LETTERS NORTH
Roughly this many Black Americans left the South between 1916 and 1930.
Who/What is 1.5 million?
This 1890 Louisiana law required railroads to provide separate cars for white and Black passengers.
What is the Separate Car Act?
This 1929 short film starring Bessie Smith is the only surviving footage of her performing.
What is St. Louis Blues?
This painter is known for flat silhouettes, hard angles, and radiating circles of light.
Who is Aaron Douglas?
A fifteen-year-old in Palestine, Texas wrote to a newspaper in 1917 asking whether a Colored boy could be this.
What is an artist?
This Black-owned Chicago newspaper urged Southerners to come north and received thousands of letters asking for help.
What is the Chicago Defender?
The 1896 Supreme Court case that approved "equal but separate" accommodations.
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?
Duke Ellington's orchestra became the house band at this Harlem nightclub in 1927.
What is the Cotton Club?
Douglas's 1934 four-panel mural series, painted for a Harlem library branch.
What is Aspects of Negro Life?
"Not white art painted black" — the painter who wrote this to Langston Hughes in 1925.
Who is Aaron Douglas?
He collected hundreds of migrant letters and published them in the Journal of Negro History in 1919.
Who is Emmett J. Scott?
The lone dissenting justice who wrote that the Constitution is color-blind.
Who is John Marshall Harlan?
Ellington's 1929 screen debut, named after one of his own compositions.
What is Black and Tan?
In his 1926 essay "Criteria of Negro Art," he argued that all art is propaganda.
Who is W.E.B. Du Bois?
"What we could not say openly we expressed in music" — this bandleader, writing in 1931.
Who is Duke Ellington?
World War I cut off this supply of workers, which is why northern factories suddenly wanted Black Southern labor.
What is European immigration?
Sitting in the wrong railway car cost this fine, or up to twenty days in jail.
What is $25?
Before film, this technology carried Harlem's sound into millions of American homes.
What is radio?
This poet argued in 1926 that Black artists should portray ordinary Black life without shame.
Who is Langston Hughes?
Alain Locke's 1925 name for the assertive, forward-looking Black identity of the era.
What is the New Negro?
This crop-destroying insect ruined Southern cotton harvests and pushed farming families off the land.
What is the boll weevil?
Poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses were designed to strip Black Southerners of this.
What is the right to vote?
The contradiction of the Cotton Club: every performer was Black, and the audience was this.
What is whites only?
Douglas blended African art and Art Deco with this fractured European style of flat, broken planes.
What is Cubism?
"If one race be inferior to the other socially" — the 1896 court opinion this line comes from.
What is the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson?