Red Summer of 1919 => Racial violence across the country

The Red Summer of 1919

The Red Summer of 1919 was a pattern of White-on-Black violence that occurred in 1919 throughout the United States. The post World War I period was marked by a spike in racial violence, much of it directed toward African American veterans returning from Europe. They were often treated much better there than by White Americans, despite their brave service to the country. The Red Summer of 1919, coined by James Weldon Johnson was a culmination of growing racial tensions from the great migration of Blacks from the rural South.

The Red Summer of 1919, coined by James Weldon Johnson, was a pattern of White-on-Black violence that occurred in 1919 throughout the United States. The post World War I period was marked by a spike in racial violence, much of it directed toward African American veterans returning from Europe, where they were often treated much better there than by White Americans, despite their brave service to the country. World War I caused many social and economic changes within the United States, especially in regard to the 10 percent of the population that comprised the African American minority. Black America emerged from the war as a community with rising expectations. African Americans showed a new determination to gain a practical realization of constitutional and demanded full citizenship through thousands of acts of courage, small and large, individual and collective.

After the war thousands of servicemen returned home from fighting in Europe to find that their jobs in factories, warehouses and mills had been filled by newly arrived Southern Black people or immigrants. Amid financial insecurity, racial and ethnic prejudices ran rampant. Meanwhile, African-American veterans who had risked their lives fighting for the causes of freedom and democracy found themselves denied basic rights such as adequate housing and equality under the law, leading them to become increasingly militant. Many Whites feared that the return of tens of thousands of Black veterans, with experience living abroad and, more significantly, having received military training, would be unwilling to resubmit to traditional political and social subjugation in the U.S. The period also marked a new willingness on the part of Black men to fight for their rights in the face of injustice and oppression. Black intellectuals, writers and scholars encouraged these veterans to fight against injustice, disenfranchisement and lynchings in the United States.

World War I gave birth to what scholars have often referred to as the “New Negro,” more aware of discrimination and more active in opposition to it. The industrial expansion brought on by the war, and the concomitant drop in the numbers of White workers and European immigrants, meant more jobs in northern industries for Blacks. The prospect of a better way of life, steady employment and increased financial opportunity, and an atmosphere incorrectly thought relatively discrimination-free spurred a mass migration of southern blacks to northern industrial cities between 1914 and 1919, most being actively recruited by northern industries seeking cheap labor to fill war orders. Almost 500,000 Black Americans moved north between 1916 and 1918 alone.

Wartime military service of some 380,000 other African Americans stood as a source of immense pride and satisfaction to many in the minority community. Over 140,000 African American servicemen went to France, and of this number, 42,000 served in two all-Black combat units, the 92nd and 93rd Infantry Divisions. The vast majority, however, had noncombat roles in supply, stevedore, engineer, and labor battalions, in a marked and unwelcome departure from the elite African American units of earlier wars. Of the Black combat troops, only half served with the American Expeditionary Forces, and the four regiments of the 93rd were put exclusively under French command and control. The large number of African Americans serving in the Army brought many Whites into close contact with them for the first time. As a result, their military service caused much discussion within the Army, with conclusions that were in general unflattering. Black units serving in the AEF were frequently criticized as lacking motivation, determination, efficiency, and courage.

Wherever they served, their contribution to the struggle to “make the world safe for democracy” led Blacks to demand a greater degree of equality at home after the war. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP ) leader W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in the Crisis Magazine, “But by the God of heaven,” “we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land. We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.” Although DuBois told Blacks to “forget … special grievances,” and to “close … ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own White fellow citizens and the allied nations … fighting for democracy,” he also predicted that African Americans fighting for democracy expected their “full share of the fruits thereof". “Make way for Democracy,” Du Bois added. “We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States, or know the reason why.”

At the root of the trouble lay racism and antiradicalism, combined with the Whites’ economic fears. Of twenty-five major racial disorders in the two years following the armistice of 1917, six resulted in calls for the Army to restore order. In only one could racial violence be equally attributed to the actions of both sides. The remainder originated from provocative and hostile actions of Whites, often caused by off-duty soldiers, sailors, and marines. Although the attitudes of the officers and men of the predominantly white Regular Army toward African Americans were conventional for the times, the Army quelled the disorders in a neutral manner, but not bloodlessly. Nonetheless, Army discipline and adherence to orders proved to be the key to quelling disturbances that otherwise could have degenerated into widespread, open racial warfare. Local authorities relied heavily on the military for discipline.

The racial violence of the Red Summer erupted in many other Southern locations as well as in the North, most notably in Chicago. The presence of racial hostility in the North was partly a reaction of Northern Whites to the large influx of African Americans into Northern cities during the Great Migration, though this hostility did not prevent large numbers of African Americans from heading North. During “Red Summer,” thousands of Black people were fatally shot, lynched and burned alive. Hundreds of Black-owned businesses and homes in Black communities were obliterated in fires fueled by racism and hatred. Millions of dollars of Black businesses and generational wealth were stolen. In the summer of 1919, race relations in America reached a boiling point. There was persistent talk of an impending race war; some feared it, while others wanted one to happen. “The blood lust which World War I was too short to satiate made the year 1919 one of almost unmitigated horror,” Walter White, a field secretary for the NAACP, wrote in his autobiography, A Man Called White.

The massacres and lynchings that occurred during “Red Summer,” a term used to describe the blood that flowed in the streets of America, were sparked by disparate events, but the common denominator was racial hatred against a people who had recently risen out of enslavement and prospered. Most violent incidents during the Red Summer were not initiated by fringe White supremacist terror groups. Ordinary White civilians and veterans, unaffiliated with the Ku Klux Klan or any other racist organization, formed most of the mobs. In Omaha, Will Brown was falsely accused of assaulting a White woman as she walked with her boyfriend. In East St. Louis, it was Black men working factory jobs that White people wanted for themselves. In Longview, Texas, it was a Black man writing a newspaper story about a love affair between a Black man and a White woman, in which the White woman initiated the affair.

In Washington, D.C., it was an accusation that Black men tried to take a White woman’s umbrella. White soldiers started riots that lasted for four days. Fifteen died and dozens were injured. In Chicago, it was a Black teenager swimming in Lake Michigan and accidently floating over an invisible color line. In Elaine, Arkansas, it was Black sharecroppers trying to get better payment for their cotton crops. Smaller riots erupted in Charleston, South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, and more than three dozen other cities. Chicago saw some of the worst of the violence. Here, riots started on July 27 and the violence lasted a week. Thirty-eight people were killed. Hundreds were injured. Violence erupted across the country in small and large cities. Even though the violence was widespread in the North and South, in both large and small cities, the cities highlighted below received the most attention.

In each community, the racial violence was often prompted by a false accusation that a Black man had assaulted a White woman. Fanning the flames could be traced back to the movie Birth of a Nation, a racist blockbuster by D.W. Griffiths, which was inspired by the novel "The Clansman". The 1915 classic portrayed a racist and stereotypical portrait of Black people, while glorifying the brutality of the Ku Klux Klan. The movie depicted the Klan as the protector for the South and of White women during the Reconstruction period. But, in reality, the Klan was a terrorist organization that murdered thousands of Black people and raped and assaulted Black women. The film also prompted a reemergence of the Klan. After the film’s release, hordes of White people poured into the streets of some major U.S. cities, openly assaulting Black people. A White man in Indiana killed a Black teenager after watching the movie. Racial lynchings of Black men, women and children increased during this period, which historians called the “Nadir”—a dark, low period in history.

The Great Migration Begins

When World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, industrialized urban areas in the North, Midwest and West faced a shortage of industrial laborers. The war put an end to the steady tide of European immigration to the United States. With war production kicking into high gear, recruiters enticed Blacks to come north, to the dismay of White Southerners. Industrial jobs that had not been previously available to African Americans now became accessible in greater quantity and variety. Black newspapers published advertisements touting the opportunities available in the cities of the North and West, along with first-person accounts of success.

This flood of African American migrants dramatically changed the demography of many cities in both the North and South, as the percentage of African American residents exploded. In the years leading up to the initial Great Migration, two-thirds of African Americans in the South lived in rural areas, working in lumber camps, as farm laborers, or as sharecroppers who rented land on which they grew crops to make a living. By the end of 1919, an estimated 1 million Black people had left the South, usually traveling by train, boat or bus. This population surge placed great pressure on the municipal services and housing supply of these cities. It created growing tension between residents as they competed for places to live and for jobs, particularly after the war ended.

As a result of housing tensions, many Black residents ended up creating their own cities within big cities, fostering the growth of a new, urban, Black culture. Often denied the opportunity to live elsewhere, those neighborhoods often developed vibrant Black culture. The most prominent example was Harlem in New York City, a formerly all-White neighborhood that by the 1920s housed some 200,000 Blacks. Rising rents in segregated areas, plus a resurgence of KKK activity after 1915, worsened Black and White relations across the country. Although the migrants found better jobs and fled the South entrenched in Jim Crow, many African Americans faced injustices and difficulties after migrating.

The summer of 1919 began the greatest period of interracial strife in U.S. history at that time, including a disturbing wave of race riots. It was rooted in tensions and prejudice that arose from White people having to adjust to the demographic changes in their local communities. The “Red Summer” of 1919 marked the culmination of steadily growing tensions surrounding the great migration of Blacks from the rural South to the cities of the North that took place during World War I. The Black experience during the first Great Migration became an important theme in the artistic movement. It became known the New Negro Movement and later as the Harlem Renaissance. It which would have an enormous impact on the culture of the era. African-American struggles did not end when they arrived in the North, but they did escape the entrenched segregation of the post-Civil War South.

Black migration slowed considerably in the 1930s, when the country sank into the Great Depression. It picked up again with the coming of World War II and the need for wartime production. By World War II the migrants continued to move North but many of them headed west to Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, California, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. Black soldiers returning from the war found that the GI Bill didn’t always promise the same postwar benefits for all. The Great Migration also began a new era of increasing political activism among Black Americans, who after being disenfranchised in the South found a new place for themselves in public life in the cities of the North and West. The civil rights movement directly benefited from this activism.

Six Cities of Violence From The Red Summer of 1919

The Chicago Race Riot, was one of the most severe race riots throughout the U.S, was triggered by the death of a Black youth who had been swimming in Lake Michigan and had drifted into an area reserved for Whites.

One of the last of the major riots of the “Red Summer” of 1919, the so-called race riot in Elaine, Arkansas. It possibly may have been the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States.

Over a century ago, Knoxville was embroiled in a race riot. The Knoxville race riots began when a lynch mob stormed the county jail in search of Maurice Mays, a biracial man who had been accused of murdering a White woman.

This race riot was a series of violent incidents in Longview, Texas, between July 10 and July 12, 1919, when Whites attacked Black neighborhoods, burning down several properties, because of an affair between a Black man and a White woman.

White rioters stormed into an Omaha courthouse, beat, lynched, burned and dragged a Black jailed man, (whom they thought had robbed and killed a White women) who said he was innocent out to his death.

A four-day riot in Washington, D.C. began on July 19 when a rumor that Black men had assaulted a White woman incited mobs to attack local Black neighborhoods and assault random Black individuals on the streets.

Chicago

One of most famous race riot in the history of Chicago occurred in the summer of 1919. The violence was precipitated by the drowning of an African American teenager who had crossed an invisible line at 29th Street separating customarily segregated “white” and “black” beaches. Soon, White and Black Chicagoans, especially in the South Side residential areas, engaged in a seven-day orgy of shootings, arsons, and beatings that resulted in the deaths of 15 Whites and 23 Blacks with an additional 537 injured (342 black, 195 white). The passions of this outbreak were rooted in pent-up tensions surrounding the massive migration of southern Blacks during World War I. Whites met the influx of Blacks into their cities with hostility, using intimidation and discrimination to block access to jobs and housing. Sometimes hired as strikebreakers, their increased industrial presence was viewed by many White workers as a threat to their own livelihoods.

On Sunday, July 27, 1919, an unusually hot summer day, Black seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams and four of his friends took a homemade wooden raft out into Lake Michigan on the South Side. They pushed off from 26th Street beach, the only beach in the city reserved for Black beachgoers and swimmers. Although there was no legal segregation in Chicago, de facto segregation was common including along the Lakefront. While in the water the boys unintentionally floated across an invisible boundary line demarcating a “whites only” part of the lake as well as the beach, at 29th Street. Before the boys knew they had drifted into the unforbidden waters, a White man on the shore, George Stauber spotted Williams in the White swimming area, and became insulted. He began throwing rocks at the Black kids. One of the teens, Eugene Williams, was hit in the head fell off the raft, plunged into the lake, and drowned.

The White police officer on duty at the beach, Daniel Callahan, refused to arrest Stauber, nor would Callahan let a Black police officer do so. It was not uncommon for the ethnic White Irish police officers to ignore White-on-Black crime in the city and that fact touched a raw nerve. Thousand of Black Chicagoans assembled at the 29th Street beach and demanded the police arrest Stauber for murder. They refused to arrest him. Police reinforcements massed at the scene but confronted the Black crowd rather than investigating Williams’s murder. A Black man named James Crawford, opened fire on a group of police officers. Crawford was immediately shot and killed. But the crowd did not disperse and other African American individuals began to attack other White individuals.

As word and rumors spread, the city erupted in racial violence. The majority of the rioting and violence was concentrated in the “Black Belt” section, the predominantly Black neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. It spread into nearby White ethnic neighborhoods like "Back of the Yards" and "Bridgeport", though violence also spread northward to the downtown Loop area as well as the near West Side. By nightfall, rumors of “race war” in White neighborhoods were running rampant, and the rioting began. White males, especially members of youth gangs and so-called “athletic clubs,” loaded into automobiles and sped through Black neighborhoods, firing indiscriminately at African Americans and their homes. Some of these gangs also set fire to tenement buildings inhabited mostly by Eastern European immigrants in order to stoke further tensions between working-class White communities and Black Chicagoans.

Richard J. Daley, who served as Chicago's powerful mayor from 1955 until his death in 1976, was a 17-year-old member of an Irish-American organization called the Hamburg Athletic Club. Though an investigation later identified the club among the instigators of the rioting, Daley and his supporters never admitted that he participated in the violence. White mobs pulled African Americans from streetcars or in city parks and other public venues and attacked individuals walking to and from work, severely beating, and on several occasions, killing, their victims. White gang members also bombed and torched the homes of African Americans, leaving them homeless. At the height of the rioting, over four-fifths of Chicago’s 3,500 police officers had been sent to control the angry crowds.

Black people fought back, in particular World War I veterans, fought back in unprecedented numbers by returning fire or otherwise engaging in self-defense. Often gangs of men attacked and stabbed White civilians, but White rioters had superiority in numbers and firepower and in many cases the sympathy of the police. A street-level expression of the growing race consciousness catching fire swept across the country that summer. This spirit of resistance was famously captured in the Jamaican-born, Harlem-based writer Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die,” published in the socialist magazine "The Liberator" as a response to the race riots of the Red Summer. The rioting lasted almost a whole week. The Illinois governor, Frank Lowden, deployed 6,000 national guard soldiers to quell the violence and to bring much-needed provisions into the besieged Black Belt but eventually, a steady rain proved most effective in restoring peace.

Ultimately, the Chicago Police Department and the State’s Attorney’s office overwhelmingly blamed Black resistance for the violence and largely ignored or defended White perpetrators. The devastation wrought by the 1919 Chicago Race Riot was terrible, and so was the aftermath along with the Riot’s subsequent expulsion from official memory. Not only had hundreds been killed and injured, large swaths of property in working-class Black and white neighborhoods on the South Side also had been destroyed. Over a thousand Black families were left homeless. Some major employers—like the stockyards—temporarily closed during the Riot, leaving many workers without work or access to back pay. When the meatpacking plants reopened, some plant owners banned African Americans from returning to their jobs for fear of further clashes with White workers, which exacerbated the unemployment crisis. Civic leaders also lacked the funds and the will to prosecute most rioters. Only a handful were ever tried or saw any prison time. Most of those prosecuted were Black.

In August of 1919, Governor Lowden called for an investigation of Black life and race relations in the city of Chicago. The resulting twelve-person Chicago Commission on Race Relations was made up of prominent Black and White Chicagoans to look into the root causes of the riots and find ways to combat them. The commission, suggested several key issues and represented an extraordinary effort at interracial collaboration, research, and resolution. African American sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson carried out most of the research. The resultant six-hundred-plus-page report, published in 1922 and entitled "The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot", remains a landmark of sociology. It covered the Great Migration, housing, employment, and social life for African Americans in Chicago, the causes and aftermath of the Riot, and surveys on public opinion regarding the city’s “race problem".

The Report extensively detailed the Commission’s findings of systemic racism in housing and employment policy, and the Commissioners ultimately provided recommendations to remedy these problems. The immediate aftermath of the riot laid the foundation for decades of racist policies aimed at containing Black Chicagoans. Carl Sandburg, already a renowned writer working for the Chicago Daily News, had been writing a series of articles designed to ease tension between the races. Sandburg based his recommendations on the input of locals, union members and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His articles detailed the root causes of the riots, which Charles S. Johnson had reported, that fueled the flames of anger on both sides.

