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During the four decades following the Reconstruction, the position of the Negro in America steadily deteriorated. The hopes and aspirations of the freedmen were shattered after the federal government betrayed the Negro and restored the white supremacist control to the South. Blacks were left the mercy of the black slaveholders and former Confederates, as the United States government adopted a laissez faire policy regarding the “Negro problem” in the South. The era of Jim Crow brought to the American Negro disfranchisement, social, educational, and occupational discrimination, mass mob violence, murder and lynching. Under a sort of peonage, black people were deprived of their civil and human rights and reduced to a status of quasi-slavery or “second class” citizenship. Strict legal segregation of public facilities in Southern states was strengthened in 1896 by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case. Racists, northern and southern, proclaimed that the Negro subhuman, barbaric, immoral, and innately inferior, physically and intellectually, to whites and totally incapable of functioning as an equal in white civilization. (1) Negro leadership at the turn of the twentieth century was divided betwe