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Unlock This CourseSlavery ended in the USA in 1865, but by the 1920s black Americans were still far from equal. More than eight in ten lived in the Southern states, where most worked as poor farmers on land owned by white people.
Key terms:
Black and white people had separate schools, railway carriages, waiting rooms, parks and drinking fountains. The Supreme Court had said in 1896 (Plessy v Ferguson) that this was lawful if facilities were 'separate but equal'. In reality black schools and hospitals got far less money.
Black men had been given the vote after the Civil War. Southern states kept them from using it with poll taxes (a fee to vote), reading tests and threats. White officials judged the tests unfairly, so very few black Southerners could vote.
Black people who challenged the system, or who were simply accused of a crime, risked being lynched. Most victims were black men, and the killers were rarely punished. Local police and juries often did nothing. Lynchings became fewer through the 1920s, but they did not stop.
The NAACP, a civil rights group founded in 1909, campaigned against lynching. In 1922 the House of Representatives passed the Dyer Bill, which would have made lynching a federal crime (a crime under national law, not just state law). Southern senators blocked it, so it never became law.
Many black Southerners decided to leave. This movement is called the Great Migration. Hundreds of thousands moved north in the 1910s and 1920s to cities such as Chicago, Detroit and New York.
Key term: Great Migration: the movement of black Americans from the South to Northern cities.
Chicago's black population grew from about 44,000 in 1910 to over 230,000 in 1930.
The North had no Jim Crow laws, but life was still hard. Black families were pushed into crowded areas such as Harlem in New York, because white landlords refused to rent to them elsewhere. Black workers got the worst-paid jobs and were often the first to lose them. Some white workers resented the newcomers. In Chicago in July 1919 a quarrel at a beach led to days of rioting in which 38 people died.
The Ku Klux Klan was a secret society of white men. A first Klan had been set up in the South after the Civil War and had faded away. A second Klan was started in 1915 at Stone Mountain, Georgia, by William J. Simmons. That year the hit film The Birth of a Nation showed the first Klan as heroes, which helped to make the new one popular.
The 1920s Klan was for white Protestants only. Its slogan was '100 per cent Americanism'. It attacked black Americans, but also Catholics, Jews and immigrants. It also claimed to defend 'old-fashioned morals' and was against drinking, which was banned by Prohibition at this time.
The Klan was not just a Southern group. It was strong in the Midwest and in towns and small cities across the country. Its members were often ordinary people, such as shopkeepers and farmers. It held parades, picnics and fund-raisers to look respectable.
By the mid-1920s the Klan had millions of members, with estimates of up to four million. In August 1925 tens of thousands marched in robes through Washington DC.
Then it collapsed quickly:
By 1930 it had lost most of its members. It had not changed the law, but it had shown how much hatred and fear of minorities existed in the 1920s.
Describe TWO features of EITHER the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s OR the Palmer Raids. [6 marks]
I will describe the Ku Klux Klan. One feature was that it used fear and violence. Members wore white robes and hoods and burned crosses at rallies to frighten black Americans, and some whipped, kidnapped and killed their victims, often without being charged.
A second feature was its size and spread. It was no longer just a Southern group. By the mid-1920s it had millions of members, and it was strong in the Midwest, where Klan members were elected to office in states such as Indiana.
What lifts this to the top level: each feature is named and then backed with specific facts, so it is explained rather than just listed. Giving only one feature would score no more than 3.
Pick the option you know best, give two clearly different features, and add at least two facts (a date, a name or a place) to each.