WEBVTT - SYMHC Classics: Red Summer 1919 0:00:02.360 --> 0:00:05.760 Happy Saturday. In this week's episode about the Memphis massacre, 0:00:05.920 --> 0:00:09.119 we talked about that massacre being part of a pattern. 0:00:09.920 --> 0:00:13.120 While we mentioned some other similar massacres, we really didn't 0:00:13.160 --> 0:00:15.920 spend a lot of time on the pattern part. So 0:00:16.120 --> 0:00:19.000 for today's Saturday Classic, we have chosen an episode that 0:00:19.120 --> 0:00:22.319 does spend more time on that. It's our June third, 0:00:22.400 --> 0:00:25.960 twenty nineteenth episode on the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen. 0:00:28.880 --> 0:00:31.840 Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production 0:00:31.960 --> 0:00:43.080 of iHeartRadio. This year is the one hundredth anniversary of 0:00:43.120 --> 0:00:46.199 the wave of racist violence in the United States that 0:00:46.240 --> 0:00:48.360 came to be known as Red Summer. And we talked 0:00:48.360 --> 0:00:51.240 about this just a little bit in our twenty fifteen 0:00:51.360 --> 0:00:54.560 episode on the Harlem hell Fighters, but that was a 0:00:54.600 --> 0:00:57.640 long time ago, and it was just like a little 0:00:57.640 --> 0:01:00.000 bit in part three of the episode, not really enough 0:01:00.080 --> 0:01:03.080 to do it justice. And honestly, it was a whole summer. 0:01:03.200 --> 0:01:06.880 You could do an entire podcast just on this, but 0:01:07.000 --> 0:01:09.080 with one hundred anniversary, it seemed like a good time 0:01:09.160 --> 0:01:12.600 to return to it. In a lot of ways, the 0:01:12.680 --> 0:01:15.480 violence of Red Summer was a response to two earlier 0:01:15.520 --> 0:01:18.520 and sometimes overlapping events, and those were the Great Migration 0:01:19.080 --> 0:01:21.240 and the return of black soldiers who had fought in 0:01:21.360 --> 0:01:23.839 World War One to the United States. And to be clear, 0:01:24.040 --> 0:01:27.720 neither of these things caused Red Summer. Red Summer was 0:01:27.760 --> 0:01:32.400 a backlash to them. These returning veterans and migrating families 0:01:32.440 --> 0:01:34.960 were not to blame for what happened. But since this 0:01:35.000 --> 0:01:37.560 is part of the historical context, today's episode is going 0:01:37.600 --> 0:01:39.760 to start off with a little bit about those two 0:01:39.800 --> 0:01:42.440 events before getting into the violence that stretch the summer 0:01:42.440 --> 0:01:44.520 and fall. And in case it is not clear, this 0:01:44.600 --> 0:01:48.720 episode includes a lot of violence, including sexual violence. Some 0:01:48.800 --> 0:01:54.160 of it is just particularly horrifying in nature. The Great 0:01:54.200 --> 0:01:57.760 Migration was a mass relocation of Black Americans out of 0:01:57.800 --> 0:02:00.680 the South and into the cities in the north end Midwest. 0:02:01.360 --> 0:02:03.960 It peaked in the mid to late nineteen teens, but 0:02:04.040 --> 0:02:08.720 the same pattern of migration continued for decades afterward. There 0:02:08.800 --> 0:02:12.320 was also migration within the South from rural areas into 0:02:12.400 --> 0:02:15.639 southern cities. Most of the people who were moving had 0:02:15.680 --> 0:02:19.280 been sharecroppers, doing essentially the same work as their enslaved 0:02:19.320 --> 0:02:22.320 ancestors had done, sometimes even on the same land and 0:02:22.400 --> 0:02:26.120 for the same landowners. Sharecroppers rented the land that they 0:02:26.160 --> 0:02:28.600 lived and worked on, and then they paid their rent 0:02:28.600 --> 0:02:30.799 by giving a share of their crop to the landowner. 0:02:31.520 --> 0:02:34.160 But it was almost impossible to make a decent living 0:02:34.200 --> 0:02:38.399 as a sharecropper. Many sharecroppers were in debt to their landlords, 0:02:38.440 --> 0:02:41.160 owing money for things like the tools and supplies that 0:02:41.200 --> 0:02:45.120 they needed to do their jobs. Unscrupulous landlords could make 0:02:45.160 --> 0:02:49.200 this situation much worse. But even if a person's landlord 0:02:49.320 --> 0:02:52.960 was honest and fair, a sharecropper often earned a subsistence 0:02:53.040 --> 0:02:57.040 level living at best. Sharecroppers faced the same threats to 0:02:57.080 --> 0:03:00.160 their livelihoods as any other farmer did, including pests and 0:03:00.200 --> 0:03:04.240 bad weather and fluctuating prices. The bowl weavil, which had 0:03:04.280 --> 0:03:07.119 been introduced to the United States and the late eighteen hundreds, 0:03:07.160 --> 0:03:11.200 spread farther and farther into cotton territory in the nineteen teens, 0:03:11.240 --> 0:03:14.519 destroying the crop as it went, and then in nineteen fifteen, 0:03:14.560 --> 0:03:17.880 widespread flooding affected many of the same areas that had 0:03:18.080 --> 0:03:22.200 just been ravaged by weavils. As the Southern economy shifted 0:03:22.200 --> 0:03:25.440 after the Civil War, white farmers had also been caught 0:03:25.520 --> 0:03:28.959 up in this same system of sharecropping. It was exploitive 0:03:29.040 --> 0:03:31.680 regardless of who was doing the farming, but the system 0:03:31.840 --> 0:03:35.840 was stacked most heavily against black sharecroppers, who faced the 0:03:35.880 --> 0:03:42.240 additional hardships of systemic discrimination in racism, including segregation, political oppression, 0:03:42.360 --> 0:03:46.720 and racist violence. In the nineteen teens, black Southerners started 0:03:46.760 --> 0:03:50.000 hearing about new opportunities and a potentially better life in 0:03:50.040 --> 0:03:53.320 the North and the Midwest. This included jobs with better 0:03:53.360 --> 0:03:57.320 wages and better educational opportunities for their children. People heard 0:03:57.320 --> 0:04:00.200 about these opportunities through word of mouth from friends or 0:04:00.240 --> 0:04:04.240 family who had already moved. Word also came through advertisements 0:04:04.240 --> 0:04:07.200 placed by businesses and organizations that were hoping to attract 0:04:07.240 --> 0:04:10.160 new workers to their area. After the United States entered 0:04:10.200 --> 0:04:13.240 World War One, some of these jobs were specifically connected 0:04:13.240 --> 0:04:17.120 to the war effort. Between nineteen fourteen and nineteen twenty, 0:04:17.600 --> 0:04:21.280 roughly five hundred thousand Black Americans left the South and 0:04:21.360 --> 0:04:25.359 moved to urban areas elsewhere. In nineteen twenty, m at J. 0:04:25.560 --> 0:04:28.479 Scott described it this way, quote, they were in the 0:04:28.520 --> 0:04:31.360 frame of mind for leaving. They left as though they 0:04:31.360 --> 0:04:34.719 were fleeing some curse. They were willing to make almost 0:04:34.760 --> 0:04:38.279 any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket, and they left 0:04:38.400 --> 0:04:42.120 with the intention of staying. This led to labor shortages 0:04:42.160 --> 0:04:45.839 in the South, and sometimes entire communities were abandoned. That 0:04:45.960 --> 0:04:50.279 also dramatically shifted the racial demographics of cities like Detroit, Chicago, 0:04:50.520 --> 0:04:54.000 New York, and Philadelphia. Will be returning to that shift 0:04:54.000 --> 0:04:56.880 in just a bit. The United States became involved in 0:04:56.920 --> 0:05:00.160 World War One as the Great Migration was happening. The 0:05:00.240 --> 0:05:04.280 war directly affected the nation's black citizens as well. After 0:05:04.320 --> 0:05:07.719 the United States declared war on Germany in nineteen seventeen, 0:05:08.120 --> 0:05:11.720 people were eager to enlist in the military. This included 0:05:11.800 --> 0:05:15.320 at least twenty thousand black men who volunteered in April 0:05:15.360 --> 0:05:19.520 and early May. This actually presented a problem for the military, 0:05:19.560 --> 0:05:23.600 though the Marines didn't accept black recruits at all. The 0:05:23.720 --> 0:05:27.880 Navy and the Coastguard technically did, but only in menial roles. 0:05:27.920 --> 0:05:30.640 So overwhelmingly black men were serving in the Army, which 0:05:30.680 --> 0:05:33.800 at least in theory, accepted black men in most areas 0:05:33.800 --> 0:05:37.760 of the service and practice, though the army was racially segregated, 0:05:37.880 --> 0:05:40.400 with only a very few all black units in existence 0:05:40.440 --> 0:05:43.760 at that time, So after the declaration of war on Germany, 0:05:43.800 --> 0:05:46.599 the Army reached its quota for black recruits in just 0:05:46.640 --> 0:05:50.880 about a week. In May of nineteen seventeen, Congress passed 0:05:50.920 --> 0:05:54.680 the Selective Service Act, which required men regardless of race 0:05:54.720 --> 0:05:58.440 