Book Review: Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America by Cameron McWhirter
A riot’s aftermath.
In 2019, HBO put out a new Watchmen show that introduced many Americans to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. More than a century ago, local whites razed the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma– aka Black Wall Street– to the ground, after armed black citizens attempted to prevent a lynching. The massacre was all but ignored in most American history classes, depriving children of learning about one of the worst incidents of white supremacist violence in American history. Thanks to Watchmen and media coverage of the forgotten massacre, far more people today have heard of Black Wall Street than likely ever before. Unfortunately, the need for public education about the history of white supremacy is far from gone. Just two years earlier, America saw an even more widespread string of white supremacist riots during the Red Summer of 1919, and even fewer today have ever heard of it.
As black soldiers returned home from service in the Great War, they were met with the simmering resentment of white America. While the burgeoning NAACP led by W. E. B. DuBois campaigned against lynching, cities across the country erupted in white supremacist riots in response to perceived slights by the black population. Some began as simple altercations between white sailors and the black residents of Charleston, NC, while others began after black beachgoers attempted to enter a segregated beach in Chicago. Even as Washington, DC burned outside his window, president Woodrow Wilson– a noted racist that re-segregated the previously integrated federal government– repeatedly ignored pleas from black leaders to quell the violence.
In some cases, racism was deliberately stoked by capitalists to undermine worker power, black and white alike. The Chicago riots occurred concurrently with a strike by white union stockyard workers, who resented that black workers crossed the picket line despite being barred from union membership on account of their race. A similar union-busting strategy was employed in the coal mines of my home state of Pennsylvania. Union membership mostly consisted of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Lithuania, and more. Anglo-Saxon Protestants were permitted to join, but they mostly sided with their fellow WASP bosses in disputes, partly owing to the influence of the anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-labor Ku Klux Klan. Black workers were once again not permitted to join, and bosses typically brought them in as scabs to deliberately stoke racial resentment and keep workers divided.
If white conservative America can be counted on to always be afraid of blacks “rising up”, then it can also be counted on to fear communism. Throughout Red Summer, conspiracy theories spread among whites that members of the anarcho-syndicalist union the International Workers of the World (IWW) or the Bolsheviks were conspiring to come down from the big city and convince all the local blacks to rise up and kill every white man, woman, and child. The fact that many of these supposed agitators were themselves white that often tried to organize white workers was apparently irrelevant: in the mind of a reactionary, it is easier to simply assert that everyone you fear is secretly working together. Even among certain racial justice organizations today, this myth persists. Then-president of the Portland NAACP Ed Mondainé repeated the “outside agitator” myth of white communists interfering in the cause of racial justice when he lamented that the BLM protests were hijacked by privileged white kids for other causes such as anti-capitalism– ludicrously implying that these causes aren’t related. Regardless of if it is in 1919 or 2023, the purpose of such conspiracy theories is to justify “corrective” violence. When there is a conspiracy afoot to undermine “law and order”– that is, white supremacy, class domination, or both– unlawful and disorderly vigilante violence is necessary to restore things to their proper place.
Map created by Colored Women’s Clubs of Michigan in support of the anti-lynching Dyer Bill introduced in 1922. Retrieved from: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/149268727
This is not to say that those living at the time faced such violence lying down– this was not the case by a long shot. Just as often as McWhirter focuses on the events leading up to and during the race massacres, he writes about the times black people took up arms against the white rioters that threatened them. He relates how black men stood guard with rifles around their neighbors’ houses and tit-for-tat drive-bys between white and black neighborhoods. All throughout, the NAACP saw its membership explode as DuBois and other leaders worked tirelessly to grow its membership and campaigns against the waves of anti-black violence that seemed to be taking over the country by storm. McWhirter even implicitly argues that were it not for this summer of racist violence, the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s never would have been laid. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in 20th-century American history, but especially for former American schoolchildren who most certainly didn't hear about any of this in their history class.
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