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.