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A term crystallized by philosopher Alain Locke in his 1925 anthology The New Negro, though it had circulated in Black intellectual culture since the 1890s. The New Negro rejected the older model of Black leadership that sought white approval and tried to prove worthiness by meeting white standards. Instead, the New Negro claimed the full complexity of Black experience as legitimate subject matter for art and demanded recognition — not as a favor, but as a right. Urban, educated, self-possessed, and unapologetic, the New Negro did not explain or justify Black humanity to white audiences. The New Negro assumed it.

The system of racial segregation and disenfranchisement that governed the American South from the end of Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era. Jim Crow was not merely a set of laws about who sat where on a bus. It was a total system — economic, legal, social, and violent — designed to ensure that the gains of Reconstruction never translated into actual equality. Black Americans in the South could not vote in any practical sense, could not own land on equal terms, were locked into sharecropping arrangements that kept them perpetually in debt, and lived under the constant threat of racial violence that was tolerated, and in some cases celebrated, by the surrounding white society.

The most widely read Black newspaper in the country during the early 20th century, founded in Chicago in 1905 by Robert Abbott. The Defender ran active campaigns urging Black Southerners to migrate north, publishing stories of economic opportunity, higher wages, and relative freedom from racial violence. It was sometimes banned in Southern states, and copies were smuggled in on Pullman railroad cars. At its peak, the Defender had a national circulation of approximately 230,000 and was read by an estimated three times that many people. It was one of the primary engines of the Great Migration.

A beetle that devastated Southern cotton crops beginning in the early 1910s, spreading from Texas eastward across the Cotton Belt. The boll weevil destroyed the economic foundation of sharecropping in many Southern counties, displacing hundreds of thousands of Black sharecroppers who had already been living in debt bondage. The weevil's destruction of the cotton economy was one of the most important economic push factors driving the Great Migration — combined with the pull of wartime industrial wages in the North, it accelerated Black movement out of the South dramatically in the mid-1910s.

A Black real estate entrepreneur in New York who is credited with opening Harlem to Black residents. When Harlem's real estate market collapsed around 1904–1905 due to overbuilding, Payton convinced white landlords — who were desperate for tenants — to rent to Black families at premium rates. His company, the Afro-American Realty Company, managed and brokered dozens of Harlem properties. Once the door opened, it didn't close: Black residents moved in large numbers, building institutions, churches, and community organizations that made Harlem the cultural capital it became in the 1920s. Payton's intervention was, in retrospect, one of the most consequential real estate transactions in American cultural history.

The period from late spring through early fall of 1919 in which white mobs attacked Black communities in more than 25 cities across the United States. The violence was triggered by a combination of factors: Black veterans returning home with heightened expectations, competition for industrial jobs, and white anxieties about racial hierarchy in the postwar period. Major attacks occurred in Chicago (38 dead, 537 injured), Washington D.C., Elaine Arkansas (an estimated 100–240 Black Americans killed), and Knoxville, Tennessee. The term "Red Summer" was coined by writer and NAACP official James Weldon Johnson to describe the blood spilled in the violence.

The political and cultural movement asserting the unity and solidarity of African peoples and peoples of African descent worldwide, regardless of national borders. Pan-Africanism holds that the shared history of colonialism, slavery, and racial oppression creates a common political interest that transcends individual nation-states. Du Bois was its most prominent early theorist in the American context, organizing a series of Pan-African Congresses beginning in 1919 that brought together delegates from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States to press for African self-determination at the international level. Du Bois's Pan-Africanism was primarily diplomatic and political — he sought recognition and rights through international institutions. Garvey's Pan-Africanism was more radical: he called for the literal construction of an African nation to which Black people of the diaspora could return. Both agreed that the struggle was global; they disagreed about what that meant in practice. Pan-Africanist ideas would go on to shape the independence movements that decolonized Africa in the 1950s and 1960s.

The political philosophy holding that Black people constitute a nation — a people with a shared history, culture, and collective destiny — and that the appropriate political goal is self-determination: control over Black political, economic, and cultural institutions, up to and including the establishment of an independent Black state. Black Nationalism rejects the integrationist premise that the goal of Black politics should be inclusion within existing white-dominated structures. Garvey was its most prominent 20th-century spokesman, but the tradition runs from antebellum figures like Martin Delany through the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and the Black Power movement of the 1960s. Black Nationalism has taken many forms — some emphasizing territorial separatism, some economic autonomy, some cultural pride and institution-building within existing societies — but all share the conviction that Black self-determination requires independence from white political and economic control, not merely equal access to it.

