This Presidential Speech on Race Shocked the Nation…in 1921https://narratively.com/this-presidential-speech-on-race-shocked-the-nation-in-1921/In October 1921, the city of Birmingham, Alabama, celebrated its semi-centennial with the biggest party any of its 178,000 residents could remember. Founded fifty years earlier as the planned site for a major railroad crossing, Birmingham had become a thriving industrial center with an exploding population, earning it the nicknames “The Pittsburgh of the South” and “Magic City.” During the week of reverie, as The Birmingham News reported, an aerial circus flew over the city, turning loops across the smoke-stained sky. One performer hung from a rope by his teeth. Sixty-seven beauty queens from every county in Alabama took part in fashion shows, and two local baseball teams, the Elyton Warriors and the Cahaba Invincibles, dressed in period uniforms to play a game under the rules of the 1870s.
But the festivities’ highlight was set for Wednesday, October 26: the day Warren G. Harding, the very popular 29th President of the United States would arrive. He’d been elected in a landslide in the first year that women – many of whom, like him, supported Prohibition – had the right to vote for President. An Ohio Republican, Harding agreed to travel to Birmingham in part as a favor to his old Senate colleague Oscar Underwood, a Democrat. Despite their party differences, Harding and Underwood remained close friends, but Harding had a second reason to visit the solidly Democratic Deep South, one that would not please the white population of the strictly segregated city and state.
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Pointing to the white audience members, Harding said the end of World War I three years earlier had given the nation a new challenge to face. “If the Civil War marked the beginnings of industrialism in a South which had previously been almost entirely agricultural,” he continued, “the World War brought us to full recognition that the race problem is national rather than merely sectional.” Attracted to an increased demand for labor and higher wages in the northern states, Harding described what would later be called the Great Migration of blacks from the South. Of the population shift, Harding said, “it has made the South realize its industrial dependence on the labor of the black man and made the North realize the difficulties of the community in which two greatly differing races are brought to live side by side.”
African Americans had served the country during the war, Harding pointed out, “just as patriotically” as whites. Blacks, he said, “were transported overseas and experienced the life of countries where their color aroused less of antagonism than it does here. Many of them aspire to go to Europe to live.” The service brought African-American soldiers their “first real conception of citizenship – the first full realization that the flag was their flag, to fight for, to be protected by them, and also to protect them.
The text of Harding's speech. As Instapundit Glenn Reynolds pointed out, this was in the context of the previous President, Wilson, having been "deeply racist and segregationist". Another part of the context of the times was anti-black riots by racist who feared blacks who had served in the military would be "uppity".
