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It was assumed that white people were superior to black people. Science backed this up, with the concept of the dominance of the white race. Woodrow Wilson praised the film "Birth of a Nation" about the KKK, and helped to encourage the re-emergence of the KKK. A couple of presidents were supposedly KKK members. There was a rumor that's never been completely confirmed nor denied that Warren G Harding was sworn into the KKK on the White House lawn.
In the early 1900s, President Roosevelt dined with a black man in the White House. It caused a national outrage. One paper said it was worse than dining with a dog, then the next day ran a retraction, claiming that they had not meant any insults to dogs. Roosevelt once court martialed an entire troop of black soldiers over a crime he knew they did not commit, and ordered the proof classified for 100 years. The documents were opened about twenty years ago, and a public apology issued.
The town of Tulsa once had a three day race riot, where whites in town burned, slaughtered, and terrified the black part of town. At one point a plane was used to drop explosives on the black part of town. This was almost completely covered up by the media until historians decades later dug the story back up.
Lynchings were common. A black man would be accused of a crime, anything from cheating at cards to murder--although it frequently involved him looking at a white woman wrong. The normal course of a lynching was that the whites in town would publicize the event, sometimes printing fliers and selling tickets. After the lynchings people would pose with the body, including children and local law enforcement. When state investigators would question people, no one would identify anyone in the pictures. Eventually enough pressure was put on state governments by the federal government that the states would fire or even arrest law enforcement who took part, so the pictures began showing law enforcement at lynchings with their hands loosely tied in front of them, while they smiled and posed. That way they could claim they were captured and forced to watch. They could never identify any of the culprits, though.
This was most common in the South, but not exclusive to it. The North was segregated, too, and the segregation strictly enforced by law and custom. A black man who was in the wrong part of town after dark would be lucky to be arrested only--it might mean he would survive. The fear was very real. One story that stuck in my mind was of a group of kids caught in the white part of town as the sun was setting. A group of older white boys threw rocks at them until they jumped into a river or canal to get away. The boys continued to throw rocks until each of the kids had drowned. There was no real punishment for this. I think that was Chicago, or Cincinnati, maybe.
The federal government had no jurisdiction, aside from the often ignored Civil Rights Act of 1866, which didn't really apply. Congress continually tried to pass legislation making lynchings or racial murders a federal crime, since state and local governments wouldn't prosecute. But southern states, and some northern Congresscritters, blocked the legislation every time.
Schools and colleges were under the "Separate but Equal" doctrine, meaning schools could be segregated as long as a black school was provided. These black schools were underfunded, understaffed, and frequently turned out graduates without even a rudimentary education, which meant that even if a black person could find a white employer willing to hire him or her, the lack of education meant they weren't qualified. Universities also segregated. When a court order forced the University of Texas to admit black students--one of the first steps of the carefully planned strategy of the NAACP to overturn "Separate but Equal" (the law of the land since the SCOTUS decisions in the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy vs Ferguson)--UT allowed one black student into classes, but required him to sit in a separate section of the classroom, literally roped off from the rest of the class.
One of my history professors discovered that during that period in the black communities--which were completely segregated, so that black parts of town had completely different businesses than white parts of town--the richest businesspeople where usually bar owners and cabinet makers. It took him a long time to realize why cabinet makers were so often so wealthy, until he realized that they made coffins as well as cabinets.
A black man could become successful in his community, and even wealthy by white standards. There were entrepeneurs who owned several businesses, and as long as they paid their bribes to the white authorities and kept to their part of town, they were fine, usually. Even so, a rich black man scared some white people, and some of them were known to just disappear. There was an old saying that there was northern racism and southern racism: southern racists didn't care how close a black man got, as long as he didn't get rich, and northern racists didn't care how rich a black man got, as long as he didn't get close.
Aside from financial success, there were other areas of success. Sports, jazz, poetry, art... There was always a layer of successful African Americans, who while never allowed to get too close to white society, were sometimes admired and towards the end of that period emulated by white society. Some have said that every significant cultural achievement in America began in the black communities and was taken over by whites.
Life was life. Not everyone was filled with hate. Not everyone liked the way things were. Not every black person lived in a shack on the outskirts of a small town. The bigger the city, the more the intermingling. But the constant oppression and even slaughter was a reminder to all African Americans to not get comfortable, to not turn their backs, to not get uppity. That was a big word, in fact. Uppity. That was the reason for most lynchings. That's why kids were stoned to death. That's why a black man couldn't look at a white woman or talk to her or make her laugh. It meant he thought he was as good as white folk. He could get very wealthy, even famous. But he couldn't get uppity. He had to know his place.
Of course your fifty year period is not steady. Lynchings had died down by 1950. Federal legislation and the FBI helped--though not completely, and not without a price. Changes were happening by 1950, and continued through 50s and 60s, though battles were hard fought and often costly. Heroes like Medgar Evers, who refused to bow, who got uppity, wound up dead, but at least by that time, people were noticing, and some white people even cared.
That's the short answer.
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