African Americans faced with the fires of northern cities erupting in racial violence. By the time that President Lyndon B. Johnson's Kerner Commission declared that there were "two Americas," separate (white and black) and unequal, the cries of "Black Power" raised in the throats of younger African-American leaders and thinkers such as SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael had captured the imagination of African-America.
Politically, the decade between the 1965 insurrection in the Watts section of Los Angeles and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam in 1975 saw an explosion in the number of African-American elected officials. Culturally, the philosophy of "Black Power" was popularized in music such as James Brown's "Say it Loud! (I'm Black and I'm Proud"), Marvin Gaye's "Trouble Man" album, the experimental jazz of Pharaoh Sanders, and the proto-rap of The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron. Boxer Muhammad Ali's odyssey from 1960 Olympic boxing champion to Nation of Islam Member and Malcolm X confidant, Vietnam War conscientious objector and political spokesman symbolized the transformation of the African-American athlete.
A generation of young athletes such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Lew Alcindor) and Ahmad Rashad (Bobby Moore) changed their names in emulation of the former Cassius Clay and the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City saw the protest of the condition of African-Americans by John Carlos and Tommie Moore immortalized in international sports lore. Ali, who combined the defiant imagery of early 20th century heavyweight champion Jack Johnson with the invincibility and racial appeal of Joe Louis and the symbolic significance of Jackie Robinson and Althea Gibson, was the key figure in perhaps the single most important Pan-African cultural event of the 1970s: the 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" in Kinshasa, Zäire.
The event, hosted by Zäirian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, and promoted by the largely unknown Don King, was preceded by a musical festival featuring, among others, James Brown, vocalist Bill Withers, the Spinners, African popular musician Hugh Masekela and bluesman B.B. King. The "Black Woodstock" was followed by the Ali-George Foreman heavyweight title bout, with Ali claiming that his task was the reclamation of the world title on behalf of Africans worldwide. Foreman, a heavily-favored champion clearly favored by white Americans seven time zones away, was defeated by Ali.
Intellectually, an explosion of African Americans with university degrees combined with student and community protests resulted in the concentrated push for the study of Africana history and culture in all levels of the U.S. educational system. "Black Studies" programs and departments were initiated across the country at colleges and universities and, based upon the research done by African-American scholars and sympathetic non-African-Americans for over two centuries, an intellectual movement arose which institutionalized that research tradition. Organizations such as the African Heritage Studies Association (1968), the National Council for Black Studies (1972) and the Association for African Historians (1973) wrote documents which argued that an "afrocentric" perspective on the human past should be integrated into intellectual work at all levels. These efforts resulted in the appearance of the first Ph.D. program in African-American Studies in the world at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1985.
By the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the reconfiguration of the U.S. economy in the throes of the expansion of the service and information industries and rapid white flight from large urban centers to suburbia introduced new challenges to African-American progress. By the end of the 1980s, many urban centers had become predominantly African-American and Latino, with African-American political leaders left to participate in governing with shrunken tax bases caused by white individual and corporate flight. General unemployment soared and African-American unemployment skyrocketed. Globally, the eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union presaged the beginning stages of cultural and political reconfiguration as countries such as India, China and Japan began to exert more influence on U.S. interests and fortunes. Corporations began to export jobs to areas such as Mexico, Korea and Indonesia, where labor was procured at wage slave rates, leaving domestic U.S. workers of all colors with few options save public assistance, crime and the "shadow economy" of drugs and other illicit activity.
As African Americans moved into many of the political positions which they had coveted in previous decades, empowered by the removal of barriers of de jure discrimination, they faced de facto segregation in areas such as education, labor and business. The continuing interest in linking African-American fortunes with Africans globally demonstrated across the African-American community combined with the intensifying democratization movement in Africa to spur Pan-African educational, cultural and business interests. Currently, African Americans are reexamining their positions in the United States, seeking to create effective coalitions with other oppressed groups and engaging in serious discourse over what the philosopher Cornel West has called "the future of the race."