Segregation and Lynching

   The Great Depression caused more tension between blacks and whites becasue of  job and living tensions. These are some of the ways that whites dealed with that.

Lynching

It is next to impossible to locate a newspaper article that does not identify the victim as a Negro or that refrains from suggesting that the accused was guilty of the crime and therefore deserving of punishment. For example, The New Orleans Picayune described an African-American who was lynched in Hammond, Louisiana for robbery as a "big, burly negro" and a "Black wretch" (Logan, 1965, p. 298).

In July, 1930, newspapermen poked around Emelle, Alabama, trying to ferret out details of the lynching of a Black man, as well as several other slayings. A few White residents who had been on hand when the men were killed refused to talk about the events to reporters from The Tuscaloosa News. "What the hell are you newspaper men doing here?" asked a White man who had been part of the vigilante group. "We're just killing a few negroes that we've waited too damn long about leaving for the buzzards. That's not news" (Raper, 1933, p. 67). The White resident had that part right. During the 1930s, after thousands of African Americans had been put to death by mobs -- particularly in the South but in other regions of the country as well -- lynchings were no longer unusual or shocking events that deviated from the norm. Approximately 4,742 individuals were lynched between 1882 and 1968; of the victims, 3,445 or 73 percent were Black. During the heyday of lynching, between 1889 and 1918, 3,224 individuals were lynched, of whom 2,522 or 78 percent were Black. Typically, the victims were hung or burned to death by mobs of White vigilantes, frequently in front of thousands of spectators, many of whom would take pieces of the dead person's body as souvenirs to help remember the spectacular event It is next to impossible to locate a newspaper article that does not identify the victim as a Negro or that refrains from suggesting that the accused was guilty of the crime and therefore deserving of punishment. For example, The New Orleans Picayune described an African-American who was lynched in Hammond, Louisiana for robbery as a "big, burly negro" and a "Black wretch" (Logan, 1965, p. 298).   Lynching lasted until Eleanor Roosevelt made the decision to help. By the 1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was pushing for a federal anti-lynching law. They hoped to gain the support of the President and First Lady. In the letter to NAACP executive secretary Walter Francis White, Eleanor Roosevelt describes a conversation she had with the President about the law.    With this the law was passed in July 28th, 1922 Segregation In the 1920's it was required that everything be separated. It wasn't only because the people wanted to be separate it was by law that they had to be.  This made life harder for the blacks because even though they were separated they were still discriminated.The segregation caused Jim Crow laws and Black Codes. Under the lenient Reconstruction policies of President Andrew Johnson, white southerners reestablished civil authority in the former Confederate states in 1865 and 1866. They enacted a series of restrictive laws known as "black codes," which were designed to restrict freed blacks' activity and ensure their availability as a labor force now that slavery had been abolished.