African Americans emerged from World War I determined to achieve citizenship rights. Millions had loyally supported the war effort; 350,000 had served in uniform. At the same time, the Great Migration drew hundreds of thousands from the South to northern industrial cities, where they secured good wartime jobs and found they could vote and use their new economic clout to build community institutions and work for racial justice. The black man, one observer wrote, “realized that he was part and parcel of the great army of democracy. … With this realization came the consciousness of pride in himself as a man, and an American citizen.”

These developments sparked white violence. In the South, the number of lynchings rose from 48 in 1917 to 78 in 1919, including several murders of returning black soldiers in their military uniforms. In 1921, after a brutal lynching in the railroad town of Rosewood, Florida, black residents armed for self-defense; mobs of furious whites responded by torching houses and hunting down African Americans. Police and state authorities refused to intervene. The town of Rosewood vanished from the map.

In northern and midwestern cities, the arrival of southern migrants deepened existing racial tensions. Blacks competed with whites — including recent immigrants — for scarce housing and jobs. Unionized white workers resented blacks who served as strikebreakers. Racism turned such conflicts into violent confrontations. Attacks on African Americans broke out in more than twenty-five cities. One of the deadliest riots occurred in 1917 in East St. Louis, Illinois, where nine whites and more than forty blacks died. Chicago endured five days of rioting in July 1919. By September, the national death toll from racial violence reached 120.

The oil boomtown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was the site of a horrific incident in June 1921. Sensational, false reports of an alleged rape helped incite white mobs who resented growing black prosperity. Anger focused on the 8,000 residents of Tulsa’s prosperous Greenwood district, locally known as “the black Wall Street.” The mob — helped by National Guardsmen, who arrested blacks who resisted — burned thirty-five blocks of Greenwood and killed several dozen people. The city’s leading paper acknowledged that “semi-organized bands of white men systematically applied the torch, while others shot on sight men of color.” It took a decade for black residents to rebuild Greenwood.