to register for the draft. The Army began creating new 0:05:58.520 --> 0:06:00.840 all black units and trained War one class of black 0:06:00.839 --> 0:06:04.240 officers at Fort des Moines in May of nineteen seventeen, 0:06:04.760 --> 0:06:08.280 sending most black officer candidates after that point to train 0:06:08.320 --> 0:06:13.839 at camps in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, or Panama. Ultimately, 0:06:13.920 --> 0:06:17.000 about three hundred and seventy thousand black men served in 0:06:17.080 --> 0:06:20.640 the US Army in World War One. These men faced 0:06:20.680 --> 0:06:24.440 persistent discrimination during their service. All Black units were often 0:06:24.480 --> 0:06:28.039 assigned to menial work like digging trenches and unloading cargo 0:06:28.200 --> 0:06:31.680 and removing unexploded ordnance. And while it's true that this 0:06:31.839 --> 0:06:34.200 was all work that needed to be done and somebody 0:06:34.200 --> 0:06:38.760 had to do it, disproportionately, the people doing the Army's hardest, dirtiest, 0:06:38.800 --> 0:06:42.760 and most degrading work were black. Black soldiers also experienced 0:06:42.880 --> 0:06:46.520 day to day harassment and discrimination throughout the war. There's 0:06:46.600 --> 0:06:49.080 more about all this in that past episode about the 0:06:49.080 --> 0:06:53.160 Harlem hell Fighters. Support for participation in the war wasn't 0:06:53.279 --> 0:06:56.720 universal within the black community. One line of thought was 0:06:56.760 --> 0:06:58.760 that it made no sense for people to put their 0:06:58.800 --> 0:07:01.360 lives on the line for a country that at best 0:07:01.800 --> 0:07:05.640 treated them as second class citizens. This was especially true 0:07:05.640 --> 0:07:08.640 because the United States had framed its involvement in the 0:07:08.680 --> 0:07:11.920 war as making the world safe for democracy, so it 0:07:11.920 --> 0:07:14.800 seemed hypocritical to fight for a country that was refusing 0:07:14.840 --> 0:07:18.040 to do the same within its own borders. But many 0:07:18.120 --> 0:07:21.200 civil rights leaders and organizations really took the opposite stance, 0:07:21.680 --> 0:07:24.000 arguing that this was a chance for black citizens to 0:07:24.080 --> 0:07:26.400 demonstrate to the rest of the nation that they were 0:07:26.480 --> 0:07:29.960 human beings and patriots worthy of respect who were actively 0:07:30.000 --> 0:07:34.160 making a positive contribution to the nation. The experience of 0:07:34.240 --> 0:07:37.360 military service during the war motivated many of these soldiers 0:07:37.400 --> 0:07:41.880 to actively fight for equal rights after they returned home. W. E. B. 0:07:42.000 --> 0:07:45.360 Du Boys described it this way in the NAACP's magazine 0:07:45.400 --> 0:07:49.720 The Crisis quote, we are returning from war the Crisis, 0:07:49.760 --> 0:07:52.320 and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into 0:07:52.400 --> 0:07:55.920 a great struggle for bleeding France and what she means 0:07:56.040 --> 0:07:58.960 and has meant and will mean to us and humanity, 0:07:59.040 --> 0:08:02.119 and against the threat of German race arrogance. We fought 0:08:02.160 --> 0:08:05.720 gladly into the last drop of blood for America and 0:08:05.800 --> 0:08:09.200 her highest ideals. We fought in far off hope. For 0:08:09.320 --> 0:08:13.240 the dominant Southern oligarchy entrenched in Washington. We fought in 0:08:13.280 --> 0:08:17.880 bitter resignation. And the sedatorial boys went on to describe 0:08:18.000 --> 0:08:20.960 the United States as a shameful land, saying that it 0:08:21.080 --> 0:08:25.800 lynches and disenfranchises its citizens, encourages ignorance, and steals from 0:08:25.880 --> 0:08:30.560 and insults black citizens. He concluded by saying, quote, we return, 0:08:30.960 --> 0:08:36.120 we return from fighting. We return fighting make way for democracy. 0:08:36.440 --> 0:08:38.880 We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, 0:08:38.920 --> 0:08:41.280 we will save it in the United States of America. 