Red Summer
Red Summer refers to a tumultuous period in 1919 marked by widespread racially motivated violence across the United States, primarily targeting African American communities. Triggered by the return of World War I soldiers and heightened racial tensions from the Great Migration, this violent outburst saw more than thirty cities experience riots fueled by a blend of white resentment against Black migration and competition for jobs. As African Americans moved northward to fill labor shortages during the war, they faced increasing hostility from white workers who felt threatened by their presence. The violence peaked during a series of riots, notably in Chicago and Washington, D.C., resulting in hundreds of deaths and injuries. Importantly, while the Red Summer was characterized by brutal riots, it also represented a moment of resistance for African Americans, who began to unite against racial oppression, laying the groundwork for future civil rights efforts. The events of Red Summer underscore the complex interplay between race, labor, and societal change in post-war America.
Red Summer
Red Summer was a period of time in 1919 during which the United States was rocked by a wave of racism-fueled riots and violence. Over the course of the Red Summer, a series of anti-black riots broke out in more than thirty American cities. Ignited following the return of soldiers who fought in World War I (1914–1918), the Red Summer was the culmination of growing racial tensions across America. These tensions gradually arose thanks to a number of key factors, including labor shortages in industrial Northern and Midwestern cities during the war, the migration of African Americans to these cities during the early years of the Great Migration, and the racial strife stoked among white workers with the arrival of African American workers. Between the winter and fall of 1919, this strife escalated into widespread violence that resulted in hundreds of deaths. Still, the Red Summer also marked an important moment when African Americans came together to fight back against racial oppression and helped set the stage for the civil rights movement.
Background
The events of the Red Summer are best understood in the historical context of racism in the United States. Approximately 12.5 million people were kidnapped in Africa and transported to the Americas as slaves from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In colonial America and the early United States, slavery was seen by some as an essential component of the economy. This was particularly true in the South, where slavery was widely used as a source of free labor. Slavery was considered such a vital element of the American economy that the total value of the nation’s slaves exceeded $1 billion by the mid-nineteenth century. In these times, many whites felt slavery was justified because of a commonly held racist belief that people of color were inherently inferior.
Although the practice of slavery ended following the Civil War (1861–1865) and the defeat of the Southern pro-slavery Confederate states, racial discrimination and prejudice continued across the US. In the immediate aftermath of the war, African Americans seemed ready to make significant strides in their struggle for full citizenship. Constitutional amendments gave African Americans equal protection under the law and granted African American men the right to vote. However, in practice, these gains were all but erased once federal troops left the South at the end of the Reconstruction in 1877. This power vacuum allowed white supremacists, organized in violent hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), to wage a war of terror aimed at denying African Americans the rights they had just won. This tactic, combined with fraudulent voting schemes and Jim Crow laws that institutionalized racial discrimination, made life difficult for African Americans across the South. Because they often relied on sharecropping to make a living, many African Americans also found themselves hopelessly trapped in debt. To make matters worse, any African American who dared to stand up for themselves was likely to be subjected to violence. By the early twentieth century, African Americans in the South—where the vast majority still lived—were forced to deal with an unending cycle of discrimination, segregation, and political disenfranchisement.
Overview
The road to the Red Summer began in the 1910s, with two major driving factors: American mobilization for World War I, and the Great Migration. When the United States entered the war in 1917, the mass enlistment of white workers left industrial cities in the North and Midwest facing severe labor shortages. These shortages provided African Americans with a way to escape the prejudice they experienced in the South. In short order, an estimated 500,000 African Americans moved northward and took over the jobs left behind by whites who joined the military. This mass movement of African Americans began a decades-long trend of migration known as the Great Migration.
While the Great Migration was advantageous for African Americans and the businesses that desperately needed labor, it also led to a great deal of racial strife in the cities where the African Americans settled. Many working class whites thought the African Americans were stealing their jobs and resented them for it. The situation became even worse when the war ended in late 1918 and more than 380,000 African American veterans began returning home in 1919. Tempered by their wartime experience, these soldiers came back determined to fight racial inequality on their home soil. White Americans who supported racial subordination saw such the returning soldiers as a threat and sought to quickly curtail their activism. The ensuing racial conflict soon turned violent.
The first episode of violence, the Charleston Race Riots, took place in Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1919. In the months that followed, a series of racially motivated riots broke out in small towns across the South and in a number of larger cities in the North. One of the largest of these riots occurred in Washington, D.C., on July 19. The Washington riot was sparked by a white mob after news broke that an African American man had been accused of raping a white woman. Members of the mob attacked African Americans throughout the city. When the police refused to intervene, African American citizens were forced to fight back. The fighting lasted for days and several people were killed. At least fifty were seriously injured.
Additional riots broke out in other cities through the summer and into the fall. A particularly violent riot was ignited in Chicago after a young African American accidentally swam at a beach reserved for whites and was subsequently murdered. Over thirteen days of violence, rioters destroyed African American homes and businesses and killed approximately fifty people. Perhaps the worst incident was a riot that started in Elaine, Arkansas, on October 1. Beginning as an effort to stop African American sharecroppers from starting a union, a group of white planters went on a violent rampage that left at least one hundred African Americans dead.
The Red Summer riots were started not by terror groups like the KKK, but by ordinary white citizens and veterans. These groups formed mobs and resorted to violence to prevent African Americans from moving beyond their pre-war status in society. Equally important is the fact that the Red Summer was a notable example of a time that African Americans fought back against racial discrimination and violence. In doing so, the African American community gained a greater sense of collective purpose and pride that would eventually play key role in their successful fight for equality during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Bibliography
Brown, Deneen L. “Remembering ‘Red Summer,’ When White Mobs Massacred Black from Tulsa to D.C.” National Geographic, 19 June 2020, www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/06/remembering-red-summer-white-mobs-massacred-blacks-tulsa-dc. Accessed 28 Sept. 2020.
Bundles, A’Lelia. “Know Your History: Understanding Racism in the US.” Al Jazeera, 15 Aug. 2015, www.aljazeera.com/features/2015/08/15/know-your-history-understanding-racism-in-the-us. Accessed 28 Sept. 2020.
Grigsby Bates, Karen. “Red Summer in Chicago: 100 Years after the Race Riots.” NPR, 27 July 2019, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/07/27/744130358/red-summer-in-chicago-100-years-after-the-race-riots. Accessed 28 Sept. 2020.
Higgins, Abigail. “Red Summer of 1919: How Black WWI Vets Fought Back Against Racist Mobs.” History.com, 26 July 2019, www.history.com/news/red-summer-1919-riots-chicago-dc-great-migration. Accessed 28 Sept. 2020.
Lewis, Femi. “The Red Summer of 1919 in U.S. Cities.” ThoughtCo., 7 July 2019, www.thoughtco.com/red-summer-of-1919-45394. Accessed 28 Sept. 2020.
“Red Summer: The Race Riots of 1919.” National WWI Museum and Memorial, 2020, www.theworldwar.org/learn/wwi/red-summer. Accessed 28 Sept. 2020.
Waxman, Olivia B. “‘It Just Goes On and On’: How the Race Riots of 1919’s ‘Red Summer’ Helped Shape a Century of American History.” Time, 29 July 2019, time.com/5636454/what-is-red-summer. Accessed 28 Sept. 2020.
Wolfe-Rocca, Ursula. “The Red Summer of 1919, Explained.” Teen Vogue, 31 May 2020, www.teenvogue.com/story/the-red-summer-of-1919-explained. Accessed 28 Sept. 2020.