The nadir of race relations in the United States was an ideological era of nationwide hostility directed from white Americans against African Americans. Racism was so pervasive and, in many cases, so violent, that many African Americans realized they could not influence racists to change their views. Many came to believe that only white people had the power to destroy white supremacy and the racist economic, political, cultural, and social networks that supported it.
Many white Americans around the nation and in the U.S. territories overseas supported legal and customary rules of segregation known colloquially as "Jim Crow," especially in the Midwest and the South. Racism was so prevalent that even American presidents embraced segregationist attitudes and polices in the government and the military, while black Americans turned toward civil rights and Afrocentric movements led by W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey.
The "Nadir of Race Relations"
Historians still debate the exact point in time at which the so-called nadir took place, but a commonly cited period spans the late 1880s to just after World War I, when lynchings—extra-judicial killings of black people—were common. During this period, the popular and academic understandings of slavery in the United States, the Civil War, and Reconstruction supported a Confederate, pro-slavery point of view. This perspective argued that African-American demands for justice were ill-informed and illegitimate, since the competition between black people and white people over resources and power was a zero-sum game.
The Great Migration and Social Tensions
Extending from around 1915 through the 1930s, many black people living in the South moved to Northern cities, seeking better living conditions such as more work and an escape from the common vigilante practice of lynching, the extra-judicial killing of black people, commonly by hanging.
In what became known as the Great Migration, more than 1.5 million black people left the South, and, while they faced difficulties, their chances overall were better in the North. They had to adapt to significant cultural change, as most went from rural areas to major industrial cities. In the South, white people worried about the loss of their labor force and so frequently tried to block the black migration.
Even in the North, there was still segregation; black people had to compete for jobs and housing in cities that also drew millions of Eastern- and Southern-European immigrants. African Americans commonly experienced racism in the context of territorialism, often from ethnic Irish people defending their power bases. Blackface performances—in which white people donned costumes and extensive makeup to appear black and portrayed African Americans as ignorant clowns—were still just as popular in the North as in the South.
Segregation in Ohio
A segregationist sign at a restaurant in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1938. Jim Crow laws established "separate-but-equal" facilities.
In some regions, black people could not serve on juries. The Supreme Court reflected conservative tendencies and did not overrule the Southern constitutional changes that disfranchised African Americans. Despite being made up almost entirely of Northerners, in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court ruled that "separate-but-equal" facilities for black people were in fact constitutional.
The years during and after World War I saw profound social tensions in the United States, not only because of the effects of the Great Migration and European immigration but also due to demobilization and the competition for jobs with returning veterans. Mass attacks on black people, sparked by strikes and economic competition, occurred in Houston, Philadelphia, and in East St. Louis in 1917. In 1919, there were riots in several major cities, resulting in the so-called Red Summer. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 erupted into mob violence that lasted several days, leaving 15 white people and 23 black people dead. The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma was even more deadly, with white mobs invading and burning the city’s Greenwood district.
Chicago Race Riot
A white gang looking for African Americans during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. A lack of plans for demobilization after World War I exacerbated racial and economic tensions in many cities across the U.S.