Nadir of American Race Relations - United States As A Whole

United States As A Whole

See also: Great Migration (African American)

Many blacks voted with their feet and left the South to seek better conditions. In 1879, Logan notes, "some 40,000 Negroes virtually stampeded from Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia for the Midwest." More significantly, beginning about 1915, many blacks moved to Northern cities in what became known as the Great Migration. Through the 1930s, more than 1.5 million blacks would leave the South for lives in the North, seeking work and the chance to escape lynchings and legal segregation. While they faced difficulties, overall they had better chances there. They had to make great cultural changes, as most went from rural areas to major industrial cities, and had to adjust from being rural workers to being urban workers. In the South, alarmed whites, worried that their labor force was leaving, often tried to block black migration.

During the nadir, Northern areas struggled with upheaval and hostility. In the Midwest and West, many towns posted "sundown" warnings, threatening to kill African Americans who remained overnight. These were seldom the destinations of blacks seeking industrial jobs, however, so it was fear about something that was not going to happen. Monuments to Confederate War dead were erected across the nation – in Montana, for example. As an example, in its years of expansion, the Pennsylvania Railroad recruited tens of thousands of workers from the South.

Black housing was often segregated in the North. There was competition for jobs and housing, as blacks entered cities which were also the destination of millions of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. As more blacks moved north, they encountered racism where they had to battle over territory, often against ethnic Irish, who were defending their power base. In some regions, blacks could not serve on juries. Blackface shows, in which whites dressed as blacks portrayed African Americans as ignorant clowns, were popular in North and South. The Supreme Court reflected conservative tendencies and did not overrule southern constitutional changes resulting in disfranchisement. In 1896, the Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" facilities for blacks were constitutional; the Court was made up almost entirely of Northerners.

While there were critics in the scientific community such as Franz Boas, eugenics and scientific racism were promoted in academia by scientists Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, who argued "scientific evidence" for the racial superiority of whites and thereby worked to justify racial segregation and second-class citizenship for blacks.

Numerous blacks had voted for Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election, based on his promise to work for them. Instead, he introduced the re-segregation of government workplaces and employment in some agencies. Wilson was said to be a vocal fan of the film The Birth of a Nation (1915), which celebrated the rise of the first Ku Klux Klan. His praise was used to defend the film from the NAACP.

The Birth of a Nation helped popularize the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, which gained its greatest power and influence in the mid-1920s. In 1924, the Klan had four million members. (Current, p. 693). It also controlled the governorship and a majority of the state legislature in Indiana, and exerted a powerful political influence in Arkansas, Oklahoma, California, Georgia, Oregon, and Texas. (Loewen, Lies Across America, pp. 161–162)

In the years during and after World War I, there were great social tensions in the nation, not only because of the effects of the Great Migration and European immigration, but because of demobilization and the attempts of veterans to get jobs. Mass attacks on blacks that developed out of strikes and economic competition occurred in Houston, Philadelphia and in East St. Louis in 1917.

In 1919 there were riots in several major cities, resulting in the Red Summer. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 erupted into mob violence for several days. It left 15 whites and 23 blacks dead, over 500 injured and more than 1,000 homeless. An investigation found that ethnic Irish, who had established their own power base earlier on the South Side, were heavily implicated in the riots. The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma was even more deadly; white mobs invaded and burned the Greenwood district of Tulsa. 1,256 homes were destroyed and 39 people (26 black, 13 white) were confirmed killed, although recent investigations suggest that the number of black deaths could be considerably higher.