“The Charleston” Posters, Music, Instruction
for performance, language & visual arts, music, social studies classrooms, home schoolers.

The Charleston, an energetic dance associated with the 1920s, developed in the African-American communities of the South. It was discovered being danced by dockworkers in Charleston, SC.

The Charleston was introduced to the general public in the 1923 Ziegfeld Follies and popularized by a Broadway show called Runnin' Wild. The tune associated with the Charleston was by pianist and composer James P. Johnson (see his name on this Josephine Baker poster and the sheet music.)

It is suggested that the women who danced the Charleston were called “flappers” because the movement of their arms looked like the flapping of bird wings. The flappers also cut their hair (bobbed), smoked cigarettes, shortened their skirt length, discarded corsets, and wore red lipstick.

Trends, fads, and events during the “Roaring 20s” -

• Art Deco movement,
• the Jazz Age,
• Prohibition (18th Amendment) - and speakeasies where you needed a password to get in and drink,
• 19th Amendment - women's suffrage
• The Lost Generation
• flappers and bob-hair cut,
• flagpole sitting, peanut butter & jelly
• Harlem Renaissance,
• tomb of Tutankhamen discovered,
• talking pictures and the first commercial radio station introduced,
• frozen food invented by Clarence Birdseye,
• Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic
• Charlie Chaplin
• Miss America Pageant begins (1921)
• Gerber Baby Food introduced
• The Great Gatsby
• Scopes Monkey Trial

Civil Rights 1920 - 1954 Poster

For Blacks, the “Great Migration” North began during World War I and picked up steam in the 1920s. In the North, however, a great many blacks met with continued disappointment and despair. In the northern cities, a growing number of blacks had to compete with whites for jobs. Discrimination, it turned out, was a much a part of life in the North as it was in the South. Blacks spoke of being the “last hired and first fired.” Yet for some, the move to the North was liberating. An incredible flowering of literary and musical achievement known as the Harlem Renaissance took place in New York City's famous black distict. African American leaders emerged, pushing for integration, as the NAACP did, or expressing a new spirit of separation, as in Marcus Garvey's “Back to Africa” movement. But conditions for most blacks, North and South, worsened during the Great Depression. It wasn't until World War II that a new sense of opportunity set in. Almost one million blacks served in the armed forces in the war – many with distinction. Hence black leaders voiced disgust at the diescrimination returning black veterans continued to face. Organization such as the NAACP and CORE, bolstered by growing support from both black and whites, mounted ever stronger battles in the courts against discrimination, and several marches and sit-ins foreshadowed the events to come as the civil rights movement began to come of age.

Individuals on poster - Marian Anderson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Marcus Garvey, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, Jackie Robinson, Tuskeegee Airmen, Ralph Bunche.

• more Civil Rights Posters