Obstacles to civil rights up to 1941: violence and prejudice

• The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) grew rapidly in the 1920s, using violence and intimidation against black Americans and other minority groups.
• Lynching remained a major threat, with many black Americans killed by mob justice and perpetrators rarely punished.
• Black Americans in the North still faced discrimination in jobs, universities and public life despite moving there for better opportunities.
• The Red Summer of 1919 saw race riots across the USA, driven by tensions over jobs, housing and racial prejudice.
• The Chicago Race Riot (1919) left dozens dead, hundreds injured and around 1,000 families homeless.
• The Tulsa Race Massacre (1921) was one of the worst outbreaks of racial violence in US history, destroying much of the Greenwood district and leaving around 300 black Americans dead, and thousands homeless. No white perpetrators were arrested or punished.

The Ku Klux Klan demonstrated the dark side of life in America.

The Klan had been founded in the Southern states in the 1860s and was determined to prevent black people, newly-freed from slavery, from gaining equal rights with other Americans.

The popularity of the KKK faded towards the end of the 19th Century but in 1915 the Klan was reformed in Georgia. This revival was due in part to the film The Birth of a Nation, which was set in the southern states in the aftermath of the Civil War.

The film glorified the KKK, showing them protecting white families against groups of black Americans who threatened violence and rape.

The Klan used violence and terror to intimidate any American, black or white, who advocated a policy of equal rights. The Klan was not only hostile to black Americans but also to Catholics, Jewish people, and new immigrants.

By 1925 the Klan had 3 million members, including police officers, judges, and politicians. It grew most incities that had rapidly growing black populations, such as Detroit, Memphis, Atlanta and Houston. The secret nature of the Klan and its wide membership allowed it to influence politics, law and justice.

Any black person who was believed to have committed a crime against a white person could be beaten, tortured, and lynched. The same could happen to a black person who was seen to be outspoken or arrogant.

Lynching usually meant being hanged in front of a white crowd with no trial and no defence. In many cases the local police failed to protect the victim and sometimes even played a part in the killing. Those responsible were rarely brought to justice and Klan members knew that their ‘friends’ in the courts would not convict them.

Racial discrimination in industrial life was still widespread. Most car plants in cities such as Detroit were all white or hired black workers in small numbers.

Henry Ford believed that whites, as a ‘superior’ race, were obliged to help black workers in his Ford car factories establish decent lives. But his hiring practices were not strictly altruistic: black workers faced greater job insecurity and so were usually more loyal workers. In 1926 Ford employed 10,000 black employees.

Major universities in the North, such as Harvard, actively discriminated against prospective black American students through their selection process. Despite opposing segregation in theory, they deliberately targeted students from wealthy white families and restricted the number of black students they enrolled.

They introduced policies that enabled them to screen prospective students:

• they insisted on photographs of prospective students allowing them to select candidates on ethnic appearance
• they introduced strict admissions tests that disadvantaged black students who had been given poor education by underfunded state schools
• they targeted exclusive preparatory schools that few black students attended in order to appeal to wealthy white students

Even in small northern cities, black people were still badly treated. In the 1929 sociological study of Middleton, Indiana, it was shown that although black and white children attended the same schools, churches and cinemas were still segregated.

Black people had moved north in search of the American Dream, but many found that discrimination and poverty existed in the north as well as the south.

Racial tensions were high in many cities across America. The most extreme consequence of popular prejudice against black populations could be seen in mob violence. On average 100 black Americans were lynched per year at the end of the 19th century.

In the summer of 1919, riots erupted in 20 US cities, as far apart as Charleston in South Carolina, Washington D.C., and in Longview, Texas. It became known as the Red Summer due to the amount of blood spilt.

There were several underlying reasons for the riots. Black soldiers returning from WWI were no longer willing to put up with old patterns of discrimination. They had fought and died for their country, and they believed that they deserved better treatment back in America.

At the same time, there had been an additional large migration of black people from southern states to northern cities. This increased tensions with white communities:

• Competition for jobs.
• Fears black workers were making wages lower.
• Competition for homes.
• Cultural differences between urban Northern whites and rural Southern blacks.

Against a backdrop of rising tensions, it didn’t take too much for violence to spark and get out of control.

Some of the worst of the riots happened in Chicago. The city had seen its black population grow rapidly from 44,000 in 1910, to 109,000 in 1920 (source: Encyclopaedia Britannica), and racial tensions were running high.

During the summer of 1919, a black teenager, Eugene Williams, was killed after straying into a whites-only swimming area. The death led to confrontations between whites and blacks that escalated into violence known as the 1919 Chicago Race Riot:.

• The violence lasted 13 days.
• 23 black people and 15 white people were killed.
• 537 were injured.
• 1,000 families, mostly black, were left homeless.

The extent and deadliness of the violence shocked the American nation. For 13 days a major US city had been without law. It had been necessary for US National Guard forces to be deployed to restore order.

Official inquests into the causes of the Chicago riots laid much of the blame on white Americans. The news stories covering the riots and the investigations afterwards raised awareness among many white Americans of the issues of the economic and social disadvantages experienced by black Americans and the true nature of the violence and aggression they experienced.

The riots also demonstrated that, unlike in the rural Southern states, black Americans in large US cities were prepared to fight back against aggression and persecution.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the neighbourhood of Greenwood bore witness to one of the worst acts of mob violence.

On 31 May 1921, a white mob, numbering around 2,000, made their way to the courthouse to lynch Dick Rowland, a black man who was in custody for alleged assault.

This mob was met by a group of black WWI veterans, who were intent on protecting Rowland. Shots were fired and the mob released their anger onto the entire black community.

Over a 17-hour period, homes and businesses were looted, and the black residents were beaten and shot. Around a dozen privately-owned planes were brought in to cause further damage and fear by dropping highly flammable turpentine bombs on top of the houses.

Around 32 million dollars’ worth of damage was caused to property in the area, with roughly 10,000 left homeless and at least 300 killed and 800 injured. Not one single white participant was arrested.

• The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was revived in 1915 and grew to around 3 million members by 1925, using violence and intimidation against black Americans and others they opposed.
• The KKK gained influence because its membership included police officers, judges and politicians, helping it affect politics, law and justice.
• Lynching was a major threat to black Americans, involving white mobs killing black people they suspect of crimes without a trial. Those responsible were rarely punished.
• Despite moving north in search of better opportunities during the Great Migration , many black Americans still faced racial discrimination in employment, education and public life.
• Some northern universities , including Harvard, used admissions policies that disadvantaged black applicants and limited their numbers.
• The Red Summer of 1919 saw race riots in 20 American cities, caused by tensions over jobs, housing and the treatment of black Americans after World War I.
• The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 began after the killing of Eugene Williams and left dozens dead, hundreds injured and around 1,000 families homeless.
• The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 was one of the worst incidents of racial violence in US history, leaving around 300 people dead, 800 injured and 10,000 homeless after white mobs destroyed much of the Greenwood district.