During the 1920s, thousands of African Americans migrated to urban centers in the North, but the majority stayed in the rural South. They and many in the cities were impoverished and imprisoned by segregation. During this time, the artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance provided cultural inspiration for a new national organizing effort to win equality.

New York City’s Harlem was a center of African American social and cultural aspiration during the 1920s. By the beginning of the decade, Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) had energized the working and middle classes there. The magazines The Crisis, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Opportunity, edited by Charles S. Johnson for the National Urban League (NUL), were outlets for the artists of what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance. All three organizations—the UNIA, NAACP, and NUL—helped to popularize the idea of the New Negro, a self-reliant African American who remained dignified but outspoken in the face of discrimination.

Cultural and Demographic Changes

Harlem was a symbol of the Roaring Twenties. Musicians such as Louis Armstrong established themselves in Harlem clubs, where white flappers and mobsters flocked to dance and drink bootlegged liquor, and the people of Harlem could not enter until after hours. Residents held “rent parties,” in which impoverished intelligentsia and working-class families earned money for rent by throwing parties in their apartments, often with musicians, and selling drinks to the guests. Salons, masked balls, street vendors, and 125th Street at midnight offered kaleidoscopic entertainment that bolstered Harlem’s reputation as a bohemian enclave.

In 1924, Charles Johnson organized a dinner at New York’s Civic Club, the first of many such interracial gatherings he would sponsor to promote the young writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance to potential publishers and employers. Among the guest speakers at the event was James Weldon Johnson, who had been elected the first African American general secretary of the NAACP in 1920, in which capacity he employed a corps of field secretaries to organize branches around the United States. The field secretaries responded to appeals for the NAACP’s help from small cities and towns, teaching people how to organize for their causes and establish NAACP branches. The NUL, with Eugene Kinckle Jones as executive secretary, helped thousands of migrants from the South to adjust to city life through vocational training. Pan-African activist Marcus Garvey, with his first wife, Amy Ashwood, and later his second wife, Amy Jacques, oversaw UNIA programs of business and professional enhancement for Harlem and sent their message around the country through their newspaper, Negro World. These groups worked separately to bring African Americans into a national network of mutual endeavor and support.

The Department of Labor had sent five investigators to southern states in 1917 to study the Great Migration, the exodus from South to North of over half a million African Americans since the turn of the century. The committee concluded that the main reasons for the migration were the constant threat of violence and lynching, unequal treatment under the law, and poor employment and education opportunities in the South; the lure of the cities in the North was decent schools, paying jobs, and comparative racial peace. As a result of this migration, by the 1920s Harlem had become the largest African American community in the United States. The Great Migration would continue in phases into the 1960s, by some estimates accounting for the relocation of over five million people in total.

Race Relations in the South

Although there were some wealthy and middle-class African Americans in the South, the majority of black southerners were sharecroppers on white-owned farmland, growing cotton and providing landowners with a share of the crop as rent. The South’s single-crop economy meant that the region suffered during every dip in the cotton market, and cotton prices would remain low throughout the 1920s. Sharecropping families were in constant debt. At harvest, the cotton remaining after rent payment was assessed, and its value balanced against what the tenant had borrowed for seed and groceries. Creditors took their money off the top, and a typical family was left without cash for staple food until the following spring, when the cycle began again. If creditors or the landlord cheated, which was often the case, the sharecropping family was without recourse. Black children worked in the cotton fields with their parents and attended school sporadically during winter.

Moves to organize against this system had resulted in a massacre of black men and women in Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919. A sharecroppers’ union had attracted the attention of local whites, and when a railroad security officer and a deputy sheriff, both white, arrived at one of the meetings, a shootout ensued between them and the union’s armed guards, during which the security officer was killed and the deputy sheriff was wounded. White mobs rioted in response, murdering at least twenty-five African Americans in Elaine, and possibly as many as one to two hundred. Five whites were also killed. Following the Elaine Massacre, as it came to be called, twelve African American men were sentenced to death, and sixty-five others received long prison sentences. The death penalty cases were appealed as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, which set aside six of the sentences in the 1923 decision Moore v. Dempsey. The Arkansas governor issued furloughs to the Moore defendants in 1925, securing their release, and the other six were eventually freed by the Arkansas Supreme Court.

