Racial Tension in the 1920s Flashcards
What were Jim Crow laws?
Laws to keep African Americans segregated
What was segregation?
Keeping the races apart. For example, there were different restaurants, hotels, swimming pools and cemeteries for black and white people.
Why did many African Americans move north?
There was better pay there and opportunities in new industries. The African American population of Chicago and New York doubled in the early 1900s.
What were some examples of racism that occurred in the northern states?
- African Americans were often the last to be hired and the first to be fired
- they occupied the worst housing in the poorest areas of the cities
- some factories only employed white workers or paid black workers the lowest wages
- there were occasional race riots - for example in 1919, after a black youth accidentally entered a ‘whites only’ beach in Chicago
What was the black ‘Renaissance’?
- some African American communities flourished in the Northern cities
- Harlem, New York, became a centre for creativity, black culture and pride where talented black poets, writers, artists and musicians gathered
- white customers were attracted to these areas by the excitement and liveliness of the new nightclubs and jazz bars
- some African Americans entered politics (e.g. in 1910, WEB Du Bois set up the NAACP, which worked to improve the rights of African Americans)
What was the KKK?
A racist terror group with a membership of around 5 million in 1925
What were the aims of the KKK?
Maintain white supremacy over African Americans and immigrants and ‘keep them in their place’
How did the KKK start?
It was founded in the 1860s to terrorise African Americans in the southern states. Black people were beaten up or even killed in the hope that they would be too scared to register to vote. The original KKK declined towards the end of the nineteenth century.
What caused the revival of the KKK?
A 1915 Hollywood feature film, The Birth of a Nation, showed Klansmen saving white families from violent black criminals. The film glorified the Klan as an organisation that protected decent, law-abiding citizens. It attracted huge audiences and sparked a revival.
Who were members of the KKK?
Most members were poor white people, mainly from rural areas of Southern and Western states.
Why did people join the KKK?
- they looked for someone to blame for their poverty, and turned on not just African Americans, but also Catholics, immigrants and Jewish people. They felt that black and immigrant workers’ willingness to work for lower wages took jobs from white people
- the Klan was against anyone that wasn’t like them - White and Protestant. They saw themselves as ‘defenders’ of their Protestant religion and against what they saw as a decline in moral standards (e.g. they would attack drunks and gamblers to ‘clean up’ society)
- the secrecy of the Klan, with its coded language, menacing hooded costume and strange rituals, was part of the appeal for many men who joined.
What were some KKK methods?
Dressed in white sheets, white hoods and carrying US flags, their methods of violence and intimidation included whipping, branding with acid, kidnapping, castration and lynching.
What caused the decline of the Klan?
In 1925, a popular local Klan leader was convicted of the brutal kidnapping, rape and murder of a young woman. At his trial, he exposed many secrets of the KKK. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and, within a year, KKK membership had fallen from 5 million to 300,000.
