SYMHC Classics: Red Summer 1919

of iHeartRadio. This year is the one hundredth anniversary of the wave of racist violence in the United States that came to be known as Red Summer. And we talked about this just a little bit in our twenty fifteen episode on the Harlem hell Fighters, but that was a long time ago, and it was just like a little bit in part three of the episode, not really enough to do it justice. And honestly, it was a whole summer.

You could do an entire podcast just on this, but with one hundred anniversary, it seemed like a good time to return to it. In a lot of ways, the violence of Red Summer was a response to two earlier and sometimes overlapping events, and those were the Great Migration and the return of black soldiers who had fought in World War One to the United States. And to be clear, neither of these things caused Red Summer. Red Summer was a backlash to them. These returning veterans and migrating families

were not to blame for what happened. But since this is part of the historical context, today's episode is going to start off with a little bit about those two events before getting into the violence that stretch the summer and fall. And in case it is not clear, this episode includes a lot of violence, including sexual violence. Some

of it is just particularly horrifying in nature. The Great Migration was a mass relocation of Black Americans out of the South and into the cities in the north end Midwest. It peaked in the mid to late nineteen teens, but the same pattern of migration continued for decades afterward. There was also migration within the South from rural areas into

southern cities. Most of the people who were moving had been sharecroppers, doing essentially the same work as their enslaved ancestors had done, sometimes even on the same land and for the same landowners. Sharecroppers rented the land that they lived and worked on, and then they paid their rent by giving a share of their crop to the landowner. But it was almost impossible to make a decent living

as a sharecropper. Many sharecroppers were in debt to their landlords, owing money for things like the tools and supplies that they needed to do their jobs. Unscrupulous landlords could make this situation much worse. But even if a person's landlord was honest and fair, a sharecropper often earned a subsistence level living at best. Sharecroppers faced the same threats to their livelihoods as any other farmer did, including pests and

bad weather and fluctuating prices. The bowl weavil, which had been introduced to the United States and the late eighteen hundreds, spread farther and farther into cotton territory in the nineteen teens, destroying the crop as it went, and then in nineteen fifteen, widespread flooding affected many of the same areas that had just been ravaged by weavils. As the Southern economy shifted after the Civil War, white farmers had also been caught

up in this same system of sharecropping. It was exploitive regardless of who was doing the farming, but the system was stacked most heavily against black sharecroppers, who faced the additional hardships of systemic discrimination in racism, including segregation, political oppression, and racist violence. In the nineteen teens, black Southerners started hearing about new opportunities and a potentially better life in the North and the Midwest. This included jobs with better

wages and better educational opportunities for their children. People heard about these opportunities through word of mouth from friends or family who had already moved. Word also came through advertisements placed by businesses and organizations that were hoping to attract new workers to their area. After the United States entered World War One, some of these jobs were specifically connected

to the war effort. Between nineteen fourteen and nineteen twenty, roughly five hundred thousand Black Americans left the South and moved to urban areas elsewhere. In nineteen twenty, m at J. Scott described it this way, quote, they were in the frame of mind for leaving. They left as though they were fleeing some curse. They were willing to make almost any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket, and they left with the intention of staying. This led to labor shortages

in the South, and sometimes entire communities were abandoned. That also dramatically shifted the racial demographics of cities like Detroit, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Will be returning to that shift in just a bit. The United States became involved in World War One as the Great Migration was happening. The war directly affected the nation's black citizens as well. After the United States declared war on Germany in nineteen seventeen,

people were eager to enlist in the military. This included at least twenty thousand black men who volunteered in April and early May. This actually presented a problem for the military, though the Marines didn't accept black recruits at all. The Navy and the Coastguard technically did, but only in menial roles.

