Encyclopedia

This interactive encyclopedia offers teachers and students access to terms, people, and events related to the history of Slavery in America. Many entries include reference material and some of the biographies on prominent figures contain suggestions for teaching as well as links to related sections of this site. The encyclopedia will continue to grow throughout the course of this project.

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Cable, George Washington: (1844-1925) A white Southern novelist and author born in New Orleans, Cable was a zealous advocate for political rights for blacks, prison reform, and fair treatment of African Americans in the justice system. He published these views in a series of essays compiled in a volume entitled The Silent South (1885). His views alienated him from the white New Orleans community.

Cala: Sweetened rice cake, African in origin, served with morning café au lait, formerly sold by black women in the French Quarter of New Orleans. In Georgia, this sweetened rice cake was called saraka. A women born in slavery in the 1930s recalls her mother making the cakes: "Yesium. I membuh how she made it. She wash rice, ann po off all duh watah. She let wet rice sit all night, and put in mawtuhm an beat it tuh paste wid wooden pastle. She add honey, sometime shuguh, add it in floot cake wid uh kams. Saraka, she call um."

Calalu: Thick soup or stew similar to gumbo. Ferdinand Ortiz traced calalu to African coilu, which is a Mandingo name for a plant resembling spinach. In Pointe Coupee, Louisiana, it is a rich soup or stew in which one or more kinds of calalu leaves are the chief ingredients. Calalu is also the name given to several plants having edible leaves, eaten as greens and in soup, or used medicinally.

Caribbean: The sugar islands situated off the coast of Central America, which thrived as a vital part of the slave plantation economy of the Americas. The area derives its name from the Carib language spoken at the time of the European invasions by many of its indigenous or earliest inhabitants. The many islands that composed the Caribbean, or the so-called West Indies, numbered around 22, and the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish empires from 1500 to the late nineteenth century interchangeably controlled them. From the beginning of European control over the islands, sugar dominated the island economies. By 1820, tens of thousands of enslaved Africans and their descendants produced up to 80,000 tons of sugar a year. Life on the sugar plantations was terribly harsh, and it has been estimated that one third of all enslaved Africans reaching the West Indies died within three years of their arrival. In the 1840s, the British controlled the islands of Bahama, Jamaica, the Leeward Islands (including Anguilla, St. Kitts, Barbuda, Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat, and Dominica), the Windward Islands (including St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Barbados), Trinidad, Tobago, and the Virgin Islands (Tortola). The French dominated Guadeloupe and Martinique. Spain dominated Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo. The Dutch controlled the islands of St. Marin, St. Eustatius, and Curacao. The Danes held the Virgin Islands (including St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix).

Carnegie, Andrew: (1835-1919) Born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1835, Andrew Carnegie is perhaps the ultimate rags-to-riches story in American history. He came to the United States in poverty in 1848 and went to work as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill. Later he would be employed by Western Union and the Pennsylvania Railroad, but would leave these jobs to establish his own company, which grew into Carnegie Steel Company, the classic textbook vertical monopoly. In 1889, he authored the text The Gospel of Wealth, in which he espoused the notion that any wealth accumulated by an individual, beyond that which was necessary for survival, should be distributed for the benefit of the community and society. As a manifestation of his personal conviction in this philosophy, he founded over 2,500 libraries at a cost of over $56 million. In 1901, he sold Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan for $400 million and he thereafter devoted the remainder of his life to philanthropic and educational endeavors, some of which benefited Historic Black Colleges and Universities in the South. Andrew Carnegie died in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1919.

Carroll, Vinnette: (1922 - ) The daughter of a successful dentist and teacher, Vinnette (Justine) Carroll's parents hoped their child would find happiness in a profession not unlike their own. Wanting to oblige them, Carroll embarked on a career in clinical psychology but never gave up on her private theatrical dreams. During the early 1940s, she enrolled in drama classes at the New School for Social Research and took acting classes with Lee Strassberg and Stella Adler. In 1948, she debuted in The Little Foxes and began a twelve-year acting career. Because roles for African Americans were limited, Carroll also taught drama at New York's School for the Performing Arts between 1953 and 1964. She began directing in 1960, inaugurating what would become her trademark blending of gospel music and drama. In 1967, she founded the Urban Arts Theatre, in an effort to provide black actors and musicians greater opportunities to showcase their talents. Carroll's career as a writer and director gained world renown in 1973, with the premier of Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope and in 1975 with Your Arms Too Short to Box With God, which she wrote in collaboration with Micki Grant. Based on the Book of Matthew, the show catapulted Carroll's directorial career in 1976 when she became the first black woman to direct a Broadway musical. In 1985 she moved to Florida and founded the Vinnette Carroll Repertory Company in Fort Lauderdale where she remained as artistic director until 2001.

Carver, George Washington: (1861-1943) Born a slave, Carver became a prominent researcher and contributor to the study of agriculture in the United States. He taught at Tuskegee Institute and Iowa State and became a something of a national hero because of his many innovations and scientific discoveries. Known as the "peanut wizard," his life story was popularized in the press and books.

Caste: Essentially, a group of people set off from others in society, by reason of their birth into a particular, pre-determined social stratum. The term traditionally refers to the hereditary, endogamous social classes or subclasses associated with Hindu society in India. The caste system is a stronger and often impossible-to-change social stratification because one is born into it. In the American South, the various Jim Crow laws and customs relegated all African Americans to an inferior place in society because of the color of their skin and their racial ancestry. Thus, blacks in Jim Crow America were members of an inferior caste regardless of their wealth or talent or achievement.

Central State University: An educational institution that began as the Combined Normal and Industrial Department for teacher training within Wilberforce University in 1887. Established by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Wilberforce University had been providing educational opportunities for the local black population since 1856. In a highly unusual arrangement, the Ohio Legislature provided the financial backing for the Department, which would offer teacher training while Wilberforce University provided the physical plant and resources. The Department would be administered separately from the larger university and have its own board of trustees. In 1941, it expanded to become Central State College, then formally separated from Wilberforce University in 1951. With the addition of a liberal arts curriculum, it was renamed Central State University in 1965. While a devastating 1974 tornado leveled much of the university's original buildings, a massive rebuilding campaign resulted in numerous new facilities, including a communications center named for comedian and backer Bill Cosby.

Charles Sumner High School: The first high school for black students in Missouri, was established in 1875 in St. Louis. It moved to its present location, 4248 Cottage Avenue, in 1910. The school was established as a normal school, for the training of black students to enter the teaching profession, and underwent major physical additions to its campus in 1922, 1955, and 1968.

Charleston, South Carolina: Eight English proprietors established the first permanent settlement along the southeastern seaboard in 1670. They named the village Charleston and the colony Carolina, after King Charles I, who had granted them land from Virginia to Florida. (In 1710, Carolina was divided into North Carolina and South Carolina.) Land, opportunity, and religious freedom attracted not only English settlers, but also French Huguenots, Jewish merchants, and other Europeans to the colony. They established profitable rice, indigo, and cotton plantations in the low country using Native American (Catawba, Creek, and Cherokee) and African slave labor to raise their crops. By 1720, Charleston’s population was majority African or African American. The port of Charleston grew into an important center for the trade of slaves, planters’ crops, and luxury products. By the American Revolution, Charleston was the fourth largest city in 13 colonies, and its people were the richest per capita. The city continued to prosper until the outbreak of the Civil War, which occurred in Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861, when South Carolina secessionists fired on Fort Sumter. Wracked by war, a freak east-coast earthquake in 1886, and hurricanes, Charleston declined. Too poor to tear down their historic city, Charlestonians established one of the first historic preservation districts in the United States in 1931. Tourism and military bases have helped to revitalize the city’s economy, although modern Charleston continues to suffer urban blight.

Chesnutt, Charles: (1858-1932) An essayist, folklorist, and novelist who was recognized as a major innovator in African-American fiction and an important contributor to post-Civil War southern literature. His books, The Conjure Woman, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition and The Colonel's Dream won him the Spingarn Medal in 1928 from the NAACP for his pioneering work on the behalf of the African-American struggle.

Cheyney University: A school that came into being in 1832, when Richard Humphreys, a wealthy Quaker born in the British Virgin Islands, bequeathed $10,000 to a group of fellow Quakers to build a school dedicated to instructing the descendents of the African Race. The African Institute (later renamed the Institute for Colored Youth) opened its doors on the corner of Seventh and Lombard Streets in Philadelphia on February 27, 1837, making it the first institution in the United States to offer elementary and high school instruction to African Americans. In 1903, the growing co-educational school moved 24 miles outside of Philadelphia to a farm formerly owned by George Cheyney. Andrew Carnegie donated $10,000 toward a library for the new campus, which opened in 1909 and is still standing. In 1914, the Institute for Colored Youth was renamed Cheyney Training School for Teachers, and, by 1922, the school was a State-funded normal school. It has attracted numerous illustrious African Americans as speakers, such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Mary McLeod Bethune, and John Hope Franklin. The school became Cheyney State Teachers College in 1951, Cheyney State College in 1959, and, finally, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania in 1983. The university currently enrolls over 2,000 students and offers degrees in numerous fields, including education (still the university's most popular discipline), mathematics, computer science, social science, business, and fine arts.

Childress, Alice Carroll: (1920-1994) A tireless champion of the poor and marginalized underclass, Alice Childress was an actress, playwright, and novelist whose writing focused on life's losers and "those who come in second." After spending her earliest years in South Carolina, Childress moved to Harlem to live with her grandmother, Eliza Campbell. A promising student and voracious reader, financial difficulties forced Childress to leave high school before graduation. She joined the American Negro Theatre in Harlem when she was twenty and appeared in a number of productions before writing her first play, Florence, in 1949. Gold Through the Trees followed in 1952, the first play written by an African-American woman performed on an American stage. In 1956 Childress's play Trouble in Mind, depicting the travails of black actors straining to break free of old stereotypes, won her an Obie award for the best original Off-Broadway play, the first such award ever won by a woman. Childress gained national attention for her 1966 play, The Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, about an interracial marriage in South Carolina during World War I. The entire state of Alabama banned Wine in the Wilderness, her play about the black revolution when National Educational Television aired it in 1969. Controversy continued to follow her after the 1973 publication of her novel chronicling the life of a thirteen-year-old heroin addict, A Hero Ain't Nothing But a Sandwich. Cited by the New York Times as an Outstanding Book of the Year, the book was banned from school libraries in Savannah, Georgia, until 1983 when it was reinstated by court order. After completing several more novels and plays, and garnering numerous awards, Childress died in New York in 1994.

Civil Rights Act of 1866: The law bestowing citizenship upon African Americans and passed over President Andrew Johnson's veto. It spelled out the civil rights granted to all persons born in the U. S. (except Native Americans), including the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue and give evidence, and to inherit, purchase, and convey real and personal property. It did not apply, however, to state segregation statutes. Nor did it mention the state rights of blacks regarding public education or public accommodations. Due to the racial violence, the Ku Klux Klan, and the political upheaval of the era, it failed to protect the civil rights of the formerly enslaved people of the South.

Civil Rights Act of 1875: A law passed on March 1, 1875, that guaranteed equal rights for blacks in public places and made illegal the exclusion of African Americans from jury duty. However, the Supreme Court declared this act invalid in 1883 because it protected social rather than political rights. The Court also argued that the 14th Amendment prohibited the states from depriving individuals of their civil rights but did not protect the abuse of individuals' civil rights by other individuals. This ruling ended Federal protection of African Americans against discrimination by private persons.

Civil War: (1861-1865) With the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency in 1860, eleven southern slaveholding states seceded from the United States, triggering a long and bloody civil war. After four years of brutal fighting, the Confederacy was defeated. In the process of war, nearly 600,000 Americans died from battlefield wounds and disease. Although historians argue about the causes of the war, most agree that the South left the Union because they feared that the federal government under Lincoln would move to end the institution of slavery. In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), which freed all enslaved people within the Confederacy. Nearly 185,000 African Americans, mostly enslaved people in the South, joined the U. S. army and navy to fight for their freedom and to defeat the Confederacy. Of this number, almost 40,000 died during the war. At war's end, the nation ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which ended slavery everywhere in the United States.

Claflin College: A school born from the recognition among Members of the South Carolina Mission Conference of the Methodist Church that African Americans needed access to education. In a building owned by the Baker Biblical Institute in Charleston, South Carolina, they sowed the beginnings of what would become Claflin University in 1866. With the help of the Massachusetts philanthropist Lee Claflin and his son William (also a former governor of Massachusetts and founder of the Free Soil Party of Massachusetts), a school opened in 1869. From 1875 to 1896, the South Carolina State Legislature combined Claflin with the South Carolina State Agricultural and Mechanical Institute. During those years, the school was partly financed from Federal funds for agricultural and mechanical education. In 1896, however, the two schools split again. Primarily a school for teacher education that graduated its first normal school student in 1879, Claflin currently enrolls 920 students and offers 24 different majors.

Clark Atlanta University: A school that was formed in 1988 by combining Clark College and Atlanta University, and that, today, enrolls over 5,000 students and is the United Negro College Fund's largest affiliated institution. Clark College was established in 1869 by the Freedmen's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church and provided undergraduate instruction, primarily in the liberal arts. Atlanta University, established in 1865 by the American Missionary Association, had been the nation's oldest African-American graduate institutions. It was affiliated also with Morehouse and Spelman Colleges, and the three schools comprised the Atlanta University System, later joined by Morris Brown College and Interdenominational Theological Center. One of Atlanta University's most famous professors of economics and history, W.E.B. Du Bois, taught at Atlanta University from 1869 to 1910. During his tenure, he organized a series of conferences on the problems facing American blacks and began a discourse countering Booker T. Washington's accommodationist position on educating African Americans.

Clark, Septima: (1895-1987) A teacher and active member of the NAACP in Charleston, South Carolina, who, inspired by the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, founded the Citizenship Schools of St. John's Island. The schools emphasized the education of informed citizens, focusing on issues of democracy, power and freedom. Eventually Citizenship Schools spread across the South, hosting voter registration campaigns and creating strong local leadership.

Cobb, Ned: A tenant cotton farmer who was born in Alabama in 1885 and who fought against unfair treatment of tenant farmers by forming a tenant farmers union. According to James R. Grossman, in the opening decades of the 20th century, Cobb clawed his way up the ladder from wage laborer to sharecropper, cash renter, and, finally, land owner. Grossman explains that, at the time, the value of the farmland in Alabama was often less than the value of the crops grown on it--in Cobb's case, the crop was cotton. When farmers had to borrow money to pay for expenses, bankers or merchants loaned money based on the value of the crop rather than the land. So, once the crop was sold after harvest, bankers and merchants took payment out of the cash produced by the crop. As a result, farmers were often forced to grow cash crops on all their land rather than using part of it to grow food for their own families. This forced them to go back to the same merchants to borrow more just to feed their families. The resulting cycle made it nearly impossible for them to ever rise above the poverty level.

Cobb, whose real name is Nate Shaw, was the son of slaves and struggled throughout his life to gain independence. His struggles are portrayed in the poem "In Egypt Land" by John Beecher and in the book All God's Dangers by Theodore Rosengarten. In his book, which is based on 1500 pages of oral history as told by Shaw, Rosengarten portrays Shaw in the 1930s, joining a sharecroppers union and coming to the aid of a neighbor whose land is about to be possessed by deputies. After exchanging shots with the sheriff, Shaw was sent to spend 13 years in prison. Upon his release in 1945, Shaw was almost 60.
Ned Cobb Lesson Activity Suggestions.

Coffee: Word derived from Kaffa, region in Ethiopia.

Color Line: A barrier or non-physical wall, usually created by custom or economic differences, to separate nonwhite persons from white persons. In the 1890s, this customary barrier in the southern states of America became a legal line of separation with laws stating clearly where blacks could and could not go in public spaces. By the turn of the century, African Americans were confronted with "colored" signs on doors, water fountains, bathrooms, and waiting rooms in bus and train stations designating their places for standing, sitting, eating, and using the facilities. The "colored" sign was the most visible mark of inferiority imposed upon African Americans by the Jim Crow laws. The color line also existed in the mid-western and eastern states of the nation, but it was not so clearly marked, and was seldom enforced by law.

Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union: (1866-1892) A black farmers' cooperative that formed in 1866 in Lovejoy, Texas, and joined with white farmer groups from the Midwest and South in a protest movement against the power of planters, railroad monopolies, and merchant creditors. By 1891, the Alliance had more than a million members in 12 states. The white and colored alliances maintained strict segregation policies, however, and met at separate conventions. In 1891, black cotton pickers in Arkansas participated in a strike against white planters. Whites responded by lynching some of the strikers, and a white backlash against the Colored Alliance destroyed it as an organization.

Compromise of 1877: A deal regarding the presidency in the election of 1876. In the election, neither of the two presidential candidates, Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican) and Samuel J. Tilden (Democrat) won the required majority of the Electoral College vote. Tilden held the majority of the popular vote (4, 282,020 to 4,036,572) as well as a 20-vote lead in the Electoral College (184 to 165). Twenty votes were in dispute because of fraud and violence in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. (Oregon's electoral eligibility left that State's vote uncounted as well.) Tilden needed one vote and Hayes needed 20 to achieve the necessary majority. In absence of a constitutional provision for resolving the dilemma, Congress created an Electoral Commission consisting of five members each from the House, Senate, and Supreme Court. Behind the scenes negotiations produced congressional approval of an eight to seven vote (along party lines) in favor of Hayes. According to the informal terms of the deal, the South would accept Hayes as President; the appointment of Republican James A. Garfield as Speaker of the House; protection of black civil rights in return for Federal aid to create internal improvements in the South; the patronage appointment of Democrats to Federal offices; and the return of home rule to the white South ... meaning the end of Reconstruction. Although Garfield was defeated as Speaker of the House, all Federal troops were withdrawn from the former states of the Confederacy. In a brief time, all the remaining Republican governments in the South collapsed and the "Solid Democratic South" emerged--allowing, thereafter, for the disfranchisement of black voters by means of law and violence.

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