0:08:41.440 --> 0:08:45.840 Or know the reason why. James Weldon Johnson, who coined 0:08:45.880 --> 0:08:48.520 the term red Summer, described it this way in his 0:08:48.640 --> 0:08:52.720 nineteen thirty three autobiography, quote, the colored people throughout the 0:08:52.720 --> 0:08:57.200 country were disheartened and dismayed. The great majority had trustingly 0:08:57.240 --> 0:08:59.800 felt that because they had cheerfully done their bit in 0:08:59.840 --> 0:09:03.120 the life war, conditions for them would be better. The 0:09:03.200 --> 0:09:07.240 reverse seemed to be true. Earlier civil rights advocacy had 0:09:07.280 --> 0:09:11.240 tended toward a conciliatory approach, but after the war, Dubois 0:09:11.280 --> 0:09:14.800 and other civil rights leaders were increasingly direct lobbying very 0:09:14.800 --> 0:09:18.400 aggressively for equal rights legislation and for anti lynching laws. 0:09:18.880 --> 0:09:21.520 This advocacy became part of what came to be known 0:09:21.559 --> 0:09:24.520 as the New Negro movement, which was rooted in assertiveness 0:09:24.520 --> 0:09:27.640 and confidence and was also connected to the Harlem Renaissance. 0:09:28.160 --> 0:09:32.240 Membership in the NAACP really surged from about nine thousand 0:09:32.240 --> 0:09:36.959 members before the war to one hundred thousand afterward. Compounding 0:09:36.960 --> 0:09:39.800 that many of the people who moved from the South 0:09:39.920 --> 0:09:42.200 did not find the North to be what they imagined 0:09:42.200 --> 0:09:46.520 it to be. Many schools, neighborhoods, and public accommodations were 0:09:46.559 --> 0:09:51.120 still segregated by custom, if not by law. Many industries 0:09:51.160 --> 0:09:53.360 were closed to black workers, and many of the ones 0:09:53.360 --> 0:09:57.920 that weren't involved manual labor or service work. Discrimination and 0:09:58.000 --> 0:10:00.720 harassment may have been less overt in in some ways, 0:10:01.080 --> 0:10:04.440 but they were still there. All of this folded back 0:10:04.480 --> 0:10:08.040 into that growing advocacy for equal rights and equal treatment. 0:10:09.080 --> 0:10:12.839 So it was a whole system in which people who 0:10:12.880 --> 0:10:15.440 had moved, or people who had come back from war, 0:10:15.559 --> 0:10:17.559 or people who had done both of those things were 0:10:17.600 --> 0:10:22.200 finding themselves still facing all of this discrimination. And then simultaneously, 0:10:22.280 --> 0:10:24.720 people of all races in the United States were competing 0:10:24.720 --> 0:10:28.440 for scarce jobs and housing. Immediately after the war, the 0:10:28.480 --> 0:10:31.160 first Red Scare was going on, and that created a 0:10:31.200 --> 0:10:35.640 climate of fear of communism and Bolshevism. Also, immediately after 0:10:35.679 --> 0:10:38.960 the war, the nation was very nationalistic and xenophobic, and 0:10:39.080 --> 0:10:42.240 all of this together fed into this backlash that came 0:10:42.280 --> 0:10:44.880 to be known as Red Summer. We'll start talking about 0:10:44.880 --> 0:10:57.320 how it unfolded after a sponsor break. The two main 0:10:57.400 --> 0:11:01.560 hallmarks of Red Summer were lynching and mass violence against 0:11:01.559 --> 0:11:04.320 whole communities of black residents, which were often described as 0:11:04.440 --> 0:11:08.600 race riots. These weren't unique to nineteen nineteen. The same 0:11:08.640 --> 0:11:11.920 types of violence happened before and after Red Summer, but 0:11:12.080 --> 0:11:15.200 during that summer and fall of nineteen nineteen both were 0:11:15.240 --> 0:11:18.160 really at a peak. And although the great migration that 0:11:18.200 --> 0:11:20.760 we just talked about was from the South into urban 0:11:20.800 --> 0:11:23.960 parts of the North and Midwest, these incidents happened all 0:11:24.080 --> 0:11:28.360 over the country. However, details are hard to track down 0:11:28.400 --> 0:11:31.600 for some of these incidents today. At the time, they 0:11:31.600 --> 0:11:35.080 were often reported in both black and white newspapers, although 0:11:35.080 --> 0:11:40.040 with completely different interpretations of the events. The NAACP and 0:11:40.120 --> 0:11:44.360 other civil rights organizations also conducted investigations into as many 0:11:44.400 --> 0:11:47.400 of them as they could, but often there was no 0:11:47.480 --> 0:11:51.440 formal investigation by law enforcement and no official record of 0:11:51.440 --> 0:11:55.560 what actually happened, especially when it came to mob violence. 0:11:55.840 --> 0:12:00.679 Some communities conducted investigations later on or convene truth and 0:12:00.760 --> 0:12:05.880 reconciliation commissions to document what happened and make recommendations for restitution. 0:12:06.559 --> 0:12:09.200 But in cases where that didn't happen at this point, 0:12:09.440 --> 0:12:12.080 the people who remember the events have since died, so 0:12:12.280 --> 0:12:16.240 many details are lost. So we're going to start with 0:12:16.320 --> 0:12:20.160 this pattern of lynching. A lynching is an extra judicial 0:12:20.240 --> 0:12:22.720 murder of someone who has been accused of a crime 0:12:22.840 --> 0:12:26.600 or some other perceived wrongdoing. Anyone can be the victim 0:12:26.679 --> 0:12:29.560 of lynching, although most often in the United States, lynching 0:12:29.640 --> 0:12:32.960 victims have been members of a racial, ethnic, or religious minority. 0:12:33.440 --> 0:12:36.000 In the United States, in the early twentieth century, most 0:12:36.120 --> 0:12:39.319 victims of lynching were black Americans or white Americans who 0:12:39.320 --> 0:12:42.920 had been working for civil rights. In nineteen nineteen, there 0:12:42.920 --> 0:12:46.920 were eighty three recorded victims of lynching, at least eleven 0:12:46.960 --> 0:12:50.000 of whom were veterans of World War One. That was 0:12:50.080 --> 0:12:55.360 up from sixty four in nineteen eighteen. Victims of lynching 0:12:55.440 --> 0:12:58.440 had often been accused of a crime against a white person, 0:12:58.760 --> 0:13:02.880 especially a white woman. Sometimes a crime really had taken place, 0:13:02.960 --> 0:13:08.319 but in other cases the allegations were completely fabricated. Regardless 0:13:08.360 --> 0:13:11.240 of whether anyone had committed a crime, the idea of 0:13:11.280 --> 0:13:14.800 a crime was used as justification for murder. It was 0:13:14.840 --> 0:13:17.840 often the idea of a white woman having been allegedly 0:13:17.840 --> 0:13:20.959 assaulted by a black man, something we talked more about 0:13:21.000 --> 0:13:23.760 in our two parter on the eighteen ninety eight Wilmington 0:13:23.840 --> 0:13:27.600 Coup and one of Red Summer's first incidents, a black 0:13:27.640 --> 0:13:31.080 man named Benny Richards allegedly shot his ex wife and 0:13:31.120 --> 0:13:35.160 her sister on May second, nineteen nineteen. His ex wife died, 0:13:35.200 --> 0:13:38.320 and Richards also allegedly wounded the sheriff and other white 0:13:38.320 --> 0:13:42.319 men who arrived on the scene. We have to say allegedly, 0:13:42.480 --> 0:13:46.160 because Richards was not brought to trial. Instead, a mob 0:13:46.240 --> 0:13:49.800 of between one hundred and three hundred white men apprehended him, 0:13:50.240 --> 0:13:53.760 in part by dumping gasoline into the swampy area surrounding 0:13:53.760 --> 0:13:56.280 his home and setting fire to it to try to 0:13:56.360 --> 0:14:00.280 drive him out. After they captured Richards, the mob hanged him, 0:14:00.559 --> 0:14:04.240 shot his body, and set it on fire. This was 0:14:04.360 --> 0:14:06.920 not a remotely isolated incident, and it was part of 0:14:06.960 --> 0:14:09.720 a pattern in terms of what happened and how it 0:14:09.720 --> 0:14:13.840 played out. On May fourteenth, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a mob 0:14:13.880 --> 0:14:16.640 of between eight hundred and one thousand people broke into 0:14:16.720 --> 0:14:19.640 the jail and took twenty two year old Lloyd Clay 0:14:19.720 --> 0:14:23.160 out of his cell. Clay had been accused of assaulting 0:14:23.200 --> 0:14:26.400 a white woman named Mattie Hudson. She had been presented 0:14:26.400 --> 0:14:29.560 with a lineup earlier in the day. In two different times, 0:14:29.600 --> 0:14:31.600 she had said that Clay was not the man who 0:14:31.640 --> 0:14:35.440 assaulted her, but after the mob removed him from his cell, 0:14:35.760 --> 0:14:38.600 they asked her one more time to identify him as 0:14:38.640 --> 0:14:42.640 her assailant, and she did. The mob poured oil over 0:14:42.760 --> 0:14:46.040 Clay's head and hanged him over a bonfire while also 0:14:46.200 --> 0:14:51.080 shooting him repeatedly. On May twenty fourth, seventy two year 0:14:51.120 --> 0:14:55.120 old Berry Washington was in jail in Milan, Georgia. Two 0:14:55.200 --> 0:14:58.600 white men had reportedly come into his neighborhood and tried 0:14:58.640 --> 0:15:02.920 to assault to teenage els. Washington had tried to defend 0:15:02.920 --> 0:15:05.400 them and had killed one of the men in the process. 0:15:06.320 --> 0:15:09.200 A local Baptist minister led a mob of roughly one 0:15:09.320 --> 0:15:13.480 hundred white men who abducted Washington from the jail, hanged him, 0:15:13.520 --> 0:15:17.200 and shot him repeatedly. The mob then terrorized the area's 0:15:17.240 --> 0:15:22.320 black residents and looted black owned businesses. On June seventeenth, 0:15:22.400 --> 0:15:27.200 a white mob in Longview, Texas, murdered Lemuel Walters. According 0:15:27.200 --> 0:15:30.200 to reports in white newspapers, he had robbed the home 0:15:30.240 --> 0:15:32.920 of a white woman and assaulted her, but according to 0:15:32.960 --> 0:15:35.920 an article in the Chicago Defender, Walters and this woman 0:15:35.960 --> 0:15:39.720 had been having a consensual relationship. There was a riot 0:15:39.800 --> 0:15:43.360 in Longview shortly thereafter, which started with a white mob 0:15:43.440 --> 0:15:46.600 assaulting a black journalist that they believed had written this 0:15:46.800 --> 0:15:50.160 article in the Chicago Defender, and then burning down his home. 0:15:51.160 --> 0:15:55.760 On June twenty six, a mob lynched John Hartfield of Ellisville, Mississippi, 0:15:56.080 --> 0:15:58.920 on the grounds that he had, according to them, raped 0:15:58.920 --> 0:16:02.560 a white woman. His family members and friends maintained that 0:16:02.600 --> 0:16:05.920 it was because he had a white girlfriend. This lynching 0:16:06.000 --> 0:16:08.640 was announced ahead of time on the front page of 0:16:08.680 --> 0:16:12.480 the Jackson Daily News under the headline John Hartsfield will 0:16:12.520 --> 0:16:15.960 be lynched by Ellisville mob at five o'clock this afternoon. 0:16:17.040 --> 0:16:20.240 On August twenty eighth, a mob dragged Eli Cooper out 0:16:20.280 --> 0:16:23.840 of his home in Cadwell, Georgia. This mob's rational is 0:16:23.920 --> 0:16:26.400 not clear. In some accounts he had made a pass 0:16:26.440 --> 0:16:28.680 at a white woman, and others she had made a 0:16:28.720 --> 0:16:32.000 pass at him. A newspaper report from the time said quote, 0:16:32.080 --> 0:16:34.640 he had been talking for some time in a manner 0:16:34.680 --> 0:16:36.920 that was very offensive to the white people of the 0:16:36.960 --> 0:16:40.040 community in which he resided. He was either hanged or 0:16:40.120 --> 0:16:42.280 shot in a church, and then his body was set 0:16:42.280 --> 0:16:45.680 on fire. A few days later, a mob in Bogolusa, 0:16:45.720 --> 0:16:49.720 Louisiana killed veteran Lucius McCarty, who had been accused of 0:16:49.800 --> 0:16:53.360 trying to rape a white woman. His assailants shot him 0:16:53.520 --> 0:16:56.760 hundreds of times before dragging him behind a car and 0:16:56.800 --> 0:17:01.120 burning his body. On September twenty ninth and thirtieth, three 0:17:01.160 --> 0:17:03.960 black men were lynched in Montgomery, Alabama, over the span 0:17:04.040 --> 0:17:08.119 of about twelve hours. A mob abducted Railias Pfeiffer and 0:17:08.240 --> 0:17:11.240 Robert Krosskey as they were being transported to jail after 0:17:11.280 --> 0:17:14.159 being accused of assaulting a white woman. Pfeiffer was a 0:17:14.240 --> 0:17:17.760 veteran and was reportedly in uniform at the time, the 0:17:17.800 --> 0:17:20.280 mob shot both Pfeiffer and Krossky, and then in a 0:17:20.320 --> 0:17:24.199 separate incident, an officer tried to arrest will Temple and 0:17:24.240 --> 0:17:28.440 two other people for disorderly conduct. Temple resisted arrest, fatally 0:17:28.440 --> 0:17:31.480 shooting the officer and being injured himself in the process. 0:17:31.960 --> 0:17:36.160 A mob murdered him in his hospital ward. And these 0:17:36.200 --> 0:17:39.400 are of course just samples from the eighty three recorded 0:17:39.440 --> 0:17:42.600 lynchings in the summer and fall of nineteen nineteen, and 0:17:42.640 --> 0:17:45.960 there were certainly others that were not recorded. And the 0:17:46.000 --> 0:17:49.320 reason none of the perpetrators are named is that overwhelmingly 0:17:49.600 --> 0:17:52.680 we do not know who they were. It was incredibly 0:17:52.760 --> 0:17:55.320 rare for the perpetrators of lynching to face any kind 0:17:55.359 --> 0:17:59.560 of criminal charges. Sometimes members of law enforcement were even 0:17:59.640 --> 0:18:03.600 part of the lynch mob. Occasionally law enforcement offered a 0:18:03.640 --> 0:18:07.520 reward for information or tried to arrest perpetrators, but when 0:18:07.520 --> 0:18:12.359 that happened, the white community often reacted with outrage. Afterward, 0:18:12.520 --> 0:18:15.200 members of the mob frequently took souvenirs with them from 0:18:15.200 --> 0:18:18.200 the scene, as well as taking photos which were later 0:18:18.240 --> 0:18:22.360 distributed as postcards. These were also not just some random, 0:18:22.480 --> 0:18:25.679 haphazard actions. They were part of a pattern of really 0:18:25.720 --> 0:18:29.200 gruesome racist violence committed by the white community in order 0:18:29.240 --> 0:18:33.199 to terrorize, punish, and humiliate the black community and in 0:18:33.240 --> 0:18:36.119 the minds of the perpetrators quote, keep them in their place. 0:18:36.760 --> 0:18:39.240 The same was true of nineteen nineteen's riots, which we 0:18:39.280 --> 0:18:50.680 will talk about after a break. The other major hallmark 0:18:50.760 --> 0:18:54.440 of Red Summer was mass violence perpetrated by white mobs 0:18:54.520 --> 0:18:57.800 against black people and the neighborhoods where they lived and worked. 0:18:58.320 --> 0:19:01.400 These incidents are often described as race riots, and that's 0:19:01.440 --> 0:19:04.840 a term whose meaning has shifted in various ways over 0:19:04.880 --> 0:19:07.520 the decades, but to many people it suggest that people 0:19:07.560 --> 0:19:10.480 of two or more races were fighting against each other 0:19:10.600 --> 0:19:13.960 as equal aggressors, and that's really not what was happening 0:19:14.040 --> 0:19:17.800 during Red Summer. Often black communities did try to defend 0:19:17.920 --> 0:19:21.800 themselves or fight back, and occasionally black residents went on 0:19:21.960 --> 0:19:26.080 the attack themselves, but overwhelmingly, even when this happened, the 0:19:26.119 --> 0:19:30.520 primary instigators were the white mob. As was the case 0:19:30.560 --> 0:19:33.959 with lynchings, these riots often followed some kind of crime 0:19:34.160 --> 0:19:37.919 or wrongdoing allegedly committed by a black person, usually a 0:19:37.960 --> 0:19:42.080 black man, but often these criminal allegations were completely false 0:19:42.320 --> 0:19:44.840 or the response from the white community was way out 0:19:44.880 --> 0:19:48.640 of proportion to what had really happened, and in some cases, 0:19:48.680 --> 0:19:52.399 the perceived wrongdoing wasn't a criminal act at all. In 0:19:52.480 --> 0:19:55.720 Port Arthur, Texas, a riot followed objections to a black 0:19:55.760 --> 0:19:59.119 man smoking in a streetcar in front of a white woman. 0:20:00.000 --> 0:20:04.120 In multiple instances, the purported transgression was black veterans appearing 0:20:04.119 --> 0:20:07.400 in public in their uniforms. In one of the incidents 0:20:07.400 --> 0:20:09.399 that we're going to talk about in a moment, it 0:20:09.480 --> 0:20:13.480 was a response to sharecroppers trying to organize for fairer treatment. 0:20:14.400 --> 0:20:17.880 There were at least twenty six documented examples of these 0:20:17.960 --> 0:20:22.320 riots between April and November nineteen nineteen. You'll see numbers 0:20:22.320 --> 0:20:25.240 that range from like twenty four to thirty. It kind 0:20:25.240 --> 0:20:28.480 of depends on how people are defining the window of 0:20:28.520 --> 0:20:33.080 time and exactly what constitutes a riot. They definitely occurred 0:20:33.119 --> 0:20:41.320 in Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska, 0:20:41.520 --> 0:20:47.400 New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, 0:20:47.480 --> 0:20:50.600 d C. And we're going to talk about three of 0:20:50.640 --> 0:20:54.280 the most notorious. They have a lot of similarities, but 0:20:54.359 --> 0:20:59.400 they also illustrate the range of purported causes. Riots in Washington, 0:20:59.480 --> 0:21:02.040 d C. Followed rumors of an attack on a white 0:21:02.040 --> 0:21:05.119 woman and were largely carried out by soldiers and veterans. 