revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

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Amendments, black leaders were faced with surmounting problems .
During
the eleven years known as
the Reconstruction period, black people's efforts
were concentrated on immediate economical, educational and political empowerment
. With the ending of Reconstruction, black radical and nationalist
movements reemerged .
The 1800's and 1890's were periods of mass struggle against repression
. Edward Bylden and Bishop Turner organized Afro-Americans to return
to Africa . Benjamin "Pap" Singleton led the 'exodus of 1879' of 40,000
Afro-Americans from the South in an attempt to make a black state out of
Kansas . In 1890, the Texas Colored Farmers Association proposed the formation
of an independent black state . 2 Also in 1890, the Nationalist Education
Association proposed the southern states to become an independent
black republic ; and in 1913, Chief Alfred C . Sam started a repatriation
movement in Oklahoma, and Nobel Drew Ali
organized the Moorish Science
Temple which was established in several cities . 3
World War I was a turning point in black radicalism because of the
social, economic and political conditions that accompanied this war . 4
Hundreds of thousands of blacks migrated to major northern cities looking
for jobs and/or escaping the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) terror in the South . The
overcrowded conditions,
poor housing, and de facto discrimination destroyed
the illusion for the recent migrants that 'things were okay in the north .'
2 Edwin S . Redkey, Black Exodus : Black Nationalist and Back to Africa
Movements, 1880-1910 New Haven : London Yale University Press, 1969) .
3Earl Ofari, "Black Radicalism in the 19th Century," Black Scholar .
Vol . 5, No . 5, (February 1964), p .. 5 .
4 Ibid .