“They no longer say ‘this is the party of liberty and justice,’” he wrote, “but ‘this is the party of self and profit.’”

The Niagara Movement defined what would become the modern civil rights agenda: unrestricted suffrage, freedom of speech, and equality before the law.

The so-called Red Summer of 1919 brought some of the worst racial violence the country had seen since slavery, with 25 race riots and 70 reported lynchings.

His failure was to assume that American society’s economic self-interest—a rising tide to lift all boats—would trump anti-black racism. It did not.

the harsh era defined by Plessy v. Ferguson’s doctrine of “separate but equal,” these images of deracinated, stupid, lazy, and clownish Negroes played a critical role. The ubiquitous racist caricatures justified Jim Crow by graphically illustrating why the separation of the races was necessary and turned the idea of racial equality into a joke.

Formerly enslaved African Americans wanted the same things that white people wanted.

Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone.