Goals
Despite opposition, Black Populists carried out a wide range of activities:
- Establishing farming exchanges
- Raising money for schools
- Publishing newspapers
- Lobbying for better legislation
- Mounting boycotts against agricultural trusts
- Carrying out strikes for better wages
- Protesting the convict-lease system and lynching
- Demanding Black jurors in cases involving black defendants
- Promoting local political reforms and federal supervision of elections
- Running independent and fusion campaigns.
Black Populism found early expression in various agrarian organizations, including the Colored Agricultural Wheels, the southern Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, and the Colored Farmers' Alliance. However, facing the limitations in attempting to implement their reforms absent of engaging the electoral process, Black Populists helped to launch the People’s Party and used the then left-of-centre Republican Party in fusion campaigns. (Today though, after the Republican Party moved to the right, and the Democratic Party in the South was abandoned by the White Populist Dixiecrats who had opposed integration in the 1960s, most African Americans who vote cast ballots for Democratic Party candidates).
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Famous quotes containing the word goals:
“If you really think about it, everything is wonderful in this world, everything except for our thoughts and deeds when we forget about the loftier goals of existence, about our human dignity.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
“We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)