AAST 220 – Reading Assignment #3

Chapters 16 – 17

1) How did the strategies promoted by Booker T. Washington differ from those of W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP? Which were more effective?

2) Assess Washington’s contributions to the advancement of black people.

3) How did middle-class and prosperous black people try to contribute to progress for their race? Were there efforts effective?

4) Why did most African Americans support U.S. participation in World War I? Was that support justified?

5) What factors contributed to race riots and violence in the World War I era?

6) Why did many black people leave the South in the 1920s? Why didn’t this migration begin earlier or later?

7) Why did migrants decide to leave or stay?

8) To what extent, if any, had the intensity of white supremacy changed by the 1920s from what it had been two to three decades earlier?

9) What examples of progress could leaders like W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, A. Philip Randolph, and Marcus Garvey point to in the 1920s?

10) Why did so many African-American leaders reject Marcus Garvey?

11) How did the black nationalism of the Universal Negro Improvement Association differ from the white nationalism of the Ku Klux Klan?

12) What economic opportunities existed for African Americans who had migrated to northern cities?

13) Why did the literary and artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance emerge?

14) What was distinctive about black writers, artists, and musicians? Were their creative works essentially a part of American culture or separate from it?

15) Did African Americans have any reason to be optimistic by the late 1920s?