African Americans In The 1930's

The worldwide economic downturn known as The Great Depression took the world by storm. It was during this dilemma that every group of americans were immensely affected. None were affected as much as African Americans and racial status. It was this depression that made the already problematic lives of the African Americans even more challenging. Factors which which influenced racial issues against blacks in the early 1920’s through 1930’s were the Second Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow Laws, the fight for jobs, and the racial riots/lynchings that followed.
It was during the 1920’s that the second Ku Klux Klan came to rise. This second group’s supreme leader was a dentist from the state of Texas named Hiram Evans,(Keith S. Herbert). At this time the KKK

“Jim Crow Laws were statues and ordinances established between 1874 and 1975 to separate the white and black races in the American south,” (U.S. History). The origin of Jim Crow Laws came from a song a black man once sang that was called “Jump Jim Crow”. This became a minstrel show performed by white men who used a very offensive black face. Black face is when a non colored person would color their faces black with a form of face paint or makeup to represent themselves as a black man and the name Jim Crow became the title of the event. “The term came to be a derogatory epithet for African Americans and designation for their segregated life,” (Urofsky Jim Crow Law ). Said by DR.David Pilgrim “ African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens”. The Jim Crow Laws were a physical separation between whites and colored people because whites were considered to be the ‘chosen people’. For example, in a photo from the Library of Congress in the shape of an arrow is a sign pointing to display that there is separate waiting room for those colored , so whites could wait in their own room. It was these type of signs that constantly reminded blacks of the racial order. All sort of things like hospitals, prisons, and schools were all made to a quality less than the whites had to demonstrate the African Americans inferior status. Jim Crow Laws that continued this chain of separation were, blacks could not eat at white restaurants, a black male could not shake hands with a white man or have any relations with white women. These laws allowed whites to be able to beat and punish those who disobeyed them, and it was that which led to the hundreds of race riots and lynchings of African