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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. In this week's episode about the Memphis massacre,

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Speaker 1: we talked about that massacre being part of a pattern.

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Speaker 1: While we mentioned some other similar massacres, we really didn't

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Speaker 1: spend a lot of time on the pattern part. So

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Speaker 1: for today's Saturday Classic, we have chosen an episode that

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Speaker 1: does spend more time on that. It's our June third,

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Speaker 1: twenty nineteenth episode on the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen.

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production

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Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. This year is the one hundredth anniversary of

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Speaker 1: the wave of racist violence in the United States that

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Speaker 1: came to be known as Red Summer. And we talked

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Speaker 1: about this just a little bit in our twenty fifteen

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Speaker 1: episode on the Harlem hell Fighters, but that was a

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Speaker 1: long time ago, and it was just like a little

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Speaker 1: bit in part three of the episode, not really enough

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Speaker 1: to do it justice. And honestly, it was a whole summer.

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Speaker 1: You could do an entire podcast just on this, but

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Speaker 1: with one hundred anniversary, it seemed like a good time

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Speaker 1: to return to it. In a lot of ways, the

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Speaker 1: violence of Red Summer was a response to two earlier

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Speaker 1: and sometimes overlapping events, and those were the Great Migration

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Speaker 1: and the return of black soldiers who had fought in

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Speaker 1: World War One to the United States. And to be clear,

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Speaker 1: neither of these things caused Red Summer. Red Summer was

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Speaker 1: a backlash to them. These returning veterans and migrating families

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Speaker 1: were not to blame for what happened. But since this

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Speaker 1: is part of the historical context, today's episode is going

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Speaker 1: to start off with a little bit about those two

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Speaker 1: events before getting into the violence that stretch the summer

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Speaker 1: and fall. And in case it is not clear, this

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Speaker 1: episode includes a lot of violence, including sexual violence. Some

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Speaker 1: of it is just particularly horrifying in nature. The Great

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Speaker 1: Migration was a mass relocation of Black Americans out of

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Speaker 1: the South and into the cities in the north end Midwest.

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Speaker 1: It peaked in the mid to late nineteen teens, but

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Speaker 1: the same pattern of migration continued for decades afterward. There

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Speaker 1: was also migration within the South from rural areas into

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Speaker 1: southern cities. Most of the people who were moving had

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Speaker 1: been sharecroppers, doing essentially the same work as their enslaved

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Speaker 1: ancestors had done, sometimes even on the same land and

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Speaker 1: for the same landowners. Sharecroppers rented the land that they

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Speaker 1: lived and worked on, and then they paid their rent

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Speaker 1: by giving a share of their crop to the landowner.

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Speaker 1: But it was almost impossible to make a decent living

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Speaker 1: as a sharecropper. Many sharecroppers were in debt to their landlords,

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Speaker 1: owing money for things like the tools and supplies that

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Speaker 1: they needed to do their jobs. Unscrupulous landlords could make

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Speaker 1: this situation much worse. But even if a person's landlord

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Speaker 1: was honest and fair, a sharecropper often earned a subsistence

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Speaker 1: level living at best. Sharecroppers faced the same threats to

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Speaker 1: their livelihoods as any other farmer did, including pests and

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Speaker 1: bad weather and fluctuating prices. The bowl weavil, which had

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Speaker 1: been introduced to the United States and the late eighteen hundreds,

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Speaker 1: spread farther and farther into cotton territory in the nineteen teens,

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Speaker 1: destroying the crop as it went, and then in nineteen fifteen,

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Speaker 1: widespread flooding affected many of the same areas that had

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Speaker 1: just been ravaged by weavils. As the Southern economy shifted

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Speaker 1: after the Civil War, white farmers had also been caught

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Speaker 1: up in this same system of sharecropping. It was exploitive

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Speaker 1: regardless of who was doing the farming, but the system

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Speaker 1: was stacked most heavily against black sharecroppers, who faced the

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Speaker 1: additional hardships of systemic discrimination in racism, including segregation, political oppression,

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Speaker 1: and racist violence. In the nineteen teens, black Southerners started

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Speaker 1: hearing about new opportunities and a potentially better life in

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Speaker 1: the North and the Midwest. This included jobs with better

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Speaker 1: wages and better educational opportunities for their children. People heard

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Speaker 1: about these opportunities through word of mouth from friends or

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Speaker 1: family who had already moved. Word also came through advertisements

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Speaker 1: placed by businesses and organizations that were hoping to attract

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Speaker 1: new workers to their area. After the United States entered

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Speaker 1: World War One, some of these jobs were specifically connected

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Speaker 1: to the war effort. Between nineteen fourteen and nineteen twenty,

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Speaker 1: roughly five hundred thousand Black Americans left the South and

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Speaker 1: moved to urban areas elsewhere. In nineteen twenty, m at J.

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Speaker 1: Scott described it this way, quote, they were in the

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Speaker 1: frame of mind for leaving. They left as though they

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Speaker 1: were fleeing some curse. They were willing to make almost

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Speaker 1: any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket, and they left

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Speaker 1: with the intention of staying. This led to labor shortages

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Speaker 1: in the South, and sometimes entire communities were abandoned. That

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Speaker 1: also dramatically shifted the racial demographics of cities like Detroit, Chicago,

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Speaker 1: New York, and Philadelphia. Will be returning to that shift

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Speaker 1: in just a bit. The United States became involved in

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Speaker 1: World War One as the Great Migration was happening. The

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Speaker 1: war directly affected the nation's black citizens as well. After

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Speaker 1: the United States declared war on Germany in nineteen seventeen,

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Speaker 1: people were eager to enlist in the military. This included

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Speaker 1: at least twenty thousand black men who volunteered in April

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Speaker 1: and early May. This actually presented a problem for the military,

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Speaker 1: though the Marines didn't accept black recruits at all. The

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Speaker 1: Navy and the Coastguard technically did, but only in menial roles.

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Speaker 1: So overwhelmingly black men were serving in the Army, which

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Speaker 1: at least in theory, accepted black men in most areas

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Speaker 1: of the service and practice, though the army was racially segregated,

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Speaker 1: with only a very few all black units in existence

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Speaker 1: at that time, So after the declaration of war on Germany,

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Speaker 1: the Army reached its quota for black recruits in just

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Speaker 1: about a week. In May of nineteen seventeen, Congress passed

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Speaker 1: the Selective Service Act, which required men regardless of race

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Speaker 1: to register for the draft. The Army began creating new

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Speaker 1: all black units and trained War one class of black

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Speaker 1: officers at Fort des Moines in May of nineteen seventeen,

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Speaker 1: sending most black officer candidates after that point to train

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Speaker 1: at camps in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, or Panama. Ultimately,

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Speaker 1: about three hundred and seventy thousand black men served in

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Speaker 1: the US Army in World War One. These men faced

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Speaker 1: persistent discrimination during their service. All Black units were often

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Speaker 1: assigned to menial work like digging trenches and unloading cargo

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Speaker 1: and removing unexploded ordnance. And while it's true that this

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Speaker 1: was all work that needed to be done and somebody

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Speaker 1: had to do it, disproportionately, the people doing the Army's hardest, dirtiest,

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Speaker 1: and most degrading work were black. Black soldiers also experienced

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Speaker 1: day to day harassment and discrimination throughout the war. There's

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Speaker 1: more about all this in that past episode about the

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Speaker 1: Harlem hell Fighters. Support for participation in the war wasn't

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Speaker 1: universal within the black community. One line of thought was

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Speaker 1: that it made no sense for people to put their

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Speaker 1: lives on the line for a country that at best

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Speaker 1: treated them as second class citizens. This was especially true

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Speaker 1: because the United States had framed its involvement in the

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Speaker 1: war as making the world safe for democracy, so it

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Speaker 1: seemed hypocritical to fight for a country that was refusing

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Speaker 1: to do the same within its own borders. But many

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Speaker 1: civil rights leaders and organizations really took the opposite stance,

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Speaker 1: arguing that this was a chance for black citizens to

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Speaker 1: demonstrate to the rest of the nation that they were

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Speaker 1: human beings and patriots worthy of respect who were actively

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Speaker 1: making a positive contribution to the nation. The experience of

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Speaker 1: military service during the war motivated many of these soldiers

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Speaker 1: to actively fight for equal rights after they returned home. W. E. B.

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Speaker 1: Du Boys described it this way in the NAACP's magazine

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Speaker 1: The Crisis quote, we are returning from war the Crisis,

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Speaker 1: and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into

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Speaker 1: a great struggle for bleeding France and what she means

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Speaker 1: and has meant and will mean to us and humanity,

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Speaker 1: and against the threat of German race arrogance. We fought

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Speaker 1: gladly into the last drop of blood for America and

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Speaker 1: her highest ideals. We fought in far off hope. For

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Speaker 1: the dominant Southern oligarchy entrenched in Washington. We fought in

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Speaker 1: bitter resignation. And the sedatorial boys went on to describe

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Speaker 1: the United States as a shameful land, saying that it

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Speaker 1: lynches and disenfranchises its citizens, encourages ignorance, and steals from

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Speaker 1: and insults black citizens. He concluded by saying, quote, we return,

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Speaker 1: we return from fighting. We return fighting make way for democracy.

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Speaker 1: We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah,

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Speaker 1: we will save it in the United States of America.

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Speaker 1: Or know the reason why. James Weldon Johnson, who coined

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Speaker 1: the term red Summer, described it this way in his

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Speaker 1: nineteen thirty three autobiography, quote, the colored people throughout the

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Speaker 1: country were disheartened and dismayed. The great majority had trustingly

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Speaker 1: felt that because they had cheerfully done their bit in

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Speaker 1: the life war, conditions for them would be better. The

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Speaker 1: reverse seemed to be true. Earlier civil rights advocacy had

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Speaker 1: tended toward a conciliatory approach, but after the war, Dubois

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Speaker 1: and other civil rights leaders were increasingly direct lobbying very

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Speaker 1: aggressively for equal rights legislation and for anti lynching laws.

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Speaker 1: This advocacy became part of what came to be known

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Speaker 1: as the New Negro movement, which was rooted in assertiveness

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Speaker 1: and confidence and was also connected to the Harlem Renaissance.

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Speaker 1: Membership in the NAACP really surged from about nine thousand

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Speaker 1: members before the war to one hundred thousand afterward. Compounding

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Speaker 1: that many of the people who moved from the South

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Speaker 1: did not find the North to be what they imagined

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Speaker 1: it to be. Many schools, neighborhoods, and public accommodations were

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Speaker 1: still segregated by custom, if not by law. Many industries

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Speaker 1: were closed to black workers, and many of the ones

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Speaker 1: that weren't involved manual labor or service work. Discrimination and

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Speaker 1: harassment may have been less overt in in some ways,

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Speaker 1: but they were still there. All of this folded back

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Speaker 1: into that growing advocacy for equal rights and equal treatment.

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Speaker 1: So it was a whole system in which people who

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Speaker 1: had moved, or people who had come back from war,

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Speaker 1: or people who had done both of those things were

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Speaker 1: finding themselves still facing all of this discrimination. And then simultaneously,

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Speaker 1: people of all races in the United States were competing

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Speaker 1: for scarce jobs and housing. Immediately after the war, the

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Speaker 1: first Red Scare was going on, and that created a

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Speaker 1: climate of fear of communism and Bolshevism. Also, immediately after

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Speaker 1: the war, the nation was very nationalistic and xenophobic, and

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Speaker 1: all of this together fed into this backlash that came

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Speaker 1: to be known as Red Summer. We'll start talking about

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Speaker 1: how it unfolded after a sponsor break. The two main

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Speaker 1: hallmarks of Red Summer were lynching and mass violence against

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Speaker 1: whole communities of black residents, which were often described as

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Speaker 1: race riots. These weren't unique to nineteen nineteen. The same

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Speaker 1: types of violence happened before and after Red Summer, but

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Speaker 1: during that summer and fall of nineteen nineteen both were

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Speaker 1: really at a peak. And although the great migration that

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Speaker 1: we just talked about was from the South into urban

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Speaker 1: parts of the North and Midwest, these incidents happened all

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Speaker 1: over the country. However, details are hard to track down

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Speaker 1: for some of these incidents today. At the time, they

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Speaker 1: were often reported in both black and white newspapers, although

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Speaker 1: with completely different interpretations of the events. The NAACP and

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Speaker 1: other civil rights organizations also conducted investigations into as many

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Speaker 1: of them as they could, but often there was no

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Speaker 1: formal investigation by law enforcement and no official record of

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Speaker 1: what actually happened, especially when it came to mob violence.

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Speaker 1: Some communities conducted investigations later on or convene truth and

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Speaker 1: reconciliation commissions to document what happened and make recommendations for restitution.

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Speaker 1: But in cases where that didn't happen at this point,

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Speaker 1: the people who remember the events have since died, so

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Speaker 1: many details are lost. So we're going to start with

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Speaker 1: this pattern of lynching. A lynching is an extra judicial

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Speaker 1: murder of someone who has been accused of a crime

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Speaker 1: or some other perceived wrongdoing. Anyone can be the victim

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Speaker 1: of lynching, although most often in the United States, lynching

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Speaker 1: victims have been members of a racial, ethnic, or religious minority.

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Speaker 1: In the United States, in the early twentieth century, most

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Speaker 1: victims of lynching were black Americans or white Americans who

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Speaker 1: had been working for civil rights. In nineteen nineteen, there

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Speaker 1: were eighty three recorded victims of lynching, at least eleven

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Speaker 1: of whom were veterans of World War One. That was

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Speaker 1: up from sixty four in nineteen eighteen. Victims of lynching

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Speaker 1: had often been accused of a crime against a white person,

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Speaker 1: especially a white woman. Sometimes a crime really had taken place,

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Speaker 1: but in other cases the allegations were completely fabricated. Regardless

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Speaker 1: of whether anyone had committed a crime, the idea of

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Speaker 1: a crime was used as justification for murder. It was

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Speaker 1: often the idea of a white woman having been allegedly

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Speaker 1: assaulted by a black man, something we talked more about

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Speaker 1: in our two parter on the eighteen ninety eight Wilmington

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Speaker 1: Coup and one of Red Summer's first incidents, a black

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Speaker 1: man named Benny Richards allegedly shot his ex wife and

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Speaker 1: her sister on May second, nineteen nineteen. His ex wife died,

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Speaker 1: and Richards also allegedly wounded the sheriff and other white

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Speaker 1: men who arrived on the scene. We have to say allegedly,

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Speaker 1: because Richards was not brought to trial. Instead, a mob

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Speaker 1: of between one hundred and three hundred white men apprehended him,

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Speaker 1: in part by dumping gasoline into the swampy area surrounding

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Speaker 1: his home and setting fire to it to try to

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Speaker 1: drive him out. After they captured Richards, the mob hanged him,

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Speaker 1: shot his body, and set it on fire. This was

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Speaker 1: not a remotely isolated incident, and it was part of

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Speaker 1: a pattern in terms of what happened and how it

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Speaker 1: played out. On May fourteenth, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a mob

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Speaker 1: of between eight hundred and one thousand people broke into

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Speaker 1: the jail and took twenty two year old Lloyd Clay

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Speaker 1: out of his cell. Clay had been accused of assaulting

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Speaker 1: a white woman named Mattie Hudson. She had been presented

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Speaker 1: with a lineup earlier in the day. In two different times,

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Speaker 1: she had said that Clay was not the man who

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Speaker 1: assaulted her, but after the mob removed him from his cell,

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Speaker 1: they asked her one more time to identify him as

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Speaker 1: her assailant, and she did. The mob poured oil over

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Speaker 1: Clay's head and hanged him over a bonfire while also

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Speaker 1: shooting him repeatedly. On May twenty fourth, seventy two year

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Speaker 1: old Berry Washington was in jail in Milan, Georgia. Two

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Speaker 1: white men had reportedly come into his neighborhood and tried

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Speaker 1: to assault to teenage els. Washington had tried to defend

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Speaker 1: them and had killed one of the men in the process.

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Speaker 1: A local Baptist minister led a mob of roughly one

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Speaker 1: hundred white men who abducted Washington from the jail, hanged him,

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Speaker 1: and shot him repeatedly. The mob then terrorized the area's

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Speaker 1: black residents and looted black owned businesses. On June seventeenth,

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Speaker 1: a white mob in Longview, Texas, murdered Lemuel Walters. According

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Speaker 1: to reports in white newspapers, he had robbed the home

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Speaker 1: of a white woman and assaulted her, but according to

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Speaker 1: an article in the Chicago Defender, Walters and this woman

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Speaker 1: had been having a consensual relationship. There was a riot

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Speaker 1: in Longview shortly thereafter, which started with a white mob

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Speaker 1: assaulting a black journalist that they believed had written this

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Speaker 1: article in the Chicago Defender, and then burning down his home.

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Speaker 1: On June twenty six, a mob lynched John Hartfield of Ellisville, Mississippi,

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Speaker 1: on the grounds that he had, according to them, raped

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Speaker 1: a white woman. His family members and friends maintained that

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Speaker 1: it was because he had a white girlfriend. This lynching

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Speaker 1: was announced ahead of time on the front page of

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Speaker 1: the Jackson Daily News under the headline John Hartsfield will

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Speaker 1: be lynched by Ellisville mob at five o'clock this afternoon.

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Speaker 1: On August twenty eighth, a mob dragged Eli Cooper out

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Speaker 1: of his home in Cadwell, Georgia. This mob's rational is

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Speaker 1: not clear. In some accounts he had made a pass

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Speaker 1: at a white woman, and others she had made a

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Speaker 1: pass at him. A newspaper report from the time said quote,

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Speaker 1: he had been talking for some time in a manner

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Speaker 1: that was very offensive to the white people of the

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Speaker 1: community in which he resided. He was either hanged or

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Speaker 1: shot in a church, and then his body was set

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Speaker 1: on fire. A few days later, a mob in Bogolusa,

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Speaker 1: Louisiana killed veteran Lucius McCarty, who had been accused of

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Speaker 1: trying to rape a white woman. His assailants shot him

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Speaker 1: hundreds of times before dragging him behind a car and

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Speaker 1: burning his body. On September twenty ninth and thirtieth, three

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Speaker 1: black men were lynched in Montgomery, Alabama, over the span

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Speaker 1: of about twelve hours. A mob abducted Railias Pfeiffer and

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Speaker 1: Robert Krosskey as they were being transported to jail after

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00:17:11,280 --> 00:17:14,159
Speaker 1: being accused of assaulting a white woman. Pfeiffer was a

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Speaker 1: veteran and was reportedly in uniform at the time, the

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Speaker 1: mob shot both Pfeiffer and Krossky, and then in a

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Speaker 1: separate incident, an officer tried to arrest will Temple and

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Speaker 1: two other people for disorderly conduct. Temple resisted arrest, fatally

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00:17:28,440 --> 00:17:31,480
Speaker 1: shooting the officer and being injured himself in the process.

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Speaker 1: A mob murdered him in his hospital ward. And these

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Speaker 1: are of course just samples from the eighty three recorded

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Speaker 1: lynchings in the summer and fall of nineteen nineteen, and

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Speaker 1: there were certainly others that were not recorded. And the

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Speaker 1: reason none of the perpetrators are named is that overwhelmingly

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Speaker 1: we do not know who they were. It was incredibly

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Speaker 1: rare for the perpetrators of lynching to face any kind

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00:17:55,359 --> 00:17:59,560
Speaker 1: of criminal charges. Sometimes members of law enforcement were even

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Speaker 1: part of the lynch mob. Occasionally law enforcement offered a

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00:18:03,640 --> 00:18:07,520
Speaker 1: reward for information or tried to arrest perpetrators, but when

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00:18:07,520 --> 00:18:12,359
Speaker 1: that happened, the white community often reacted with outrage. Afterward,

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00:18:12,520 --> 00:18:15,200
Speaker 1: members of the mob frequently took souvenirs with them from

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Speaker 1: the scene, as well as taking photos which were later

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00:18:18,240 --> 00:18:22,360
Speaker 1: distributed as postcards. These were also not just some random,

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Speaker 1: haphazard actions. They were part of a pattern of really

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00:18:25,720 --> 00:18:29,200
Speaker 1: gruesome racist violence committed by the white community in order

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Speaker 1: to terrorize, punish, and humiliate the black community and in

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Speaker 1: the minds of the perpetrators quote, keep them in their place.

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Speaker 1: The same was true of nineteen nineteen's riots, which we

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Speaker 1: will talk about after a break. The other major hallmark

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Speaker 1: of Red Summer was mass violence perpetrated by white mobs

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Speaker 1: against black people and the neighborhoods where they lived and worked.

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Speaker 1: These incidents are often described as race riots, and that's

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Speaker 1: a term whose meaning has shifted in various ways over

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Speaker 1: the decades, but to many people it suggest that people

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Speaker 1: of two or more races were fighting against each other

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Speaker 1: as equal aggressors, and that's really not what was happening

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Speaker 1: during Red Summer. Often black communities did try to defend

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Speaker 1: themselves or fight back, and occasionally black residents went on

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Speaker 1: the attack themselves, but overwhelmingly, even when this happened, the

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Speaker 1: primary instigators were the white mob. As was the case

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Speaker 1: with lynchings, these riots often followed some kind of crime

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Speaker 1: or wrongdoing allegedly committed by a black person, usually a

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Speaker 1: black man, but often these criminal allegations were completely false

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Speaker 1: or the response from the white community was way out

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Speaker 1: of proportion to what had really happened, and in some cases,

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Speaker 1: the perceived wrongdoing wasn't a criminal act at all. In

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Speaker 1: Port Arthur, Texas, a riot followed objections to a black

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Speaker 1: man smoking in a streetcar in front of a white woman.

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Speaker 1: In multiple instances, the purported transgression was black veterans appearing

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Speaker 1: in public in their uniforms. In one of the incidents

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Speaker 1: that we're going to talk about in a moment, it

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Speaker 1: was a response to sharecroppers trying to organize for fairer treatment.

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Speaker 1: There were at least twenty six documented examples of these

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Speaker 1: riots between April and November nineteen nineteen. You'll see numbers

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Speaker 1: that range from like twenty four to thirty. It kind

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Speaker 1: of depends on how people are defining the window of

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Speaker 1: time and exactly what constitutes a riot. They definitely occurred

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Speaker 1: in Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska,

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Speaker 1: New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington,

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Speaker 1: d C. And we're going to talk about three of

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Speaker 1: the most notorious. They have a lot of similarities, but

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Speaker 1: they also illustrate the range of purported causes. Riots in Washington,

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Speaker 1: d C. Followed rumors of an attack on a white

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Speaker 1: woman and were largely carried out by soldiers and veterans.

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Speaker 1: In Chicago, Illinois, riots followed a breach of the city's

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Speaker 1: unofficial rules about segregation, and in Elane, Arkansas, they followed

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Speaker 1: black sharecroppers attempts to organize. We will go chronologically, starting

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Speaker 1: with the Washington, d C. Riot, which started on July nineteenth,

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Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen. A black man had been detained and then

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Speaker 1: released by Washington, d C Police under suspicion that he

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Speaker 1: had assaulted a white woman. The woman was a sailor's wife,

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Speaker 1: which led servicemen, sailors, and veterans to try to seek revenge.

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Speaker 1: Rumors about this incident spread through the city saloons and

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Speaker 1: pool halls, which were a popular hangout for returning veterans.

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Speaker 1: Unemployment was a real issue, so as the rumors swirled,

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00:21:48,600 --> 00:21:54,800
Speaker 1: the people who heard them were mostly unemployed, intoxicated, and frustrated. Ultimately,

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Speaker 1: a mob of about four hundred men, many of them drunk,

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Speaker 1: made their way southwest into Washington's majority black neighborhoods, gathering

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Speaker 1: up improvised weapons as they went, and some of them

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00:22:06,080 --> 00:22:10,720
Speaker 1: were still in uniform. This mob attacked black residents indiscriminately,

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Speaker 1: and police really did very little to respond. When local

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Speaker 1: law enforcement did arrive, they mostly arrested the mob's black

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Speaker 1: victims rather than the white perpetrators. This first day of

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00:22:22,200 --> 00:22:25,360
Speaker 1: street fighting bled into more than four days of rioting,

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Speaker 1: with mobs of soldiers and sailors attacking people on the

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Speaker 1: street and black residents fighting back. More than one hundred

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00:22:32,880 --> 00:22:35,400
Speaker 1: and fifty people were physically attacked and at least nine

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00:22:35,440 --> 00:22:38,760
Speaker 1: people died during the initial wave of fighting, but the

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00:22:38,800 --> 00:22:42,679
Speaker 1: situation quickly got worse. More than five hundred firearms were

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00:22:42,760 --> 00:22:45,960
Speaker 1: sold in the city on July twenty first, as black

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00:22:46,000 --> 00:22:49,679
Speaker 1: residents took up arms to defend themselves because the police

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00:22:49,720 --> 00:22:52,480
Speaker 1: were not or in some cases to seek restitution for

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00:22:52,520 --> 00:22:55,919
Speaker 1: the earlier violence. At least fifteen people were killed or

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Speaker 1: mortally wounded just on the night of the twenty first,

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Speaker 1: ten White five black President Woodrow Wilson finally deployed about

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00:23:04,160 --> 00:23:08,520
Speaker 1: two thousand troops to try to restore order. By that point, though,

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00:23:08,560 --> 00:23:11,400
Speaker 1: the city had become so violent that people really thought

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00:23:11,440 --> 00:23:14,280
Speaker 1: that might not be enough, but the troops got help

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Speaker 1: from a heavy rainstorm that drove many of the people

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Speaker 1: who had been fighting back indoors. The riot ended on

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Speaker 1: May twenty fourth, by which point close to forty people

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00:23:23,400 --> 00:23:27,439
Speaker 1: had been killed and hundreds injured. The riot ended on

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Speaker 1: July twenty fourth, by which point close to forty people

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Speaker 1: had been killed and hundreds injured, and then the Chicago

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00:23:34,320 --> 00:23:39,040
Speaker 1: Riot started just days later on July twenty seventh, nineteen nineteen,

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Speaker 1: after an altercation at a swimming area, and the swimming

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Speaker 1: area was not officially segregated, but local white residents thought

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Speaker 1: of it as for their use only. First, there was

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Speaker 1: an altercation on shore between black residents who wanted to

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Speaker 1: use the swimming area and white residents who demanded that

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Speaker 1: they leave. As this was happening, a group of boys

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Speaker 1: was swimming from a raft and accidentally crossed into the

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Speaker 1: white's only part of the lake. Someone threw a rock

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00:24:06,640 --> 00:24:09,399
Speaker 1: at them and hit seventeen year old Eugene Williams in

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00:24:09,440 --> 00:24:13,800
Speaker 1: the head. He lost consciousness and drowned. The coroner's jury

400
00:24:13,880 --> 00:24:16,520
Speaker 1: has a slightly different account that he was not struck,

401
00:24:16,600 --> 00:24:19,320
Speaker 1: but that because of the stones being thrown he was

402
00:24:19,320 --> 00:24:21,440
Speaker 1: forced to stay under water until he was just too

403
00:24:21,480 --> 00:24:25,399
Speaker 1: exhausted to keep swimming. When police arrived on the scene,

404
00:24:25,600 --> 00:24:29,120
Speaker 1: white officers refused to arrest the man that black witnesses

405
00:24:29,160 --> 00:24:33,959
Speaker 1: identified as the stone thrower. Increasingly, angry crowds gathered at

406
00:24:34,000 --> 00:24:36,399
Speaker 1: the lake, and then rumors started to spread through the

407
00:24:36,400 --> 00:24:40,280
Speaker 1: city about exactly what had happened, and as rumors tend

408
00:24:40,320 --> 00:24:43,840
Speaker 1: to do, they spiraled as they went. Eventually, a black

409
00:24:43,880 --> 00:24:47,320
Speaker 1: man named James Crawford fired into a group of policemen

410
00:24:47,359 --> 00:24:51,120
Speaker 1: and injured one of them. They returned fire and killed Crawford.

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Speaker 1: This led to widespread violence throughout the city that lasted

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Speaker 1: until August third. Thirty eight people were killed, fifteen white

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00:25:00,080 --> 00:25:04,040
Speaker 1: and twenty three black. Five hundred thirty seven were injured.

414
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Speaker 1: Of those, one hundred ninety five were white and three

415
00:25:07,160 --> 00:25:10,840
Speaker 1: hundred forty two were black. White mobs also burned down

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Speaker 1: about one thousand homes in Chicago's black neighborhoods. The Chicago

417
00:25:15,600 --> 00:25:19,120
Speaker 1: police force was not at all effective at stopping this violence,

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Speaker 1: in part because it was understaffed and in part because

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00:25:22,000 --> 00:25:26,240
Speaker 1: white officers were biased toward the white rioters. Eventually, six

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00:25:26,359 --> 00:25:29,160
Speaker 1: thousand troops from the state militia were deployed to try

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00:25:29,160 --> 00:25:32,160
Speaker 1: to restore order, and then, as had happened in Washington,

422
00:25:32,240 --> 00:25:35,800
Speaker 1: they were helped by a sudden heavy rain. This wasn't

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00:25:35,880 --> 00:25:38,800
Speaker 1: quite as one sided as many of Red Summer's riots.

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Speaker 1: Many of the white residents who were injured or killed

425
00:25:41,440 --> 00:25:45,120
Speaker 1: were in predominantly black neighborhoods when it happened. Some were

426
00:25:45,160 --> 00:25:49,119
Speaker 1: injured or killed when black residents defended themselves, but others

427
00:25:49,200 --> 00:25:51,800
Speaker 1: were white merchants or other business people who worked in

428
00:25:51,800 --> 00:25:55,119
Speaker 1: black neighborhoods and were attacked as people sought restitution for

429
00:25:55,200 --> 00:25:58,520
Speaker 1: earlier violence. As it happened in the later days of

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Speaker 1: the Washington d c Riot, an eye for an eye

431
00:26:00,960 --> 00:26:05,280
Speaker 1: mentality developed on both sides. The third riot we're discussing

432
00:26:05,359 --> 00:26:07,800
Speaker 1: took place in a lane, Arkansas, and it was more

433
00:26:07,840 --> 00:26:11,320
Speaker 1: of a massacre than a riot. It started after black

434
00:26:11,359 --> 00:26:16,359
Speaker 1: sharecroppers started trying to organize for better pay. On September thirtieth,

435
00:26:16,440 --> 00:26:18,800
Speaker 1: about one hundred of them met with representatives of the

436
00:26:18,840 --> 00:26:22,760
Speaker 1: Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. They met in

437
00:26:22,800 --> 00:26:25,879
Speaker 1: a church in hoopsbur which was kept under armed guard

438
00:26:25,920 --> 00:26:28,720
Speaker 1: during the meeting, in the hope of preventing the kind

439
00:26:28,760 --> 00:26:32,520
Speaker 1: of violence that had been so common over the previous months.

440
00:26:33,000 --> 00:26:36,680
Speaker 1: In this part of Arkansas. Black residents outnumbered white about

441
00:26:36,720 --> 00:26:40,520
Speaker 1: ten to one, and the white community found this inherently threatening.

442
00:26:41,119 --> 00:26:44,879
Speaker 1: This kind of organizing effort was even more so, especially

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00:26:44,920 --> 00:26:49,600
Speaker 1: with the presence of armed guards. At about eleven PM,

444
00:26:49,920 --> 00:26:53,560
Speaker 1: some people fired into the church from outside, kind of

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00:26:53,600 --> 00:26:56,439
Speaker 1: in the shadows where the guards couldn't see them. The

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00:26:56,520 --> 00:26:59,640
Speaker 1: guards returned fire, and in the process a white man

447
00:26:59,720 --> 00:27:03,200
Speaker 1: named W. A. Atkins was killed. At some point during

448
00:27:03,240 --> 00:27:06,960
Speaker 1: all this, Phillips County Deputy Sheriff Charles Pratt was also wounded.

