acial segregation was legally acceptable to promote the public good. The Court’s “separate but equal” doctrine resembled more “separate but unequal” treatment. It dominated segregationists’ policies through the 1930s and beyond. Racism became the legacy of slavery.
Jim Crow laws required the separation of races in every facet of life, including transportation, schools, lodging, public parks, theaters, hospitals, neighborhoods, cemeteries, and restaurants. Business owners and public institutions could not allow black and white customers to intermingle. Inter-racial marriages were prohibited. Blacks had to live with inferior facilities, access, and service. The objective was to deprive blacks of key economic and social opportunities. They were also deprived of adequate food, shelter, clothing, education, and health care. The laws also limited black voting rights through various discriminatory voting requirements, including literacy tests and poll taxes. Whites controlled political power.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), created in 1909, took the lead in combating Jim Crow laws. The NAACP began legally challenging housing segregation during the 1910s. NAACP lawyers soon gained a major victory in a Louisville, Kentucky, case. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that government-supported segregated housing laws were unconstitutional. However, the NAACP suffered a major setback nine years later when challenging private contracts banning the sale of housing to blacks. In Corrigan v. Buckley (1926), the Court ruled private individuals had the right to discriminate in such sales. The Corrigan decision dominated legal views on racial segregation into the 1930s.
The Great Migration
Between 1910 and 1930 approximately one million southern blacks moved to northern cities. They were escaping racial discrimination, poverty, crop failures, and lynchings, as well as seeking employment in the new industrial centers. However, once in the North many found they lacked adequate 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 Unit