Ragtime - Shaw Festival Theatre

THE WORLD OF THE PLAY cont’d
CLASS WARFARE
Throughout 1900, workers demand better working conditions and higher pay, resulting in labour
disputes. Uniting workers proves to be an enormous challenge because the workers are divided along
racial and ethnic lines.
Working conditions are, in many cases, intolerable; pay is inadequate; life in the tenements is
unbearable; violence and poverty run rampant. As a result, workers begin to organize and strike;
demanding that business pay attention to the health and safety of workers.
RACIAL DISCRIMINATION
After the Civil war (1865), African Americans voted, sent representatives to Congress, and served as
sheriffs and justices of the peace. By 1900 all of that comes to an end. In the South, segregation and
“Jim Crow” regulations restrict civil rights and prevent African Americans from voting. Hostility
toward people of colour, religious minorities and immigrants grows along with organizations such as
the Ku Klux Klan. Klan members resort to lynching and other acts of terrorism. The last remaining
African American congressman, George White, introduces a bill to make lynching a federal crime, but
the motion is defeated. In his farewell speech, White challenges colleagues about the injustice African
Americans suffer. It is the last speech that any black man gives to Congress for the next 28 years!
Booker T. Washington, author of the well-known autobiography Up From Slavery, creates the
Tuskegee Institute in 1881, dedicated to teaching African Americans practical, marketable skills.
Washington urges his followers to create businesses and to become self-reliant people. He mentors a
new African American leader, W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois believes that without political power African
Americans will never achieve equality and aims to fight injustice with scholarship and reason. By
1899 he is a professor at Atlanta University. However, he witnesses a vicious crime—the lynching of
African American Sam Hose— and this changes his mind about fighting bigotry through reason and
writing, causing a split between himself and his mentor, Washington.
In Ragtime, the struggle against racial discrimination is told through the story of Coalhouse Walker
Junior, who is horribly abused and bullied by members of the Emerald Isle firehouse. Police repeatedly
ignore his petition for help and, as a result, Coalhouse takes matters into his own hands.
ACTIVITIES
Post-Show
ASK: Why do you think the men from the firehouse destroyed Coalhouse’s car?
Have students collect examples of how different ethnic groups are portrayed in today’s media from
newspapers, magazines or from commercials and sitcoms. What messages do these images send?
Have students select an image of an ethnic or racial minority from contemporary culture and write a
personal essay about what the image conveys—positive or negative. Were any images hard to find?
What would students like to see depicted? Was it different than what they found?
How do modern images of African Americans in popular culture compare to the images from America
in 1900? Has there been an improvement in this depiction? Why or why not?
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C ONNECTIONS
Shaw Festival Study Guide