The African American experience and the Harlem renaissance

• During World War I, many African Americans moved to the North and Midwest to take jobs in factories after mobilization produced a labor shortage in the Great Migration
• In their new cities, African Americans continued to face racism, discrimination, and in many cases, segregation
• In 1919, a series of riots motivated by racism and white-on-black violence shocked the country, with the largest ones taking place in Washington DC, Omaha, Nebraska, Chicago, and Elaine, a rural county in Arkansas
• The Tulsa Massacre in 1921 was one of the worst race riots in the nation's history, where an armed white mob attacked Greenwood, a prosperous black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and burned most of the neighborhood to the ground
• The Rosewood Massacre in 1923 was another incident where an angry white mob descended on Rosewood, a self-sufficient, prosperous African-American community in Florida, burning the town to the ground and killing most of the residents
• On average, 30 black men were lynched per year during the 1920s, with a big spike right after the war, and victims were often tortured before being murdered, with their dead bodies burned or mutilated
• Booker T. Washington


  Believed that African Americans should concentrate on achieving vocational skills rather than demanding immediate social equality, and proposed the Atlanta Compromise, suggesting that African Americans peacefully submit to segregation and white rule in the South in exchange for free vocational training in public schools and basic legal rights
• W.E.B. Du Bois


  Strongly disagreed with Booker T. Washington's approach, believing that African Americans should not content themselves with being inferior and should agitate to achieve full social equality and rights at once, and launched the Niagara Movement calling for equal economic opportunity and suffrage rights for blacks
• Marcus Garvey


  Firmly believed that African Americans should celebrate and take pride in their African heritage, and opposed cooperation with whites, insisting that African Americans should learn to be independent and set up their own businesses, and even proclaimed himself provisional president of Africa
• The Harlem Renaissance was a vibrant African-American community in New York City during the 1920s, where African-American communities and organizations started their own newspapers and magazines, and a cultural black movement without precedent in the United States emerged
• During World War I, Mexican immigration increased significantly to fill in the labor shortages in agriculture, but faced nativist opposition in many states, leading Congress to create the Border Patrol and require a $10 visa to enter the country, which most immigrants could not afford, leading them to cross the border illegally
• Native Americans continued to be limited to live in reservations and forced to assimilate on the terms of the Dawes Act, and faced many social problems like extreme poverty, alcoholism, crime, and suicide, even after receiving citizenship at the end of World War I
• Asians had been completely banned from immigrating to the US, and those living in the US could not become citizens, often facing discrimination and segregation, especially in the West Coast, with the US Supreme Court upholding the immigration ban on Asians as well as laws that prevented them from owning land or segregated them in public schools