So overwhelmingly black men were serving in the Army, which at least in theory, accepted black men in most areas of the service and practice, though the army was racially segregated, with only a very few all black units in existence at that time, So after the declaration of war on Germany, the Army reached its quota for black recruits in just about a week. In May of nineteen seventeen, Congress passed the Selective Service Act, which required men regardless of race

to register for the draft. The Army began creating new all black units and trained War one class of black officers at Fort des Moines in May of nineteen seventeen, sending most black officer candidates after that point to train at camps in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, or Panama. Ultimately, about three hundred and seventy thousand black men served in the US Army in World War One. These men faced

persistent discrimination during their service. All Black units were often assigned to menial work like digging trenches and unloading cargo and removing unexploded ordnance. And while it's true that this was all work that needed to be done and somebody had to do it, disproportionately, the people doing the Army's hardest, dirtiest, and most degrading work were black. Black soldiers also experienced

day to day harassment and discrimination throughout the war. There's more about all this in that past episode about the Harlem hell Fighters. Support for participation in the war wasn't universal within the black community. One line of thought was that it made no sense for people to put their lives on the line for a country that at best

treated them as second class citizens. This was especially true because the United States had framed its involvement in the war as making the world safe for democracy, so it seemed hypocritical to fight for a country that was refusing

to do the same within its own borders. But many civil rights leaders and organizations really took the opposite stance, arguing that this was a chance for black citizens to demonstrate to the rest of the nation that they were human beings and patriots worthy of respect who were actively making a positive contribution to the nation. The experience of military service during the war motivated many of these soldiers

to actively fight for equal rights after they returned home. W. E. B. Du Boys described it this way in the NAACP's magazine The Crisis quote, we are returning from war the Crisis, and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into a great struggle for bleeding France and what she means and has meant and will mean to us and humanity, and against the threat of German race arrogance. We fought gladly into the last drop of blood for America and her highest ideals. We fought in far off hope. For

the dominant Southern oligarchy entrenched in Washington. We fought in bitter resignation. And the sedatorial boys went on to describe the United States as a shameful land, saying that it lynches and disenfranchises its citizens, encourages ignorance, and steals from and insults black citizens. He concluded by saying, quote, we return, we return from fighting. We return fighting make way for democracy.

We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America. Or know the reason why. James Weldon Johnson, who coined the term red Summer, described it this way in his nineteen thirty three autobiography, quote, the colored people throughout the country were disheartened and dismayed. The great majority had trustingly felt that because they had cheerfully done their bit in the life war, conditions for them would be better. The

reverse seemed to be true. Earlier civil rights advocacy had tended toward a conciliatory approach, but after the war, Dubois and other civil rights leaders were increasingly direct lobbying very aggressively for equal rights legislation and for anti lynching laws. This advocacy became part of what came to be known as the New Negro movement, which was rooted in assertiveness and confidence and was also connected to the Harlem Renaissance.

Membership in the NAACP really surged from about nine thousand members before the war to one hundred thousand afterward. Compounding that many of the people who moved from the South did not find the North to be what they imagined it to be. Many schools, neighborhoods, and public accommodations were still segregated by custom, if not by law. Many industries were closed to black workers, and many of the ones

that weren't involved manual labor or service work. Discrimination and harassment may have been less overt in in some ways, but they were still there. All of this folded back into that growing advocacy for equal rights and equal treatment. So it was a whole system in which people who had moved, or people who had come back from war, or people who had done both of those things were

finding themselves still facing all of this discrimination. And then simultaneously, people of all races in the United States were competing for scarce jobs and housing. Immediately after the war, the first Red Scare was going on, and that created a climate of fear of communism and Bolshevism. Also, immediately after the war, the nation was very nationalistic and xenophobic, and all of this together fed into this backlash that came to be known as Red Summer. We'll start talking about

how it unfolded after a sponsor break. The two main hallmarks of Red Summer were lynching and mass violence against whole communities of black residents, which were often described as race riots. These weren't unique to nineteen nineteen. The same types of violence happened before and after Red Summer, but during that summer and fall of nineteen nineteen both were

really at a peak. And although the great migration that we just talked about was from the South into urban parts of the North and Midwest, these incidents happened all over the country. However, details are hard to track down for some of these incidents today. At the time, they were often reported in both black and white newspapers, although

with completely different interpretations of the events. The NAACP and other civil rights organizations also conducted investigations into as many of them as they could, but often there was no formal investigation by law enforcement and no official record of what actually happened, especially when it came to mob violence. Some communities conducted investigations later on or convene truth and reconciliation commissions to document what happened and make recommendations for restitution.

