This book review of Scott Nearing's Black America
was published on the eve of the Great Depression and it provides a very accurate account of that community.
"There are in the United States today, if statistics do not lie, some twelve million Negroes. The population of the Argentine is not so large, nor that of Holland, nor that of Sweden. Eight million of these dark Americans live in the South. In Georgia alone there are more than a million colored people...How do they live - these blacks in a country controlled by whites.
Author Scott Nearing (1883 – 1983) was an American naturalist, educator and civil rights advocate.
Click here to read an article by Ralph Ellison concerning Black writers of the 1930s.
A small notice appeared in POPULAR MECHANICS MAGAZINE that announced African Americans "will be allowed" to live in a new town located in Virginia intended to house the employees of the naval station in nearby Portsmouth. Due to small reports as this, Truxton proved to be a destination during the African-American migration period. A profile of Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887 – 1940), Jr.; National Hero of Jamaica. During his lifetime Garvey worked as a publisher, a journalist, and an entrepreneur. A devoted Black nationalist and a black separatist, Marcus Garvey was the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). He rubbed a good many white folk the wrong way and this article from The Literary Digest covers much of his activities leading up to 1922. Attached is a 1921 account of the Hampton Institute; it's past, present and future is entirely outlined in this magazine article that was written by a celebrated journalist of the time, Mr. Talcott Williams (1849 - 1928).
Click here for the Ku Klux Klan Archive. As many of the readers in the OldMagazineArticles.com audience have figured out, the purpose of this site is to allow the past to represent itself -- warts and all, and few articles make manifest this policy better than this 1921 article which reported on the efforts of an appropriately forgotten scientist from the University of Virginia, Dr. George Oscar Ferguson. Ferguson was the author of a project that somehow measured the intelligence of African Americans and White Americans and concluded that his: "psychological study of the Negro indicates that he will never be the mental equal of the white race." A single page report giving an account of two racial uprisings that took place in 1919. The journalist was not at all alarmed that such events should have taken place in a Southern locale like Washington, D.C. -but was stunned to hear of race riot in the Northern city of Chicago. The article is accompanied by two photographs illustrating the events.
Click here to read about the first Black Marines.
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