The nadir of American race relations is a historical period defined by historian Rayford Logan as the worst time for race relations in the United States after the Civil War ended slavery. It overlappe
Ku Klux Klan on parade in Springfield, Ohio, in 1923
"And Not This Man?", Harper's Weekly, August 5, 1865. Thomas Nast drew this cartoon; in 1865 he, like many Northerners, remembered Black people's military service and favored granting them voting rights.
"Colored Rule in a Reconstructed(?) State", Harper's Weekly, March 14, 1874. Nine years later, Nast's views on race had changed. He caricatured black legislators as aggressive buffoons.
A quote from Woodrow Wilson used in The Birth of a Nation
Sundown town
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Sundown towns, also known as sunset towns, gray towns, or sundowner towns, were all-White municipalities or neighborhoods in the United States and Canada that practiced a form of racial segregation by
Nadir of American race relations
…period was characterized by the legal solidification of Jim Crow laws, the rise of lynchings and racial massacres, and the nationwide institution of sundown towns. Historians differ on the period's date range. Logan's 1954 book The Negro in American Life and Thought defines "The Nadir, 1877–1901" when "the Negro's…
1940 edition of The Negro Motorist Green Book
A sculpture on Windom Road, between North Brentwood, Maryland, a historically black community, and Brentwood, Maryland, a sundown town, depicts two hands removing the original barrier between the municipalities.
Apartheid signs trainstation
Le Petit Journal 7 Oct 1906