African American Political Activism

When suffrage was extended to women upon passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, numerous black women attempted to register to vote in the South. Only in a few areas would white registrars take their names, mostly places where the population of black women posed no threat to the white majority. In Kentucky, for example, black women were vastly outnumbered by white women, and so faced little resistance.

Outside the South, women’s suffrage increased the African American vote more significantly, and the Republican Party—the “party of Lincoln”—welcomed the new black votes, which could tip an election. Republican senator Leonidas Dyer introduced a bill in 1920 to make lynching a federal crime, and President Warren Harding called upon Congress to pass the law in 1922. That year, African American activist Mary Talbert and her women’s group, the Anti-Lynching Crusaders, undertook a national speaking and fund-raising campaign in support of the bill, sponsored by the NAACP. The House of Representatives passed the bill, but a filibuster in the Senate prevented its final passage. Black women of Chicago successfully campaigned for Oscar De Priest, the only African American elected to the House of Representatives during the 1920s. In 1923, the government established a Negro Veterans’ Hospital at Tuskegee, Alabama. Federal authorities maintained that the director and staff of the hospital must be white; the NAACP lobbied for the staff to be black. African American voters were important enough that the disputants compromised.

In another instance, a petition campaign trumped the United States Army. In 1917, police in Houston, Texas, had beaten and arrested a black woman and the two black soldiers who defended her. In response, soldiers from the all-black Third Battalion of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment had marched on Houston with their weapons. They met the police and a group of armed locals on the edge of town, and a riot ensued. Four black soldiers, four white police officers, and twelve white civilians were killed. Three courts-martial resulted in the execution of nineteen black soldiers and the sentencing of dozens of others to life terms. In 1924, an NAACP delegation presented a petition with 124,454 signatures calling for pardons to President Calvin Coolidge, who reduced all of the prisoners’ sentences, including commuting ten more death sentences to life in prison.

The government’s pursuit of black nationalist activist and orator Marcus Garvey was one of many incidents that shook African Americans’ faith in the United States government. Since 1919, the new Bureau of Investigation (later the Federal Bureau of Investigation) had spied extensively on Garvey, hoping for a misstep that could end the UNIA. Former colleagues of Garvey provided the evidence. In 1923, Garvey was convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to five years in federal prison. President Coolidge commuted Garvey’s sentence in 1927, and he was deported to his native Jamaica upon his release.

Asa Philip Randolph flirted with the UNIA and socialism, but he committed his life to trade unionism. In 1925, he established the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union of men, mostly African Americans, employed by the Pullman Sleeping Car Company. The Brotherhood was the first black-led union to be admitted to the American Federation of Labor, following the Democratic sweep of the national elections in 1932.

W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the nation’s leading intellectuals, had organized the first Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919, and was involved in subsequent congresses in the 1920s. His idea was that leaders from the global African diaspora should work together to advocate for improved conditions and self-determination in Africa, which remained subject to European colonial domination. In 1927, the fourth congress moved from Europe to Harlem and opened its plenary session to the public. The Women’s International Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations, an organization of African American women, helped ensure that the Pan-African Congress met regularly during the 1920s. Some of the leaders of the Circle had also established the International Council of Women of the Darker Races in 1922 to facilitate cross-cultural discussion and study among black women.

Before the energy of the 1920s faded into the economic depression of the 1930s, agriculture in the South entered a crisis. The price of cotton dropped precipitously in 1928, further impoverishing black sharecroppers. Meanwhile, in the industrial centers of the North, impoverished and racially segregated ghettoes began to form, as a labor surplus created by the Great Migration kept wages low.

Impact

The Harlem Renaissance, which flowered in the 1920s and into the 1930s, brought African American artists and intellectuals into the mainstream of American and indeed international culture, and had an enduring impact on both African Americans and the larger society into which they had yet to be integrated. Although the most dramatic and successful push for African American civil rights would not occur until the second half of the twentieth century, earlier decades, including the 1920s, saw the formation of nationally coordinated mass campaigns for democratic rights among African Americans. Political advocacy by groups such as the NAACP saw modest but notable successes; for example, despite the failure of the Dyer anti-lynching bill, the publicity it created resulted in the number of lynchings dropping dramatically by the end of the decade. Furthermore, the Great Migration and the Nineteenth Amendment enabled African Americans to form significant voting blocs that local and national politicians would court. Thus, despite ongoing social and political exclusion, a distinct African American identity and consciousness continued to take shape and make itself known during the 1920s.

Further Reading