A wave of deadly, anti-black violence swept across the United States in the summer of 1919. The name Red Summer was coined to recognize the amount blood that was shed. During that spring to fall season, at least 26 major riots and white mob actions broke out across the country. Hundreds of blacks were killed, thousands were injured, and even more forced to flee their destroyed neighborhoods.
World War I had just ended and racial tensions were deepened by the discharge of millions of military personnel. Competition for postwar jobs, combined with a migrated black population placed whites and blacks in conflict yet again. Black American servicemen returned from the First World War only to find a new type of violent racist conflict waiting for them. How and why did this all come about?
During the 1910’s, cities across the north were reshaped by The Great Migration. By 1919, about 1 million blacks had fled the segregated South for northern cities in hopes of escaping poverty and discrimination. The black population grew by 200 percent or more in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where blacks were freer, paid better, and in some cases had political power.
This caused anxiety among whites that blacks were taking jobs, housing, and even “security” from their lives. In the South, black sharecroppers were making money because of a huge worldwide demand for cotton. They were buying houses, cars, and even land. Southern white towns suddenly felt threatened.
In 1917, thousands of young black men answered President Woodrow Wilson’s call to fight for American democracy in The Great War. Many African American soldiers returned with a determination to fight segregation and white supremacists. After fighting Germans, black veterans argued that since the Negro was fit to wear the uniform he was fit for anything. Or as one Texas official put it, “One of the principal concerns is the returned negro soldier who is not ready to fit back into his prior status.”
When the war ended, many returning white servicemen resented that their vacated jobs had been taken by lower-paid African Americans. Many whites feared that a hundred thousand returning black veterans would be unwilling to resubmit to segregation and subjugation.
Because of their military service, whites saw black veterans as a threat.
Having just returned from the battlefield trenches, black veterans were not going to take any abuse lying down. Now they had come back to a country that recognized neither their service nor their right to co-exist as equals. That summer, former soldiers would end up using their military weapons training to defend their neighborhoods against white mob violence.
Black leaders encouraged returning servicemen to assert themselves for the dignity and respect they had earned through military service. Many black veterans were instead mistreated and even attacked while in uniform. The KKK (Ku Klux Klan), which had been shut down during Reconstruction, experienced a sudden resurgence in popularity, carrying out dozens of cross-burnings.
During the 1919 Red Summer, all that mass anxiety became mass violence. Between April and November, there would be approximately 25 riots and 97 recorded lynchings. Racial violence broke out in some of the nation’s most populous cities. Most incidents were initiated by white civilians and veterans. They were made far worse as local, state and federal officials hesitated to take any action or turned a complete blind eye to the violence.
It began in April 1919 at Carswell Grove Baptist Church. The Klan burns down a sharecroppers’ church in rural Georgia, killing seven. In May, an anti-black riot of 1,000 drunken white sailors erupts in the port of Charleston. In June, there is a terrible publicly-advertised lynching, corpse burning and dismemberment by a mob of 8,000 whites in Ellisville, Mississippi.
Washington D.C. had over 5,000 black veterans. It had a successful black middle class which symbolized black people’s expanding economic and social status. They made up a quarter of the population. They also held many jobs in the federal government. It was a slow but steady march forward—one that many white city leaders felt needed to be stopped.
Violence began July 19 when a false rumor spread that a ‘Negro Fiend’ had assaulted a white woman.
It incited white mobs to attack black neighborhoods and assault random African Americans on the streets. One of the first killed was a 22-year-old black veteran. The city’s white-owned newspapers fanned the flames, reporting false instances of black men assaulting white women. The Washington Post even ran a front page story posting the locations for white servicemen to meet and carry out attacks.
“It was almost impossible for me to realize that black men and women were being mobbed, chased, dragged from buses, beaten and killed within the shadow of the Capitol dome,” wrote NAACPs James Weldon Johnson.
White sailors went on a four-day-long drunken rampage, assaulting, and in some cases lynching black people on the capitol’s streets. When the police did nothing, Washington’s black veterans banded together to fight back, arming themselves with bats, clubs, pistols and knives. Back veterans grabbed their guns and stationed themselves on rooftops in black neighborhoods, prepared to act as snipers in the case of white mob violence.