449
00:27:07,920 --> 00:27:11,359
Speaker 1: In the minds of Elaine's white residence. This transformed the

450
00:27:11,359 --> 00:27:15,400
Speaker 1: meeting from an implicit threat to an armed insurrection actively

451
00:27:15,440 --> 00:27:18,919
Speaker 1: being planned, and it wasn't just rumor. The white press

452
00:27:18,960 --> 00:27:23,120
Speaker 1: reported this supposed insurrection as a fact. Hundreds of white

453
00:27:23,119 --> 00:27:26,320
Speaker 1: residents from around Phillips County traveled to Elaine to deal

454
00:27:26,400 --> 00:27:29,880
Speaker 1: with the supposed threat, and local authorities asked the governor

455
00:27:29,960 --> 00:27:33,960
Speaker 1: to deploy the National Guard. A mob burned down the

456
00:27:34,080 --> 00:27:38,080
Speaker 1: church where the meeting had happened, and together these vigilantes

457
00:27:38,160 --> 00:27:41,240
Speaker 1: and the National Guard troops took hundreds of black residents

458
00:27:41,240 --> 00:27:44,520
Speaker 1: of Elaine into custody and held them in temporary stockades.

459
00:27:45,240 --> 00:27:48,439
Speaker 1: This mob, over the next couple of days, killed at

460
00:27:48,560 --> 00:27:51,879
Speaker 1: least two hundred people. The official toll may have been

461
00:27:51,960 --> 00:27:55,600
Speaker 1: much higher, but there wasn't a formal tally. Walter White,

462
00:27:55,720 --> 00:27:59,879
Speaker 1: assistant secretary of the NAACP, and past podcast subject I

463
00:28:00,040 --> 00:28:03,560
Speaker 1: to b Wells Barnett each investigated what had happened in

464
00:28:03,600 --> 00:28:07,760
Speaker 1: a Lane. Both found that the quote armed insurrection being

465
00:28:07,840 --> 00:28:10,640
Speaker 1: hyped in the white press just simply did not exist,

466
00:28:11,000 --> 00:28:14,200
Speaker 1: and if Elaine's black community had been planning an armed insurrection,

467
00:28:14,680 --> 00:28:17,080
Speaker 1: it seemed as though the death toll logically would have

468
00:28:17,080 --> 00:28:20,879
Speaker 1: been much different. None of the white participants in this

469
00:28:21,040 --> 00:28:24,640
Speaker 1: were ever tried for their roles in this massacre. Instead,

470
00:28:24,840 --> 00:28:27,679
Speaker 1: twelve black men were put on trial and the deaths

471
00:28:27,720 --> 00:28:31,960
Speaker 1: of the five white people who were killed. During the trials,

472
00:28:32,000 --> 00:28:35,440
Speaker 1: a white mob surrounded the courthouse and threatened to lynch

473
00:28:35,520 --> 00:28:37,640
Speaker 1: the men if they were not given the death penalty.

474
00:28:38,240 --> 00:28:40,760
Speaker 1: An all white jury found them all guilty, and the

475
00:28:40,880 --> 00:28:43,600
Speaker 1: judge handed down sentences of death for all of them.

476
00:28:44,240 --> 00:28:46,360
Speaker 1: These twelve were not the only people who were set

477
00:28:46,400 --> 00:28:50,240
Speaker 1: to stand trial. Another sixty five accepted plea bargains. After

478
00:28:50,280 --> 00:28:55,360
Speaker 1: that first wave of convictions and sentencing, the NAACP backed

479
00:28:55,360 --> 00:28:57,920
Speaker 1: a series of appeals that finally made their way to

480
00:28:58,000 --> 00:29:01,840
Speaker 1: the US Supreme Court as Voar versus Dempsey in nineteen

481
00:29:01,880 --> 00:29:06,400
Speaker 1: twenty three. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes authored the majority opinion

482
00:29:06,440 --> 00:29:09,920
Speaker 1: that the defendant's constitutional rights had been violated. This was

483
00:29:09,960 --> 00:29:13,000
Speaker 1: a major victory for the NAACP and for the civil

484
00:29:13,080 --> 00:29:17,320
Speaker 1: rights of Black Americans in general. After being granted new trials,

485
00:29:17,400 --> 00:29:21,320
Speaker 1: the twelve men were ultimately freed. Red Summer was not

486
00:29:21,680 --> 00:29:24,680
Speaker 1: at all the end of racist violence in the United States.

487
00:29:24,840 --> 00:29:27,760
Speaker 1: We have talked about similar riots and massacres that happened

488
00:29:27,760 --> 00:29:31,280
Speaker 1: afterward on the show before, including the destruction of Greenwood,

489
00:29:31,320 --> 00:29:34,800
Speaker 1: Oklahoma in nineteen twenty one, and the massacre in Rosewood,

490
00:29:34,800 --> 00:29:38,600
Speaker 1: Florida in nineteen twenty three, but they didn't happen with

491
00:29:38,640 --> 00:29:41,040
Speaker 1: the same frequency as they had during the Red Summer.

