Textbook: Chapter 5
1. The women of the North wanted freedom for the black women and men of the South whereas white women in the South wanted to keep their slaves. This is what divided them most. Southern women were not seen the same way as Yankee women were. This made for lots of hostility between the two. Black women in the North were free while black women in the South, of course, were not. Just like the men, the women fought against themselves. Where the lived determined who they stood for during the war. Women were fighting against women during the Civil War because they were standing behind their men and doing what was right for each.
2. For blacks the “New South” was their beginning of a new life. They were now considered free, but where were they to go now? Many families stayed on the white plantations because they had no where else to go. When they didn't stay they had tough times ahead, establishing a residence and a family. Many men and women tried to search for family and loved ones that had been sold years earlier only to find out their children had no recollection of them and their loved ones had moved one. Blacks did have success in pursuing an education though. Northern white and black women teachers moved down to educated men and women alike. Colleges started to form as well. Since black men under the 14th and 15th Amendment were granted their rights to vote, they expressed these by electing blacks into local government positions. These angered white women who had been fighting for their right to vote for decades and saw it as an insult. Since their black slaves were freed white women now had to do most of their household work on their own. Especially the elite, women now were forced to either pay for black workers or learn to do it themselves. They had a hard to coping with their new work. Middle class women on the other hand were already use to doing everything for themselves and had little problems adjusting to the emancipation of blacks.
Source Interpretation
Textbook document
1. Thomas Moss and his two associates were lynched for their ability to make money. They angered the white store owner because now that they were not the white men's money makers, they were their own. The white store owner thought it was insulting that he had competition with a black man. What Wells discovered after that day the three entrepreneurs lost their lives was that white men lynched blacks because of their freedom and success and covered it up with rapes and assaults of white men. Because blacks were frequently becoming successful, therefor a threat, white men had to find reasons to limit them.
2. The lynching of blacks was due to the rapes of white women and children and assaults on white men. Wells determined that this was just a cover up reason to limit black people among the South. She found that many of the blacks that were lynched were becoming wealthier and more powerful than expected and white men wanted to “keep the ni—er down” (308). (I do not like using that degrading n word, sorry) She also thought that many of the rapes were not rapes at all, but that they were wanted relationships, not forced. Since women were not allowed to speak out against a white man they were unable to help save a black man from dieing. Wells thought that many white women and black men's relationships were romantic but to save the reputation of the women, white men were forced to lynch those responsible.
Wells states “ I also found that what the white men of the South practiced as all right for himself, he assumed to be unthinkable in white women.” (1308-9) What Wells means is that during the antebellum South white men found themselves in relationships with black women and either sold off their children as slaves or put them in the North to be freed. With that, men were able to have sexual relations with black women, but it was “unthinkable” for a white woman to have a sexual relationship with a black man. White men were not lynched for raping black women, but on the very assumption that a black man was raping a white women, he was lynched, no questions asked or trial set forth.
1 comment:
Elias-R#1
Thanks for the response and you were right, it really was not bad at all. I enjoyed reading your blog because it really helped me understand the questions better and allowed me to focus on the main points. You made a great point in your response when you said that there is always a rivalry between women. Rivalries will always exist throughout the history of the world just as they have existed throughout many centuries. This is mainly because one group is always attempting to prove that their group is more significant and more superior than the other. I also liked the fact that you pointed out how the black people in the “New South” received some opportunities after the war such as education and their right to vote. That was something that I had missed in my reading and had learned while reading your blog. You wrote about how the free black men searched for their families but some of their children did not even remember who they were. I thought this was very sad because these men were so excited to finally see their families but had to discover the reality that many of the family members or lovers they had found moved on with their own lives. It just shows how much of an emotional impact slavery had on these people.
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