Religion and race: the Bible Belt and the KKK
Religious Fundamentalism and the Bible Belt
In many parts of rural America, particularly across the southern and mid-western states, Protestant Christianity was more than a private belief — it shaped schooling, politics and daily life. This region, stretching from Texas to Virginia, became known as the Bible Belt. For religious fundamentalists, the Bible was the literal word of God, to be accepted without question. Darwin’s theory of evolution was seen as a direct challenge to the Biblical account of creation in Genesis.
The conflict between religion and modern science exploded into public view in 1925. Tennessee had passed the Butler Act that year, making it illegal to teach evolution in state-funded schools. A young biology teacher named John Scopes deliberately challenged the law by teaching evolution to his class in Dayton, Tennessee. His arrest and trial became a national sensation.
The 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, pitted William Jennings Bryan (fundamentalist) against Clarence Darrow (defence) over the teaching of evolution. Scopes was convicted and fined $100, but the trial exposed fundamentalism to national ridicule and was broadcast live on radio to millions of Americans.
The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate and devout fundamentalist. The defence was led by Clarence Darrow, one of the most famous lawyers in America. The trial became a clash of worldviews: Bryan argued that the Bible must govern what was taught in schools; Darrow argued that freedom of thought and scientific inquiry must not be sacrificed to religious doctrine.
Scopes was convicted and fined $100 (the verdict was later overturned on a technicality). However, the real verdict went to the modernists. Broadcast live on radio, the trial allowed millions to hear Darrow cross-examine Bryan directly on the Bible — an embarrassing experience for Bryan, who struggled to answer questions about the age of the Earth. Bryan died five days after the trial ended. Although fundamentalism did not disappear, its influence on national politics weakened after 1925.
Segregation and Jim Crow
For African Americans, the 1920s were years of profound inequality. Across the South, Jim Crow laws enforced the separation of Black and white Americans in schools, transport, restaurants, hospitals and courtrooms. The 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson had declared “separate but equal” facilities constitutional, providing legal cover for systematic discrimination.
In practice, Black facilities were rarely equal. Schools for Black children received a fraction of the funding allocated to white schools. Voting rights were suppressed through poll taxes, literacy tests and the constant threat of violence. Lynching — the murder of Black people, usually by hanging, by white mobs — was used as a weapon of terror. Between 1882 and 1968, approximately 3,446 Black Americans were lynched, according to records compiled by the NAACP. The 1920s saw a peak of racial violence, including the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which a prosperous Black neighbourhood was destroyed by a white mob.
The revived Ku Klux Klan, re-founded in 1915, reached a peak membership of approximately 4–5 million by the mid-1920s. Unlike the original post-Civil War Klan, the 1920s Klan targeted not only Black Americans but also Catholics, Jews, immigrants and trade unionists, and had significant political influence in several states.
The Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan
The original Ku Klux Klan was founded in the South after the Civil War to terrorise newly freed Black Americans. It was largely suppressed by the 1870s. In 1915, it was revived by William Joseph Simmons at Stone Mountain, Georgia, partly inspired by the racist film The Birth of a Nation. The 1920s Klan was a mass movement, not just a fringe organisation. It attracted millions of members across the North and Midwest as well as the South, appealing to working-class white Protestants who felt threatened by immigration, urbanisation and social change.
The Klan used terror — beatings, arson and murder — but also operated openly through marches, political endorsements and church events. By 1924 it had significant influence in the Democratic Party’s national convention. Its power declined sharply after 1925, when a prominent Klan leader, David Stephenson, was convicted of the murder of a young woman in Indiana. The scandal drove many members away. However, the Klan’s violence had already caused immense harm.
African Americans organised to resist racism in different ways. The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), founded in 1909, campaigned through legal challenges and lobbying for anti-lynching legislation. Although Congress blocked an anti-lynching bill in the 1920s, the NAACP kept pressure on lawmakers and publicised racial violence to northern audiences.
Marcus Garvey offered a different vision. His UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) promoted Black pride, economic self-help and, ultimately, the idea that African Americans should return to Africa to build an independent nation. Garvey attracted hundreds of thousands of followers, particularly in urban Black communities. He was imprisoned in 1925 on fraud charges and deported in 1927, but his ideas influenced later Black nationalist movements.
The most significant response to southern racism was migration. In the Great Migration, approximately 1.6 million Black Americans moved north and west between 1910 and 1930, seeking factory work in cities like Chicago, Detroit and New York, and escaping the worst of Jim Crow segregation. This migration created vibrant Black urban communities and was the foundation of the Harlem Renaissance.