But in cases where that didn't happen at this point, the people who remember the events have since died, so many details are lost. So we're going to start with this pattern of lynching. A lynching is an extra judicial murder of someone who has been accused of a crime or some other perceived wrongdoing. Anyone can be the victim of lynching, although most often in the United States, lynching victims have been members of a racial, ethnic, or religious minority.

In the United States, in the early twentieth century, most victims of lynching were black Americans or white Americans who had been working for civil rights. In nineteen nineteen, there were eighty three recorded victims of lynching, at least eleven of whom were veterans of World War One. That was up from sixty four in nineteen eighteen. Victims of lynching had often been accused of a crime against a white person, especially a white woman. Sometimes a crime really had taken place,

but in other cases the allegations were completely fabricated. Regardless of whether anyone had committed a crime, the idea of a crime was used as justification for murder. It was often the idea of a white woman having been allegedly assaulted by a black man, something we talked more about in our two parter on the eighteen ninety eight Wilmington Coup and one of Red Summer's first incidents, a black man named Benny Richards allegedly shot his ex wife and

her sister on May second, nineteen nineteen. His ex wife died, and Richards also allegedly wounded the sheriff and other white men who arrived on the scene. We have to say allegedly, because Richards was not brought to trial. Instead, a mob of between one hundred and three hundred white men apprehended him, in part by dumping gasoline into the swampy area surrounding his home and setting fire to it to try to drive him out. After they captured Richards, the mob hanged him,

shot his body, and set it on fire. This was not a remotely isolated incident, and it was part of a pattern in terms of what happened and how it played out. On May fourteenth, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a mob of between eight hundred and one thousand people broke into the jail and took twenty two year old Lloyd Clay out of his cell. Clay had been accused of assaulting a white woman named Mattie Hudson. She had been presented

with a lineup earlier in the day. In two different times, she had said that Clay was not the man who assaulted her, but after the mob removed him from his cell, they asked her one more time to identify him as her assailant, and she did. The mob poured oil over Clay's head and hanged him over a bonfire while also shooting him repeatedly. On May twenty fourth, seventy two year old Berry Washington was in jail in Milan, Georgia. Two white men had reportedly come into his neighborhood and tried

to assault to teenage els. Washington had tried to defend them and had killed one of the men in the process. A local Baptist minister led a mob of roughly one hundred white men who abducted Washington from the jail, hanged him, and shot him repeatedly. The mob then terrorized the area's black residents and looted black owned businesses. On June seventeenth,

a white mob in Longview, Texas, murdered Lemuel Walters. According to reports in white newspapers, he had robbed the home of a white woman and assaulted her, but according to an article in the Chicago Defender, Walters and this woman had been having a consensual relationship. There was a riot in Longview shortly thereafter, which started with a white mob assaulting a black journalist that they believed had written this article in the Chicago Defender, and then burning down his home.

