1900s

By 1900, every former Confederate state had passed comprehensive Jim Crow legislation mandating racial segregation in virtually all public life: railroads, streetcars, waiting rooms, hospitals, hotels, restaurants, barber shops, water fountains, phone booths, and cemeteries. Georgia and North Carolina segregated textile factories by race. Oklahoma segregated telephone booths. Mississippi required separate textbooks for Black and white students, with the books stored separately to prevent contamination. Florida made it illegal for white and Black students to use the same edition of a textbook. These laws backed by threat of violence.

By 1900, every former Confederate state had constitutionally disfranchised Black voters through a combination of poll taxes, literacy tests administered selectively, white primaries, grandfather clauses, and residency requirements. In Mississippi, Black voter registration fell from 190,000 in 1890 to fewer than 1,200 by 1904. In Louisiana, Black voters fell from 130,000 in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904. The disfranchisement was total and enforced by violence: attempting to register could result in job loss, eviction, or death.

By 1900, every former Confederate state has enacted statutory Jim Crow covering railroads, schools, public accommodations, and political participation. The system rests on three legal pillars validated by the Supreme Court: Plessy's 'separate but equal' for public life, Williams' endorsement of voter suppression mechanisms, and the 1883 Civil Rights Cases' limitation of federal protection to state action. Black civil rights exist on paper in the Constitution and nowhere in practice.

The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision legitimating 'separate but equal' racial segregation defined American public life in the early twentieth century. In practice, separate facilities were never equal: Black schools received a fraction of per-pupil funding, Black rail cars were inferior, Black hospitals lacked equipment. The doctrine was enforced not through state inspection of equality but through violence and economic coercion. Any Black person who challenged the arrangement risked physical assault, job loss, or death. The Supreme Court did not overturn Plessy until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

The NAACP's painstaking documentation, drawing on newspaper reports and local records, identified over 1,100 documented lynchings of Black Americans between 1900 and 1919, an average of more than one per week, every week, for twenty years. Mississippi led with the most lynchings, followed by Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama. Many lynchings went undocumented. The NAACP hung a banner from its New York office reading 'A Man Was Lynched Yesterday' each time a lynching was reported. The consistency and scale constituted a systematic campaign of racial terror, not isolated criminal incidents.

On the centennial of Lincoln's birth, a multiracial coalition including Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, Mary White Ovington, and Moorfield Storey issued the 'Call,' founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP was explicitly formed to combat lynching, disenfranchisement, and Jim Crow segregation through legal action, lobbying, and public pressure. It became the primary institutional vehicle for Black civil rights for the next six decades.

Black land ownership in the South peaked at approximately 15 million acres in 1910, representing an extraordinary achievement of post-Reconstruction self-help against enormous obstacles. Beginning in the 1910s and accelerating over the following decades, Black land was stripped through a combination of: tax sales in which landowners were not notified; heirs' property laws that fragmented ownership and enabled partition sales; racially exclusionary USDA loan programs; intimidation and violence; deed fraud; and the use of 'white riders' who filed false claims. By 1997, Black landowners held less than 2 million acres.

Between 1910 and 1930, approximately 1.6 million Black Americans left the South for Northern and Midwestern cities, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York. They were fleeing lynching, disenfranchisement, debt peonage, convict leasing, and economic exclusion, and seeking industrial wages and greater freedoms. The Chicago Defender, smuggled south by Pullman porters, advertised Northern opportunities and published letters from migrants. The demographic transformation reshaped American politics, culture, and race relations.

On July 2, 1917, white workers and residents of East St. Louis, Illinois attacked Black neighborhoods over two days. White mobs shot Black residents fleeing their burning homes, beat people to death, and hanged bodies from telephone poles. Estimates of Black deaths range from 100 to 200; the official figure was set artificially low. Six thousand Black residents were driven from their homes and entire neighborhoods burned. The attack was triggered by white labor resentment of Black workers recruited from the South by industries during WWI. Congressional investigations documented it as one of the worst massacres in US history.

The summer and fall of 1919 saw anti-Black race riots in at least 25 American cities, Washington DC, Chicago, Elaine Arkansas, Omaha, Knoxville, Longview Texas, Charleston South Carolina, and others, making it the bloodiest period of racial violence in American history outside of the Civil War era. At least 97 Black Americans were lynched that year alone, including 10 veterans still in military uniform. The NAACP's James Weldon Johnson named it the 'Red Summer.' The violence was a direct response to Black military service, Great Migration, and demands for equality.

On July 27, 1919, Eugene Williams, a Black teenager, drowned in Lake Michigan after white beachgoers threw rocks at him when he drifted toward the white beach at 29th Street. Police refused to arrest the white man identified as responsible. The incident ignited 13 days of riots in which 38 people were killed (23 Black, 15 white), 537 were injured, and more than 1,000 Black families were made homeless when their homes were burned. Irish gangs from the 'athletic clubs' were primary aggressors. Illinois National Guard was eventually called. The riot cemented residential segregation patterns that persisted for a century.

Black sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas had organized the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America to negotiate cotton prices collectively. On September 30, 1919, white men fired into a union meeting at a church; return fire killed one white man. White mobs and federal troops then spent five days hunting and killing Black residents, estimates range from 100 to 237 Black deaths, with only 5 white deaths acknowledged. Twelve Black men were sentenced to death and 67 to long prison terms. The NAACP appealed; in Moore v. Dempsey (1923) the Supreme Court held the trials unconstitutional, one of the first times federal courts reviewed state criminal proceedings for due process violations.

On May 31–June 1, 1921, a white mob aided by deputized officers burned 35 square blocks of Greenwood, the prosperous Black district of Tulsa known as 'Black Wall Street.' Up to 300 people were killed, 10,000 left homeless, and millions of dollars in property destroyed. Greenwood residents began rebuilding almost immediately, and film shot by Rev. Solomon Sir Jones from 1925–1928 shows a thriving district restored within a few years, an act of collective resilience with no government assistance.

On May 31–June 1, 1921, white mobs attacked Greenwood, Tulsa's prosperous Black district known as 'Black Wall Street.' Over 300 Black residents were killed, 35 blocks burned to the ground, 1,256 homes destroyed, and more than 10,000 left homeless. The attack began after Dick Rowland, a Black shoe-shiner, was accused of assaulting white elevator operator Sarah Page. Police deputized white civilians who participated in the assault. Oklahoma National Guard units arrested Black residents rather than protecting them.