Red Summer of 1919

David Neiwert of Daily Kos wrote a three part remembrance of the Red Summer of 1919. Here are links to the first, second, and third parts. The Red Summer, actually pretty much the whole year, was the peak of lynchings and other violence perpetrated by white people against black people. This year is the 100th anniversary of that violence and too many white people (me included until I read these essays) know nothing about this part of American history and how it affects the present.

The first part discusses what led up to the deadly year. Wrote Neiwert:

These events were in many ways the fevered culmination of the long campaign after the Civil War to reverse its outcome by putting the now-freed slaves in a continued state of submission by other means—violent ones.

The main means was lynching. The Tuskegee Institute says there were at least 3,445 lynchings between 1882 and 1968. Many consider the number to be much higher and they don’t include the large number of lynchings in the early 1870s during the fight over Reconstruction.

The rationale for these horrific acts lay in a kind of guilty white projection, in which black males—many of whom were in fact the progeny of their mothers’ rapes by their white masters—were demonized widely as likely rapists, sexual brutes with ravenous appetites. The supposed threat of black rape, and the ensuing protection of “white womanhood” by “gallant men” of determination who moved in mobs and slaughtered with extreme violence, made it all justified as necessary self-defense in the popular white view.

Ida B. Wells, civil rights pioneer, examined the facts around lynchings and in most cases found “rape” was a pretext for a white woman caught with a black man. Others found …

Far more often, black people were lynched for being too successful by white standards. Economic jealousy fueled many a lynching.

I wouldn’t call it economic “jealousy.” It is more about supremacy – the supremacist can’t allow a black man have a chance to match his economic and social position.

Lynchings were barbaric and cruel. Even so…

Lynchings were hugely popular community events. Parents ensured that their children, especially their daughters, had front-row seats, so they could see what it took to preserve white maidenhood. And, in their minds, it was all justified. Indeed, it was celebrated in popular culture.

That popular culture included the book The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon in 1905, which became the movie The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith. It is credited with reviving the KKK.

So race riots – events with multiple lynchings and ethnic cleansing – happened. These were whites rioting against blacks. First in New York in 1900, a couple in Springfield, Ohio in 1904 and 1906, then across the South, the Midwest, and the nation.

An aggravating factor was black American soldiers returning from WWI in 1917. They were seen not as heroes, but as “uppity” because only white men were supposedly capable and brave.

The second essay describes 30 race riots across the country in 1919. Many included full scale attacks on the black residents of a community, including chasing them out of town. Many riots resulted in hundreds of deaths. Several of these riots lasted more than one day, the longest, in Chicago, lasted a week.

The third essay begins with two more riots. One was in Ocoee, Florida in 1920. The violence and ethnic cleansing resulted in it becoming an all white town, and it remained that way until 1981.

The other big riot was in Tulsa in 1921. The Greenwood neighborhood, the “Black Wall Street” was burned, with help from biplanes dropping flaming turpentine balls. The area was destroyed and the black residents fled.

The violence subsided around 1925.

If I remember right, it is during this era of 1900-1925 that most of the Confederate monuments were built – the memorials and statues that just in the last few years public outcry has finally brought many of them down.

The rest of the third essay discusses the consequences.

Even after cultural mores about racial discrimination and the value of racial diversity finally shifted, the system of economic and cultural advantages and disadvantages the previous regime of violence had created (better known in this case as “white privilege”) persist ad infinitum.

The mechanics of how this happened can be observed by looking at what happened to America demographically as a result of these “race riots.” Essentially, black Americans were driven out of rural America and forced to reside in racially and economically segregated urban neighborhoods.

The NAACP was born to oppose lynching. It got attention by flying a banner outside its New York offices whenever appropriate that said, “A man was lynched yesterday.”

Many places declared themselves to be sundown towns. A black person could be in this town during the day – likely working as a maid or gardener – but laws mandated they be out of town by sundown. There were thousands of towns that passed such laws and they were all across America.

James Loewen wrote the book *Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism*. Here is part of the book’s conclusion:

We have seen how residents often interpret the continued overwhelmingly white population of sundown suburbs as the result of economic differences and individual housing decisions, including those made by black families. Even worse, suburban whiteness can get laid at the eugenics doorstep: whites can blame African Americans for being too stupid or lazy to be successful enough to live in their elite, all-white town.

Token blacks allow them to “prove” that racism is over. That allows the claim that African Americans are responsible for whatever inequalities remain. That’s why it is important to know our nation’s history.