The Second Mississippi Plan was devised by the Mississippi legislature to avoid honoring the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments without attracting federal intervention. The plan included a residency length requirement, poll tax, literacy test, and clean criminal record requirement. The Second Mississippi Plan successfully disfranchised most African Americans in that state.
W. E. B. Du Bois’s landmark book of essays, Souls of Black Folk, was published. The book combined history and sociology with commentary on the experiences of African Americans in America.
President Woodrow Wilson attended a White House screening of D. W. Griffith’s new film, The Birth of a Nation. The film, based on the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, celebrated the Ku Klux Klan and presented racist portrayals of African Americans. Wilson reportedly called the film “terribly true.” Fervor created by the film contributed to race riots and violence against African Americans throughout the nation, as well as the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a race riot broke out over the alleged attack against a white female elevator operator. Armed white mobs gathered in the city’s African American neighborhood of Greenwood and burned down homes and businesses and indiscriminately murdered black residents. More than 300 people were killed and 1,200 homes destroyed, leaving many surviving black families homeless.
Booker T. Washington opened the Tuskegee Institute for African Americans in Tuskegee, Alabama.
Vermont abolished slavery, followed by Massachusetts in 1783. Gradual emancipation laws were passed between 1780 and 1804 in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey.
The Great Migration, in which about half a million African Americans moved to the urban North from the rural South, began about 1905 and ended around 1930.
Congressman Rufus King of Massachusetts proposed a ban on slavery in the western US territories.
Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway to great success and interest. The play told the story of a black Chicago family trying to move out of the city and into an all-white neighborhood.
Members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, an African American church, in Birmingham, Alabama. The bomb was detonated just before a Sunday service, killing four young girls and injuring fourteen other people.