94 ChaPter 2
“war for democracy” like African Americans did. Denied equality and basic
rights after slavery was abolished, southern Blacks lived in a system called Jim
Crow. It meant that not only were they denied basic rights like voting and a
good education, but always had to “know their place,” which was inferior to
Whites. They could not speak badly of White people, talk to them unless
spoken to, or even look at a White woman [a crime similar to rape called
“reckless eyeballin’”]. In 1896, the US Supreme Court approved of this sys-
tem in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which said that it was acceptable to make
blacks sit on different railroad cars [and thus have segregated institutions all
over] so long as it was “separate but equal.” At the same time, violence against
blacks continued, with about 1100 lynchings between 1900 and the start of
The Great War, and about 140 during the war years, while many Blacks were
in the army fighting for democracy. There was also a renewed interest in the
Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist, racist group formed after the civil war to harass
and attack Blacks. The KKK had fallen into some disrepute but returned with
a vengeance in the 1910s, in some good part due to President Woodrow
Wilson’s attitudes toward “radicals” and Blacks and his rave review of the rac-FIGuRE 2-9 Photograph of Eugene Debs taken after he was freed from
prison on December 25, 1921