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A Divided Society

III – Racism and the Ku Klux Klan

  

  

ARGUMENT 1.  A Time of Oppression  [SHACKLE]

 

  1. Supremacism and routine racism

    • At this time in America's history 'WASP' Americans believed (and were told by 'eugenicist' scientists) that they were genetically superior to other races, and that they were harder-working, more intelligent and more civilised that other races.  Discrimination was EMBEDDED throughout American society, not only towards immigrants and African Americans (see below), but also – though not stated topics in your GCSE specification – towards Native Americans and Mexicans. 

    2.  

  2. Hostility to Immigrants

    3.  

     

  3. American Government and laws

    • the government refused to pass laws banning lynchings or giving Black Americans the vote.

    • in 1926 a Supreme Court judgement (Corrigan v. Buckley) upheld racial covenants in housing, allowing neighborhoods to remain segregated.

    • racial minorities faced discriminatry policing and harsher court sentences.

    • many unions, notably the American Federation of Labor barred non-white workers from joining t.

    4.  

  4. Jim Crow Laws

    • the name for laws passed in the southern states which prevented Black Americans from mixing with whites ('segregation'), marriage between the races ('miscegenation'), denied them equality of education and civil rights, and prevented them from voting.

    5.  

  5. Ku Klux Klan

    • an organisation to maintain WASPs supremacy, which had 5 million members by 1925.  Some supporters were poor whites, who did not want Black Americans to be their equals/feared they would take their jobs, but most were educated, middle-class white Americans.  They wore white sheets and hoods, and marched with burning crosses.  They spoke with each other in a secret language which they called 'Klonversations'.  At the local level, they campaigned for better schools and local improvements.  They also intimidated, attacked, tortured and killed Black Americans, but also Jews and Catholics and 'immoral' people such as alcoholics.

    •  WHY DID THE KKK GROW SO QUICKLY 1920-24?   [AWESOME AS]

      • Anglo-Saxon white racism and nativism

      • WWI disillusionment

      • Economic Instability caused by immigration

      • Social community of the Klaverns

      • Opposition to modernism and cultural change

      • Media and theatricality

      • Enforcement of prohibition and morality

      • Anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish Protestant prejudice

      • Support for local political issues

     

  6. Lynchings

    • mobs of white people often hanged ('lynched') Blacks Americans whom they suspected of a crime (usually the police turned a blind eye).

    7.  

  7. Even in the North

    • Black Americans ended up with the low-paid menial jobs, such as janitors, bootblacks, cooks, houseboys, baggage handlers, waiters, doormen, dishwashers and washroom attendants.  In 1919, white Americans in Chicago rampaged through Black neighbourhoods after a drowning black man clinging to a log had drifted into a whites-only swimming area.

  

Source B

In the morning, a Black mother sent her children to a school for colored children only. 

Going to town, she sat at the back of the bus, in the seats for coloreds.  She went to the post office for coloreds, visited the library for coloreds, and walked in a separate park.  When she went shopping, she stood in line, so White women could go in front of her. 

Her husband went to work, but he was not the boss; that was a job for a White man.  He used a separate rest room, and went to a separate toilet. 

John D Clare, The Black Peoples of America (2001)

  

 

Going Deeper

The links below will help you widen your knowledge:

BBC Bitesize on Prejudice and intolerance against African Americans and their responses

Historiography of the Second KKK

 

'Black' and 'White' - extensive resources on race in America

'Ku Klux Klan' - extensive resources on the KKK

 

  Essay: To what extent did African Americans share in the Boom of the 1920s?

 

YouTube

The Harlem Renaissance

  

 

 

Source A

A lynching (1935) - note the children.

 

 

Consider:

Racism had FIVE aspects in 1920s America [LEAFS]:

  Legal Discrimination
  Economic Discrimination
  Abuse & Violence
  Forced Assimilation
  Segregation & Exclusion

Identify examples of all five aspects in the way non-white races were treated in America in the 1920s.

ARGUMENT 2.  A Time of Flowering [RHINO]

 

  1. Role models

    • some Black Americans became famous – the sprinter Jesse Owens, the baseball player Jackie Robinson, the dancer Josephine Baker.  They were an inspiration to other Black Americans. 

    2.  

  2. Harlem Renaissance

    • a cultural flowering in the New York Black neighbourhood of Harlem, based on jazz, but also excellent Black architects, novelists, poets and painters.  Many of these believed in 'Artistic Action' – winning equality by proving they were equal.

    3.  

  3. Identity

    • in 1925 Alain Locke wrote The New Negro, who had to smash the old image of 'Uncle Tom' and 'Sambo', and develop a new identity, 'uplift' the race and fight for equality.  There were Black newspapers and magazines.  This was the time when the phrase was coined: 'Black is Beautiful'.

    4.  

  4. NAACP

    • Set up in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People campaigned for civil rights.

  5. One-and-a-half million

    • Black Americans migrated from the south to the north.  Although many of them ended up in low-paid jobs, some of them formed a new Black middle class, and were educated at university.

  

 

 

Consider:

In this section of the specification we have seen a society deeply divided:

•  Rich v Poor
•  Unions v Employers
•  Flappers v conservatives
•  Wet v Dries
•  Police v Gangsters
•  Immigrants v Nativism
•  Political Radicals v the State
•  Science v Religion
•  Blacks v KKK

The American historian William Leuchtenburg (Source C) believed that they all boiled down to the same issue – 'Modernity' (i.e. CHANGE).

1.  Go back through the last seven webpages, and trace all the links you can find between the nine different issues (e.g. 6 and 9 are both fundamentally about racism).  Do you agree with Leuchtenburg that they are all different sides of the same coin?  Or were they separate, distinct problems?

2.  And, if you agree that they are all linked, do you agree with Leuchtenburg that the connecting issue was Modernity – and if not, what? 

3.  Do you agree with Leuchtenburg that the fundamentalists lost and the modernists won?

4.  Write an essay to sum up all you have learned so far: "How far was American society divided in the 1920s?"

 

  • AQA Exam-style Questions

      1.  Describe two problems faced by African-Americans in the 1920s.

      2.  In what ways were the lives of African-Americans in the 1920s affected by:
        •  government actions
        •  the Ku Klux Klan? 

  

Source C

Political Fundamentalism

The aftermath of the Scopes trial is symbolic of the fate of political fundamentalism in the 1920s.  Immigration restriction, the Klan, prohibition, and Protestant fundamentalism all had in common a hostility to modernity and a desire to arrest change through coercion by statute.  The anti-evolutionists won the Scopes trial; yet, in a more important sense, they were defeated, overwhelmed by the tide of cosmopolitanism. 

Such was the fate of each of the other movements.  By the end of 1933, the Eighteenth Amendment had been repealed and the Klan was a dim memory.  Immigration restriction, which apparently scored a complete triumph and certainly did win a major one, was frustrated when (since the law did not apply to the Western Hemisphere) Mexicans, French Canadians, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans, most of them ‘swarthy’ Catholics, streamed in. 

Ostensibly successful on every front, the political fundamentalists in the 1920s were making a last stand in a lost cause.. 

William Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity (2010)

 

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