-
Civil Rights Movement
A social movement that found its catalyst in two events: Brown vs. the Board of Education, a Supreme Court decision which found segregation unconstitutional; and Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat at the front of the bus in Selma, Alabama. The movement, which found its leader in Martin Luther King, Jr., pushed for an end to Jim Crow Laws and the passage of a civil rights act that would prohibit discrimination based on one's skin color. -
Harlem Renaissance
Refers to the proliferation of art and music in New York's African-American community in the 1920's. During this time, Harlem became the undisputed intellectual and artistic center of African-American society. The 1920s in Harlem produced writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson and Claude McKay, and photographers like Roy De Carava and James Van Der Zee. -
Jim Crow Laws
Jim Crow Laws were the most effective agent of segregation in the South. The laws prohibited businesses from employing African-Americans, and barred African- Americans access to public places such as hotels, restaurants and public restrooms. Jim Crow legislation was officially instituted by the southern states shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation. These laws remained in place until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. -
Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan, or KKK, is a "secret society" based in the South which promotes the superiority of white Protestants over all non-white and non- Protestant people. The KKK was responsible for many acts of violence against African-Americans, including lynchings, after the Civil War, and this violence continued up until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Since the passage of the Civil Rights Amendment, the KKK's influence has dwindled drastically. -
Moses Stokes' Traveling Show
A traveling vaudeville and minstrel tent show run by Lonnie and Cora Fisher. Bessie's brother Clarence Smith first worked the circuit as a comedian and then managed to convince the Fishers to give Bessie Smith in 1912. Bessie Smith then joined the show. -
Minstrels
Minstrel shows became popular in the 1820s and were, for years, the most popular form of live entertainment in America. In minstrel shows, white performers blackened their faces and exaggerated their facial features, often lining their lips in white paint, in order to imitate slaves in the South and former slaves in the North. Blackface minstrels were particularly offensive–to our modern sensibilities–because they portrayed African-Americans as lazy, shiftless and dim-witted, and these stereotypes continued for decades. -
Northern Migration
The Northern Migration of Southern African-Americans to the great industrial cities of the North took place after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Despite being freed from slavery, life did not improve much for African- Americans in the devastated Southern states and many sought opportunity in the prosperous, relatively liberal North. However, with the influx of European immigrants, African-Americans found jobs scarce and discrimination as rampant as it had been in the South. -
Reconstruction
The period of readjustment–social, economic and physical–that occurred in the American South following the Civil War. The South had been completely devastated during the four-year war and now, with the once entrenched social system turned on its head, had to rebuild and redefine itself. -
Roaring Twenties
Term given to the years directly following America's victory in WWI in which industrialization hit a high point and the country's wealth increased rapidly. Also, alternatively, called the Jazz Age. -
Segregation
A policy of separating the races that was put in place in the South during Reconstruction. Segregation usually took the form of what were informally called Jim Crow Laws, in which blacks and whites were required, by law, to use separate facilities, including schools, restrooms and drinking fountains. -
TOBA
Theater Owners' Booking Association, or as the African-American artists who worked under its auspices liked to call it, "Tough On Black Asses." A collective of theater owners that booked vaudeville, minstrel, and blues shows in the South. -
Black Tuesday
October 29, 1929. The stock market went into a tailspin and stocks lost value, setting the Great Depression in motion.
-
Prohibition
The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibited "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes." As a result, saloons became underground speakeasies, organized crime controlled most of the illegal liquors and bootlegging became one of the most lucrative careers one could enter into in the 1920s.
-
Emancipation Proclamation
Signed by Abraham Lincoln on September 22, 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation essentially put an end to slavery in the United States. In its wake, huge numbers of freed slaves migrated to Northern cities.
-
Great Depression
The severe economic crisis instigated by the Stock Market Crash of 1929. The Depression's impact on the various sectors of American industry, business and society was devastating.
-
Lusitania
A British ocean liner that was downed by a German torpedo on May 7, 1915, in the midst of WWI. Although officially the United States maintained its neutrality in the wake of the attack, the sinking of the Lusitania did much to stir up anti-German sentiment and increased American willingness to join a global war in progress.
-
Nineteenth Amendment
The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified on August 22, 1920, gave women the right to vote.
-
Twenty-First Amendment
The Constitutional amendment repealing The Eighteenth Amendment, or Prohibition, ratified in 1933.
-
WWI
Also known as the Great War. Instigated in 1914 by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist, World War I plunged all of Europe into chaos. After Germany sank the Lusitania and America's neutrality was pushed to its breaking point, Germany announced unrestricted warfare in British waters. In protest, America broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and, on April 6, 1917, joined WWI.