Civil Rights and Intolerance
Immigration Quotas "
1921 & 1924
Anti-Immigration Laws and the Great Migration
• 1921 Congress passes a law limiting the number of
immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.
• 1924 More restrictions with stricter quotas.
• 1929 More restrictions against the Europeans most
anxious to come to the U.S.
• Asian immigration continued to be heavily restricted.
• Over half a million blacks migrated from the rural
South to industrial cities in search of work.
• Thousands of Mexicans and Canadians immigrated to
the U.S.
Sacco and Vanzetti
Anti - Communist Measures continue
• Sacco - Vanzetti Case ~ May 1920 The case
began with the arrest of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo
Vanzetti for murder and armed robbery in
Massachusetts.
Sacco -­‐ VanzeK Case conMnued • Although the evidence against them was inadequate, they were presumed guilty because they were anarchists. (anarchism -­‐ the idea that all forms of gov’t are bad and should be done away with.) • The judge was openly prejudiced. • This case illustrates what hatred and prejudice can do. • The men were convicted, sentenced to death, and despite worldwide protests, they were executed in 1927. • Many decades later they were posthumously exonerated by the MassachuseCs Governor Michael Dukakis. Racial Unrest • 1917 Race riots occurred in Houston, Philadelphia, and East St. Louis. • 1919 White mobs terrorized black communiJes from Texas to Washington, D.C. • In Chicago, a white mob stoned a black swimmer to death who had strayed into the “white secJon” of the beach. 38 more people were killed in the violence that followed. • Since 1890, thousands of blacks died in lynchings in the South. Tulsa, Oklahoma 1921
Greenwood Burns - ‘The Black Wall Street”
Ku Klux Klan • 1920 The Klan hires 2 sales agents to help expand their power base beyond the south. • They directed their hatred against anyone who was not white and Protestant. • They now targeted Catholics, Jews, Asians, and immigrants as well as African Americans. • 1925 The Klan had as many as 5 million members. They elect five senators and four state governors -­‐in northern not just southern states. • 1925 a Klan leader was convicted of murder and membership began to drop as the increasing violence weakened the Klan’s appeal. NAACP NaJonal AssociaJon for the Advancement of Colored People • Begin an anJ-­‐lynching campaign, asking Congress to make lynching a federal crime. The Senate refused. • NAACP conJnues to use the courts to aYack segregaJon, disenfranchisement, and lynchings, winning few victories. Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey -­‐ leader of the black working class, advocated a return to Africa Preached separaJon from white society and encouraged pride in their African heritage. Jailed for mail fraud in 1925, some of his ideas were revived in the 1960s. Black intellectuals created a thriving Afro-­‐American culture in new York’s Harlem. • Poets, arJsts, novelists, and musicians reach back to their African roots to demonstrate the richness of their racial heritage. • Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson • These arJsts inspire and encourage African Americans to remain strong in the face of racial violence. THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
The Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance is the name given to
the period from the end of World War
I and through the middle of the 1930s
Depression, during which a group of
talented African-American writers,
thinkers and artists produced a sizable
contribution to American culture.
SOUTHERN BLACKS AND THE LURE OF THE NORTH BEFORE AND AFTER 1914 •  Most African Americans remained in the South nearly fifty years after the Civil
War.
•  There were plenty of reasons for blacks to leave the south, but little economic
advantage to moving northward.
•  With outbreak of World War I, this dynamic changes because:
–  1) war generates new opportunities for industry
–  2) much of existing labor supply leaves work force
–  3) immigrant labor pool evaporates.
End result: The Great Migration which congregated black populations in
northern cities like Chicago and New York in unprecedented numbers. The
concentration, in New York city, occurred on the upper west side, in Harlem.
Harlem, New York
THE NORTH AS PROMISED LAND AND LAND OF BROKEN PROMISES
•  Northern city life proves both exhilarating and extremely
troubling from World War I onward.
•  Economically, gains moving from the South are real, but
frustrations over their limits grow over time.
•  Relative to the South, the North provides greater
educational, political, social opportunities, but rising
northern racism leads to strict residential segregation that
causes overcrowding, run-down conditions, artificially high
rents.
Important Features of the Harlem
Renaissance
•  It became a symbol and a point of reference for everyone to recall. The
name, more than the place, became synonymous with new vitality, Black
urbanity, and Black militancy.
•  It became a racial focal point for Blacks the world over; it remained for a
time a race capital.
•  The complexity of the urban setting was important for Blacks to truly
appreciate the variety of Black life. Race consciousness required a shared
experience.
•  It encouraged a new appreciation of folk roots and culture. Peasant folk
materials and spirituals provided a rich source for racial imagination.
•  It continued a celebration of primitivism and the mythology of an exotic
Africa that had begun in the 19th century.
Important Features, cont’
•  Common themes begin to emerge: alienation, marginality, the use of
folk material, the use of the blues tradition, the problems of writing
for an elite audience.
•  The Harlem Renaissance was more than just a literary movement: it
included racial consciousness, "the back to Africa" movement led by
Marcus Garvey, racial integration, the explosion of music particularly
jazz, spirituals and blues, painting, dramatic revues, and others.
I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I'll be at the table When company comes. Nobody'll dare Say to me, "Eat in the kitchen," Then.
Besides, They'll see how beauMful I am And be ashamed -­‐ I, too, am America. “I saw no curse in being black.” Harlem Renaissance Lois M. Jones Jeunesse by Palmer Hayde William Johnson Palmer Hayden Hayden, The Tunnel Hale Woodruff, 1934 Hale Woodruff