Marcus Garvey was the third major black visionary during the 1920s. Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887. One of Garvey's biggest accomplishments was the creation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 in New York City. UNIA promoted African American pride and self-improvement as well as helped African Americans to get stronger economically. Garvey was inspired by many of the ideas of Booker T.Washington. Washington believed that African Americans should first improve themselves through education, industrial training, and business ownership and that equal rights would naturally come later when whites realized the importance of African Americans. Another visionary that was popular in the 1920s was W. E. B. Dubois who agreed that self-improvement was a good idea, but that it should not happen at the expense of giving up immediate full citizenship rights. Dubois and Washington's views were much more popular than Garvey's as his plans were not possible or appealing. Garvey believed that integration between whites and blacks would never be possible and that African Americans should start their own community or if possible move back to Africa where they can start their own country. In 1920, Garvey held the first UNIA convention in New York in which over 20,000 people attended. The convention created a "Declaration of Negro Rights," which denounced lynchings, segregated public transportation, job discrimination, and inferior black public schools. The document also called for "Africa for the Africans." Without consulting the African people, the convention proclaimed Garvey the "Provisional President of Africa." The UNIA also set up many small black-owned businesses such as restaurants, groceries, a publishing house, etc. Garvey's goal was to create a separate economy and society run for and by African Americans. Garvey wanted African Americans to fo back to Africa and free it from British rule, but, Garvey's UNIA lacked the necessary funds, and very few African Americans in the United States indicated any interest in going "back to Africa." Garvey would later meet with the KKK leader where he would openly begin to support segregation and describe how UNIA's goals were similar to the KKK. This would eventually lead to the complete rejection of Garvey's plans and he would eventually die an "almost forgotten man".  

The NAACP or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was formed in 1909 to advocate for justice for African Americans by a group of people including W.E.B DuBois, Ida B. Wells, Mary White Ovington, and Moorfield Storey. Since the very beginning the NAACP's main goal was to defend the African American population from unfair laws that legalized and promoted segregation. The association wanted to remove these unjust laws and replace them with laws that would benefit the African American society. James Weldon Johnson was appointed the NAACP's first black executive leader in 1921. Under his leadership  the amount of memberships for the association would increase and his guidance would lead the NAACP on a path it would follow for decades. In the beginning the NAACP fought legal cases as a way to achieve their goals of advancing African Americans' rights. However, with the failure of the Dyer Anti-lynching Bill the NAACP saw the ineffectiveness of trying to achieve their goals through the legal classes, and saw this particularly during the time when blacks were denied the right to vote in the south. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was proposed by Congressman Leonidas Dyer who created a bill in April 1918 that guarded "citizens of the United States against lynching in default of' state action," however, this bill was not passed, but it did help the NAACP realize that working through the legislative branch would be futile and would always render unsuccessful. The south would be able to fill Congress with leaders who were bent upon keeping blacks in their "place" at the bottom without any power. The NAACP then turned to the judicial branch of our government and began to focus on legal cases for the decade following the defeat of the Dyer Bill. Soon the NAACP would end up concentrating on cases involving criminal justice, voting, housing, and education. Due to the Great Migration there was increase in the competition for housing between whites and blacks. When African Americans tried to move in they were always sacred away by whites and so the NAACP worked to bring justice to African Americans in this area. The last issue the was extremely important to the NAACP cause was voting right for African Americans. The realized that it was important for African Americans to get the right to vote in the south and so planned to achieve this by securing a hearing before the House Census Committee to investigate black disenfranchisement(being denied the right to vote) and to challenge it under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. Though this idea did not gain popularity among southerners and Congress it did help to expose many issues of the southern government branches to Congress. One of the cases the NAACP fought was the Dr. Lawrence Nixon vs Herndon case in which they were challenging voting restriction in Texas, the case would eventually go to the Supreme Court and the NAACP would achieve their first win in the steps towards allowing African Americans to vote in the South by giving them the right to vote in the primary elections of Texas.   

Ever since WWI several ethnic groups have been facing prejudice and racism, many of these conflicts between races would explode into race riots, with some riots being so violent that they can result in hundreds dead and injured. Not only did African Americans face such racism and discrimination but several ethnic groups like immigrants also had to face prejudice, as said before religious groups like the Jewish and Catholics were also targeted and discriminated against by the KKK only because of their religion. One example of ill treatment towards immigrants would be the Sacco & Vanzetti case where two italian immigrants were executed for murder though they were innocent simply because they were foreigners. The next form of racism that has existed ever since the Civil war was lynching. Lynchings were used as a way for white mobs to keep African Americans in their "place" at the bottom of the hierarchy. The next type of racism was from white supremacy groups and recently white, Christian groups like the KKK. After the KKK disbanded after the Civil War they came together again in the 1920s in which they began to target more groups than just African Americans, these groups included immigrants, Jews, and Catholics. Detroit, home to Henry Ford, was a place where African Americans and Jews were given equal rights similar to whites, because of this Detroit eventually became the center for KKK activity. Eugenics was also a major issue during this time, eugenics was a term used to describe the idea of racial purity , it was the study of how to arrange reproduction within certain race groups, the Nazis used this as a reason to justify their harsh treatment towards Jews. Finally, the most brutal form of racism and the most savage race riot was the Tulsa Race Riot in which hundreds of people were massacred only because of their race.       

Following WWI, Tulsa was recognized nationally for its large and prosperous African American community in the Greenwood district. The thriving community, with large businesses and huge economic growth, was known as the "Black Wall Street". However, in June of 1921 a series of events including the Tulsa Race Riot, would change the history of Tulsa and almost destroy the entire the Greenwood District. The Tulsa Massacre is largely forgotten and has only been talked about recently. The Tulsa Race riot began when a "hysterical" white girl accused a 19 year old colored boy of assaulting her in a public elevator, which is in a public office, in a large town of about 100,000 people in "broad daylight", without pausing to think once about how inaccurate and false such a story could be, a mob of Americans (whites, native to America) went forth on a wild rampage to destroy the black community. This attack would be the reason for about 250 people deaths, 50 being white, 200 being African American. During this riot over $1,500,000 worth of property was destructed by fire and looted. African Americans eventually got involved in the already explosive riot in an effort to prevent lynching of the young man who was accused by the white girl and to prevent lynching in general as it has been going on since the Civil War. In another movement during the Tulsa Race Riot white Tulsans invaded the Greenwood section of Tulsa and drove out African American residents by burning the entire area to the ground. Other invaders drove around the neighborhood and shot at African Americans and their homes. During these "fire fights" hundreds of African Americans were killed with only a fraction of this number being the number of whites dead. Blacks tried to fight back and protect themselves as best as they could but they were being attacked at their very own homes, several of them were arrested with the justification that they were being put in "protective custody". The Tulsa Race Riot was one of the most savage and brutal riots in the history of our nation.   

The most traumatic story comes from Elwood Lett, who died recently at the age of 82. Five white men came to his family's house but surprised them by allowing the grandfather to place his daughter and two grandchildren into a wagon so that they could leave town. ''I was happy to know they didn't shoot him or kill him there at the house,'' Lett recalled. ''He's thinking, 'They're pretty nice people by letting us get in the wagon and go on about our business.' . . . We hadn't got to the town of Sperry before this white guy asked, 'Where in the hell you going?' -- using the 'N' word. My grandfather said, 'We're heading out, we're going out of town.' And he said, 'Not this day you're not going out of town.' Bam! . . . And he just tumbled. My mother let out a scream: 'Oh, you have killed my father, you've killed him,' and I thought he was going to do the same thing to my mother.''