uate skills and education. They ended up with jobs as laborers or servants or remained unemployed. Unsanitary conditions, run-down housing, poverty, crime, and despair characterized the growing black ghettos.
Racism in America
In the 1920s U.S. society was strongly and openly racist. The entertainment media often portrayed black Americans as stupid and laughable. With white actors speaking the parts of black characters, the radio program called Amos ‘n’ Andybegan in 1928. It exploited all the stereotypes held by white America at that time. By 1929 it was the most popular radio program in the nation, attracting 60 percent of all radio listeners. “Darky” jokes were popular, and amusement parks had games called “Hit the Coon and Get a Cigar.” Racism and discrimination clearly carried over into the job market. During the economic prosperity of the 1920s, black unemployment rates remained high.
Associated with racism and white supremacy were lynchings. Lynching had long been a violent tradition in the South. From 1889 to 1933, some 3,745 people, mostly black Americans, had been lynched. The most incidents occurred in 1892 with 255 lynchings. Rarely did local police authorities pursue those committing the murders, as it was predominately a white attack on blacks for some alleged crime against a white. Often the actual victim of the lynching was innocent. Lynchings in the South continued into the 1960s with murders of civil rights workers.
With a rash of lynchings and race riots from 1911 through 1916, the NAACP formed an Anti-lynching Committee. The committee began compiling data, investigating the specific cases of lynching, and organized business and political leaders. It also conducted a major fund raising campaign to provide a legal defense for those arrested in a race riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917. A “Silent Protest Parade” was also held in New York City in July 1917. The march attracted more prominent black Americans to the organization. In 1919 the NAACP published “Thirty Year of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918.” However, racial violence only escalated in 1919. The most violent incident occurred in Phillips County, Arkansas, when over two hundred people, mostly black Americans, were killed by a large group of armed whites. The whites were attacking blacks thought to be organizing to combat social injustice in the South. The NAACP lawyers defended many blacks that were arrested. The court proceedings led to a successful U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1923, Moore v. Dempsey, which overturned the previous conviction of a black. The decision provided a guarantee of legal protection from mob actions. Through the 1920s the NAACP focused on anti-lynching legislation.
The notion of equality before the law in the United States, though supposedly affirmed for black Americans by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution following the Civil War, still had a long way to develop. The emphasis of courts was still on protection of property rights under the Constitution rather than individual rights. In addition to Jim Crow laws enforcing public segregation, other traditional discriminatory practices persisted. Black Americans had limited access to the U.S. judicial system. The system rarely protected blacks in the early twentieth century. For example, blacks were routinely denied the right to fair trial. One way this was done was by prohibiting blacks from testifying in a court of law against a white person. Obviously, mob actions against blacks, including lynchings, were a stark denial of a fair trial when accused of a crime. Black Americans were clearly not treated equally under the law.
Despite the rampant racism in America during the 1920s, a number of black performers became accepted in the entertainment world. Jazz had only recently grown out of black folk blues. Exotic nightclubs featuring black jazz musicians became very popular with white society, such as the Cotton Club in Harlem. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington would become the nation’s leading jazz musicians.
Literary contributions also bloss