As the situation escalated, President Wilson first refused to act. He worried that the riots would damage the image of the United States as a global model of justice. After four days of mob violence, 40 people were killed and dozens more were injured. The chaos was only curbed when Wilson finally deployed 2,000 federal troops onto the city streets.
Just two days after federal troops withdrew from Washington, a black teenager was killed by a white man in Chicago on July 27. The 17-year-old teenage boy was floating on a homemade raft on Lake Michigan, trying to escape the oppressive summer heat. A white man started pelting him with rocks from shore. The teen had drifted past an invisible line that divided the white and black beaches. One rock hit the boy in the head. It knocked him unconscious and his body slipped into the lake, drowning the teen.
A white police officer at the scene refused to arrest the man on any crime, despite a large crowd of angry black witnesses and family members. By the time the boy’s body was recovered, a thousand black people had gathered, demanding police action. In response, armed white men jumped in their cars and drove through the West Side streets, firing into black homes and businesses. A white mob marched down South Side streets, assaulting black pedestrians and torching black neighborhoods.
The Chicago police refused to take any action.
This murder kicked off a week of violent riots. By the end, 15 white people and 23 black people would be dead and 537 people injured. Over 1,000 black families would be homeless after their homes and neighborhoods were burned down or destroyed by white mobs. The National Guard was eventually called in.
Black veterans in Chicago formed militias to defend black neighborhoods when the city government refused. One group of black veterans broke into an armory and stole weapons they then used to beat back a white mob. Because they had actually seen battlefield combat, they were willing and able to defend themselves. Throughout the rest of the Red Summer, black veterans around the country were inspired by Washington D.C. and Chicago vets.
The single deadliest riot occurred in Elaine, Arkanas, on Sept. 30 after a white law officer was killed outside a black sharecropper gathering. The governor ordered 500 Army soldiers from nearby Camp Pike to march on Elaine and put down the “insurrection” of sharecroppers. White mobs went off into the fields and started shooting blacks. Upwards of 200 blacks are believed to have lost their lives. We’ll never know how many were killed as there was no formal investigation made.
It soon became panic across America where everyone wondered, “Where’s the next race riot going to happen?” As bloodshed spread to Texas, South Carolina, Nebraska, Florida, and Ohio, black veterans continued to be targets for lynching. Those who dared wear their uniforms in public were seen by many whites as an affront to America’s racial system.
Riots broke out in August in Knoxville, Tennessee next.
A mob of 2,000 white men searched the town for a black man thought to have killed a white woman. In September in Omaha, a black man is accused of attacking a white woman. The man was arrested and jailed in the city courthouse. A mob of 3,000 white men surrounded the courthouse demanding he be turned over for lynching. The mayor came outside and said they were not turning this man over. The mob knocked him down, broke in, dragged the black man out, and murdered him in the square.
In Elaine, Arkansas in October, after black sharecroppers tried to organize a union for better working conditions, a three day long massacre occurred during which over 200 black men, women, and children in the town were killed.
It’s impossible to say exactly how many were killed or injured during the 1919 Red Summer—official records kept by white officials underreported deaths or never documented them. Hundreds lost their lives, thousands were injured, and ten of thousands were left homeless. The Red Summer would not be the end of mass violence against black Americans. But one of the consequences was the growing confidence of black communities in fighting back—in the streets, the courts and voting booths.
Before the war, the NAACP had 9,000 members. By the early 1920s it had 100,000, planting the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement. The NAACP fought in the courts and started building coalitions in Congress to fight for federal laws to protect people from mobs. The simple message of the NAACP was, ‘We’re American citizens. We deserve the same rights as everyone else.’ That was considered a radical message in 1919.
The Red Summer saw black populations fight back against racial violence like never before. The mob violence did not intimidate blacks into submission. Instead, African Americans emerged with a greater sense of shared purpose, identity and pride. Eventually even racist city governments realized that riots weren’t good for business and profits. They finally started to calm down the white mobs and the Red Summer came to an end.
World War I had become a broken promise for black veterans, who had risked their lives for America and make the world safe for democracy. Then they came home to find that their country was still going to deny African Americans the privileges of that very democracy. Despite the events of the Red Summer, 1.2 million black men would enlist and defend their county again in World War II.