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The summer of 1919 was given the moniker Red Summer by James Weldon Johnson because it ushered in one of the greatest periods of interracial discord in U.S. history. Referring to the summer and fall of 1919, race riots exploded in more than 25 cities across the nation, regardless of region. Some were large and others were small. All the racial riots were indicative of a complete meltdown in American race relations. Incited by racism, unemployment, and inflation, indigenous terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan urged the riots on by terrorizing African Americans into submission. Competition for employment also helped to inflame relations between the races. White Americans did not want to compete for jobs with African Americans. Additionally, the Red Scare fueled racial unrest, and African Americans who saw equality as a constitutional right were branded as radicals.

Among the riots that took place in 1919, the three most violent incidents occurred in Chicago (July 27), Washington, D.C. (July 19), and Elaine, Arkansas (October 1). Other cities of note where riots occurred in 1919 are: Charleston, South Carolina (May 10); Longview, Texas (July 13); Knoxville, Tennessee (August 30); and Omaha, Nebraska (September 28). Although rioting persisted for the next few years, not many of the racial eruptions equaled in proportion to those of 1919. In June 1921, interracial conflict broke out between Africans and whites in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Two years later, in January, a white mob from a neighboring community annihilated the predominately African American town of Rosewood, Florida, burning it to the ground. Those who escaped the Rosewood massacre did not break their silence until the early 1980s. In 1994 Florida’s legislative body provided reparations of $150,000 to each of the survivors. Detroit joined the pandemic of racial unrest in 1925, when an African American physician purchased a home in a white neighborhood.

In the post-World War I environment, African Americans prepared to fight and die in their own defense introduced a new dynamic into America’s most deep-seated societal dilemmas. No longer was it the case of one race intimidating another race into submission. In 1919 one of the Harlem Renaissance’s outstanding poets, Jamaican Claude McKay, captured the feelings of many African Americans in his poem “If We Must Die,” writing: “If we must die, let it be not like hogs hunted and penned in an inglorious spot…. If we must die; oh let us nobly die. dying but fighting back.” Unlike previous race riots that took place in American history, these riots were among the first to project an organized African American rejoinder. The NAACP conducted an investigation of the crimes committed against African Americans. In 1919 the NAACP published its findings in Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918. The report indicated 3,224 people were lynched in the 30-year period. Of these, 702 were white and 2,522 were African American.

The Red Summer of 1919 galvanized the NAACP and its supporters to lobby for the passage of a federal law against lynching. Late in 1919, the NAACP took the first steps toward securing the passage of a federal law against lynching. Although the Dyer Anti-Lynching bill ultimately failed in Congress, its supporters succeeded in bringing attention to and generating greater condemnation of lynching. On June 13, 2005, Congress officially apologized for failing to pass anti-lynching legislation early in the twentieth century, when it passed a non-binding resolution introduced by two senators from the South: Democratic Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu and Republican Senator George Allen of Virginia.

Linda T. Wynn