President Woodrow Wilson publicly blamed White people for being the instigators of race-related riots in both Chicago and Washington, D.C., and introduced efforts to foster racial harmony, including voluntary organizations and congressional legislation. In addition to drawing attention to the growing tensions in America’s urban centers, the riots in Chicago and other cities in the summer of 1919 marked the beginning of a growing willingness among African Americans to fight for their rights in the face of oppression and injustice. And despite the participation of many hundreds of Chicagoans in the 1919 riot, only 47 were eventually indicted. The riots themselves provoked new legal problems. After the end of the Chicago riots of 1919, the documented failure of the legal system to prosecute Whites in the same proportion to Blacks is a question of racial justice. In the 1920s, city government and industry embraced legal strategies to segregate Black people. Racially restrictive covenants barred Black Chicagoans from renting or owning residences outside of a small number of neighborhoods.

Chicago

Elaine

The Elaine Massacre was by far the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States. The case had both labor and racial aspects. Though exact numbers are unknown, it is estimated that over 200 Blacks were killed, along with five Whites, during the White hysteria of a pending insurrection of Black sharecroppers. The conflict began on the night of September 30, 1919. When approximately 100 Black men attended a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA) at a church in Hoop Spur. Hoop Spur (Phillips County), is located three miles north of Elaine. They were mostly sharecroppers on the plantations of White landowners, organizing to obtain better payments for their cotton crops.

Aware of White fears of Communist influence on African Americans, the Black union posted armed guards around the church to prevent disruption and infiltration. During the evening, a group of White men, including the local sheriff, and a Black trustee from Helena’s jail tried to break up the meeting, fired shots into the church. The shots were reciprocated, and by the end of the night, one White man was killed. Though sharp debate and several conflicting narratives exists as to who fired first, the Black guards killed W.A. Adkins, a security officer from the Missouri-Pacific Railroad, and injured Charles Pratt, the deputy sheriff. “Kidd” Collins, a Black trustee who was with Adkins and Pratt, escaped the shootout unharmed and made his way to Elaine where he reported the shooting. Local telegraph operators contacted law enforcement in neighboring towns and the governor’s office.

At approximately 2 am on October 1st, hours after the initial gunfire outside the Hoop Spur church, Phillips County law enforcement sent a deputized posse from Helena to investigate the shooting. Within a few hours hundreds of White men, many of them the "low down" variety, began to comb the area for Blacks they believed were launching an insurrection. Arkansas newspapers declared a race riot was in motion in the county. Later that day a sheriff deputy reported that Elaine was under attack by a group of armed Blacks. Rumors spread about the sharecroppers and that there would be an uprising. Hundreds of White men rushed in from as far as Mississippi and Tennessee to help suppress the alleged uprising, killing any Black person they could find. Mobs descended on the nearby Black town of Elaine, destroying homes and businesses and attacking any Black people in their path over the coming days. No White casualties occurred in town.

White women and children were put on a train to Helena for safety. As word of the attack spread throughout the Black community, terrified Black residents, including women, children, and the elderly, fled their homes and hid for their lives in nearby woods and fields. Some of the Black residents armed themselves in defense. The mob then turned its attention to disarming those Blacks who fought back. Outside of Elaine two posse members, Clinton Lee and James Tappen, were killed while hunting down Black men. The Johnston brothers, members of a prominent African American family in Helena, were murdered en route to Helena after being forcibly removed from a train by a White posse. Posse member O.R. Lilly was also killed. There were conflicting reports on how everyone in this situation died. Arkansas Governor Charles Brough persuaded the War Department to send troops from nearby Camp Pike to restore order in Elaine.

Four White men were dead at this point. Late that night, the troop train left from Little Rock to Elaine carrying 550 infantrymen to deal with alleged Black insurrectionists. The troops rounded up and placed several hundred Blacks in temporary stockades, where there were reports of torture. The men were not released until their White employers vouched for them. Commanding officer Colonel Jenks led the troops that arrived in Elaine on the morning of October 2nd. Colonel Jenks ordered everyone, Black and White, to be disarmed. With Elaine secured, the Colonel sent a detachment to Helena to guard the jail where Blacks were rounded into to prevent lynchings. He then goes to Hoop Spur with a company of men and two machine guns. One of his men, Corporal Luther D. Earls, was killed but Jenks’ report did not include any mention of his men firing shots. Corporal Earls was the last White casualty from the event, a total of five White men.

Having accepted the rumored Black insurrection as told by a number White men, Jenks’ soldiers aided in interrogating Black prisoners, including torture. Hundreds of blacks were put in stockades, only released after their White employers vouched for them. Military intelligence reports didn’t include the names of African Americans interrogated and tortured but these reports claimed these individuals confessed to planning an insurrection. Blacks were moved from the stockades to the Helena jail where torture continued. The soldiers banded with local vigilantes and, over the next four days, murdered more than 200 Blacks (estimates up to 800), with hundreds more jailed or charged with first-degree murder. The killing was indiscriminate―Black men, women, and children in the area were not spared. Many hid in the swamps and thickets, others were said to have been gunned down in fields as they worked, and throngs of others surrendered themselves to the authorities for arrest. A White journalist for the Memphis Press reported that White mobs shot at dead Black bodies lying in the street.

Held in a makeshift jail, hundreds of Blacks were detained until their participation in the PFHUA could be verified. Those farmers who had not participated in the union were held until their landlords arrived to vouch for and collect them. Those fortunate enough to leave the stockade were given passes they were to show on demand and were ordered to return to the fields for work. During the last days of October 1919, the Phillips County grand jury charged 122 union’s members with assault, murder, and nightriding. At the end of the violence, 65 Black men were brought to trial. Twelve were sentenced to death and the others appealed to higher courts. No White man was ever charged in the massacre. Monitoring these events with alarm, African American activists took action. Journalist and anti-lynching activist who helped bring national attention to the Elaine Massacre and its aftermath, Ida B. Wells-Barnett traveled to Arkansas to interview the condemned men.

The Committee of Seven, a group of local planters and city and county officials, formed on October 2nd. They met with Governor Brough that same day to propose leading an investigation into the riot. In Little Rock, Brough held a press conference where he praised the five White men killed but made no mention of White mob activities. The committee claimed they discovered a plan of Blacks insurrection set for October 6th that was prematurely enacted on the night of the Hoop Spur church shooting. They further claimed White planters in the area were targeted for death, that African Americans expected to seize their land, and that union organizer Robert Hill had knowingly conned African Americans for his own personal gain. The same day the committee released their findings, a circular was passed out advising Blacks to get back to work as if nothing had happened. Editorials from Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi warned African Americans against further involved, adding that it would only result in more Blacks deaths.

By October 7th 1919, the massacre ended. Walter White, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been sent down to investigate and get a first hand report, passing as a White reporter the "Chicago Daily News". Walter White, mixed-race ancestry and Caucasian appearance allowed him to speak confidentially with White locals. Furious, Brough tried to keep the NAACP magazine the Crisis and the African American newspaper the Chicago Defender from distribution in Arkansas. It was later discovered that there was a "damned yellow nigger down here passing for white, and we're going to get him". Tipped off to the danger, Walter White quickly fled town, not bothering to go back to the hotel to get his bags, he jumped on a train without a ticket, to avoid being attacked himself. Even though Mr. White escaped, he heard rumors that he had been lynched in Arkansas that afternoon.

On November 5th 1919, 12 Black men were convicted of murder and sentenced to die by electrocution. The court-appointed lawyers did little in their defense despite the investigation and involvement of the NAACP. Through grassroots efforts, the NAACP built support for the sharecroppers dubbed the “Elaine Twelve” and raised money for their legal counsel. Scipio Jones, the leading Black attorney of his era in Arkansas, and Edgar L McHaney were hired to fight for justice for the accused at Elaine, who were divided into the Moore v. Dempsey and Ware v. Dempsey cases. He received assistance from the NAACP. The lawyers won new trials for six of the men. However, the convictions of six of the men were upheld. The first six defendants were eventually freed by the Arkansas supreme court.

The case of the Moore defendants went to the United States Supreme Court, which granted a new hearing, in the case of Moore v Dempsey. It took 4 years of appeals before the case finally reached the Supreme Court. On February 19, 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 6–2 decision in favor of the Moore defendants, maintaining the twelve had been denied “due process” and noting the judicial proceedings had been influenced by a mob that had assembled outside of the courthouse before the men were sentenced. The men were released off of death row. The Supreme Court's decision marked the beginning of an era in which the Supreme Court gave closer scrutiny to criminal justice cases and reviewed state actions against the Due Process Clause and the Bill of Rights. Despite the favorable ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, the Moore defendants remained in jail facing a re-trial in district court. On November 3, 1923, new Governor Thomas McRae commuted the death sentences of the sharecroppers to twelve-year terms in prison, making them immediately eligible for parole.

