The only good thing that occurred in 1919 was the birth of my mother. Otherwise, in the aftermath of the Great War, the United States was in the midst of the influenza pandemic that killed 675,000 people — more than fifty-million world-wide. Gamblers paid the Chicago White Sox to throw the 1919 World Series and ever after be known as the Black Sox. 1919 was also the Red Summer of race riots, three dozen, mostly in cities, but the most deadly in rural Elaine, Arkansas, where more than two-hundred African-Americans and five white men were killed.
During the Jim Crow era following Reconstruction, mobs of white people burning black neighborhoods and killing their residents was not uncommon. If an African-American community appeared too prosperous, too educated, too uppity, the white folks were quick to remind them of their place at the bottom of society. Violence against blacks often was based on unsubstantiated report of a white woman being defiled by a thuggish person of color. There was also irony in that a master’s rape of female slaves had long been considered his right as property owner.
Nearly 400,000 black soldiers returned home after serving in World War I. Wearing their country’s uniform and fighting to make the world “safe for democracy” made them not inclined to return to a life of abject subservience. They also brought back the weapons training they had received in the military.
By the end of the Great War, a million African-Americans had moved from the South to the industrial north. War mobilization created labor shortages. Northern factories recruited workers from the South. Good-paying factory jobs brought the first wave of the Great Migration. There was no plan for absorbing returning troops at the end of the war. Simmering resentment from working-class whites toward blacks whom they felt had stolen their jobs boiled over into violence. Rioting against blacks in East St. Louis and Houston in 1917 was a precursor of the future.
The South nurtured a resurgent Ku Klux Klan: sixty-four lynchings in 1918, eighty-three in 1919.
In July 1919,, rumor of a Washington DC white woman’s rape by a black man played out in four days of violence. Roving groups of white men, many in service uniforms attacked blacks at random, on sidewalks and pulling them off streetcars. With no response from D.C. police, black veterans organized to defend their neighborhood. On the fourth day, President Woodrow Wilson ordered 2,000 troops into the city to put down the violence. A heavy rainstorm helped quell the rioting.
Later that July, a Chicago teenager, floating a homemade raft on Lake Michigan, crossed the the line into the white section. He was greeted by flying rocks. One hit him on the head. His unconscious body slipped off his raft into the water. Although there were many witnesses, white police refused to arrest the man who threw the rock. Fueled by rumors, resulting violence killed twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites. A thousand black families were burned out of their homes.
Memphis, Charleston, Bisbee AZ, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Omaha, on and on and on.
The NAACP named 1919 the ”Red Summer” because of blood spilled. Anti-communists called 1919 the “Red Summer” because they were certain that Bolsheviks (Reds) were trying to spread the Russian Revolution to the U.S. by infiltrating and creating unrest among the African-American population.
Two years later, perhaps the most infamous — and most suppressed — race riot took place in Tulsa OK. White mobs destroyed thirty-five blocks of the prosperous African-American Greenwood community, known as “Black Wall Street.” Rioters killed 300 people and burned 1,200 homes. The governor declared martial law, brought in the National Guard and arrested 6,000 black citizens.
Fortunately, things are better now, thanks to the current occupant of the White House, who said, “I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”