On June twenty six, a mob lynched John Hartfield of Ellisville, Mississippi, on the grounds that he had, according to them, raped a white woman. His family members and friends maintained that it was because he had a white girlfriend. This lynching was announced ahead of time on the front page of the Jackson Daily News under the headline John Hartsfield will be lynched by Ellisville mob at five o'clock this afternoon. On August twenty eighth, a mob dragged Eli Cooper out

of his home in Cadwell, Georgia. This mob's rational is not clear. In some accounts he had made a pass at a white woman, and others she had made a pass at him. A newspaper report from the time said quote, he had been talking for some time in a manner that was very offensive to the white people of the community in which he resided. He was either hanged or shot in a church, and then his body was set

on fire. A few days later, a mob in Bogolusa, Louisiana killed veteran Lucius McCarty, who had been accused of trying to rape a white woman. His assailants shot him hundreds of times before dragging him behind a car and burning his body. On September twenty ninth and thirtieth, three black men were lynched in Montgomery, Alabama, over the span of about twelve hours. A mob abducted Railias Pfeiffer and Robert Krosskey as they were being transported to jail after

being accused of assaulting a white woman. Pfeiffer was a veteran and was reportedly in uniform at the time, the mob shot both Pfeiffer and Krossky, and then in a separate incident, an officer tried to arrest will Temple and two other people for disorderly conduct. Temple resisted arrest, fatally shooting the officer and being injured himself in the process.

A mob murdered him in his hospital ward. And these are of course just samples from the eighty three recorded lynchings in the summer and fall of nineteen nineteen, and there were certainly others that were not recorded. And the reason none of the perpetrators are named is that overwhelmingly we do not know who they were. It was incredibly rare for the perpetrators of lynching to face any kind of criminal charges. Sometimes members of law enforcement were even

part of the lynch mob. Occasionally law enforcement offered a reward for information or tried to arrest perpetrators, but when that happened, the white community often reacted with outrage. Afterward, members of the mob frequently took souvenirs with them from the scene, as well as taking photos which were later distributed as postcards. These were also not just some random,

haphazard actions. They were part of a pattern of really gruesome racist violence committed by the white community in order to terrorize, punish, and humiliate the black community and in the minds of the perpetrators quote, keep them in their place. The same was true of nineteen nineteen's riots, which we will talk about after a break. The other major hallmark of Red Summer was mass violence perpetrated by white mobs against black people and the neighborhoods where they lived and worked.

These incidents are often described as race riots, and that's a term whose meaning has shifted in various ways over the decades, but to many people it suggest that people of two or more races were fighting against each other as equal aggressors, and that's really not what was happening during Red Summer. Often black communities did try to defend themselves or fight back, and occasionally black residents went on the attack themselves, but overwhelmingly, even when this happened, the

primary instigators were the white mob. As was the case with lynchings, these riots often followed some kind of crime or wrongdoing allegedly committed by a black person, usually a black man, but often these criminal allegations were completely false or the response from the white community was way out of proportion to what had really happened, and in some cases,

the perceived wrongdoing wasn't a criminal act at all. In Port Arthur, Texas, a riot followed objections to a black man smoking in a streetcar in front of a white woman. In multiple instances, the purported transgression was black veterans appearing in public in their uniforms. In one of the incidents that we're going to talk about in a moment, it was a response to sharecroppers trying to organize for fairer treatment. There were at least twenty six documented examples of these

riots between April and November nineteen nineteen. You'll see numbers that range from like twenty four to thirty. It kind of depends on how people are defining the window of time and exactly what constitutes a riot. They definitely occurred in Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, d C. And we're going to talk about three of

the most notorious. They have a lot of similarities, but they also illustrate the range of purported causes. Riots in Washington, d C. Followed rumors of an attack on a white woman and were largely carried out by soldiers and veterans. In Chicago, Illinois, riots followed a breach of the city's unofficial rules about segregation, and in Elane, Arkansas, they followed

black sharecroppers attempts to organize. We will go chronologically, starting with the Washington, d C. Riot, which started on July nineteenth, nineteen nineteen. A black man had been detained and then released by Washington, d C Police under suspicion that he had assaulted a white woman. The woman was a sailor's wife, which led servicemen, sailors, and veterans to try to seek revenge.

