Trial/EOTO3 reax

 The rise of the second Ku Klux Klan caused a lot of violence and fear among white supremacists in American history before the Civil Rights movement. A movie called Birth of a Nation set off this period of fear and violence. While you think a movie may seem harmless, it caused the KKK to become more active again by showing African Americans as monsters who only wanted to prey on white women and the KKK as good guys who were going to save the country. The NAACP tried to sue the movie for slandering African Americans, but they were not successful. This new second coming of the Klan's terror target was seen by a lot more people than the first one. Not only did they scare African Americans, but also Jews, immigrants, Catholics, and labor unions. Sadly, the number of lynchings in the country, especially in the North, went through the roof after the movie came out. The Omaha Courthouse Lynching was one of the scariest events. A group of white terrorists took Will Brown, a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman, from a courthouse jail, stripped him of his clothes, hung him on a light, and then shot him dead.

Sunset towns were also common during this time. I knew what the term meant because I used to live near an old sundown town in Chevy Chase, Maryland, but I didn't know how they came to be. It was their goal to keep their towns white and stop black people from having to move there. How can you tell the difference between a tourist and a local? Simple: people who live there sleep there, not guests! Because of this, they told black people all the time not to leave town until the sun went down. I had no idea that this was a way for these towns to show their pride. In a commercial for Edmond, Oklahoma, the mayor bragged that there were "no negroes" in the town. He did this to attract people who might want to move there.

At this time, the country was so unsafe for African Americans that in 1936, a man named Victor Hugo Green wrote the Negro Motorist Green Book. African Americans used the book as a map to get around the country during segregation. It gave safe ways to travel for people who owned cars and told them how to stay away from "sundown towns" and other places where black people often had problems. It was seen as a way to fight against racial injustice and was even called "the bible for black travel during Jim Crow."