The Red Summer

During the series named “By The Numbers,” we touch on a historical event called the Red Summer. I remember telling you I thought I had written an article about it, but it seems I had not, although I had mentioned it countless times in other articles. We are going to address that right now and talk about when the racists had lost every brain cell in their minds in the violent event called the Red Summer.

They Asked For It

The Red Summer was a series of race riots and attacks on African Americans between April and November of 1919. So, when I first heard about the Red Summer, I was like, “What did we do to make them lose their minds up in there”? They already got their payback for that azz kicking we gave them during the Civil War…
General Grant: Colonel Shine… do all our colored troops have on their shiny new black boots?
Colonel: Yes suh general! … and they’re all two sizes larger, just like you ordered.
General Grant: Okay… send them out there…
So yeah… I know they were pissed about that…
I mean they were hanging black folks weekly like we were their laundry and had enacted Jim Crow wishing a nigra would. We couldn’t drink out of the same water fountains, couldn’t eat in the same restaurants, couldn’t sit beside them on public transportation, couldn’t go to the same schools and lawd gawd don’t even think about a white woman. Just talking to one could get your side of the city burned down to a smoldering pile of cardboard. They didn’t allow Nigras to have wood or brick houses because they couldn’t get at you fast enough if you violated. Okay… they let a nigra have wooden houses because they burned longer… but no brick! Anywho… the real reason for the Red Summer was that WWI had just ended, and more than 400,000 black soldiers had returned from fighting the war in Europe. These men were seen as a particular threat because now that they had shed blood, the thought of being subordinate to a bunch of hooch-drinking racist hillbillys with long beards, wearing Confederate hats, and carrying rusty pistols just wasn’t gonna happen.
Racist: Boy you can’t go in there! Only white men can go in there!!
Blackman: Well, who’s gonna stop me!!
Racist: Me and this large rusty pistol gonna stop you!!
Blackman: Oh yeah!! Well, me and my Lee-Enfield Mk III with this twenty-inch bayonet says not only are we going in there… but we gonna go in there and talk to white women and have them sitting on our lap, while we have a whiskey!!
Racist: OH YEAH!!
Blackman: YEAH!!
Racist: OH YEAH!!
Blackman: YEAH!!
Racist: (Whistles and fifty racist Hillbillys come out… each with a large rusty pistol and a bag of bullets…)
Blackman: So suh, you say I go down there and take a left at the corner… and that’s where my worthless, no good, lazy azz is supposed to drink at suh…?
Racist: Naw nigra… naw… sitting on yo lap huh…
Well, most of the time it wasn’t going to happen.
Anyway, there was a congruence of events that precipitated the Red Summer. We talked about the black servicemen coming from WWI, but there also was the migration of one million blacks escaping the Jim Crow South and a lot of whites saw them as competing for jobs and housing in the North. So, to them, they saw a bunch of nigra’s trained on how to kill with their bare hands and able to shoot a tick off a dog’s ass from 200 yards away coming back fresh from a war overseas and large cornbread and biscuit eating angry hostile nigra’s mad about Jim Crow who can lift a Volkswagen over their heads with one arm coming up from the south. The white anxiety level was off the charts… Oh my goodness!! The nigra’s are coming…!!!

The Nigras Are Here

So, shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles ending WWI, it hit the fan in Washington D.C. Hooched-up Navy sailors began attacking black folks on the streets of the nation’s capital. It got so bad that black servicemen started positioning themselves on rooftops to act as sharpshooters for those racists who still thought they were in Sundown, Alabama, where tap dancing and shucking was a required course in nigra schools. Barricades were put around Howard University because the racist viewed those nigra’s back sassing as “lawd have mercy” being disrespectful!!
Howard: We are just as strong as the white man!! We are just as smart as the white man, and we are just as equal to if not better than the white man!! (Crowd roars!!)
Racist: I’ll give $1000 to the first white man that makes that nigra ride a burning cross down Mississippi Avenue!!!
So yeah, the hate was real… Anyway, it started in D.C. and spread to other cities. Although any black person was subject to indiscriminate attack, a lot of the violence centered on the returning black servicemen. You see in Europe they were treated as equals, especially in France and the UK where black soldiers had been part of the military for over a century in the case of the UK. The French Foreign Legion had enlisted black soldiers as far back as 1831 at its inception, and black soldiers have been a part of the British military since before the formation of a standing army in the 17th century. I think I mentioned in my series “By The Numbers,” about the U.S. presidents, how black servicemen returning from overseas were a driver of the Civil Rights movement, especially after WWII, when the racist tried to re-enact the Red Summer Pt II. Anywho, racists were afraid the returning black soldiers had forgotten how to grovel and would need a refresher course. So that anxiety we talked about earlier would eventually turn into violence. Between April and November of 1919, there would be an astounding 25 race riots in America, 97 recorded lynchings, and an event called the “Elaine Massacre.” Though official estimates put the black death toll at between 200 and 300 people, some experts estimate as many as 700 black people were killed in the massacre. I have also mentioned this massacre many times in my articles but haven’t written about it. We will take care of that next week. For now, I will give just a brief overview of what happened. A few men were trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. When the white folks of Elaine, Arkansas noticed they were black, they killed them… and basically that’s the end of the story. We will get into the particulars next week. So yeah, one of the greatest race riots of the last century happened during the Red Summer. This time also coincided with the second resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. After the Civil War when the Klan first emerged, President Grant shut them down faster than a Popeyes in Beverly Hills, and basically said…
“Anyone seen wearing a white sheet and a hood at night… would also be seen wearing a white sheet and a hood in the daytime… swinging from a tree.”
That shat got people’s attention. I don’t think they even made white sheets for a couple of years after that. He also passed the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. The act gave the government the ability to use military force against any terrorist organization bent on denying African Americans, public officials, and white sympathizers their constitutionally protected civil rights. It also gave the government the right to suspend the writ of habeas corpus against these white supremacist groups. That meant they could lock them up and throw away the key without giving them a trial. I heard they are still finding moldy sheets and hoods chained to the walls in the jail cells of some of these older prisons…. a hundred and fifty years later. Anyway, like I said, people started paying attention to that shat and it wouldn’t be until after Grant had passed and after the beginning of the 20th century that they would make a resurgence. By the way, parts of the Ku Klux Klan Act are still on the books and were recently used against you know-who… Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers for their part in the Insurrection Of 2020. Anyway, let’s get back to the Red Summer…

All Of Us…

Now hard as it may be to believe, when Woodrow “Sing Mammy First Nigra” Wilson, one of the most racist presidents in American history called out for the young men of America to fight for democracy against the Germans, many black men enlisted, in fact, close to 400,000 would enlist before the war was over. So, WWI was no joke. The technical innovations in warfare had surpassed humankind’s ability to manage them. It was wholesale slaughter on the European fronts. It was like giving cavemen machine guns. Why our young boys would ever want to go into that mess, I’ll never know, but I do know that when they came back the day of shucking and jiving was over. Across the country, former soldiers used their government-provided weapons training to defend their neighborhoods against racist white mobs. It was the first time since the end of Reconstruction in 1877 that black people started fighting back. Oh yes, there are many heroes who fought racism on their own, but it was the first time that we collectively fought back.
“This is the country to which we Soldiers of Democracy return. This is the fatherland for which we fought!”- W.E.B DuBois
Washington D.C was a major destination for African Americans during the Great Migration because of access to jobs and housing. There was a vibrant middle class here and blacks made up a quarter of the city’s residents. In addition, one of our great universities was also in Washington D.C. Howard University had produced some real heavyweight freedom fighters, that knew exactly what buttons to push and how to really get deep under the skin of the bigots and racists… shat… under the skin? They were getting into the blood vessels and the livers of them folks and the racists wanted them so bad, they began to name trees after them. Some of the finest black minds in America came right out of a small campus called the Theological and Normal Institute located on what would one day be Georgia Avenue N.W. On March 2, 1867, its name would change to… Howard University. So anyway, Washington D.C was on the racist “Somebody Needs A Whooping” list and during the Red Summer violence first appeared on its streets.

Once Upon A Time At The Washington Post

There were over 5000 black veterans in D.C. and they were pissed off at the inaction of the federal government to put a stop to the brazen attacks on black folks. To make matters worse, the Washington Post, which at that time was run by a Dixie Democrat supporter named Edward McLean. He would run scandalous stories!! Anything to make a dime! Edward’s father, John R. Mclean had died in 1916 and left the paper to his son. His father was also a racist and put out stories about blacks that were suspect… but his father made money… Edward did not. To make the bills, Edward went from being a “nasty racist,” to being a “low down cruddy nasty racist.” This dude would print full-page advertisements in his newspaper telling the racist white servicemen where they could find black people to carry out attacks on. God doesn’t like ugly and due to declining sales and ad revenue; the Washington Post eventually went into receivership in 1933. As for Edward “Ned” Mclean, he would be declared insane that year and was committed to a psychiatric hospital where they electrocuted his ass several times a day… okay I don’t know if he was treated with shock therapy, but I do know he died there in 1941 from a heart attack. You reap what you sow… So, like I said earlier, D.C. was happening for black folks, education, housing, jobs, a vibrant middle class, and the first black-owned bank in the country… Industrial Savings Bank. White folks wanted to take D.C. down a couple of notches. Racist: Them nigras are busting out their britches again over there..”
“I knew it to be true, but it was almost an impossibility for me to realize as a truth that men and women of my race were being mobbed, chased, dragged from street cars, beaten, and killed within the shadow of the dome of the Capitol, at the very front door of the White House.” -James Weldon Johnson
For those who are not familiar with Johnson, he was an author, journalist, and past president of the NAACP. He also wrote the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice And Sing.” He died in 1938. Anyway, after almost a week of white folks losing their minds, 2000 federal troops were called in and stationed on the streets of Chocolate City after more than forty people were killed and dozens wounded.

These Hands

(Picture of what a segregated beach looked like. Whites on one side and blacks on the other.)

Meanwhile, the black folks in Chicago were like “WTF!!,” when racists up there bought on the ugly by killing 17-year-old Eugene Williams. So Williams was in a homemade raft floating in the waters of Lake Michigan when the raft passed an imaginary line in the water separating the white beach from the black beach. A white man named George Stauber started feeling some kinda way and begin throwing rocks at him. I don’t know why because it’s not like Williams was going over there to watch white women, the only thing you could see on the beach back in them days were women’s ankles. They were covered up completely from head to toe. Anyway, one of the rocks knocked Williams unconscious. He slipped into the water and drowned before anybody could get to him. A white police officer refused to arrest Stauber. By the time they pulled William’s body out of the water, more than a thousand blacks had gathered and were like” Either you are gonna take Stauber to the jail or you gonna take him to the cemetery…” Okay… they didn’t say that, but they protested. It was on and popping then. In response to the protest, armed white men in cars began driving the streets of Chicago shooting into black homes and businesses. Mobs roamed the streets attacking black and burning homes. In the meantime, the police stood by and did nothing. Black veterans had seen enough. Like in D.C., they began forming militias to defend black homes, neighborhoods, and families. One group of black veterans said “faque dat” and broke into an armory and stole weapons they then used to beat back a white mob. Racist: “OMG!! THE NIGRAS GOT GUNS AND DEY IS SHOOTING THEM TOO!!” By the end of the weeklong struggle more than 15 whites were dead, 23 blacks had been killed, and over 500 were injured. Hundreds more were left homeless after whites torched black neighborhoods. It was worth it though because all over the rest of the United States black veterans began to take inspiration from what was happening in Washington D.C and Chicago and begin forming their own black militias to fight off the racist.
“The males carried their guns with as much calmness as if they were going to shoot a rabbit in a hunt, or getting ready to shoot the Kaiser’s soldiers.” – Preacher in South Carolina from “The Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America.” (2012)

The Last Time

As the mob attacks spread nationally, at least 15 black servicemen were lynched, many of them in uniform. It was crazy because they had believed what many of our leaders had told them that fighting in the war would be a path to equality, instead, it was a path to the tallest tree a racist could find. This wasn’t new though. A report by the Equal Justice Initiative found that from “Reconstruction to just after World War II, “thousands of black veterans were assaulted, threatened, abused, or lynched following military service… No one was more at risk of experiencing violence and targeted racial terror than black veterans who had proven their valor and courage as soldiers during the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.”
It’s funny though because even after the racist showed their very azz after WWI and during the Red Summer, over 1.2 million black men and women enlisted to fight in WWII. Although the Red Summer concluded at the end of 1919, it would not be the end of racial mob violence against African Americans. Just two years later, they would bring the ugly again, when they torched the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa Oklahoma. More than 300 African Americans were killed in that attack and thousands were left homeless. However, one thing did change after the Red Summer. The way we responded. White mobs were no longer permitted to walk into our neighborhoods and grab folks and hang them in trees in front of their houses. After the Red Summer when they came into the hood, they were met with long shiny poisoned tipped bullets… and a whole lot of them too!! The attacks brought us closer together. Before the Red Summer, there were 9000 members in the NAACP. By the early 1920s, there were over 100,000!! As time passed other groups would be formed like the Niagra Movement, The National Urban League, The American Negro Labor Congress, The National Council Of Negro Women, The Black Panther Party, The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SNCC, and hundreds more that brought a national strategy that helped prevent that type of racial violence from ever again destroying our lives homes and businesses.
Racist 1: I feel like going down to Nigratown and kicking a little bit. How about getting the boys together and we ride down there and string up a couple from the highest tree we can find?
Racist 2: Naw Lester… I’m afraid you gonna have to count me out of this one. You know where Black Leroy Bowling Alley is in Nigratown?
Racist 1: Yeah, my dad used to kick a little bit right behind there in that field. I think it’s a cemetery now…
Racist 2: Well Lester… that ain’t a black cemetery…
No, it’s not Lester. As an aside, I chose the name Lester for one of my racists as a nod to “Mississippi Burning”. Mississippi Burning is about the three civil rights workers who were killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964. Lester was the one the FBI blackmailed and then took him to the outskirts of town and dropped him off in a black neighborhood. Lester did make it back to town because they found him guilty in court and he received seven years in prison. Now if he still had both of them or not, I couldn’t tell ya. So I couldn’t find that scene, but here is another favorite scene of mine from the movie.
So that brings us to the end of our article about the “Red Summer.” I have only touched a very small part of this historic era in African American history. I highly recommend reading “Targeting Black Veterans,” by the Equal Justice Initiative, a report that brings to life the real story of black veterans and the fight for civil rights. See you next time for more of Hill1News.

Thanks for reading ©Hill1News.

black service man blinded. black service man beaten to death .