Race and Ethnicity in the 1920s

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Race and Ethnicity in the 1920s

• United States in the Interwar Years
• 7 October 2004

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Background African-Americans in the Early 20th
Century

• Half a century after the Civil War, about ninety
  percent of the African-American Population of the
  US still lived in the South, mostly in rural
  areas.
• Only a small fraction owned their own land. Most
  worked as sharecropperstenants who paid part of
  their crops (usually half) to the landlord.
• Politically and socially, Southern Blacks
  suffered from acute racial discrimination and
  growing segregation, legalized by the U.S.
  Supreme Court in 1896 (the Plessy v. Ferguson
  case).

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The Great Debate Washington vs. DuBois

• Booker T. Washington, born a slave, became the
  leading spokesman for Southern Blacks in the
  1890s. He preached a doctrine of gradual
  improvement and acceptance of segregation. He
  told a white audience in 1895
• "In all things that are purely social we can be
  as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand
  in all things essential to mutual progress."

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The Great Debate Washington vs. DuBois

• W.E.B. DuBois, the first Black to receive a Ph.D
  from Harvard, was one of Americas leading
  intellectuals of the twentieth century as well as
  a political activist.
• He objected to Washingtons acceptance of
  second-class citizenship and called for the
  development of a talented tenth of
  African-Amerians who would fight for full
  equality.

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DuBois, from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903

• The problem of the twentieth century is the
  problem of the color-line--the relation of the
  darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and
  Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.

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The NAACP

• In 1909, DuBois and a group of white and
  African-American men and women formed the
  National Association for the Advancement of
  Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP soon became
  the leading civil rights organization in the US.
  

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War and Racial Conflict

• African-American soldiers fought in World War I
  in a segregated army, commanded by white
  officers.
• During and immediately after the War, there were
  major race riots in cities across the United
  States. The most deadly was in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
  where as many as 300 African-Americans may have
  died and the citys once-thriving Black
  neighborhood was destroyed.

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Tulsa Race Riot 1921
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Revival of the Ku Klux Klan

• The Ku Klux Klan had formed in the years after
  the Civil War to intimidate and suppress
  newly-free African Americans.
• In 1915, a new KKK was formed,inspired by the
  movie Birth of a Nation, which presented a
  distorted and racist view of the post-Civil War
  Reconstruction period.
• In the early 1920s, the Klan grew rapidly, with
  about five million people joining.

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The KKK, American Politics and Society in the
1920s

• The 1920s Klan was a national organization,
  strong not only in the South but also in states
  like Indiana (Midwest), Colorado (West) and
  Oregon (Pacific Coast).
• Its aims were not only to preserve white rule but
  also to express hostility to Catholics, Jews and
  immigrant groups.
• The Klan also was involved in attempted to combat
  some of the modern cultural trends of the
  twenties.

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The KKK Marches By the US Capitol
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(No Transcript)
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Marcus Garvey and Garveyism

• One Response to American racism was to demand
  full inclusion and equality. This was the
  approach of DuBois and the NAACP.
• Another was to call for African-American
  nationalism. In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey led a
  movement officially known as the Universal Negro
  Improvement Association (UNIA) that stressed the
  need to separate from white society and relate to
  the peoples of Africa.

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Garveyism Still Has Followers TodayPhiladelphia,
2004
15
The Harlem Renaissance

• Manhattans African-American neighborhood became
  a vital center of Black cultural and artistic
  life in the 1920s and 1930s. Some themes of the
  Harlem Renaissance

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A sense of connection to Africa and inclusion of
African themes and images

• Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers
• I've known rivers
• I've known rivers ancient as the world and older
  than the flow of human blood in human veins.
• My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
• I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
• I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to
  sleep.
• I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids
  above it.
• I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe
  Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen
  its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
• I've known rivers
• Ancient, dusky rivers.
• My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

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Writers, artists and musicians make use of
aspects of urban life
Jacob Lawrence, Brownstones, from The
Migration Series
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White Interest and Involvement in African
American Culture

• In part because of the economic insecurity of
  Black intellectuals and artists, the Harlem
  Renaissance depended to a large extent on white
  patronage.
• White involvement reflects several factors
• Anti-racism and a desire to build a truly
  integrated society
• A kind of primitivisma belief that Black
  culture was less corrupted by the evils of modern
  industrial society and more in touch with basic
  emotions and instincts.

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• If there is time and if we have access to a VCR,
  well watch excerpts from a video, Against the
  Odds Artists of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Some Websites of Interest

• A good interactive site on Jacob Lawrence,
  painter of the wonderful Migration Series is at
  http//www.phillipscollection.org/lawrence/index.h
  tml
• A site on the Tulsa race riot of 1921
• A brief history of the Ku Klux Klan
• Research center on Marcus Garvey and Universal
  Negro Improvement Association
• The NAACPs website
• The W.E.B. DuBois Virtual University
• Exhibit on Harlem 1900-1940
• Hypertext version of a collection of Harlem
  Renaissance works originally published in 1925.