Although peace had returned to Elaine, the White communities in the plantation counties along the Mississippi River continued to fear the possibility of a Black uprising. Such was the case in Desha County, south of Elaine. When Deputy Sheriff Breedlow and two local men attempted to arrest Doc Hays, a Black man accused on January 21st 1920 of stealing hogs, they met unexpected resistance. Ten armed Black men objected to the arrest and freed Hays after a brief struggle with the deputy and his men. Local officials, fearing the clash was a portent of another rebellion, requested help from the governor. Brough responded to the request by making a telephone call to Camp Pike, seeking federal troops to prevent a race riot. The post commander complied by sending a detachment of 130 men under the command of Maj. Austin Preston by special train the next day. Upon arrival Preston quickly discovered that a Black uprising was not in the offing, and two days later the troops returned to Little Rock. On January 13, 1925, the six Moore defendants were granted indefinite furloughs from McRae and were released from jail. Their attorney, Scipio Jones arranged for these men to be quickly escorted out of state to prevent them from being lynched.

Elaine

Throughout the Red Summer of 1919 and beyond, no journalist did more to chronicle the lynchings and other forms of terror inflicted on Black people than Ida B Wells-Barnett. From East St Louis, Illinois, to Elaine, Arkansas, her pen was an instrument for justice. The men, who had come to be called “The Elaine 12”, had been unfairly rounded up, then falsely convicted after a sham six-minute trial in Helena, Arkansas. Now, they sat on death row for crimes they did not commit. They had one last hope. Perhaps, Ida B Wells-Barnett, a Black investigative journalist known for her utter fearlessness in her “crusade for justice” for her people, could save them. Perhaps this woman, who had once written “if it were possible”, she, “would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them,” had that kind of power to fight a “tide of hatred”.

Did Wells, an unflinching woman who had traveled the country to investigate the ruthless barbarity of White mobs in other lynchings and massacres, have that much power to save these Black men on death row in Arkansas? One of the old Black men believed she did.

“Dear Mrs. Wells-Barnett,” he wrote. “This is one of the 12 mens which is sentenced to death speaking to you on this day and thanking you for your grate speech you made throughout the country in the Chicago Defender paper. So I am thanking you to the very highest hope you will do all you can for your collord race. Because we are innercent men, we Negroes. So I thank God that thro you, our Negroes are looking into this truble, and thank the city of Chicago for what it did to start things and hopen to hear from you all soon.”

The letter was dated December 30th 1919 with a date line of Little Rock, Arkansas. It was sent to Wells three months after the Elaine Massacre had started. Wells-Barnett heard the desperation in the letter and, without hesitation, took a train from Chicago, heading into the deep south, which had once threatened her life and warned her never to return. “It was my first return to the South since I had been banished thirty years before,” she later wrote.

In Chicago, when Wells-Barnett heard the news of the “Elaine 12”, Frank Moore, Frank Hicks, Ed Hicks, Joe Knox, Paul Hall, Ed Coleman, Alfred Banks, Ed Ware, William Wordlaw, Albert Giles, Joe Fox, and John Martin, she began immediately raising attention about their case and raising money to save them. “They had been in prison in Helena, Ark, since the first week in October,” Wells wrote. “They had been beaten many times and left for dead while there, given electric shocks, suffocated with drugs, and suffered every cruelty and torment at the hands of their jailers to make them confess to a conspiracy to kill White people. Besides this a mob from the outside tried to lynch them.”

Wells explained that “during all that two months of terrible treatment and farcical trial, no word of help had come from their own people until a copy of the Chicago Defender, December 13th, fell into their hands”. “A letter of mine had already appeared in the Chicago Defender calling attention to the fact that the riot had been precipitated by the refusal of colored men to sell their cotton below the market price because they had an organization which advised them so to do,” Wells wrote in “Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells”. “I appealed to the colored people of the country to use their influence and money for those twelve men, who had been found guilty of murder in the first degree and then sentenced to be electrocuted.”

On January 22nd 1920, Wells-Barnett arrived in Little Rock, Arkansas, and headed immediately for the secret address the man had included in his letter.

“Those men were under sentence of death and there was no time to be lost,” Wells wrote. In Little Rock, she found a group of Black women, the wives and mothers of the 12 Black men who were waiting on death row. She disguised herself as an old woman and slipped into the jail. “The iron bars were wide enough apart to enable us to shake hands,” Wells wrote. “The one guard on duty sat about fifty feet away reading the Sunday paper. When he looked up, he saw only a group of insignificant looking colored women who had been there many times before, so he went on reading his newspaper.” Inside the jail, Wells took precise notes, recording the testimony of the men. Wells asked them “to write down everything they could recollect about the rioting, and what befell each one of them.” She asked them to “tell me the number of acres of land they had tilled during the year, how much cotton and corn they had raised, and how many heads of cattle and hogs they owned, and be sure to say what had become of it all.“

William Wordlow told her that it was about five carloads of white men who drove to the church that night on 30 September 1919.

“I was out in front of the church in the road when these men came up in these cars and started shooting in the church on the other people both women, men and children. When the White men started that work, I broke and ran away. I saw them when they made the first shot. I went in the woods and stayed all night. I stayed until the soldiers came, then I came to them. I had eight women and children with me to hide, keep them from getting killed. The White people sent word all through the country they were coming to kill all the Negroes they could find. The soldiers took me to Elaine and I was put in the school-house and they kept me there seven days. Then they brought me on to Helena jail and we were whipped like dogs to make stories on each other.”

The man pleaded:
“I did not kill no one. I did not have a gun. Then after my trial was over in six minutes, some of the White men came from Elaine to the jail and told me if I would put something on more Negroes they would turn me free, if I would call just two or three men’s names that they did call to me. I would not do so, because it would be a story and I will not lie on no one. I was whipped twice in jail. Near to death. While they were whipping me they put some kind of dope in my nose; also I was put in an electric chair and shocked to make me tell a story on other men.”

Frank Moore told Wells that more than 120 Black men, women and children were in the church that night. When the White men began shooting, he said he ran home. “The next morning the Whites sent us word that they was coming down there and ‘kill every nigger they found.’” Moore told Wells:
“The White people want to say that union was the cause of the trouble. It’s not so; the White people were threatening to run us from our crops before this trouble started. The Phillips County people know they started this trouble and they only got the army there to cover what they had done.”

Before she left, Wells asked the men to “have faith to believe that the great state of Arkansas would undo the wrong that had been done to them. I said they should pray daily that God would give the authorities the wisdom to realize the wrong that had been done, and the courage to right that wrong. I earnestly believe such prayers, will strengthen the hands of the White people of the state who want to do the right thing.” Wells returned to Chicago and wrote a pamphlet on the Elaine Massacre, publishing “the facts I had gathered and helping them to circulate them”, Wells wrote in her, “Crusade for Justice”. “I raised the money to print a thousand copies, and circulated almost the entire edition in Arkansas.”

The NAACP mounted a case to fight for them. “In Little Rock and at the headquarters of the NAACP in New York, efforts began to fight the death sentences handed down in Helena, led in part by Scipio Africanus Jones,” according to the Encyclopedia Arkansas, “the leading Black attorney of his era in Arkansas, and Edgar L McHaney. Jones began to raise money in the Black community”. The lawyers won new trials for six of the men. However, the convictions of six of the men who became known as the Moore defendants were upheld. The first six defendants were eventually freed by the Arkansas supreme court. The case of the Moore defendants went to the US supreme court, which granted a new hearing, in the case of Moore v Dempsey, ruling the men had not been given due process. Attorney Scipio Jones began negotiations to have the men released. On January 14th 1925, Governor Thomas McRae ordered that the Moore defendants be released.

Knoxville

The Knoxville Race Riot in Knoxville, Tennessee, was one of several race riots that took place in the “Red Summer” of 1919. It was a race riot, which means it involved violence between different racial groups. This event took place on August 30 and 31, 1919. For many years after the Civil War, Knoxville was seen as a city where Black and White people got along. This was unusual for a city in the Southern United States. Black citizens in Knoxville could vote, hold public jobs, and even work as police officers. In 1918, a respected Black leader named Charles W. Cansler wrote that relations between races in Knoxville were very good. He said that no race riots had ever happened there. The last place anyone — least of all a Knoxvillian — might have looked for signs of impending racial violence was surely in this east Tennessee city, where Mayor John E. McMillan, a Democrat, had denounced the Ku Klux Klan, and gained a following among Blacks.

