Gordon Blaine Hancock was a professor at Virginia Union University, pastor of Moore Street Baptist church in Richmond and a leading spokesman for African-American equality in the generation before the civil rights movement. Hancock co-founded the Richmond chapter of the Urban League and wrote newspaper columns for the Associated Negro Press, advising his mostly black audience on how to get by in tough times while still taking principled stands against segregation. His work with the Virginia Interracial Commission and the Southern Regional Council also suggested his willingness to be both outspoken and pragmatic in the midst of the fight against segregation – a fight, he wrote, that must be won “if the Negro is to survive.” Hancock reached his broadest audience through the church, countless speeches and a weekly column, which eventually ran in 114 black newspapers. During the Depression, he cautioned black workers to hold onto their jobs when possible while emphasizing economic, educational and political consciousness. The VIC, an affiliate of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta, sought to erode racism and violence gradually and by steps. But Hancock also urged it to oppose so-called Jim Crow laws more directly and seek “full citizenship” for all Virginians.
Further Reading:
Raymond Gavins, The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership: Gordon Blaine Hancock, 1884-1970 (1993)
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Raymond Gavins, professor of history at Duke University
On April 1 2008 Doug Stewart said: @ 12:40 pm
I regularly see mention of ‘Jim Crow’ laws, but I have yet to see the mention of what they are, or where they originated. Do you know? Doug Stewart(Quote)
On April 6 2008 Leonard Edloe said: @ 10:25 pm
Sadly you left off what Dr. Hancock was best known for in his preaching to the black community, the double duty dollar. The dollar to this day only circulates in the black community one time, and sadly that is why “you can tell that you are in an African American community wherever you go in America” (Rev. Floyd Flake) Dr. Hancock encouraged black people to make every effort to spend their hard earned money at a black-owned business. Hence the phrase double duty dollar. Leonard Edloe(Quote)
On April 7 2008 Brendan Wolfe said: @ 8:42 am
Mr. Stewart,
“Jump Jim Crow” was a song and dance from the early nineteenth century in which a white man, in blackface, satirized blacks. “Jim Crow laws” take their name, rather appropriately, from this Jim Crow. From the end of Reconstruction until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Jim Crow laws were enacted throughout the South to entrench segregation and to prevent African Americans from fully exercising legal rights such as, but certainly not limited to, voting.
An example from Virginia:
“The conductors or managers on all such railroads shall have power, and are hereby required, to assign to each white or colored passenger his or her respective car, coach or compartment. If the passenger fails to disclose his race, the conductor and managers, acting in good faith, shall be the sole judges of his race.”
When older African Americans say they grew up with Jim Crow, they are referring to such laws, but they are also referring to — and here I’m thinking of that original Jim Crow in blackface — a system designed to mock and dehumanize them. Brendan Wolfe(Quote)