Rumors about this incident spread through the city saloons and pool halls, which were a popular hangout for returning veterans. Unemployment was a real issue, so as the rumors swirled, the people who heard them were mostly unemployed, intoxicated, and frustrated. Ultimately, a mob of about four hundred men, many of them drunk, made their way southwest into Washington's majority black neighborhoods, gathering up improvised weapons as they went, and some of them

were still in uniform. This mob attacked black residents indiscriminately, and police really did very little to respond. When local law enforcement did arrive, they mostly arrested the mob's black victims rather than the white perpetrators. This first day of street fighting bled into more than four days of rioting, with mobs of soldiers and sailors attacking people on the

street and black residents fighting back. More than one hundred and fifty people were physically attacked and at least nine people died during the initial wave of fighting, but the situation quickly got worse. More than five hundred firearms were sold in the city on July twenty first, as black residents took up arms to defend themselves because the police were not or in some cases to seek restitution for

the earlier violence. At least fifteen people were killed or mortally wounded just on the night of the twenty first, ten White five black President Woodrow Wilson finally deployed about two thousand troops to try to restore order. By that point, though, the city had become so violent that people really thought that might not be enough, but the troops got help from a heavy rainstorm that drove many of the people

who had been fighting back indoors. The riot ended on May twenty fourth, by which point close to forty people had been killed and hundreds injured. The riot ended on July twenty fourth, by which point close to forty people had been killed and hundreds injured, and then the Chicago Riot started just days later on July twenty seventh, nineteen nineteen, after an altercation at a swimming area, and the swimming area was not officially segregated, but local white residents thought

of it as for their use only. First, there was an altercation on shore between black residents who wanted to use the swimming area and white residents who demanded that they leave. As this was happening, a group of boys was swimming from a raft and accidentally crossed into the white's only part of the lake. Someone threw a rock at them and hit seventeen year old Eugene Williams in

the head. He lost consciousness and drowned. The coroner's jury has a slightly different account that he was not struck, but that because of the stones being thrown he was forced to stay under water until he was just too exhausted to keep swimming. When police arrived on the scene, white officers refused to arrest the man that black witnesses

identified as the stone thrower. Increasingly, angry crowds gathered at the lake, and then rumors started to spread through the city about exactly what had happened, and as rumors tend to do, they spiraled as they went. Eventually, a black man named James Crawford fired into a group of policemen and injured one of them. They returned fire and killed Crawford. This led to widespread violence throughout the city that lasted until August third. Thirty eight people were killed, fifteen white

and twenty three black. Five hundred thirty seven were injured. Of those, one hundred ninety five were white and three hundred forty two were black. White mobs also burned down about one thousand homes in Chicago's black neighborhoods. The Chicago police force was not at all effective at stopping this violence, in part because it was understaffed and in part because

white officers were biased toward the white rioters. Eventually, six thousand troops from the state militia were deployed to try to restore order, and then, as had happened in Washington, they were helped by a sudden heavy rain. This wasn't quite as one sided as many of Red Summer's riots. Many of the white residents who were injured or killed

were in predominantly black neighborhoods when it happened. Some were injured or killed when black residents defended themselves, but others were white merchants or other business people who worked in black neighborhoods and were attacked as people sought restitution for earlier violence. As it happened in the later days of the Washington d c Riot, an eye for an eye mentality developed on both sides. The third riot we're discussing took place in a lane, Arkansas, and it was more

of a massacre than a riot. It started after black sharecroppers started trying to organize for better pay. On September thirtieth, about one hundred of them met with representatives of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. They met in a church in hoopsbur which was kept under armed guard during the meeting, in the hope of preventing the kind of violence that had been so common over the previous months.

