EOTO #3 Reaction

   

    The period of American History before the Civil Rights movement was characterized by white supremacist violence and terror brought on by the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan. The catalyst of this era of terror and bloodshed was ironically a seemingly harmless movie called Birth of a Nation. Though you would think a movie to be harmless, its portrayals of African Americans as monsters who only wanted to prey on white women and the KKK as righteous heroes meant to save the country led to the incredibly problematic resurgence of the KKK. The NAACP tried to sue the film for defamation of African Americans, but unfortunately, they failed. This new second coming of the Klan target of terror was much more widespread than the original. They terrorized not only African Americans, but Jews, immigrants, catholics, and labor unions. Following the film, the number of lynchings in the country, especially in the North, regrettably skyrocketed. A particularly harrowing instance was that of the Omaha Courthouse Lynching, in which a white terrorist mob forcefully took Will Brown, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, from a courthouse jail, stripped him of his clothes, hung him on a lamppost, and then shot his lifeless body.

    Another staple of this era were sundown towns. I had heard of the term before, considering I lived near former sundown town Chevy Chase, Maryland, but I didn't know the history behind them. There goal was to keep their towns all-white and discourage black people from wanting to become residents. Now how does one distinguish between a visitor and a resident of a town? Simple, residents sleep there and guests don't! So, they constantly threatened black people to not let the sun set while they were still in town. I had no idea that this practice was actually a badge of honor for these towns. In an advertisement for Edmond, Oklahoma, the mayor bragged about the fact that they had "no negroes" in their town and used it as a selling point for potential residents.

    The country's landscape at this time was so dangerous for African Americans that a man named Victor Hugo Green published the Negro Motorist Green Book in 1936. The book was a guide y for African Americans on navigating the country during segregation. It provided safe travel options for those who owned cars; giving advice on how to avoid sundown towns or specific locations that had a tendency to cause problems for black people. It became a symbol of resistance against racial inequality and was even called "the bible for black travel during Jim Crow."