In the nation’s capital, white mobs attacked African Americans in the streets after newspapers falsely reported the attack of a white woman. Six people were killed over four nights before President Woodrow Wilson intervened and sent in two thousand troops to put down the riot.
In Harlem, A. Philip Randolph and black workers organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first all-black trade union.
Howard University professor Alain Locke published The New Negro, a landmark anthology of essays, poetry, and fiction by African American writers including Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, and others.
In Scottsboro, Alabama, nine African American teenage boys were accused of sexually assaulting two white girls.
Black educator Mary McCleod Bethune founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls, later known as Bethune-Cookman College, in Daytona Beach, Florida.
In Elaine, Arkansas, white mobs searched out and murdered African Americans after a conflict in which a white security guard was killed. An unknown number, possibly ranging into the hundreds, of African Americans were slaughtered and five whites killed in the violence. US troops were sent in to put down the conflict, though evidence later suggested that troops actually participated in the murders.
In one of the Red Summer’s most violent episodes, twenty-three African Americans and fifteen whites were killed, 537 injured, and 1,000 black families left homeless in a Chicago race riot.
Booker T. Washington delivered “Atlanta Compromise” speech, in which he urged African Americans to aim for economic advancement rather than challenge segregation and disfranchisement.
Rutherford B. Hayes was declared winner of a presidential election fraught with accusations and arguments. The final outcome of the election hinged on the disputed results in four states—Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina—which prevented either candidate from securing a majority of electoral votes. At a meeting in February 1877, Democratic leaders accepted Hayes’s election in exchange for Republican promises to withdraw federal troops from the South, provide federal funding for internal improvements in the South, and name a...
Named for its first meeting place at Niagara Falls, New York, the Niagara Movement formed as an organized response to Booker T. Washington’s policies of accommodation and conciliation. Led by W. E. B. Du Bois, the Niagara Movement aimed to counteract Washington’s influence over the black community and in its manifesto declared its intention to “claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social.”