1915

Inspired directly by 'The Birth of a Nation,' William Joseph Simmons and fifteen followers burned a cross on Stone Mountain, Georgia on Thanksgiving night 1915, relaunching the Ku Klux Klan. Aggressive marketing in the early 1920s grew it to an estimated 4 million members, with particular strength in Indiana, Ohio, and other Northern states. The second KKK targeted Black Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants, carrying out hundreds of lynchings and thousands of acts of intimidation across the country.

The boll weevil, which entered the United States from Mexico around 1892, spread rapidly through Southern cotton states by 1915-1916, destroying crops that Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers depended on. Combined with catastrophic flooding in 1915 and 1916, the destruction wiped out already precarious incomes. With demand for Northern industrial labor rising due to WWI cutting off European immigration, the weevil became a major push factor in the Great Migration of approximately 1.6 million Black Americans who left the South between 1910 and 1930.

In Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down Oklahoma's grandfather clause, which exempted men whose ancestors could vote before 1866 from literacy tests — effectively protecting illiterate white voters while subjecting all Black voters to the tests. It was the NAACP's first major Supreme Court victory and the first time the Court struck down a law as a violation of the 15th Amendment since Reconstruction. Oklahoma responded by passing a new law restricting new voters that the Court later invalidated in Lane v. Wilson (1939).

In Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down Oklahoma's grandfather clause, which exempted men whose ancestors could vote before 1866 from literacy tests, effectively protecting illiterate white voters while subjecting all Black voters to the tests. It was the NAACP's first major Supreme Court victory and the first time the Court struck down a law as a violation of the 15th Amendment since Reconstruction.

Carter G. Woodson, the second Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard, founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History on September 9, 1915, and began publishing the Journal of Negro History in 1916. Woodson argued that Black history had been deliberately omitted from American education and that this erasure was a tool of oppression. He established 'Negro History Week' in 1926 (expanded to Black History Month in 1976). His scholarship systematically recovered Black historical contributions that white academic history had ignored or distorted.

Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent in Atlanta, was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan based on dubious evidence, with credible evidence pointing to janitor Jim Conley (Black) who became a prosecution witness. After Governor John Slaton commuted Frank's death sentence, a mob calling itself the 'Knights of Mary Phagan' abducted Frank from prison and lynched him. The case exposed the intersection of anti-Black and antisemitic violence in the South and led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League. Jim Conley, the more likely perpetrator, was never seriously reinvestigated.

D.W. Griffith's film glorifies the Klan and fuels a violent revival.

The Supreme Court strikes down the "grandfather clause" used to disenfranchise Black voters.