Red Summer

What became known as the Red Summer took place in the summer and fall of 1919 when race riots erupted [Page 412]between African Americans and European Americans in over 25 U.S. cities. The word red in Red Summer refers to the blood shed throughout the United States during the riots. In every instance, the riots were the result of some form of violence inflicted on Africans by Europeans. The Red Summer epitomized blacks’ resistance to white supremacist violence against them. Lynchings and mob violence against Africans had long been occurring (especially in the South). However, the Red Summer was different because Africans were fighting back in a more strong and organized fashion. Claude McKay captured the African perspective on the Red Summer in his poem If We Must Die when he wrote, “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack/Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”

There were several factors that prompted the explosion of race riots during the summer of 1919. First, the migration of large numbers of African people to Northern cities caused racial tensions. Thousands of black workers began to compete with white workers for factory jobs. Second, since 1915 there had been a sudden surge of lynchings (in both the North and South). Many attribute this to the influence of the movie The Birth of a Nation, which depicted Africans as uneducated savages and rapists of white women. After the movie opened, lynchings increased and Ku Klux Klan memberships quadrupled. With the surge in racial violence, the call for African resistance and selfdefense increased. Third, as blacks began to organize themselves and establish their own independent communities, whites felt threatened and sought to suppress this growing power through mob violence.

The bloodiest incidents of the Red Summer occurred in Chicago, Illinois, and Elaine, Arkansas. The riot in Chicago began on July 27, 1919, when a black youth was drowned for mistakenly swimming on the white side of a local beach. Fighting broke out between whites and blacks after the police refused to arrest the men involved in the drowning. The Chicago race riot lasted for 5 days. In its aftermath, some 23 blacks and 15 whites were killed, more than 500 people were injured, and 1,000 black families were left homeless. The riot in Elaine, Arkansas, occurred that same year during the first 3 days of October. On September 30, a group of black men and women met at a local church to organize a farmer's union. Sometime during the meeting, two white police officers interrupted the meeting and gunshots were exchanged. As a result, one of the officers was killed. Word of this incident quickly spread throughout the county and as far as Mississippi. Hundreds of whites armed with guns began a shooting rampage with the order to kill any black person in sight. By the end of the 3-day riot, the official count of the dead was 5 whites and 25 blacks; however, some reports say that as many as 200 blacks were killed during the riot. During the Red Summer, riots also occurred in Harlem, New York; Washington, D.C.; Cleveland, Ohio; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview and Gregg counties in Texas; and several other Southern towns.

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