The riot began on August 30, 1919, when an intruder entered the home of Bertie Lindsey, a twenty-seven-year-old White woman. In late May of 1919 while her husband was looking for a job in Akron, Ohio she was living alone in their home until mid-July, when her 21-year-old first cousin, Ora Smyth, moved in from her parents' farm. Bertie Lindsey and Ora Smyth were asleep in a double bed in the front room when someone entered. The women were awakened, and a pistol shot was fired, striking Bertie Smyth Lindsey in the chest. She died almost immediately. The only witness was Lindsey’s twenty-one-year-old cousin, Ora Smyth. Smyth, who soon after the intruder left their Knoxville home, ran next door to the house of a city policeman. Two patrolmen, Jim Smith and Andy White, arrived on the scene. Smyth described the intruder as a light-skinned Negro, with a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

Patrolman White then got his superior officer's permission to go with three others in search of a man White considered a prime suspect. The man's name was Maurice F. Mays. Andy White, immediately accused Maurice Mays. Mayes, a well-known political figure, was rumored to be the illegitimate son of Knoxville Mayor John E. McMillan. Mays had a reputation for associating with both Black and White women, making him unpopular with many of the city's White residents. He became known as “Uncle John’s bastard son”. He was a well-known African American political figure who briefly served as a deputy sheriff in North Knoxville. Though he was married, he did not live with his wife — or with his mother and stepfather. He was known to have connections among gamblers and prostitutes.

Patrolman Smith later testified that Officer White specifically singled out Mays because of a personal grudge. At around 3:30 AM, Knoxville police arrived at the Mays home on Humes Street. The only evidence they found was a .38 revolver, which the officers decided must have been fired recently. They arrested Mays and took him back to Eighth Street, where the distraught Ora Smyth “identified” him as the intruder after barely glancing at Mays. Maurice Franklin Mays was then taken to the Knox County jailhouse. Police in Knoxville knew there might be trouble. So, they moved Maurice Mays from the smaller city jail to the larger Knox County Jail. The county Sheriff W. T. Cate then, fearing trouble, arranged for Mayes to be removed to Chattanooga.

At around 8:00 a.m. the next morning, angry Whites began to congregate near the Knox County Jail. A few individuals broke into the jail in search for Mays thinking Mays was there. A much larger and angrier crowd formed in Market Square. By late afternoon, about 5,000 people were in Market Square. By noon, news of the murder had spread, and scattered groups of men began to congregate in the downtown market square. Guns were everywhere in evidence. A crowd of curious onlookers had gathered at the county jail, thinking Mays was being held there. Around 5:00 PM, the crowd at the jail became very angry. They demanded that Mays be brought out. Deputy sheriff Carroll Cate and jailer Earl Hall told them Mays was not there. They even let some people from the crowd look inside the jail. Sheriff Cate and Hall could not convince the crowd that Mays was gone, they locked the jail's strong riot doors.

Unable to find Mays, around 8:30 PM, the rioters used dynamite to break into the jail. They searched every floor for Mays. In the ensuing melee, no Black prisoners were disturbed, but a dozen White inmates were freed, including three under murder charges. The liquor storage room was pillaged, and the jail demolished. As rumors of violence circulated, the crowd broke into downtown hardware stores, armed themselves, and fought a pitched gun battle with the residents of a predominantly Black neighborhood. A detachment of the National Guard, from a nearby training camp had been called in to reinforce the outnumbered policemen. They proved to be of little use in controlling the crowd, as guardsmen joined the White mob and fired into Black-occupied buildings.

While the White mob was smashing windows and taking more guns and ammunition from hardware stores and pawn shops along the way, soldiers rushed to set up machine guns at Vine and Central and at other points in the vicinity. When the soldiers turned onto Vine Street, a gun battle started. Black defenders fired at both the rioters and the soldiers. The shooting continued for several hours. The black defenders tried to capture the machine guns many times but could not. They were outgunned and slowly left Central and Vine. One National Guard officer was killed accidentally by his own men, and one African American was also shot and killed. By dawn a nervous calm had settled over the empty streets. On the morning of Sunday, August 31, several hundred additional guardsmen restored order.

The effect on the Black community was devastating. The National Guard quickly blocked off Central Street. They searched all Black homes, sometimes forcibly in the blocked area. A rule was put in place that everyone had to be home by a certain time. Also, 200 white citizens were temporarily made special police officers. Small reports of violence continued throughout the day. Whites, on the other hand, were generally left alone by the authorities. Thirty-six Whites were arrested, but an all-White jury refused to convict any of them. From the moment of Mayes arrest he had steadfastly maintained his innocence. The state, with equal steadfastness, moved rapidly to convict and punish him. He called the case against him "unfair and prejudiced."

In October 1919, Mays's trial began. Former mayor Samuel Heiskell was a special prosecutor. Mays was defended by lawyers Reuben Cates and William F. Yardley. During the first two days of testimony 15 witnesses were called, including the husband of Bertie Lindsey, the doctor who examined her body, and several police officers involved in the investigation. But the most attention by far was paid to two people: Ora Smyth, the eyewitness, and Andy White, the arresting officer. As the trial entered its third day, Cates called White back to the stand for more cross-examination and attempted to show that he had nursed a long-standing grudge against Mays and was attempting to frame him for the Lindsey murder. White had focused his suspicion on Mays even before his investigation, Cates suggested.

The first defense witness was Mays himself. In a soft-spoken but confident manner, he described his activities on the day of the crime. The defense called 20 more witnesses to support Mays's claim of innocence. The state took just 35 days after Bertie Lindsey's murder to arrest and convict the only suspect and prescribe his punishment. An all-White jury took 18 minutes to find Mays guilty, of Lindsey's death. But two and a half years would elapse before it administered that punishment to Maurice Mays. Even though there was no clear reason for the crime and very little evidence, Mays was found guilty. No reports on fingerprints or ballistics or an autopsy were presented in evidence. The case was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court. But Mays was found guilty again in a second trial in April 1921 and sentenced him to die in the electric chair. Six months later, the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed the verdict, finding no trial errors and no technical flaws to warrant another reversal. On March 15, 1922, as he continued to proclaim his innocence, Maurice Mays died in the electric chair.

Because no African American prisoners were harmed in the mob’s assault on the jail, many historians believe that Mayes was the only target of the crowd. The subsequent march to the African American section of town and the ensuing firefight has convinced other historians that while the Knoxville riot of 1919 may not have begun as a race riot, it ultimately became one. Mayor McMillan’s earlier attacks on the Ku Klux Klan and the city’s comparatively placid racial atmosphere demonstrate a progressive attitude among many Whites that stands in sharp contrast to the mob action of August 30-31, 1919. Deputy Carroll Cates estimated that between 25 and 30 had been killed, while National Guard Major Maurice Martin placed it between 30 and 40. Others placed the death toll in the hundreds. The riot prompted many African Americans to flee the city. In 1926, former mayor John McMillan believed to have been Mays's biological father, committed suicide.

Knoxville

Longview

The Longview riot was much less bloody than either the Washington or Chicago riots. This low mortality could have been partially due to the rural environment of Longview, which in 1919 had a population of 5,700 of which 1,790, or thirty-one percent, was Black. It was an area of historic cotton cultivation, which had depended on slave labor before the Civil War. Longview is located in Northeast Texas 125 miles due east of Dallas. It is the county seat of Gregg County, which, in 1919, had a population of 16,700 of which 8,160, or forty-eight percent, was Black. Blacks were oppressed under Jim Crow rules and White supremacy. The most influential Black publication to circulate in Gregg County was "The Chicago Defender", a weekly Negro newspaper with nationwide coverage and circulation.

In July 1919, the Chicago Defender published an article about a June lynching in Longview, Texas. The paper reported that White vigilantes murdered Lemuel Walters on June 17 and described the circumstances surrounding the lynching. While coverage in the White press accused Walters of burgling a home and threatening a married White woman, the Defender suggested Walters only crime was that he was loved by a White woman, and it quoted her as saying that she would have married him if they had lived in the North. Even though the article did not name the Kilgore woman, her friends and relatives knew to whom it referred, and they considered the article scurrilous. This report fanned the flames of White rage and provoked a thousand of the town’s White residents to riot.

Racial tension was especially high immediately before the riot because two locally prominent Black leaders, Samuel L. Jones, and Dr. Calvin P. Davis, a Black physician, to other Black residences, had urged Black farmers to avoid local White cotton brokers and sell directly to buyers in Galveston. Because of its critique of racism and celebration of Black independence and self-defense, the Chicago Defender was a perennial target of White supremacists who sought to disrupt its distribution, typically by attacking its reporters and printers. In 1919, the local distributor of the Defender in the Longview community was Samuel L. Jones, a school teacher and labor rights advocate. When the Walters article appeared in the Defender, White citizens of Longview concluded that Jones was its author.

Walters, according to the article, was safely locked in the Gregg County Jail until the sheriff willingly handed him over to a White mob that murdered him on June 17th. A mob formed and found Jones by the town courthouse on July 10. He was beaten, supposedly by two brothers of the Kilgore woman, but escaped to find his friend, Dr. Calvin P. Davis, who immediately began to organize for his defense. That evening, Jones hid at a relative’s house while Davis and 25 other armed Black men set up defensive positions at Jones’ house and waited. A dozen or so armed Whites arrived at Jones’ house and tried to enter by force, but the Black men opened fire on the White attackers. Several of the White men were injured, supposedly by two brothers of the Kilgore woman.

