Events
1909
NAACP is founded
1920
Great Migration begins
1927
Marcus Garvey is deported
1941
Roosevelt signs Executive Order 8802,
creates Fair Employment Practices Committee
1942
CORE is founded
1946
Truman creates Committee on Civil Rights
1947
Jackie Robinson becomes first black player in Major
League Baseball
1948
Executive Order 9981 signed
1950
Ralph Bunche wins Nobel Peace Prize
Key People
-
W. E. B. Du Bois
Black historian and sociologist; helped found the
NAACP in 1909
-
Marcus Garvey
Jamaican
immigrant who promoted “black nationalism”; helped found UNIA; led
movement to resettle blacks in Africa
-
A. Philip Randolph
President of National Negro Congress; threatened
to march on Washington during World War II if more civil rights
legislation was not passed
-
Franklin D. Roosevelt
32nd
U.S. president; signed Executive Order 8802 and
created Fair Practices Employment Committee
-
Harry S Truman
33rd
U.S. president; created President’s Committee on Civil Rights and
signed Executive Order 9981 to
desegregate U.S. military
-
Jackie Robinson
Athlete who in 1947 became
first black player in Major League Baseball
-
Ralph Bunche
U.N.
diplomat who in 1950 became
first African American to win Nobel Peace Prize
The NAACP
In 1909, W.
E. B. Du Bois and several other activists, frustrated by setbacks
to the civil rights movement such as Plessy v. Ferguson, founded
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The NAACP, whose leadership and membership consisted of both blacks
and whites, published a monthly journal called Crisis and
worked diligently to gain more legal and political rights for blacks.
Black women, meanwhile, formed their own associations
geared toward providing social services and community support. The National
Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, for example, worked to
improve the lives of urban black women by building settlement houses,
promoting public health initiatives, and providing child-care services
for working mothers.
The Great Migration
The prospect of new jobs in the war industries encouraged
as many as half a million black tenant farmers in the South to move
to cities in the North during and after World War I. The Great
Migration, as it came to be called, had a profound effect
on blacks’ lives and on the cities in which they resettled, as millions
of white Americans began leaving for the suburbs. Furthermore, the
invention of the mechanical cotton picker in the 1940s
made southern agricultural jobs scarcer and spurred more than a
million additional blacks to leave the South. As more and more blacks
moved to northern cities, more people became aware of the enormous
economic inequalities that separated blacks from whites.
The Harlem Renaissance
Nowhere were the effects of the Great Migration clearer
than in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, where
as many as 200,000 blacks
settled between World War I and World War II. Harlem quickly became
one of the largest black communities in the world outside Africa.
Although most of the blacks who moved to Harlem lived in poverty,
a sizable group of middle-class blacks helped lead the so-called Harlem
Renaissance of the 1920s.
During this Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. Du Bois’s “black
consciousness” took root among black artists and intellectuals,
who began to recognize, develop, and appreciate a distinctive black
cultural identity. Black writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee
Cullen, and Langston Hughes expressed their immense
pride in the creation of the “New Negro.” As
black essayist James Weldon Johnson put it, “Nothing
can go further to destroy race prejudice than the recognition of
the Negro as a creator and contributor to American civilization.”
Marcus Garvey and the UNIA
No single individual contributed more to the development
of black pride during this period than Marcus Garvey.
Garvey, who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in
Jamaica in 1914, moved to the United States
in 1916. He settled in Harlem and
established the U.S. branch of the UNIA to help blacks achieve
economic independence in the United States and unite black communities
around the world. He organized parades and massive rallies to boost
black pride and encouraged black-owned companies to
do more business within the community. On the other hand, the UNIA
also encouraged blacks to leave the United States and resettle in
their ancestral homes in Africa.
