1897-1928
W.E.B. Du Bois was the first African American to graduate from Harvard with a PhD. He became the voice of black intellectuals of the 20th century and was one of the founding members of the NAACP.
“Without a doubt, the African American political, scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic movement of the interwar years changed the fabric of American culture. For the first time there was a concerted effort to challenge the derisive and stereotypical images of African Americans produced by blackface minstrelsy, magazine publishers, and racist science. Henry L. Gates, Jr. has pointed out that "to call the Harlem Renaissance a 'New Negro' movement is to describe exactly what its visual and verbal artists sought to create: a largely unregistered, unimagined image of the Noble Negro that would destroy forever the confusing, limited range of black stereotypes that every artist had to confront."
This paragraph from Lee Bakers book "From Savage to Negro" is I think the best way to describe the breakout of African American culture in the 1920's.
Baker, L. D. (1998). From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954. Univ of California Press.
Greenwood was a thriving African American community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was known as Black Wallstreet. After what is believed to be an innocent bump on an elavator of a young black man into a white woman. This encounter set off the worst massacre of white on black killing and total destruction of the Greenwood neighborhood
W.E.B. Du Bois and other intellectual of the early 20th century were making great strides for African Americans. The city of Greenwood, Oklahoma had some of the richest African Americans the country had ever seen. The false narrative that the movie Birth of a Nation told was not what the Greenwood and people like W.E.B. Du Bois were portraying and the burning and massacre that happened are the effects of the achievements of African Americans. White America saw Birth of a Nation as the real story and could not let a place like Greenwood exist anywhere else, so they got rid of it. Not only by burning it down they also removed it from history for a long time.