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The Passage of the Black Codes
Though freed from the physical shackles of slavery, blacks in the former Confederate states faced a continued threat to their freedom in the form of onerous "black codes" passed by white southerners in 1865 and 1866. These codes sought to codify a system where the white population be permanently superior to and indentured black mass. -
The Era of Radical Reconstruction
Partially in response to the onerous "black codes" of the South, a Republican controlled national legislature pursued an aggressive form of reform in the former Confederate states. Radical Reconstruction sought to empower blacks by pushing them full bore into the labor force and political life, seeing the election of blacks to state and federal seats. The velocity of this change would prove to radical for whites in the former Confederate states, who'd racial animus would rise again in backlash. -
The Atlanta Compromise Speech
A speech given by Booker T. Washington at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, the Atlanta Compromise was so dubbed because it sought to court white's acceptance of black racial equality by encouraging blacks to work on self-improvement of their communities without agitating white society. This proved controversial among the black community. -
NAACP Founded
W.E.B. Du Bois, a critic of Booker T. Washington's "compromise", helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. The organization set out to break from Washington's twin tenets of separate but equal and non-agitation, by aggressively advocating in court for black civil liberties. -
The Release of Birth of A Nation
The acclaimed director D.W. Griffith's film, Birth of A Nation, based on a novel by Thomas Dixon called The Clansman, romanticizes the Antebellum South and sets the Civil War and its aftermath as a tragedy that is undone by the heroism of the Ku Klux Klan. It is a hit and helps to gain sympathy for the case against full black equality. -
The Harlem Renaissance
The black enclave of Harlem in New York City helped incubate a cultural revolution in black culture and America at large. The generation of the Harlem Renaissance (among them the writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, the singer Billie Holiday, the musician Louis Armstrong) came to embody a development in American society, where despite systemic antagonism after relief from slavery, black American's would work their way in the country they new as home.