Born in Jamaica, Garvey arrived in New York in 1916 and within four years had built the Universal Negro Improvement Association into the largest Black mass movement in American history. His message was a direct challenge to Du Bois's integrationism: rather than demanding inclusion in American society, Garvey argued that Black people should build their own institutions, achieve economic self-sufficiency, and ultimately return to Africa to establish a free Black nation. Federal authorities monitored him from 1919, alarmed by his capacity to mobilize Black Americans around a vision of independent power. He was convicted of mail fraud in 1923, imprisoned, and deported to Jamaica in 1927. His Pan-African vision prefigured movements from the Nation of Islam to Black Power that followed in subsequent decades.

Founded by Marcus Garvey in Jamaica in 1914 and brought to New York in 1916, the UNIA at its peak claimed two to four million members worldwide — a figure historians debate, but even skeptical estimates place in the hundreds of thousands. The UNIA's newspaper, The Negro World, reached an international audience. Its Harlem parades — uniformed marchers, flags, brass bands moving through the streets — were public assertions of Black dignity at a moment when Black public life was systematically humiliated nearly everywhere else. The UNIA demonstrated that Black people could organize at mass scale, pool capital, and build institutions that required no white approval or white investment.

Incorporated by Marcus Garvey in 1919 through a stock offering aimed specifically at ordinary Black Americans, the Black Star Line was a shipping company designed to demonstrate that Black people could compete in global commerce. Thousands of Black Americans invested — many of them working-class families who could ill afford to risk their savings — because the company represented something worth more than a sound business investment: proof of possibility. The ships Garvey purchased were overpriced and mechanically unreliable; the company's management was chaotic. The Black Star Line collapsed in debt by 1924. Federal authorities who had been targeting Garvey prosecuted him for mail fraud in connection with the stock offering. The failure as a business does not exhaust its historical meaning — the attempt itself, and the mass investment it inspired, demonstrated a scale of Black economic ambition that had never been seen before.

In 1920s Harlem, landlords charged Black tenants premium rates in a segregated housing market while Black workers earned substantially less than white workers for the same labor. Many families couldn't reliably cover monthly rent on a single paycheck. The solution was communal and inventive: the rent party. A family in need would throw a Saturday night apartment party, charge a small admission, serve home-cooked food, hire a piano player or small band, and collect enough to make the rent. Rent parties were entirely Black spaces, invisible to white Harlem, and they functioned simultaneously as fundraisers, neighborhood social institutions, and incubators for the blues and jazz that Hughes celebrated. Langston Hughes saw rent parties as perfect symbols of Black self-reliance — people systematically excluded from mainstream venues had built their own vibrant world, not as a consolation prize but as a genuine alternative.

The Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma was a self-contained Black urban economy built over two decades through mutual aid, reinvestment, and deliberate community building. At its peak in 1921 it contained over 300 businesses including banks, hotels, law offices, medical and dental practices, grocery stores, theaters, two high schools, a public library, multiple churches, and the Tulsa Star — Greenwood's own newspaper, edited by A.J. Smitherman, which covered local news and national civil rights issues. Black dollars were estimated to circulate through Greenwood businesses an average of thirty-six to one hundred times before leaving the community, a multiplier effect that community leaders consciously promoted. Property values in the district exceeded $1.5 million in 1921 dollars — an enormous accumulation of wealth built from effectively nothing by people whose parents had been enslaved.

Dick Rowland was a nineteen-year-old Black shoeshiner who on May 30, 1921, entered an elevator in a downtown Tulsa office building operated by a white woman named Sarah Page. What happened in that elevator was never established — Page herself declined to press charges, and the accusation of assault was almost certainly false or based on a misunderstanding. The Tulsa Tribune published a sensationalized account the following day under the headline "Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator." Within hours a white mob had gathered at the courthouse demanding Rowland be handed over. A group of Black Tulsans — many of them World War I veterans who had resolved not to allow another lynching — went to the courthouse armed. A confrontation broke out, shots were fired, and what followed was not a riot in any meaningful sense of the word. It was a massacre — the trigger was minor, but the destruction that followed reflected years of white resentment of Greenwood's visible success.

The deliberate suppression of a historical event from the public record — through omission from textbooks, absence from official commemoration, social pressure on survivors not to speak, and the simple passage of time. The Tulsa Race Massacre was almost entirely absent from Oklahoma history education for decades. Survivors were alive and living in Tulsa, but the community's grief was treated as a private matter, and local newspapers ceased to report on it. The suppression was not passive — it was active and sustained. Many survivors died without acknowledgment. The massacre began to re-enter public consciousness in the 1990s through the work of historians like Scott Ellsworth, was the subject of a formal Oklahoma state investigation in 2001, and became widely known nationally after the centennial commemorations in 2021 and — notably — after the HBO series Watchmen depicted it in its opening sequence in 2019.