Jim Crow, the Klan and racial violence
Jim Crow America
Throughout the 1920s, the majority of African Americans lived under a system of legal and social oppression enforced across the South and, in different forms, throughout much of the country. The Jim Crow laws mandated separation of the races in schools, transport, restaurants, hospitals, and public spaces. The Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v Ferguson had declared “separate but equal” facilities constitutional — in practice, Black facilities were always inferior and the equality was fiction.
Jim Crow laws in the South denied African Americans equal access to education, barred them from voting through literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses, prohibited interracial marriage, and enforced segregation in virtually all public spaces. Employment discrimination kept most Black workers in the lowest-paid, most insecure jobs regardless of their qualifications. The economic consequences were reinforced by physical terror: according to records maintained by the Tuskegee Institute, 3,446 Black Americans were lynched between 1882 and 1968, with the highest rates in the period before and after the First World War.
The Klan’s Second Revival
The original Ku Klux Klan had been suppressed in the 1870s. In 1915, a new organisation calling itself the Ku Klux Klan was refounded at Stone Mountain, Georgia, partly inspired by D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915), which portrayed the original Klan as heroic. This second Klan was broader in scope than its predecessor: it targeted not only African Americans but also Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and anyone it characterised as morally degenerate.
The Klan grew explosively in the early 1920s. By 1924 to 1925, membership had reached an estimated 4 to 6 million, with significant strength outside the South — in Indiana, Ohio, and Oregon as well as the traditional strongholds of the former Confederacy. Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson built a powerful political machine that influenced state government and claimed to have elected congressmen and a governor.
The most devastating single act of racial violence in the 1920s occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May–June 1921. Greenwood, a prosperous African American neighbourhood known as “Black Wall Street,” was attacked by a white mob that included some deputised civilians. Homes and businesses were burned, and aircraft may have been used to fire on the neighbourhood. The 2001 Oklahoma Commission, established to investigate the events, confirmed 39 deaths, though other estimates run much higher, and found that roughly 35 blocks of Greenwood were destroyed. The event had been largely suppressed from public memory for decades. Tulsa city government officially adopted the term “massacre” in 2001 — use this framing rather than the older term “riot,” which implies mutual combat rather than an organised attack on a community.
Red Summer 1919 and the Context of Violence
The racial violence of the 1920s did not emerge from nowhere. The summer of 1919 — known as the Red Summer — saw race riots in at least 25 American cities, including Chicago and Washington DC. African American soldiers who had served in France came home expecting greater respect and rights; they encountered instead intensified racial hostility. The NAACP, led by James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois, documented and publicised these outrages, campaigning for a federal anti-lynching law. Every such bill was filibustered to death in the Senate by Southern politicians through the entire period covered by this unit.
The Klan’s membership collapsed after 1925 for several reasons. D.C. Stephenson, the Indiana Grand Dragon, was convicted of rape and second-degree murder in 1925 after the death of a woman he had assaulted on a train. His conviction destroyed the Klan’s claim to stand for moral decency. Press exposure of corruption among Klan-affiliated politicians, and internal factional fighting, accelerated the decline. By the late 1920s, membership had fallen from millions to a few hundred thousand.
African Americans responded to racial violence and oppression in multiple ways. The NAACP, led by W.E.B. Du Bois (who edited its magazine The Crisis) and James Weldon Johnson, pursued legal and political strategies. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) offered a different vision: Black economic self-sufficiency and ultimately a return to Africa, encapsulated in his “Back to Africa” movement. At its peak in the early 1920s, the UNIA had claimed several million members worldwide, though these figures were disputed. The Great Migration, in which around 1.6 million African Americans moved from the South to northern cities between 1910 and 1930, was itself a form of resistance — leaving the most oppressive conditions — though discrimination followed them North.