by Birth of a Nation, which opened in 1915, the Ku Klux Klan rose to its
zenith, boasting more than four million members. For a time the KKK openly
dominated the state governments of Georgia, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon,
and it probably inducted President Warren G. Harding as a member in a White
House ceremony. During the Wilson and Harding administrations, perhaps one
hundred race riots took place, more than in any other period since
Reconstruction. White mobs killed African Americans across the United
States. Some of these events, like the 1919 Chicago riot, are well-known.
Others, such as the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped
dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than seventy-five
people and destroying more than eleven hundred homes, have completely
vanished from our history books.^77
Not only industrial jobs but even moving services were reserved for whites in
some cities.
It is almost unimaginable how racist the United States became during the
nadir. From Myakka City, Florida, to Medford, Oregon, whites attacked their
black neighbors, driving them out and leaving the towns all-white.
Communities with no black populations passed ordinances or resolved
informally to threaten African American newcomers with death if they