Unit 4-Great Migration-Red Summer

Great Migration

This was a mass movement of six million African Americans to the North and West. They left the South to escape racial terrorism and economic repression in the form of sharecropping. African Americans also left to escape political oppression in the form of Jim Crow laws, suffrage restrictions, and convict leasing. They went to the North and West for political, economic, and educational opportunities, as well as going to friends and family waiting in the North and just simply for hope.

Red Summer of 1919

This was a period of white racist mob violence across the US in the spring and fall. Two hundred fifty African Americans were killed. This time period was caused by competition between African Americans and whites for jobs and housing in cities. It often started off as small arguments that escalated to violence, with the whites generally being the aggressors. Police also often sided with whites.

Chicago Race Riot of 1919

On July 27, 1919, a Black teen accidentally swam from a “Blacks Only” beach on lake Michigan to a “Whites Only” beach. White teens threw rocks at the Black teen causing him to drown. This resulted in thirteen days of violence, thirty-eight deaths (twenty-three African Americans and fifteen whites), and one thousand Black families left homeless.

Tulsa Race Massacre of May 1921

This was a period of violence between races. It started when a nineteen year-old black teen was accused of assaulting seventeen year-old Sarah Page who was a white elevator operator. This resulted in an attack to the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood, which contained seventy Black owned businesses and ten thousand residents. White mobs burned, looted, and murdered in Greenwood. Thirty-six blocks of homes and businesses were destroyed, eight to ten thousand people were left homeless, and three hundred people were killed.

KKK 2.0

This was inspired by the 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation”. Members were portrayed heroically during Reconstruction. Membership exploded in the Midwest and West. Oregon was a major member state in the 1920s and by 1925, US membership was at four and a half million. It was reborn in 1915 in Atlanta, Georgia and led by an Atlanta businessman named William Simmons. It was called “The Invisible Empire”. This used violence and fear to bring about political and social change. This was anti-Black, anti-Semitic, anti-catholic, and anti-immigrant, and supported “100% Americanism”.