3.6 White Supremacist Violence and the Red Summer

Racial violence incited by white supremacists spread across the country between 1917 and 1921. The worst stretch came in 1919, which the writer and activist James Weldon Johnson named the 'Red Summer'.

Several pressures came together that year:

• A deadly worldwide flu pandemic added fear and strain.
• After the First World War, white workers competed with Black migrants and returning soldiers for jobs and housing in growing cities.
• Black veterans who had served overseas came home expecting respect and rights, and faced discrimination and attacks instead.

More than 30 race riots broke out in cities that summer, usually started by white mobs attacking Black neighborhoods. In Chicago, violence began after a Black teenager drifted toward a beach that white people claimed for themselves and drowned after being attacked; days of rioting followed. In Elaine, Arkansas, Black sharecroppers who were organizing for fair pay were attacked, and many were killed.

Greenwood, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was one of the wealthiest Black communities in the country, sometimes called 'Black Wall Street', with Black-owned stores, theaters, churches, hotels and newspapers. In 1921, after a Black teenager was accused of assaulting a white woman, armed Black residents went to the courthouse to prevent a lynching. A white mob, joined and helped by city officials, then attacked Greenwood.

Over about a day, the mob burned the district. More than 1,250 homes and businesses were destroyed, thousands of people were left homeless, and many Black residents were killed; estimates range from dozens to several hundred. The required photographs show Greenwood burning, Black men being detained with their hands raised, and the destruction left afterward.

Violence like this did more than take lives. It destroyed homes, businesses and savings, which kept many Black families from building wealth and passing it on to their children.

African Americans resisted through political activism, published accounts and armed self-defense. In 1917, after a deadly attack on Black residents of East St. Louis, thousands marched silently down Fifth Avenue in New York to protest. The NAACP campaigned for a federal anti-lynching law, which Congress didn't pass until 2022.

Claude McKay's sonnet 'If We Must Die' (1919), a required source, begins, 'If we must die, let it not be like hogs'. It urges people facing a mob to die with dignity, fighting back. Violence and poverty in the South also pushed many Black families north in the Great Migration (3.16).