wip-badgeCultural Rebirth and Political Reaction (1900–1915)

Racism becomes official U.S. government policy, as ‘race’ rewrites the nation’s culture.

We’ll produce this projected/proposed new Between Civil War and Civil Rights program here on this site in multi-media form, but with a one-hour audio core version suitable for public radio broadcast. Watch this page for information and more audio samples as we develop the script. Send us your thoughts, narratives, images, texts, and especially sound, and please join in developing, funding and producing, the most effective production possible:

We’ll document and debate and weave this tale from such elements as:

Portrait of an African American clergyman, holding a bible. Blue suit with white collar.

An early back-to-Africa movement led by A.M.E. Bishop Henry Turner.

After one of Turner’s followers unleashes mayhem in New Orleans, and a creative musical diaspora

Ida B. Wells takes her anti-lynching campaign overseas.

Booker T. Washington

While black leaders Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois battle over tactics, Southern Blacks swell a Great Migration, and

Thomas J. Dixon

White writers, led by novelist Thomas Dixon and historian William Dunning, authoritatively rewrite the Reconstruction as a time of Black misrule.

Drawing

Race riots ravage Atlanta (1906), and Springfield Illinois (1908), as

DuBois and others found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

President Woodrow Wilson holding a baseball in a crowd filled outdoor stadium.

Political History Professor Woodrow Wilson is elected President. He re-segregates the Federal government, purges Blacks officials, and steps up U.S. military interventions in Latin- and black American neighbor-nations.

And as the U.S. joins the War to End All Wars, Congressman Leonidas Dyer offers an anti-lynching Bill. It shall never pass.

The Ballad of Robert Charles