The mob fled and went to alert their friends and relatives, others broke into a hardware store to get guns and ammunition. Black residents called upon the town’s White mayor, sheriff, and governor for aid. During the White rioting, the only law enforcement present were the local police. Grown now to nearly a thousand men, incensed by the specter of Black self-defense, the White mob returned to Jones’ house and burned it to the ground. They also destroyed several other properties owned by Black residents, including the home of Davis, and to a Black dance hall in which they suspected the Blacks had stored ammunition. Jones and Davis both managed to escape from Longview with their lives, but Davis’ father-in-law, Marion Bush, was chased down and killed after he fled from Sheriff Meredith, who was either offering him protective custody or attempting to arrest him.

Meredith felt that Bush might be in danger of an attack by the White radicals because of his family relationship with Davis. The Sheriff explained this danger to Bush and assured him that he was not there to arrest him or harass him. After a few moments of discussion, Bush told the Sheriff that he would go with him but asked him to wait until he could go back inside and get his hat. When he returned he was concealing a .45 caliber revolver and said that he had changed his mind and was not going. Bush, undoubtedly, recalled the fate of Lemuel Walters and, therefore, determined that he was not going to jail, even for this so-called protection. As he spoke he leveled the revolver at Meredith and fired. After firing the shots Bush dashed back inside the house and fired again at Meredith.

In a few moments Bush ran out the back door and headed west carrying a pistol and a high-powered rifle. Meredith emptied his pistol at him, but did not hit him. Bush headed west along the railroad tracks, presumably trying to reach the Negro lodge at Camp Switch, a train stop about ten miles west of Longview. The Negro lodge contained guns, and he probably hoped to find refuge there. When Meredith was unable to apprehend Bush, he telephoned Jim Stephens, a farmer who lived five miles west of town at Willow Springs, and asked him to stop Bush. When Stephens saw Bush he shouted for him to halt, but Bush refused to do so. He fired at Stephens and ran into a cornfield. Stephens pursued him and killed him with shots to the chest and neck.

Early Friday, July 11, County Judge E. M. Bramlette and Sheriff D. S. Meredith telephoned Governor William P. Hobby, who ordered only eight Texas Rangers from Austin and San Antonio and placed three Texas National Guard units in East Texas on alert. However, the Rangers and the National Guard did not arrived until the next week to monitor the situation. Bush's death led Mayor G. A. Bodenheim to request more aid from the governor. Governor Hobby responded by dispatching an additional 150 guardsmen to Longview. A curfew was enacted, as was martial law. Hobby put Brigadier General Robert McDill in command of the guardsmen and rangers and he issued orders initiating the specific details of the martial law. McDill, prohibited groups of three or more people from gathering on streets, and ordered all Longview citizens, including county, precinct, and city peace officers, to turn in all firearms at the county courthouse.

McDill asked city and county officials Sunday night to name a citizens’ committee to work with him and the other military officers. The committee passed resolutions expressing disapproval of the shooting and burning and pledged their support to the military authorities. In the meantime Captain Hanson and his rangers conducted investigations to find the White men involved in the attack upon Jones’ house and those responsible for burning the African American property. By talking to various White men, the rangers identified the ringleader who revealed the names of sixteen other men who had made the initial attack with him upon Jones’ house. The rangers arrested seventeen White men on charges of attempted murder; each was released on $1,000 bond.

Twenty-one Black men were arrested, but were never tried, and none of the twenty-six White men arrested were never tried. As the tension in Longview subsided, General McDill talked with the committee of citizens about the appropriate time for lifting the martial law. The committee cautioned that before ending the martial law that the Black men who had been arrested should be sent out of the county for their own safety since rumors were circulating that White individuals planned to kill some of them as soon as they got their guns back. Consequently, on Wednesday the Black men were taken to Austin under guard of the Troop from Nacogdoches. General Wolters and Captain Hanson also accompanied them. On the same day that the Black prisoners left, General McDill ordered home all of the remaining National Guard units. Throughout the duration of the martial law, no further acts of violence were reported, except for a couple of minor fires.

Tension had subsided by Thursday to such a degree that Hobby ordered an end to martial law at noon Friday, July 18, and the citizens were allowed to pick up their firearms at noon Saturday. Although Judge Bramlette, Mayor Bodenheim, and other community leaders regretted deeply the turn of events which had brought the troops and the adverse nationwide publicity to Longview, they did not regret calling the troops. On the other hand, some white residents criticized the officials for asking for troops, feeling that the local White people should have been allowed to settle the matter themselves. Once martial law was lifted, county and city officials attempted to promote harmonious relations between the races and to avoid activities which would remind people of the riot. Thus, it becomes evident that the Longview and Gregg County officials, especially the Mayor and the Judge behaved in a very responsible manner throughout the riot.

Longview

Omaha

The Great Migration brought tens of thousands of African Americans to northern industrial cities—including Omaha, Nebraska, which saw its Black population doubled, in the second decade of the 20th Century, as they were recruited to work in the meatpacking industry. The major meatpacking plants hired Black people as strikebreakers in 1917. The growing Black population, the lack of housing and resentment over job competition, after the end of World War I, by White ethnic groups helped fuel racial tension in Omaha as it did in other cities across the North. Following a national pattern the Omaha Bee, a newspaper notorious for its sensationalist headlines and open racial hostility, exploited this tension by the summer of 1919. They carried daily newspaper accounts of attacks by Black males on White women, without similar coverage concerning assaults on African American women, by White males.

Although the other major Omaha newspapers carried similar stories, the Bee sensationalized the news the most, blaming in particular Mayor Edward P. Smith and his hand-picked police chief, Marshall Eberstein. On September 25th 1919, a 19-year-old White woman, Agnes Loebeck, was allegedly assaulted at gunpoint by a Black male in south Omaha. The assault was witnessed by Millard Hoffman, described by the newspapers and subsequent reports as “a crippled friend” of Loebeck’s. The following day police arrested a 41-year-old Black man, Will Brown, who was known by many to be living with a White woman. The victim identified Brown as the perpetrator of the assault, although the police and Army intelligence later reported that the identification was not positive. In the local Omaha Bee, however, the incident was cited as only one further example of unpunished depredations committed upon White women by African Americans.

Here, too, local politics was a factor. The newspaper was controlled by a recently ousted political machine that was highly critical of the new reform-minded city administration. Over the course of several months it had published a series of articles highlighting alleged instances of Black criminality to embarrass city officials. The first attempt by a mob to lynch Brown was unsuccessful, but two days after his arrest rumors began to circulate that another attempt would be made on his life. On the afternoon of Sunday, September 28th, at about 2 pm, a crowd of mostly young men gathered at a school on the south side, reputed to be friends of Loebeck’s, gathered at the Bancroft School in south Omaha. They began a one-mile march led by Hoffman, adding followers as it progressed, to the downtown Douglas County Court House, where Brown was being held. By 4:00 pm this group had been joined by a much larger crowd.

Although initially good humored, the mob turned rapidly hostile, demanded that the prisoner be surrendered to them, and stoned the building, breaking all the windows on the first and second floors. By 7:00 p.m these actions forced the forty-five Omaha policemen present to retreat to the third and fourth floors. There, they joined forces with Michael Clark, sheriff of Douglas County, who had summoned his deputies to the building with the hope of preventing the capture of Brown. The county jail was on the fifth floor. The mob then stormed the building. The police opened fire, killing two, but only succeeded in delaying the mob temporarily. Within minutes the situation had escalated far beyond the capacity of the police to control. By 7:45 pm the crowd numbered some 5,000 people.

By 8:00 p.m. the mob had begun firing on the courthouse with guns they looted from nearby stores. They began to assault the police officers, pushing one through a pane of glass in a door and attacking two others who had wielded clubs at the mob. Demanding that Brown be handed over to them, several rioters had looted a nearby gasoline station and seized fuel which they promptly used to set fire to the first several floors of the courthouse, hoping to burn out the police and Brown. When firefighters appeared, their hoses were cut into pieces by rioters who had broken into nearby hardware stores and stolen axes as well as firearms. Nearly every window on the south side of the courthouse was broken. The mob continued to strike the courthouse with bullets and rocks, and many civilians were caught in the midst of the mayhem. Spectators were shot while women were thrown to the ground and trampled.

Black people were dragged from streetcars and beaten. Many members of the mob even inflicted minor wounds upon themselves. About 11 o'clock, when the frenzy was at its height, Mayor Edward Smith arrived on the scene and attempted to persuade the rioters to leave. He had been in the burning building for hours. Throughout the confrontation, Mayor Smith refused resolutely to surrender Brown. As he emerged from the doorway, a shot rang out. "He shot me. Mayor Smith shot me," a young man in the uniform of a United States soldier yelled. The crowd surged toward the mayor. He fought them and was struck on the head from behind, a rope was placed around his neck, and his unconscious body was strung up to a lamppost. Smith was suspended in the air when State Agent Ben Danbaum drove a high-powered automobile into the throng right to the base of the signal tower. He and others grasped the mayor and untied the noose.

The detectives brought the mayor to Ford Hospital. There he lingered between life and death for several days, finally recovering. "They shall not get him. Mob rule will not prevail in Omaha," the mayor kept muttering during his delirium. Meanwhile, the plight of the police in the courthouse had become desperate. The fire had spread to the third floor, and officers faced the prospect of burning to death. Appeals for help to the crowd below brought only bullets and curses. The mob frustrated all attempts to raise ladders to the imprisoned police. "Bring Brown with you and you can come down," somebody in the crowd shouted. Police authorities moved Brown and the other prisoners to the roof. The mob poured more gasoline into the building. The flames were spreading rapidly upward, and death seemed certain for the prisoners and their protectors. Attempts by the fire department to extinguish the flames were thwarted.

Boys and young men placed firemen's ladders against the building. They mounted to the second story. One man had a heavy coil of rope on his back, and another carried a shotgun. From inside the courthouse, terrified White inmates threw down a note surrendering to the mob: “THE JUDGE SAYS HE WILL GIVE UP NEGRO. BROWN. HE IS IN THE DUNGEON. THERE ARE TEN WHITE PRISONERS ON THE ROOF. SAVE THEM.” At this point the mob finally captured Brown. The actual sequence of events remains unclear, but one account maintains that the prisoners on the roof, in spite of Sheriff Clark's efforts, surrendered Brown to save their own lives. Clark also reported that Brown moaned "I am innocent, I never did it; my God, I am innocent," as he was surrendered to the mob. By the time the ground floor was reached, he had likely been beaten to death. They tortured him, hoisted into the air on a lynch rope, his swaying body was then riddled with bullets. A 12-year-old future actor named Henry Fonda witnessed the lynching, and could only speak about it near the end of his life.

Not yet satisfied, the crowd pulled his corpse to a nearby intersection where he was burned, and what remained of Will Brown was then towed about downtown Omaha. Still not satisfied, the mob ransacked more stores in search of arms and then went to the nearby police station to lynch other Blacks being held there. After Brown was murdered, however, the police captain on duty at the jail released the other Black prisoners, an action that undoubtably saved their lives. The lawlessness continued for several hours, throughout the night, after Brown had been lynched. Both the police patrol and emergency automobile were burned. Three times, the mob went to the city jail. The third time its leaders announced that they were going to burn it (but never did). Omaha municipal officials had already directed requests for aid both to local posts and to the War Department in Washington, D.C., which had been going on long before Brown was killed.

During the night federal troops arrived. The local Army commander, acting without prior War Department authorization, had decided to intervene under Army regulations allowing the deployment of troops in an emergency situation. On the morning of September 29th, Col. John E. Morris assumed command of the troops in Omaha. With Morris came sizable reinforcements from Camp Dodge, Iowa; Camp Grant, Illinois; and Camp Funston, Kansas. The largest detachment, from Camp Dodge, consisted of a provisional machine-gun company of 11 officers and 152 men with ten heavy machine guns. The Omaha Army commanders quickly published emergency orders to prevent a repetition of the previous day’s events. Colonel Morris had the newspapers in Omaha publish a proclamation warning that any citizen bearing arms faced immediate arrest, and a further proclamation ordering Blacks to remain indoors.

In the afternoon the Army launched an observation balloon in west Omaha, providing a panoramic view of the entire Black neighborhood. A thunderstorm aided the Army in keeping people off the streets; by nightfall of 29 September the city was reported quiet and under control. Major General Leonard Wood, commander of the Central Department, came the next day to Omaha by order of Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. Arriving late in the evening of 30 September, Wood immediately met with Nebraska Governor S. R. McKelvie, Acting Omaha Mayor Ure, and Colonel Morris. Then he created a strong reserve at the city auditorium – a provisional battalion, company, and machine-gun company – capable of being thrown quickly into any trouble spot. Three other company-size detachments were deployed at 24th and Lake Streets, in the Black neighborhood, the courthouse and city hall, in the city center

The New York Times quoted Wood as warning that “those who attempt to interfere with the military authorities will find themselves fighting the United States Army". Wood next issued a proclamation outlining the reasons for the federal military presence. He also prohibited public gatherings and carrying of firearms by all people except the police and military. Drawing on community support to help with local policing, he approved the deputizing of 200 men of the American Legion. The legionnaires made a favorable impression upon Wood, who later deputized men from this private, patriotic veteran’s organization in other civil disorders that the Army was ordered to quell. He observed in his diary that the legionnaires “have done good work and have shown what can be done with them in case of civic emergency”. On the following day, October 1st 1919, Wood declared modified martial law in Omaha.

Several arrests were made in the following days for complicity in the riot, but a grand jury's deliberations resulted in only a few indictments of little consequence. In Omaha racial tensions may have been orchestrated for political purposes. A reform movement's candidates had been elected in 1918, defeating the political machine headed by Thomas "Old Man" Dennison that had dominated city hall for two decades. Dennison was a saloon keeper turned political boss who resented reformers trying to clean up his influence, such as Mayor Smith, who had been elected on a platform of good government. Direct accusations by church leaders and an assessment by Gen. Leonard Wood assigned responsibility for the lynching to political ambition. They asserted that to discredit the reformers, Dennison and his newspaper ally, the Omaha Bee, exaggerated crime and racial tensions to create the atmosphere that exploded on September 28, 1919.

The Army’s efforts in Omaha involved the largest contingent of federal troops deployed to meet a racial disturbance during 1919-1920, 70 officers and 1,222 enlisted men. By early October the initial emergency had passed, and by midmonth only two companies of regulars remained in the city. The last troops departed Omaha on November 15th. Wood’s way of seizing and exercising authority marked another departure from prewar procedures for using the military in domestic disorders, and his analysis of the riot’s origins were obviously flawed. Yet, the overall performance of the Army in Omaha represented a fair and effective effort. On October 1, 1919, Brown was laid to rest in Omaha's Potters Field. The interment log listed only one word next to his name: "Lynched"

Omaha

Washington D.C

In late June and early July of 1919 several attempted rapes of White women were reported in Washington D.C and surrounding areas. Police officials within the 804-member city police department became convinced by eyewitness reports that one African American was responsible for several of the crimes. Many Whites, however, believed that a premeditated epidemic of sexual assaults by Blacks upon area White women was under way. Although suspects were arrested, most were released amid strong press criticism of the district government for lax law enforcement. In particular, the Washington Post ran a sensational campaign about a “crime wave” in the city, highlighting rapes both actual and imaginary. The stories were picked up by Washington’s other daily newspapers, the Washington Times, the Washington Herald, and the Washington Evening Star, generating outrage within the White community.

The Washington riot was one of more than 20 that took place that summer. With rioting in Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, TN., Charleston, S.C., and other cities, the bloody interval came to be known as "The Red Summer." Unlike virtually all the disturbances that preceded it – in which White-on-Black violence dominated – the Washington riot of 1919 was distinguished by strong, organized and armed Black resistance, foreshadowing the civil rights struggles later in the century. Postwar Washington, roughly 75 percent White, was a racial tinderbox. Housing was in short supply and jobs so scarce that ex-doughboys in uniform panhandled along Pennsylvania Avenue. Unemployed Whites bitterly envied the relatively few Blacks who had been fortunate enough to procure such low-level government jobs.

Many Whites also resented the Black "invasion" of previously segregated neighborhoods around Capitol Hill, Foggy Bottom and the old downtown. Washington's Black community was then the largest and most prosperous in the country, with a small but impressive upper class of teachers, ministers, lawyers and businessmen concentrated in the LeDroit Park neighborhood near Howard University. But Black Washingtonians were increasingly resentful of the growing dominance of the Jim Crow system that had been imported from the Deep South. Racial resentment was particularly intense among Washington's several thousand returning Black war veterans. They had proudly served their country in such units as the District's 1st Separate Battalion, part of the segregated Army force that fought in France. These men had been forced to fight for the right to serve in combat because the Army at first refused to draft Blacks for any role other than laborer. They returned home hopeful that their military service would earn them fair treatment.

Instead, they saw race relations worsening in an administration dominated by conservative Southern Whites brought here by Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian. Wilson's promise of a "New Freedom" had won him more Black voters than any Democrat before him, but they were cruelly disappointed: Previously integrated departments such as the Post Office and the Treasury had now set up "Jim Crow corners" with separate washrooms and lunchrooms for "colored only." Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan was being revived in Maryland and Virginia, as racial hatred burst forth with the resurgence of lynching of Black men and women around the country – 28 public lynchings in the first six months of 1919 alone, including seven Black veterans killed while still wearing their Army uniforms.

Nobody knows precisely how or where it started, but on a steamy Saturday night, July 19, 1919, twenty-two-year-old Elsie Stephnick, the spouse of a White, U.S navy aviator on her way home from work at the Bureau of Engraving just a few blocks away when she was jostled by two Black men. Although frightened, the woman was not assaulted. A Black suspect, Charles Ralls, questioned in the so-called attempted sexual assault on Stephnick, had been released by the Metropolitan Police for lack of evidence. The preceding weeks had seen a sensationalist newspaper campaign concerning the alleged sexual crimes of a "negro fiend", which contributed to the violence of the succeeding events. Word began to spread among the saloons and pool halls of downtown Washington, where crowds of soldiers, sailors and Marines freshly home from World War I were taking weekend liberty about the release of Ralls.

The crowd of White Americans, mostly consisting of veterans, formed and crossed the tree-covered Mall heading toward a predominantly poor Black section of Southwest. They picked up clubs, lead pipes and pieces of lumber as they went. Near Ninth and D streets SW, the mob spotted Charles Ralls who was out with his wife, Mary and began beating them. The couple broke free and bolted home, shots ringing out behind them. The mob tried to break in, but Ralls’ neighbors and friends rallied to his defense — a return fusillade scattered the mob and wounded a sailor. Servicemen fired back as Black residents locked their doors and prepared to defend their homes. In route the mob assaulted several Blacks and laid siege to the home of an African American family. The city police and the military provost guard intervened and broke up the mob, but they were too late to prevent other clashes.

The mob then attacked a second Black man, George Montgomery, 55, who was returning home with groceries. They fractured his skull with a brick. The rampage by about 400 Whites initially drew only scattered resistance in the Black community, and the police were nowhere to be seen. When the Metropolitan Police Department finally arrived in force, its White officers arrested more Blacks than Whites, sending a clear signal about their sympathies. Racial partisanship was an old tradition among the metropolitan police, who arrested eight Blacks but only two White sailors. When policemen tried to arrest a Black man later that night, he wounded one of them – the first sign that racial conflict in the nation’s capital would not be a one-sided affair. Black Americans were “dragged from cars” by the veterans and beaten, and throughout all of this, there was little attention brought to the police. The violence continued to grow into the night and the next day.

Violence escalated on the second night, Sunday, July 20, when White mobs sensed the 700-member police department was unwilling or unable to stop them. Blacks were beaten in front of the White House, at the giant Center Market on Seventh Street NW, and throughout the city, where roving bands of Whites pulled them off streetcars. One of Black Washington's leading citizens, author and historian Carter G. Woodson, 43, the new dean at Howard University, was caught up in that night's horror. Walking home on Pennsylvania Avenue, Woodson was forced to hide in the shadows of a storefront as a White mob approached. "They had caught a Negro and deliberately held him as one would a beef for slaughter," he recalled, "and when they had conveniently adjusted him for lynching, they shot him. I heard him groaning in his struggle as I hurried away as fast as I could without running, expecting every moment to be lynched myself."

By nightfall on July 20th violence erupted with greater intensity in the vicinity of 7th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. The group of veterans were emboldened to enact more violence considering the half-hearted effort of prevention from the police. The mob drew strength from a seedy neighborhood off Pennsylvania Avenue NW called "Murder Bay," known for its brawlers and brothels. Beatings were also held in front of the Washington Post as well as the White House with rarely any consequences being issued for the White attackers. Because of this second night and the lack of police/military intervention, the African American community opted to find protection themselves. They purchased guns and ammunition in order to ensure some source of safeguard.

Washington's newspapers made a tense situation worse, with an unrelenting series of sensational stories of alleged sexual assaults by an unknown Black perpetrator upon White women. The headlines dominated the city's four daily papers – the Evening Star, the Times, the Herald and The Post – for more than a month. A sampling of these July headlines illustrates the growing lynch-mob mentality: 13 SUSPECTS ARRESTED IN NEGRO HUNT; POSSES KEEP UP HUNT FOR NEGRO; HUNT COLORED ASSAILANT; NEGRO FIEND SOUGHT ANEW. Washington's newly formed chapter of the NAACP was so concerned that on July 9 – 10 days before the bloodshed – it sent a letter to the four daily papers saying they were "sowing the seeds of a race riot by their inflammatory headlines."

Attempts to calm the situation were unsuccessful. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) requested that Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels restrain the sailors and marines in the Washington area. Daniels did nothing, however, apparently blaming most of the trouble on the African Americans and making no effort to protect them. The Parents League, a Black citizens group that had been formed primarily to improve the "colored schools," printed and distributed about 50,000 copies of a Notice to the Colored Citizens, a handbill that advised "our people, in the interest of law and order and to avoid the loss of life and injury, to go home before dark and to remain quietly and to protect themselves".

The city's chief executive, Louis Brownlow, the chairman of the District Commissioners, issued an urgent appeal: "The actions of the men who attacked innocent Negroes cannot be too strongly condemned, and it is the duty of every citizen to express his support of law and order by refraining from any inciting conversation or the repetition of inciting rumor and tales." But a crucial event had already occurred that morning that would overwhelm Brownlow's good intention. In response to the second night, "The Washington Post" published a front-page article that would be singled out by the NAACP, and later by historians, as a contributing cause of the riot's escalation. Under the words "Mobilization for Tonight," The Post erroneously reported that all available servicemen had been ordered to report to Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventh Street at 9 p.m. for a "clean-up" operation. The NAACP asked that the paper be charged with inciting a riot.

Reports of police beatings of Black prisoners had spread, and African American leaders predicted that mounting Black frustration could explode into greater violence. One of the leaders told Brownlow that the Black people of Washington were “determined not to stand up and be shot down like dogs,” but they were “prepared to protect their families and themselves and would do so at all hazard.” The role of servicemen in the early stages of the riot did little to engender the trust of the Black residents of the city. The Black community leaders asked Brownlow if Black soldiers would be included among any federal troops assigned to the police force. Upon being informed by Brownlow that all colored soldiers had been discharged, the African Americans leaders bluntly told the assembled city officials that the Black community believed that they would not receive a “square deal” from the White soldiers.

It was never clear how this fictional mobilization call was issued, but it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as White rioters gathered and Blacks began arming themselves in defense. Longtime Post reporter Chalmers Roberts, in his history of The Washington Post, called the paper's riot coverage "shamefully irresponsible." As Blacks realized that authorities were not protecting them, many took up arms. More than 500 guns worth $14,000 were sold by pawnshops and gun dealers that Monday, when the worst violence occurred. White mobs were met by Black mobs up and down the Seventh Street commercial corridor. Black Army veterans took out their old guns; sharpshooters climbed to the roof of the Howard Theatre; Blacks manned barricades at New Jersey Avenue and at U Street. The new violence reversed the pattern of the earlier clashes. Now the majority of assaults were directed by Blacks against White citizens and police.

After his meeting with the Black leaders, Brownlow quickly met with Secretary of War Baker and Army Chief of Staff March at the War Department, requesting the help of any available federal forces to end the cycle of violence. Finally, after four days of police inaction, as city leaders and members of Congress realized the situation was out of hand, President Wilson mobilized about 2,000 troops to stop the rioting – cavalry from Fort Myer, Marines from Quantico, and Army troops from Camp Meade. The Navy Department agreed to supply 400 marines, and the War Department promised troops to reinforce the police. A unit of five officers and ninety men of the 3d Calvary under the command of Lt. Col. William O. Reed also made ready to supply the police with reinforcements if called. Limited violence arose that night, but a strong summer downpour doused their spirits and heavy rains continued through the night, effectively ending the riot of 1919.

The violence of the night of Monday, July 21 brought renewed strife and prompted a full-scale intervention by the federal government. City officials and businessmen closed the saloons, movie houses and billiard rooms in neighborhoods where violence erupted. Despite the federal troops, White mobs gathered again. In the ensuing months, the NAACP and others pushed for hearings into the riot. The Washington, D.C. race riot evoked a mixed response from the political and military figures most actively involved in its suppression. Race prejudice, economic competition, political corruption and exploitation of Black voters, police inefficiency, newspaper lies about Black crime were important causes of this event. All of these factors, most importantly race prejudice and economic competition, prove themselves as crucial in the build-up of the Washington Race Riot. These events were occurring in Washington as well as around all of the USA. But the episode became a mostly forgotten chapter of Washington history, largely because conservative Southern congressmen blocked further inquiry.