Guided Readings: The Jazz Age - The American 1920s Race Some of the most vicious racial violence in American history took place between 1917 and 1923, partly due to dramatic shifts in the demography of race. Black workers who had been historically confined to the South had begun to move north and compete with whites for factory jobs--often as strikebreakers, which was the only way many could get hired. In addition, black veterans returned from World War I insisting on the civil rights that they had fought for in Europe. In Chicago, Longview Tex., Omaha, Neb., Rosewood, Fl., Tulsa, Okla., Washington, D.C., white mobs burned and killed in black neighborhoods. In Tulsa 40 city blocks were leveled, and 23 African American churches and a thousand homes and businesses were destroyed. In 1921, Tulsa, which was about 12 percent black, had the Southwest's most prosperous African American business community, which Booker T. Washington had called "the black Wall Street." The incident that led to the violence was the arrest of a 19-year-old African-American bootblack for supposedly assaulting a white teenaged elevator operator. Police later concluded that the young man had stumbled into the woman as he was getting off the elevator. An inflammatory newspaper articles that helped touch off the violence was headlined "To Lynch Negro Tonight." The death toll is in dispute. A government report said 26 blacks and 10 whites had died and another 317 were injured. A recent scholarly study concluded that black deaths approached one hundred and may have been much higher. Another incident of racial violence took place on New Year's Day in 1923, in the tiny black settlement of Rosewood, Fl. A white mob, which came from as far away as Georgia and was purportedly searching for an alleged rapist, burned the town of 150. Only one structure, a house owned by the community's only white resident, was not destroyed. Newspaper accounts differ on the total number of people killed; one lists seven, another 21. One Rosewood resident, a blacksmith, was hanged. Lacking hard evidence, historians have had to rely on oral history. One man, who was eleven at the time of the attack, recalled his father's reports of the violence. He described a black man who was forced to dig his own grave, then shot and shoved into it; a man was hanged from a tree in his front yard when he told a posse that he could not lead them to the alleged rapist; and a pregnant woman was shot as she tried to crawl under her porch for protection. In 1994, the state of Florida paid $2.1 million in reparations. Back to menu Next
	Return To Teacher Modules