0:21:05.760 --> 0:21:08.920 In Chicago, Illinois, riots followed a breach of the city's 0:21:08.960 --> 0:21:13.679 unofficial rules about segregation, and in Elane, Arkansas, they followed 0:21:13.720 --> 0:21:18.719 black sharecroppers attempts to organize. We will go chronologically, starting 0:21:18.760 --> 0:21:22.000 with the Washington, d C. Riot, which started on July nineteenth, 0:21:22.080 --> 0:21:25.560 nineteen nineteen. A black man had been detained and then 0:21:25.640 --> 0:21:28.639 released by Washington, d C Police under suspicion that he 0:21:28.640 --> 0:21:32.439 had assaulted a white woman. The woman was a sailor's wife, 0:21:32.480 --> 0:21:36.000 which led servicemen, sailors, and veterans to try to seek revenge. 0:21:37.080 --> 0:21:40.199 Rumors about this incident spread through the city saloons and 0:21:40.280 --> 0:21:44.080 pool halls, which were a popular hangout for returning veterans. 0:21:44.840 --> 0:21:48.320 Unemployment was a real issue, so as the rumors swirled, 0:21:48.600 --> 0:21:54.800 the people who heard them were mostly unemployed, intoxicated, and frustrated. Ultimately, 0:21:54.840 --> 0:21:58.120 a mob of about four hundred men, many of them drunk, 0:21:58.400 --> 0:22:03.080 made their way southwest into Washington's majority black neighborhoods, gathering 0:22:03.200 --> 0:22:06.040 up improvised weapons as they went, and some of them 0:22:06.080 --> 0:22:10.720 were still in uniform. This mob attacked black residents indiscriminately, 0:22:10.840 --> 0:22:14.080 and police really did very little to respond. When local 0:22:14.160 --> 0:22:17.879 law enforcement did arrive, they mostly arrested the mob's black 0:22:17.960 --> 0:22:22.119 victims rather than the white perpetrators. This first day of 0:22:22.200 --> 0:22:25.360 street fighting bled into more than four days of rioting, 0:22:25.800 --> 0:22:28.720 with mobs of soldiers and sailors attacking people on the 0:22:28.800 --> 0:22:32.879 street and black residents fighting back. More than one hundred 0:22:32.880 --> 0:22:35.400 and fifty people were physically attacked and at least nine 0:22:35.440 --> 0:22:38.760 people died during the initial wave of fighting, but the 0:22:38.800 --> 0:22:42.679 situation quickly got worse. More than five hundred firearms were 0:22:42.760 --> 0:22:45.960 sold in the city on July twenty first, as black 0:22:46.000 --> 0:22:49.679 residents took up arms to defend themselves because the police 0:22:49.720 --> 0:22:52.480 were not or in some cases to seek restitution for 0:22:52.520 --> 0:22:55.919 the earlier violence. At least fifteen people were killed or 0:22:56.000 --> 0:22:58.879 mortally wounded just on the night of the twenty first, 0:22:59.080 --> 0:23:04.120 ten White five black President Woodrow Wilson finally deployed about 0:23:04.160 --> 0:23:08.520 two thousand troops to try to restore order. By that point, though, 0:23:08.560 --> 0:23:11.400 the city had become so violent that people really thought 0:23:11.440 --> 0:23:14.280 that might not be enough, but the troops got help 0:23:14.320 --> 0:23:16.680 from a heavy rainstorm that drove many of the people 0:23:16.760 --> 0:23:20.520 who had been fighting back indoors. The riot ended on 0:23:20.560 --> 0:23:23.399 May twenty fourth, by which point close to forty people 0:23:23.400 --> 0:23:27.439 had been killed and hundreds injured. The riot ended on 0:23:27.520 --> 0:23:31.000 July twenty fourth, by which point close to forty people 0:23:31.040 --> 0:23:34.119 had been killed and hundreds injured, and then the Chicago 0:23:34.320 --> 0:23:39.040 Riot started just days later on July twenty seventh, nineteen nineteen, 0:23:39.080 --> 0:23:43.080 after an altercation at a swimming area, and the swimming 0:23:43.119 --> 0:23:46.800 area was not officially segregated, but local white residents thought 0:23:46.840 --> 0:23:50.240 of it as for their use only. First, there was 0:23:50.280 --> 0:23:53.359 an altercation on shore between black residents who wanted to 0:23:53.440 --> 0:23:56.600 use the swimming area and white residents who demanded that 0:23:56.640 --> 0:24:00.000 they leave. As this was happening, a group of boys 0:24:00.240 --> 0:24:03.240 was swimming from a raft and accidentally crossed into the 0:24:03.280 --> 0:24:06.600 white's only part of the lake. Someone threw a rock 0:24:06.640 --> 0:24:09.399 at them and hit seventeen year old Eugene Williams in 0:24:09.440 --> 0:24:13.800 the head. He lost consciousness and drowned. The coroner's jury 0:24:13.880 --> 0:24:16.520 has a slightly different account that he was not struck, 0:24:16.600 --> 0:24:19.320