African American History, 1877-1919

African American History, 1877-1919 National | Year | African American | James Garfield inaugurated as President, assassinated later in the year; Chester Arthur becomes President | 1881 | Tennessee introduces racial segregation on the railways, opening a pattern of legalised discrimination in public facilities that will spread through the Southern states. | | | July The black activist Booker T. Washington (18561915) opens the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to provide agricultural and industrial education for black Americans to equip them for economic independence. | | | Dec. Five thousand black Americans move to Arkansas from South Carolina in response to persistent discrimination and violence. | Brookly Bridge opened; Pendleton Act passed, first civil service legislation | 1883 | Oct. The Supreme Court prepares the ground for systematic racial segregation by declaring the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional on the grounds that the Reconstruction Acts do not extend to public facilities and are concerned with discrimination by states rather than individuals. | | | Nov. A racially integrated local government in Danville, Mississippi is ousted by whites and four black people are killed; Whites kill four black people in a coup which ousts the racially integrated local government in Danville, Virginia. | Grover Cleveland elected President | 1884 | May Black activist Ida Wells-Barnett (18621931) wins $500 damages after refusing to sit in an all-black railway coach; the result is overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1887; Timothy Thomas Fortune (18561928) establishes the influential black newspaper the New York Age. | Haymarket Square bombing and riots | 1886 | Mar. The leading American union organisation, the Knights of Labor, allows a black delegate to address its national convention; he declares that one of the organisation's objects should be `the abolition of those distinctions which are maintained by creed or