During the first three decades of the twentieth century, black reformers focused on a number of issues that affected the lives of African American citizens. They attempted to raze the barriers that blocked black citizens from voting; they worked to extend to citizens of color equal protection of the laws; they promoted expanded educational and occupational opportunities for American blacks; and they fought to reform the segregated, so-called Jim Crow society that had developed in the American South in the wake of Reconstruction.

Despite the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution in the aftermath of the Civil War, most black Americans, at the start of the twentieth century, lived as second-class citizens. In 1896, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws that mandated the separation of the races in...