As the nation finished piecing itself back together at the end of the Reconstruction era, white supremacy found new means to suppress and control African Americans. Although African Americans had made substantial political gains after the Civil War, as white Southern Democrats regained political control, they instituted legal regulations that sought to isolate African Americans from white people—heralding a legalized system of segregation called Jim Crow. In addition to passing legal restrictions, Southern white supremacists also used violence—such as with lynchings—to enforce racial segregation using violence. The Supreme Court, in the consequential Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case, cemented and upheld this newly created system when it declared segregation constitutional, allowing it to persist well into the 20th century. Read more ...
In the late 19th century, roughly from 1878 to 1890, there was a mass exodus of African Americans from the Deep South to Kansas in the Midwest, who sought freedom from racism and also financial opportunities. Although the end of the Civil War brought emancipation to enslaved African Americans, it did not extinguish old forms of racism which would replace slavery with new forms of subjugation. The people that joined this migration are known as Exodusters. Read more ...
The Progressive Era was a period of intense and wide-ranging reform in U.S. society. Milestones included the purging of corrupt businesses and government bodies, the development of factory standards, the attainment of better work environments and child labor laws, and the campaign against poverty and prostitution. Also critical was the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, which outlawed the manufacture, transportation, import, export, and sale of alcoholic beverages, and the Nineteenth Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote. At the same time, African Americans launched campaigns to demand equal rights and freedoms and to end the white-on-Black violence that persisted throughout this era. Read more ...
The Great Migration is the term used to describe the mass movement of African Americans from the South to the North in the 20th century. It helped set the stage for cultural movements like the Harlem Renaissance and political movements like the NAACP and the Urban League. Issues in the South pushed African Americans to migrate, while the lure (often false) of a better life pulled them northward. Read more ...
World War I was an international conflict waged between the Allied Powers, which included the United States, France, and Great Britain, and the Central Powers led by Germany. For many Americans, the war felt like a distant European problem when it first started in 1914. However, U.S. entry into the conflict three years later had profound economic, political, and social effects, particularly for African Americans. At the time, racial discrimination was a potent force in American life, and the war galvanized the black community to fight for democracy and the full rights of citizenship both at home and abroad. It also contributed to a massive demographic shift, as economic opportunities as a result of wartime industrial production drew thousands of African Americans to the urban North. Read more ...
The Harlem Renaissance was the upswelling of creative output by African Americans in post-World War I society. It was also called the "New Negro" movement, highlighting the movement's attempt to shift how African Americans were perceived. It encompassed a diverse group of artists and intellectuals that helped move African American arts further into the mainstream of American culture. Read more ...
The 1930s were a turbulent and transformative time for African Americans. The Great Depression and federal responses to it were unevenly applied to whites and African Americans. Political leaders and intellectuals did their part to ensure that New Deal programs helped African Americans instead of hindering them. Along the way, cultural institutions like Negro League baseball helped inspire African Americans to follow the example of symbols of hope and aspiration they found in courageous Black baseball pioneers. Read more ...
While the beginning of World War II marked the end of the Great Depression, the social, political and economic status of African Americans would not change dramatically during wartime. It would take efforts like the Double V campaign—spearheaded by African Americans to symbolize the same kind of victory against racism in the United States as Americans hoped to realize for democracy abroad—to draw increased attention to barriers to equal opportunities for African Americans. The campaign coincided with the production demands of World War II, which offered African Americans more of a chance to participate in the domestic economy as workers than they had ever been granted before. The combination of an increased visibility for African Americans both as skilled laborers and as citizens who deserved to serve their country as equals with white troops would lay important groundwork for the civil rights movement that was to come. Read more ...
While the United States publicized its commitment to democracy and freedom in the post–World War II era, African Americans were visibly discriminated against in U.S. society. Such discrimination could be seen in increasing housing segregation and the targeting of African American artists and cultural leaders during Sen. Joseph McCarthy's hunt for communists. Anticommunist hysteria not only led to the scrutiny of influential African Americans who embraced leftist politics, but it also had a chilling effect on the development and cohesion of the early civil rights movement. At the same time, however, progress was seen when Jackie Robinson became the first African American player in Major League Baseball. Read more ...