African Americans faced discrimination and violence as a part of their daily lives in 1916. The second-class nature of black citizenship was codified on a state-by-state basis through what became known as “Jim Crow”--segregation-- laws. Since the late 1800s, southern white legislatures passed laws that banned African Americans from using the same public facilities as white Americans including schools, train cars, parks, and restaurants; marriages were considered invalid if they involved a white person and a non-white person. These laws were ruled constitutional under the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v Ferguson that permitted racial segregation so long as it was “Separate but Equal.” In reality, conditions could never honestly be described as such.
If African Americans wanted to challenge the status quo through the ballot, they would only find further obstacles. The disenfranchisement of black voters became a science as lawmakers found ways to make it so that African Americans were technically allowed to vote, thus following the Constitution, but making it so difficult that voting was nearly impossible. These measures included poll taxes that disproportionately affected African Americans, timed literacy tests designed to be failed, and a convoluted registration system. These targeted measures saw millions of African Americans effectively lose their right to vote. Finally, and perhaps worst of all, African American men and women died at the hands of mobs, they were lynched, sometimes hung, other times burned alive. As one scholar called it, this was the nadir of black life in America.
The successful release of the infamously racist film Birth of a Nation in 1915, and the subsequent resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan that it inspired that same year, were simply the symptoms of how deeply ingrained racial prejudice was in American life at the time.
Disillusioned by the intolerable conditions they had endured for over a generation in the post-Reconstruction South, many African Americans chose to seek a change of fortune. Millions embarked on a northward diaspora that would later become known as the “Great Migration” to northern states during World War I. Although they still faced harsh treatment in northern cities, there were fewer obstacles to voting and less overt segregation. Additionally, job openings due to the wartime demands provided industrial employment.
African American did not sit still; they fought for their rights. Black political activists organized during this era. Organizations dedicated to advancing African-American rights such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League formed during this period; they would fight for African American soldiers’ rights in World War I. Prominent thinkers and activists such as W.E.B Du Bois and Booker T. Washington gave voice to African Americans’ frustration with the status quo.
When war came in 1917, African Americans stood at a crossroads. Should they support the war effort in hope of not only improving their own lives but dismantling the system that demeaned and oppressed Black Americans? Should they risk life and limb for a nation that treated them so poorly? Ultimately, many decided that military service as part of an effort to make the world safe for democracy would allow them to challenge the racist narrative and assert black dignity.
Klarman, Michael J. From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Courts and the Struggle for Racial Equality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Logan, Rayford W. The Betrayal of the Negro, from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. New York: Da Capo Press, 1965.
Stokes, Melvyn. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York, Vintage, 2011.
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© 2018 UCF