In this part of Arkansas. Black residents outnumbered white about ten to one, and the white community found this inherently threatening. This kind of organizing effort was even more so, especially with the presence of armed guards. At about eleven PM, some people fired into the church from outside, kind of in the shadows where the guards couldn't see them. The guards returned fire, and in the process a white man

named W. A. Atkins was killed. At some point during all this, Phillips County Deputy Sheriff Charles Pratt was also wounded. In the minds of Elaine's white residence. This transformed the meeting from an implicit threat to an armed insurrection actively being planned, and it wasn't just rumor. The white press

reported this supposed insurrection as a fact. Hundreds of white residents from around Phillips County traveled to Elaine to deal with the supposed threat, and local authorities asked the governor to deploy the National Guard. A mob burned down the church where the meeting had happened, and together these vigilantes and the National Guard troops took hundreds of black residents of Elaine into custody and held them in temporary stockades. This mob, over the next couple of days, killed at

least two hundred people. The official toll may have been much higher, but there wasn't a formal tally. Walter White, assistant secretary of the NAACP, and past podcast subject I to b Wells Barnett each investigated what had happened in a Lane. Both found that the quote armed insurrection being hyped in the white press just simply did not exist, and if Elaine's black community had been planning an armed insurrection, it seemed as though the death toll logically would have

been much different. None of the white participants in this were ever tried for their roles in this massacre. Instead, twelve black men were put on trial and the deaths of the five white people who were killed. During the trials, a white mob surrounded the courthouse and threatened to lynch the men if they were not given the death penalty. An all white jury found them all guilty, and the judge handed down sentences of death for all of them. These twelve were not the only people who were set

to stand trial. Another sixty five accepted plea bargains. After that first wave of convictions and sentencing, the NAACP backed a series of appeals that finally made their way to the US Supreme Court as Voar versus Dempsey in nineteen twenty three. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes authored the majority opinion that the defendant's constitutional rights had been violated. This was a major victory for the NAACP and for the civil rights of Black Americans in general. After being granted new trials,

the twelve men were ultimately freed. Red Summer was not at all the end of racist violence in the United States. We have talked about similar riots and massacres that happened afterward on the show before, including the destruction of Greenwood, Oklahoma in nineteen twenty one, and the massacre in Rosewood, Florida in nineteen twenty three, but they didn't happen with the same frequency as they had during the Red Summer.

We talked at the start of the show about all the factors that had primed the United States for all this violence. So that leads to the question of why did Red Summer end. The economy did start to improve, and especially when it came to mob violence, The onset of colder winter weather probably tempered things a little bit, but a lot of those other factors were still present or even growing. The Great Migration was still going on, and by the end of it millions of people would

have moved to cities. This general atmosphere of nationalism and xenophobia was still very present. A big part of it is that by the fall of nineteen nineteen, the white majority had increasingly started to see these incidents as part of an unacceptable pattern. There had been elected officials and other civic leaders who had denounced the events from the very beginning, but these calls became louder and more frequent.

Law enforcement officials started taking more steps to make sure that mobs couldn't just abduct people from the jail to lynch them. The white press also started toning down some of its rhetoric in terms of criminal allegations against black residents, and then across the board, newspapers started taking a less sensationalistic and incendiary approach to discussing race related violence. Civil rights were organizations also started working toward building more positive

relations between black and white communities. For example, after the Chicago riot, the city established the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which investigated the riot and made recommendations to prevent something similar from happening again. It published its report The Negro in Chicago, a Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot in nineteen twenty two, which included not just a thorough investigation of the riot, but also of relationships between

white and black communities in Chicago. Although not every riot led to this sort of investigation, there were other commissions and organizations that did the same types of work elsewhere in the United States. In other words, the violence didn't just play itself out. People actively worked to stop it. So that's sort of the highlights of highlights is not even a good word like low lights. Yes, that's sort of a quick look at read Summer. Like I said,

this could be there could be a whole podcast. It would just be about Red Summer that would go on for many, many, many episodes, because there were so many things that happened, but so many of them follow this exact same pattern in terms of like the precipitating event and then what transpired, the actions that this like white mob took, and then how things usually ended without any kind of formal acknowledgment or investigation. Thanks so much for

joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows