Clarence Lang

And sometimes they could be very separate and distinct, and sometimes those traditions overlap, but they are very particular.

Yes.

No.

So certainly the broad strokes are absolutely correct.

And I appreciate that you have given me an opportunity to talk a little bit more about the specific experiences that black people were encountering in the late 19th and early 20th century.

There had been a major civil war.

around the issue of slavery.

Slavery had been destroyed as a consequence of that war based on the self-activity of Black people themselves in the context of that war.

There was a period, several decades, of reform, interracial reform, known as Reconstruction.

And that particular project, whereby Black people were brought into citizenship, were holding elected office, was over time, certainly by the 1880s, had been largely dismantled

due to a vigorous counter revolution, if you will, a reaction to reconstruction.

And that's destroyed and out of the ashes grows a new system

of racial domination that we can refer to as segregation or Jim Crow or Jim Crow segregation whereby black people were no longer in a legal sense slaves, but their conditions economically and politically were essentially as non-citizens.

And so this is the really important fork in the road where there are some activists who argue for the need to lobby to restore and even expand those rights.

And then there were others

who argue the best thing that Black people can do under these circumstances is think about how we build on our own internal resources to serve our particular needs.

And that was more of the, if you will, the Black nationalist standpoint.

Now, you mentioned Booker T. Washington in this, and he's a very interesting figure because in many respects, some of his foundational ideas

were very influential and paralleled a number of black nationalist ideas.

The idea that you build separate and distinct autonomous institutions outside of the purview of white control and domination.