Red Summer of 1919 - Riots

Riots

• After the riot of May 10 in Charleston, South Carolina, the city imposed martial law. US Navy sailors led the race riot; Isaac Doctor, William Brown, and James Talbot, all black men, were killed. Five white men and eighteen black men were injured. A Naval investigation found that four U.S. sailors and one civilian—all white men—initiated the riot.

• In early July, a race riot in Longview, Texas led to the deaths of at least four men and destroyed the African-American housing district in the town.

• On July 3, local police in Bisbee, Arizona attacked the 10th U.S. Cavalry, a segregated African-American unit founded in 1866.

• In Washington, D.C. in July, white men, many in military uniforms, responded to the rumored arrest of a black man for rape with four days of mob violence. They rioted, randomly beat black people on the street and pulled others off streetcars for attacks. When police refused to intervene, the black population fought back. Troops tried to restore order as the city closed saloons and theaters to discourage assemblies, but a summer rainstorm had more of a dampening effect. When the violence ended, a total of 15 people had died: 10 whites, including two police officers; and five blacks. Fifty people were seriously wounded and another 100 less severely wounded. It was one of the few times when white fatalities outnumbered those of blacks.

The NAACP sent a telegram of protest to President Wilson (he had re-segregated federal offices after he was first elected):

...the shame put upon the country by the mobs, including United States soldiers, sailors, and marines, which have assaulted innocent and unoffending negroes in the national capital. Men in uniform have attacked negroes on the streets and pulled them from streetcars to beat them. Crowds are reported ...to have directed attacks against any passing negro....The effect of such riots in the national capital upon race antagonism will be to increase bitterness and danger of outbreaks elsewhere. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People calls upon you as President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the nation to make statement condemning mob violence and to enforce such military law as situation demands.

"The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?"

• In Norfolk, Virginia, a white mob attacked a homecoming celebration for African-American veterans of World War I. At least six people were shot, and the local police called in Marines and Navy personnel to restore order.

• Starting July 27, the summer's greatest violence occurred during rioting in Chicago. The city's beaches along Lake Michigan were segregated in practice. A black youth who swam into the area on the South Side customarily reserved for ethnic whites was stoned, and he drowned. When the Chicago police refused to take action against the attackers, young black men responded violently. Violence between mobs and gangs lasted 13 days, with white rioting led by the well-established ethnic Irish, whose territory bordered the black neighborhood. The resulting 38 fatalities included 23 blacks and 15 whites. The injured totaled 537, and 1,000 black families were left homeless. Other accounts reported 50 people were killed, with unofficial numbers and rumors reporting more. White mobs destroyed hundreds of mostly black homes and businesses on the South Side of Chicago; Illinois called in a militia force of seven regiments: several thousand men, to restore order.

At the end of July, the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, at an annual convention, denounced the rioting and burning of negroes' homes then happening and asked President Wilson "to use every means within your power to stop the rioting in Chicago and the propaganda used to incite such." At the end of August, the NAACP protested again, noting the attack on the organization's secretary in Austin, Texas the previous week. Their telegram said: "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?"

• In August, the Knoxville Riot in Tennessee broke out over a white mob's gathering because a black suspect was accused of murdering a white woman. A lynch mob stormed the county jail searching for the prisoner. They liberated 16 white prisoners, including suspected murderers. They moved on and attacked the African-American business district, where they fought against the district's black business owners, leaving at least seven dead and wounding more than 20 people.

• At the end of September, the race riot in Omaha, Nebraska erupted when a mob of more than 10,000 ethnic whites from South Omaha attacked and burned the county courthouse to force the police to release a black prisoner accused of raping a white woman. They destroyed property valued at more than a million dollars. The mob lynched the suspect, Will Brown, and burned his body. They spread out through the city and attacked black neighborhoods and stores on the north side. After the mayor and governor appealed for help, the government sent Federal troops from a nearby fort to restore order. They were under the command of Major General Leonard Wood, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, and a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 1920.

• On October 1, a race riot broke out in Elaine, Arkansas. Distinctive because it occurred in the rural South, its character shared local resistance to labor organizing and fear of socialism. Black sharecroppers were meeting in the local chapter of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. Planters opposed their efforts to organize for better terms, and the sharecroppers had been warned of trouble. A white man intent on arresting a black bootlegger approached the lookouts defending the meeting, and was shot. The planters formed a militia to attack the African-American farmers. In the riot they killed between 100 and 200 blacks, and five whites also died. Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough appointed a Committee of Seven to investigate. The group was composed of prominent local white businessmen. They concluded that the Sharecroppers Union was a Socialist enterprise and "established for the purpose of banding negroes together for the killing of white people."

That report generated headlines such as the following in the Dallas Morning News: "Negroes Seized in Arkansas Riots Confess to Widespread Plot; Planned Massacre of Whites Today." Several agents of the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation spent a week interviewing participants, but they spoke to no sharecroppers. They also reviewed documents. They filed a total of nine reports stating there was no evidence of a conspiracy of the sharecroppers to murder anyone. Their superiors at Justice ignored their analysis.

The local government tried 79 blacks, who were all convicted by all-white juries, and 12 were sentenced to death. (As Arkansas and other southern states had disfranchised most blacks at the turn of the 20th century, they could not vote, run for political office, or serve on juries.) The remainder of the defendants accepted prison terms of up to 21 years. Appeals of their convictions went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed the verdicts because of trial errors. Federal oversight of defendants' rights was increased as a result.