492
00:29:42,000 --> 00:29:44,240
Speaker 1: We talked at the start of the show about all

493
00:29:44,240 --> 00:29:46,880
Speaker 1: the factors that had primed the United States for all

494
00:29:46,920 --> 00:29:49,840
Speaker 1: this violence. So that leads to the question of why

495
00:29:49,880 --> 00:29:53,960
Speaker 1: did Red Summer end. The economy did start to improve,

496
00:29:54,440 --> 00:29:57,480
Speaker 1: and especially when it came to mob violence, The onset

497
00:29:57,480 --> 00:30:00,960
Speaker 1: of colder winter weather probably tempered things a little bit,

498
00:30:01,480 --> 00:30:04,400
Speaker 1: but a lot of those other factors were still present

499
00:30:04,520 --> 00:30:07,360
Speaker 1: or even growing. The Great Migration was still going on,

500
00:30:07,520 --> 00:30:10,080
Speaker 1: and by the end of it millions of people would

501
00:30:10,120 --> 00:30:14,520
Speaker 1: have moved to cities. This general atmosphere of nationalism and

502
00:30:14,760 --> 00:30:19,480
Speaker 1: xenophobia was still very present. A big part of it

503
00:30:19,560 --> 00:30:22,160
Speaker 1: is that by the fall of nineteen nineteen, the white

504
00:30:22,160 --> 00:30:25,840
Speaker 1: majority had increasingly started to see these incidents as part

505
00:30:25,920 --> 00:30:29,640
Speaker 1: of an unacceptable pattern. There had been elected officials and

506
00:30:29,720 --> 00:30:32,000
Speaker 1: other civic leaders who had denounced the events from the

507
00:30:32,120 --> 00:30:35,600
Speaker 1: very beginning, but these calls became louder and more frequent.

508
00:30:36,600 --> 00:30:39,640
Speaker 1: Law enforcement officials started taking more steps to make sure

509
00:30:39,680 --> 00:30:42,960
Speaker 1: that mobs couldn't just abduct people from the jail to

510
00:30:43,120 --> 00:30:46,600
Speaker 1: lynch them. The white press also started toning down some

511
00:30:46,720 --> 00:30:50,800
Speaker 1: of its rhetoric in terms of criminal allegations against black residents,

512
00:30:50,840 --> 00:30:54,040
Speaker 1: and then across the board, newspapers started taking a less

513
00:30:54,120 --> 00:30:59,560
Speaker 1: sensationalistic and incendiary approach to discussing race related violence. Civil

514
00:30:59,640 --> 00:31:03,400
Speaker 1: rights were organizations also started working toward building more positive

515
00:31:03,400 --> 00:31:07,440
Speaker 1: relations between black and white communities. For example, after the

516
00:31:07,520 --> 00:31:11,719
Speaker 1: Chicago riot, the city established the Chicago Commission on Race Relations,

517
00:31:12,080 --> 00:31:15,760
Speaker 1: which investigated the riot and made recommendations to prevent something

518
00:31:15,800 --> 00:31:20,040
Speaker 1: similar from happening again. It published its report The Negro

519
00:31:20,160 --> 00:31:22,760
Speaker 1: in Chicago, a Study of Race Relations and a Race

520
00:31:22,840 --> 00:31:26,200
Speaker 1: Riot in nineteen twenty two, which included not just a

521
00:31:26,240 --> 00:31:29,920
Speaker 1: thorough investigation of the riot, but also of relationships between

522
00:31:29,920 --> 00:31:34,320
Speaker 1: white and black communities in Chicago. Although not every riot

523
00:31:34,400 --> 00:31:37,520
Speaker 1: led to this sort of investigation, there were other commissions

524
00:31:37,520 --> 00:31:40,840
Speaker 1: and organizations that did the same types of work elsewhere

525
00:31:40,880 --> 00:31:44,160
Speaker 1: in the United States. In other words, the violence didn't

526
00:31:44,160 --> 00:31:47,360
Speaker 1: just play itself out. People actively worked to stop it.

527
00:31:48,840 --> 00:31:51,480
Speaker 1: So that's sort of the highlights of highlights is not

528
00:31:51,520 --> 00:31:54,520
Speaker 1: even a good word like low lights. Yes, that's sort

529
00:31:54,560 --> 00:31:57,600
Speaker 1: of a quick look at read Summer. Like I said,

530
00:31:57,600 --> 00:32:00,040
Speaker 1: this could be there could be a whole podcast. It

531
00:32:00,120 --> 00:32:02,480
Speaker 1: would just be about Red Summer that would go on

532
00:32:02,600 --> 00:32:06,080
Speaker 1: for many, many, many episodes, because there were so many

533
00:32:06,720 --> 00:32:08,880
Speaker 1: things that happened, but so many of them follow this

534
00:32:09,040 --> 00:32:14,440
Speaker 1: exact same pattern in terms of like the precipitating event

535
00:32:14,800 --> 00:32:19,280
Speaker 1: and then what transpired, the actions that this like white

536
00:32:19,320 --> 00:32:22,760
Speaker 1: mob took, and then how things usually ended without any

537
00:32:22,840 --> 00:32:32,280
Speaker 1: kind of formal acknowledgment or investigation. Thanks so much for

538
00:32:32,360 --> 00:32:35,160
Speaker 1: joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send

539
00:32:35,200 --> 00:32:39,040
Speaker 1: us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio

540
00:32:39,200 --> 00:32:42,120
Speaker 1: dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on

541
00:32:42,160 --> 00:32:45,560
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to

542
00:32:45,600 --> 00:32:46,640
Speaker 1: your favorite shows