More than 200 African Americans died at the hands of white rioters across the country 100 years ago in what became known as “Red Summer.” Today, few people know about it.
In this 1919 photo provided by Chicago History Museum, a crowd of men and armed National Guard stand in front of the Ogden Cafe during race riots in Chicago. Red Summer, as the summer of 1919 came to be known, saw white-on-black violence in big cities like Washington and Chicago and small towns like Elaine, Ark., and Bisbee, Ariz.
Beyond the lives and family fortunes lost, it had far-reaching repercussions, contributing to generations of black distrust of white authority. But it also galvanized blacks to defend themselves and their neighborhoods with fists and guns; reinvigorated civil rights organizations like the NAACP and led to a new era of activism; gave rise to courageous reporting by black journalists; and influenced the generation of leaders who would take up the fight for racial equality decades later.
That could change. A monument has been proposed in Arkansas. Several authors have written about the bloody summer. A Brooklyn choral group performed Red Summer-theme songs like “And They Lynched Him on a Tree” in March to commemorate the centennial. The violence didn’t start or end in 1919. Some count the era of Red Summer as beginning with the deaths of more than two dozen African Americans in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917 and extending through the Rosewood Massacre of 1923, when a black town in Florida was destroyed. All told, at least 1,122 Americans were killed in racial violence over those six years, by Tuttle’s count.
“Sensing the failure of the police, the mob became even more contemptuous of authority — two Negroes were attacked and beaten directly in front of the White House.”“They had caught a Negro and deliberately held him as one would a beef for slaughter, and when they had conveniently adjusted him for lynching, they shot him,” Woodson wrote. “I heard him groaning in his struggle as I hurried away as fast as I could without running, expecting every moment to be lynched myself.
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