SYMHC Classics: Red Summer 1919

This 2019 episode marked 100 years since a wave of racist violence in the U. S. that became known as Red Summer. In many ways, Red Summer was a response to (but NOT caused by) two earlier events: the Great Migration and the return of black soldiers who had fought in World War I. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:02Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 2:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. In this week's episode about the Memphis massacre, we talked about that massacre being part of a pattern. While we mentioned some other similar massacres, we really didn't spend a lot of time on the pattern part. So for today's Saturday classic, we have chosen an episode that does spend more time on that. It's our June 3, 2019 episode on the Red Summer of 1919.

• 2:33Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  This year is the 100th anniversary of the wave of racist violence in the United States that came to be known as Red Summer. And we talked about this just a little bit in our 2015 episode on the Harlem Hellfighters. But that was a long time ago, and it was just like a little bit in part three of the episode, not really enough to do it justice. And honestly, it was a whole summer. You could do an entire podcast just on this. But with the 100th anniversary, it seemed like a good time to return to it. In a lot of ways, the violence of Red Summer was a response to two earlier and sometimes overlapping events. And those were the Great Migration and the return of Black soldiers who had fought in World War I to the United States.

• 3:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  And to be clear, neither of these things caused Red Summer. Red Summer was a backlash to them. These returning veterans and migrating families were not to blame for what happened. But since this is part of the historical context, today's episode is going to start off with a little bit about those two events before getting into the violence that stretched through the summer and fall. And in case it is not clear, this episode includes a lot of violence, including sexual violence. Some of it is just particularly horrifying in nature.

• 3:58Holly Frey?

  The Great Migration was a mass relocation of Black Americans out of the South and into the cities in the North and Midwest. It peaked in the mid to late 19-teens, but the same pattern of migration continued for decades afterward. There was also migration within the South from rural areas into southern cities.

• 4:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Most of the people who were moving had been sharecroppers, doing essentially the same work as their enslaved ancestors had done, sometimes even on the same land and for the same landowners. Sharecroppers rented the land that they lived and worked on, and then they paid their rent by giving a share of their crop to the landowner.

• 4:35Holly Frey?

  But it was almost impossible to make a decent living as a sharecropper. Many sharecroppers were in debt to their landlords, owing money for things like the tools and supplies that they needed to do their jobs. Unscrupulous landlords could make this situation much worse, but even if a person's landlord was honest and fair, a sharecropper often earned a subsistence level of living at best.

• 4:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Sharecroppers faced the same threats to their livelihoods as any other farmer did, including pests and bad weather and fluctuating prices. The boll weevil, which had been introduced to the United States in the late 1800s, spread farther and farther into cotton territory in the 19-teens, destroying the crop as it went. And then in 1915, widespread flooding affected many of the same areas that had just been ravaged by weevils.

• 5:24Holly Frey?

  As the southern economy shifted after the Civil War, white farmers had also been caught up in this same system of sharecropping. It was exploitive regardless of who was doing the farming, but the system was stacked most heavily against Black sharecroppers, who faced the additional hardships of systemic discrimination and racism, including segregation, political oppression, and racist violence.

• 5:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the 19-teens, Black Southerners started hearing about new opportunities and a potentially better life in the North and the Midwest. This included jobs with better wages and better educational opportunities for their children. People heard about these opportunities through word of mouth from friends or family who had already moved. Word also came through advertisements placed by businesses and organizations that were hoping to attract new workers to their area. After the United States entered World War I, some of these jobs were specifically connected to the war effort.

• 6:19Holly Frey?

  Between 1914 and 1920, roughly 500,000 Black Americans left the South and moved to urban areas elsewhere. In 1920, Emmett J. Scott described it this way, quote, "They were in the frame of mind for leaving. They left as though they were fleeing some curse. They were willing to make almost any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket, and they left with the intention of staying."

• 6:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  This led to labor shortages in the South, and sometimes entire communities were abandoned. It also dramatically shifted the racial demographics of cities like Detroit, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. We'll be returning to that shift in just a bit.

• 6:59Holly Frey?

  The United States became involved in World War I as the Great Migration was happening, and the war directly affected the nation's Black citizens as well. After the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, people were eager to enlist in the military. This included at least 20,000 Black men who volunteered in April and early May.

• 7:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  This actually presented a problem for the military, though. The Marines didn't accept Black recruits at all. The Navy and the Coast Guard technically did, but only in menial roles. So overwhelmingly, Black men were serving in the Army, which at least in theory, accepted Black men in most areas of the service. In practice, though, the Army was racially segregated, with only a very few all-Black units in existence at that time. So after the declaration of war on Germany, the Army reached its quota for Black recruits in just about a week.

• 7:51Holly Frey?

  In May of 1917, Congress passed the Selective Service Act, which required men, regardless of race, to register for the draft. The Army began creating new all-Black units and trained one class of Black officers at Fort Des Moines in May of 1917, sending most Black officer candidates after that point to train at camps in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, or Panama. Ultimately, about 370,000 black men served in the US Army in World War I.

• 8:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  These men faced persistent discrimination during their service. All black units were often assigned to menial work like digging trenches and unloading cargo and removing unexploded ordnance. And while it's true that this was all work that needed to be done and somebody had to do it, disproportionately, the people doing the Army's hardest, dirtiest, and most degrading work were black. Black soldiers also experienced day-to-day harassment and discrimination throughout the war. There's more about all this in that past episode about the Harlem Hellfighters.

• 8:54Holly Frey?

  Support for participation in the war wasn't universal within the black community. One line of thought was that it made no sense for people to put their lives on the line for a country that, at best, treated them as second-class citizens. This was especially true because the United States had framed its involvement in the war as making the world safe for democracy. So it seemed hypocritical to fight for a country that was refusing to do the same within its own borders.

• 9:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  But many civil rights leaders and organizations really took the opposite stance, arguing that this was a chance for black citizens to demonstrate to the rest of the nation that they were human beings and patriots worthy of respect, who were actively making a positive contribution to the nation.

• 9:36Holly Frey?

  The experience of military service during the war motivated many of these soldiers to actively fight for equal rights after they returned home. W.E.B. Du Bois described it this way in the NAACP's magazine, "The Crisis." Quote, "We are returning from war. The crisis and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into a great struggle. For bleeding France and what she means and has meant and will mean to us and humanity and against the threat of German race arrogance, we fought gladly and to the last drop of blood. For America and her highest ideals, we fought in far-off hope. For the dominant Southern oligarchy entrenched in Washington, we fought in bitter resignation."

• 10:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  In this editorial, Du Bois went on to describe the United States as a shameful land, saying that it lynches and disenfranchises its citizens, encourages ignorance and steals from and insults black citizens. He concluded by saying, quote, "We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for democracy. We saved it in France, and by the great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why."

• 10:48Holly Frey?

  James Weldon Johnson, who coined the term "red summer," described it this way in his 1933 autobiography, quote, "The colored people throughout the country were disheartened and dismayed. The great majority had trustingly felt that, because they had cheerfully done their bit in the war, conditions for them would be better." The reverse seemed to be true.

• 11:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Earlier, civil rights advocacy had tended toward a conciliatory approach, but after the war, Du Bois and other civil rights leaders were increasingly direct, lobbying very aggressively for equal rights legislation and for anti-lynching laws. This advocacy became part of what came to be known as the New Negro Movement, which was rooted in assertiveness and confidence and was also connected to the Harlem Renaissance. Membership in the NAACP really surged from about 9,000 members before the war to 100,000 afterward.

• 11:40Holly Frey?

  Compounding that, many of the people who moved from the South did not find the North to be what they imagined it to be. Many schools, neighborhoods, and public accommodations were still segregated, by custom if not by law. Many industries were closed to black workers, and many of the ones that weren't involved manual labor or service work. Discrimination and harassment may have been less overt in some ways, but they were still there. All of this folded back into that growing advocacy for equal rights and equal treatment.

• 12:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  So it was a whole system in which people who had moved, or people who had come back from war, or people who had done both of those things, were finding themselves still facing all of this discrimination. And then simultaneously, people of all races in the United States were competing for scarce jobs and housing immediately after the war. The first red scare was going on, and that created a climate of fear of communism and Bolshevism. Also, immediately after the war, the nation was very nationalistic and xenophobic. And all of this together fed into this backlash that came to be known as Red Summer. We'll start talking about how it unfolded after a sponsor break.

• 12:54Speaker 00

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• 13:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 14:09Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:23Speaker 06

  First thought is like, wow, how are we gonna do all this?

• 14:26Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.

• 15:01Speaker 07

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• 15:07Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:18Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:23Speaker 08

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• 16:06Speaker 08

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• 16:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  The two main hallmarks of Red Summer were lynching and mass violence against whole communities of Black residents, which were often described as "race riots." These weren't unique to 1919. The same types of violence happened before and after Red Summer, but during that summer and fall of 1919, both were really at a peak. And although the Great Migration that we just talked about was from the South into urban parts of the North and Midwest, these incidents happened all over the country.

• 16:54Holly Frey?

  However, details are hard to track down for some of these incidents today. At the time, they were often reported in both Black and White newspapers, although with completely different interpretations of the events. The NAACP and other civil rights organizations also conducted investigations into as many of them as they could, but often there was no formal investigation by law enforcement and no official record of what actually happened. Especially when it came to mob violence, some communities conducted investigations later on, or convened truth and reconciliation commissions to document what happened and make recommendations for restitution. But in cases where that didn't

• 17:36Holly Frey?

  happen, at this point, the people who remember the events have since died, so many details are lost.

• 17:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  So, we're going to start with this pattern of lynching. A lynching is an extrajudicial murder of someone who has been accused of a crime or some other perceived wrongdoing. Anyone can be the victim of lynching, although most often in the United States lynching victims have been members of a racial, ethnic, or religious minority. In the United States in the early 20th century, most victims of lynching were Black Americans or White Americans who had been working for civil rights. In 1919, there were 83 recorded victims of lynching, at least 11 of whom were veterans of World War I. That was up from 64 in 1918.

• 18:22Holly Frey?

  Victims of lynching had often been accused of a crime against a white person, especially a white woman. Sometimes a crime really had taken place, but in other cases, the allegations were completely fabricated. Regardless of whether anyone had committed a crime, the idea of a crime was used as justification for murder. It was often the idea of a white woman having been allegedly assaulted by a black man, something we talked more about in our two-parter on the 1898 Wilmington coup.

• 18:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  In one of Red Summer's first incidents, a black man named Benny Richards allegedly shot his ex-wife and her sister on May 2, 1919. His ex-wife died, and Richards also allegedly wounded the sheriff and other white men who arrived on the scene.

• 19:08Holly Frey?

  We have to say allegedly, because Richards was not brought to trial. Instead, a mob of between 100 and 300 white men apprehended him, in part by dumping gasoline into the swampy area surrounding his home and setting fire to it to try to drive him out. After they captured Richards, the mob hanged him, shot his body, and set it on fire.

• 19:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  This was not a remotely isolated incident, and it was part of a pattern in terms of what happened and how it played out. On May 14, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a mob of between 800 and 1,000 people broke into the jail and took 22-year-old Lloyd Clay out of his cell. Clay had been accused of assaulting a white woman named Maddie Hudson. She had been presented with a lineup earlier in the day, and two different times she had said that Clay was not the man who assaulted her. But after the mob removed him from his cell, they asked her one more time to identify him as her assailant, and she did. The mob poured oil over Clay's head and hanged him over a bonfire while also shooting him repeatedly.

• 20:17Holly Frey?

  On May 24th, 72-year-old Barry Washington was in jail in Milan, Georgia. Two white men had reportedly come into his neighborhood and tried to assault two teenage girls. Washington had tried to defend them and had killed one of the men in the process. A local Baptist minister led a mob of roughly 100 white men who abducted Washington from the jail, hanged him, and shot him repeatedly. The mob then terrorized the area's black residents and looted black-owned businesses.

• 20:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  On June 17th, a white mob in Longview, Texas murdered Lemuel Walters. According to reports in white newspapers, he had robbed the home of a white woman and assaulted her. But according to an article in the Chicago Defender, Walters and this woman had been having a consensual relationship. There was a riot in Longview shortly thereafter, which started with a white mob assaulting a black journalist that they believed had written this article in the Chicago Defender, and then burning down his home.

• 21:19Holly Frey?

  On June 26th, a mob lynched John Hartfield of Ellisville, Mississippi, on the grounds that he had, according to them, raped a white woman. His family members and friends maintained that it was because he had a white girlfriend. This lynching was announced ahead of time on the front page of the Jackson Daily News under the headline, "John Hartfield Will Be Lynched By Ellisville Mob At 5 O'Clock This Afternoon."

• 21:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  On August 28th, a mob dragged Eli Cooper out of his home in Cadwell, Georgia. This mob's rationale is not clear. In some accounts, he had made a pass at a white woman; in others, she had made a pass at him. A newspaper report from The Times said, quote, "He had been talking for some time in a manner that was very offensive to the white people of the community in which he resided. He was either hanged or shot in a church, and then his body was set on fire."

• 22:11Holly Frey?

  A few days later, a mob in Bogalusa, Louisiana, killed veteran Lucius McCarthy, who had been accused of trying to rape a white woman. His assailants shot him hundreds of times before dragging him behind a car and burning his body.

• 22:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  On September 29th and 30th, three black men were lynched in Montgomery, Alabama, over the span of about 12 hours. A mob abducted Raylius Pfeiffer and Robert Kroski as they were being transported to jail after being accused of assaulting a white woman. Pfeiffer was a veteran and was reportedly in uniform at the time. The mob shot both Pfeiffer and Kroski. And then in a separate incident, an officer tried to arrest Will Temple and two other people for disorderly conduct. Temple resisted arrest, fatally shooting the officer and being injured himself in the process. A mob murdered him in his hospital ward.

• 23:03Holly Frey?

  And these are, of course, just samples from the 83 recorded lynchings in the summer and fall of 1919. And there were certainly others that were not recorded. And the reason none of the perpetrators are named is that overwhelmingly, we do not know who they were. It was incredibly rare for the perpetrators of lynching to face any kind of criminal charges. Sometimes, members of law enforcement were even part of the lynch mob. Occasionally, law enforcement offered a reward for information or tried to arrest perpetrators. But when that happened, the white community often reacted with outrage. Afterward, members of the mob frequently took souvenirs with them from the scene, as well as taking photos, which were later distributed as postcards.

• 23:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  These were also not just some random haphazard actions. They were part of a pattern of really gruesome racist violence committed by the white community in order to terrorize, punish, and humiliate the black community. And in the minds of the perpetrators, quote, "keep them in their place." The same was true of 1919's riots, which we will talk about after a break.

• 24:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends,

• 25:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 25:41Speaker 08

  Okay, chicken nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.

• 26:23Speaker 08

  This new chicken nugget, reinvented based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 26:37Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 27:18Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 27:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  The other major hallmark of Red Summer was mass violence perpetrated by white mobs against black people in the neighborhoods where they lived and worked. These incidents are often described as "race riots," and that's a term whose meaning has shifted in various ways over the decades. But to many people, it suggests that people of two or more races were fighting against each other as equal aggressors. And that's really not what was happening during Red Summer. Often, black communities did try to defend themselves or fight back, and occasionally, black residents went on the attack themselves. But overwhelmingly, even when this happened, the primary instigators were the white mob.

• 28:28Holly Frey?

  As was the case with lynchings, these riots often followed some kind of crime or wrongdoing allegedly committed by a black person, usually a black man. But often, these criminal allegations were completely false, or the response from the white community was way out of proportion to what had really happened. And in some cases, the perceived wrongdoing wasn't a criminal act at all. In Port Arthur, Texas, a riot followed objections to a black man smoking in a streetcar in front of a white woman. In multiple instances, the purported transgression was black veterans appearing in public in their uniforms. In one of the incidents that we're going to talk about in a moment, it was a response to sharecroppers trying to organize for fairer treatment.

• 29:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  There were at least 26 documented examples of these riots between April and November 1919. You'll see numbers that range from like 24 to 30. It kind of depends on how people are defining the window of time and exactly what constitutes a riot. They definitely occurred in Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington DC.

• 29:46Holly Frey?

  And we're going to talk about three of the most notorious. They have a lot of similarities, but they also illustrate the range of purported causes. Riots in Washington DC followed rumors of an attack on a white woman and were largely carried out by soldiers and veterans. In Chicago, Illinois, riots followed a breach of the city's unofficial rules about segregation. And in Elaine, Arkansas, they followed black sharecroppers' attempts to organize.

• 30:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  We will go chronologically, starting with the Washington DC riot, which started on July 19, 1919. A black man had been detained and then released by Washington DC police under suspicion that he had assaulted a white woman. The woman was a sailor's wife, which led servicemen, sailors, and veterans to try to seek revenge.

• 30:36Holly Frey?

  Rumors about this incident spread through the city's saloons and pool halls, which were a popular hangout for returning veterans. Unemployment was a real issue, so as the rumors swirled, the people who heard them were mostly unemployed, intoxicated, and frustrated. Ultimately, a mob of about 400 men, many of them drunk, made their way southwest into Washington's majority-black neighborhoods, gathering up improvised weapons as they went. And some of them were still in uniform.

• 31:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  This mob attacked black residents indiscriminately, and police really did very little to respond. When local law enforcement did arrive, they mostly arrested the mob's black victims rather than the white perpetrators.

• 31:20Holly Frey?

  This first day of street fighting bled into more than four days of rioting, with mobs of soldiers and sailors attacking people on the street, and black residents fighting back. More than 150 people were physically attacked, and at least nine people died during the initial wave of fighting.

• 31:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  But the situation quickly got worse. More than 500 firearms were sold in the city on July 21st, as black residents took up arms to defend themselves, because the police were not, or in some cases, to seek restitution for the earlier violence. At least 15 people were killed or mortally wounded just on the night of the 21st, 10 white and 5 black.

• 32:00Holly Frey?

  President Woodrow Wilson finally deployed about 2,000 troops to try to restore order. By that point, though, the city had become so violent that people really thought that might not be enough. But the troops got help from a heavy rainstorm that drove many of the people who had been fighting back indoors. The riot ended on May 24th, by which point, close to 40 people had been killed and hundreds injured.

• 32:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  The riot ended on July 24th, by which point, close to 40 people had been killed and hundreds injured. And then the Chicago riot started just days later, on July 27th, 1919, after an altercation at a swimming area. And the swimming area was not officially segregated, but local white residents thought of it as for their use only.

• 32:48Holly Frey?

  First, there was an altercation on shore between black residents who wanted to use the swimming area and white residents who demanded that they leave. As this was happening, a group of boys was swimming from a raft and accidentally crossed into the whites-only part of the lake. Someone threw a rock at them and hit 17-year-old Eugene Williams in the head. He lost consciousness and drowned. The coroner's jury has a slightly different account, that he was not struck, but that because of the stones being thrown, he was forced to stay underwater until he was just too exhausted to keep swimming.

• 33:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  When police arrived on the scene, white officers refused to arrest the man that black witnesses identified as the stone thrower. Increasingly angry crowds gathered at the lake, and then rumors started to spread through the city about exactly what had happened. And as rumors tend to do, they spiraled as they went. Eventually, a black man named James Crawford fired into a group of policemen and injured one of them. They returned fire and killed Crawford.

• 33:51Holly Frey?

  This led to widespread violence throughout the city that lasted until August 3rd. Thirty-eight people were killed, 15 white and 23 black. 537 were injured. Of those, 195 were white and 342 were black. White mobs also burned down about 1,000 homes in Chicago's black neighborhoods.

• 34:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Chicago police force was not at all effective at stopping this violence, in part because it was understaffed and in part because white officers were biased toward the white rioters. Eventually, 6,000 troops from the state militia were deployed to try to restore order. And then, as had happened in Washington, they were helped by a sudden, heavy rain.

• 34:34Holly Frey?

  This wasn't quite as one-sided as many of Red Summer's riots. Many of the white residents who were injured or killed were in predominantly black neighborhoods when it happened. Some were injured or killed when black residents defended themselves. But others were white merchants or other business people who worked in black neighborhoods and were attacked as people sought restitution for earlier violence. As it happened in the later days of the Washington DC riot, an eye-for-an-eye mentality developed on both sides.

• 35:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  The third riot we're discussing took place in Elaine, Arkansas, and it was more of a massacre than a riot. It started after black sharecroppers started trying to organize for better pay. On September 30th, about 100 of them met with representatives of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. They met in a church in Hoopsboro, which was kept under armed guard during the meeting in the hope of preventing the kind of violence that had been so common over the previous months.

• 35:31Holly Frey?

  In this part of Arkansas, black residents outnumbered white about 10 to 1, and the white community found this inherently threatening. This kind of organizing effort was even more so, especially with the presence of armed guards.

• 35:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  At about 11:00 PM, some people fired into the church from outside, kind of in the shadows where the guards couldn't see them. The guards returned fire, and in the process, a white man named WA Atkins was killed. At some point during all this, Phillips County Deputy Sheriff Charles Pratt was also wounded.

• 36:06Holly Frey?

  In the minds of Elaine's white residents, this transformed the meeting from an implicit threat to an armed insurrection actively being planned. And it wasn't just rumor. The white press reported this supposed insurrection as a fact. Hundreds of white residents from around Phillips County traveled to Elaine to deal with the supposed threat, and local authorities asked the governor to deploy the National Guard.

• 36:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  A mob burned down the church where the meeting had happened, and together, these vigilantes and the National Guard troops took hundreds of black residents of Elaine into custody and held them in temporary stockades. This mob, over the next couple of days, killed at least 200 people. The official toll may have been much higher, but there wasn't a formal tally.

• 36:53Holly Frey?

  Walter White, Assistant Secretary of the NAACP, and past podcast subject Ida B. Wells Barnett, each investigated what had happened in Elaine. Both found that the "armed insurrection" being hyped in the white press just simply did not exist. And if Elaine's black community had been planning an armed insurrection, it seemed as though the death toll logically would have been much different.

• 37:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  None of the white participants in this were ever tried for their roles in this massacre. Instead, 12 black men were put on trial in the deaths of the five white people who were killed. During the trials, a white mob surrounded the courthouse and threatened to lynch the men if they were not given the death penalty. An all-white jury found them all guilty, and the judge handed down sentences of death for all of them.

• 37:43Holly Frey?

  These 12 were not the only people who were set to stand trial. Another 65 accepted plea bargains after that first wave of convictions and sentencing.

• 37:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  The NAACP backed a series of appeals that finally made their way to the US Supreme Court as Moore versus Dempsey in 1923. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes authored the majority opinion that the defendant's constitutional rights had been violated. This was a major victory for the NAACP and for the civil rights of black Americans in general. After being granted new trials, the 12 men were ultimately freed.

• 38:19Holly Frey?

  Red Summer was not at all the end of racist violence in the United States. We have talked about similar riots and massacres that happened afterward on the show before, including the destruction of Greenwood, Oklahoma in 1921, and the massacre in Rosewood, Florida in 1923. But they didn't happen with the same frequency as they had during the Red Summer.

• 38:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  We talked at the start of the show about all the factors that had primed the United States for all this violence. So that leads to the question of why did Red Summer end? The economy did start to improve, and especially when it came to mob violence, the onset of colder winter weather probably tempered things a little bit. But a lot of those other factors were still present or even growing. The Great Migration was still going on, and by the end of it, millions of people would have moved to cities. This general atmosphere of nationalism and xenophobia was still very present.

• 39:17Holly Frey?

  A big part of it is that by the fall of 1919, the white majority had increasingly started to see these incidents as part of an unacceptable pattern. There had been elected officials and other civic leaders who had denounced the events from the very beginning, but these calls became louder and more frequent.

• 39:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  Law enforcement officials started taking more steps to make sure that mobs couldn't just abduct people from the jail to lynch them. The white press also started toning down some of its rhetoric in terms of criminal allegations against black residents. And then across the board, newspapers started taking a less sensationalistic and incendiary approach to discussing race-related violence.

• 39:58Holly Frey?

  Civil rights organizations also started working toward building more positive relations between black and white communities. For example, after the Chicago riot, the city established the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which investigated the riot and made recommendations to prevent something similar from happening again. It published its report, "The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot", in 1922, which included not just a thorough investigation of the riot, but also of relationships between white and black communities in Chicago. Although not every riot led to this sort of investigation, there were other commissions and organizations that did the same types of work elsewhere in the United States.

• 40:41Holly Frey?

  In other words, the violence didn't just play itself out, people actively worked to stop it.

• 40:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  So that's sort of the highlights of... highlights is not even a good word.

• 40:51Holly Frey?

  It's like lowlights.

• 40:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yes, that's sort of a quick look at Red Summer. Like I said, this could be, there could be a whole podcast that would just be about Red Summer, that would go on for many, many, many episodes, because there were so many things that happened, but so many of them follow this exact same pattern in terms of, like, the precipitating events and then what transpired, the actions that this, like, white mob took, and then how things usually ended without any kind of formal acknowledgement or investigation.

• 41:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 41:52Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 42:27Speaker 09

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• 42:55Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 43:40Tracy V. Wilson?

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