Good morning POU! It’s Friday, let’s continue with the open thread theme…
Ku Klux Klan
Many blacks had voted for Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election, based on his promise to work for them. Instead, he segregated government workplaces and employment in some agencies. The first feature-length film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which celebrated the original Ku Klux Klan, was shown at the White House to President Wilson and his cabinet members.
A quote from Woodrow Wilson used in “Birth of a Nation”.
The Birth of a Nation resulted in the rebirth of the Klan, which in the 1920s had more power and influence than the original Klan ever did. In 1924, the Klan had four million members. It also controlled the governorship and a majority of the state legislature in Indiana and exerted a powerful political influence in Arkansas, Oklahoma, California, Georgia, Oregon, and Texas.
Mob violence
Further information: Red Summer
During the years during and after World War I, there were great social tensions in the nation. Besides the Great Migration and immigration from Europe, African-American Army veterans, newly demobilized, sought jobs, and as trained soldiers, were less likely to agree to discrimination. Mass attacks on blacks that developed out of strikes and economic competition occurred in Houston, Philadelphia, and East St. Louis in 1917.
In 1919 there were riots in several major cities, so many so that the summer of 1919 is known as Red Summer. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 erupted into mob violence for several days. It left 15 whites and 23 blacks dead, over 500 injured, and over 1,000 homeless. An investigation found that ethnic Irish, who had established their own power base earlier on the South Side, was heavily implicated in the riots. The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was even more deadly; white mobs invaded and burned the Greenwood district of Tulsa; 1,256 homes were destroyed and 39 people (26 black, 13 white) were confirmed killed, although recent investigations suggest that the number of black deaths could be considerably higher in academia by scientists Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, who argued “scientific evidence” for the racial superiority of whites and thereby worked to justify racial segregation and second-class citizenship for blacks.