THE GREAT MIGRATION
The Great Migration was one of the largest movements of people in United States history. Approximately six million Black people moved from the American South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states roughly from the 1910s until the 1970s. The driving force behind the mass movement was to escape racial violence, pursue economic and educational opportunities, and obtain freedom from the oppression of Jim Crow. Read more here.
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HISTORICAL CONTEXT
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS
BACK IN THE 1930s
PARCHMAN FARM
Mississippi State Penitentiary (MSP), also known as Parchman Farm, is a maximum-security prison farm located in the unincorporated community of Parchman in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region. Inmates work on the prison farm and in manufacturing workshops. Originally, Parchman was one of two prisons designated for black men, with the other prisons housing other racial and gender groups. Read more here and here.
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SCOTTSBORO BOYS
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
The Great Depression was a worldwide economic downturn that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world. The Great Depression represented the harshest adversity faced by Americans since the Civil War. African Americans were hit hardest by the Great Depression, experiencing high unemployment rates and being "last hired, first fired" due to existing racial prejudices in the job market. By 1932, approximately half of African Americans were out of work. In some Northern cities, whites called for African Americans to be fired from any jobs as long as there were whites out of work. Racial violence again became more common, especially in the South. Lynchings, which had declined to eight in 1932, surged to 28 in 1933. Read more here and here.
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BACK IN THE 1930s
SCOTTSBORO BOYS
1930: The Black Islamic movement known as the Nation of Islam (NOI) is established in Detroit, Michigan, by Wallace Fard Muhammad.
1931: Nine Black young men are accused of raping two White women in Scottsboro, Alabama. They come to be known as the Scottsboro Boys.
1932: The "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" is established through the U.S. Public Health Service in partnership with Tuskegee University - the participants are misled about the goal of the experiment and lied to about their treatment, the study, carried out without their informed consent, is one of the most egregiously unethical experiments ever conducted. The study goes on for 40 years.
1933: Historian Dr. Carter G. Woodson publishes "Mis-education of the Negro." This book details everything that he sees wrong with the way the American education system educates, or "mis-educates," Black students.
1934: Zora Neale Hurston publishes her first novel, "Jonah's Gourd Vine."
1935: The Southern Tenant Farmer's Union (STFU) is established by the Socialist Party to assist southern sharecroppers in fighting for better wages and working conditions.
BLACK HISTORY OF THE 30s
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HISTORICAL CONTEXT
PARCHMAN FARM