1 Jan 1919 Jahr - Race riot in CHicago

Beschreibung:

Great Migration, St. Louis

then Red Summer: Antiblack riots in the summer and fall of 1919 by white Americans in more than two dozen cities leading to hundreds of deaths. The worst riot occurred in Chicago, in which 38 people were killed (23 blacks, 15 whites).


Tensions remained high after the war, because African Americans emerged from the conflict determined to achieve citizenship rights. Millions had loyally supported the war effort, and 370,000 had served in uniform. Returning veterans, empowered by their military service, often refused to accept second-class treatment at the hands of whites, whether in the North or South. The black man, one observer wrote, “realized that he was part and parcel of the great army of democracy…. With this realization came the consciousness of pride in himself as a man, and an American citizen.”

These developments sparked white violence. In what became known as the Red Summer of 1919, bloody battles raged in more than two dozen cities, from major urban areas such as Washington, D.C. to small towns such as Longview, Texas. Chicago fared the worst, enduring five days of rioting in July after white youths stoned a black teenager to death on a Lake Michigan beach. The rioting led to the deaths of 23 black and 15 white Chicagoans and the destruction of more than a thousand black residences. By September, the year’s death toll from racial violence across the country reached 120. Lynchings also spiked in 1919, including several murders of returning (and still uniformed) black soldiers.

Attacks on African Americans continued after 1919, as well. In June 1921, sensationalized (and false) reports of an alleged rape helped incite white mobs in the oil boomtown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Anger focused on the eight thousand residents of Tulsa’s prosperous Greenwood district, locally known as “the black Wall Street.” The mobs — aided by National Guardsmen, who arrested African Americans defending their homes and businesses — burned thirty-five blocks of Greenwood and killed several dozen people. The city’s leading paper acknowledged that “semi-organized bands of white men systematically applied the torch, while others shot on sight men of color.” It took a decade for black residents to rebuild Greenwood. Tulsa was only one terrible incident in a steady pattern of racial violence in the early 1920s. In an equally grim episode in January 1923, mobs of furious whites in a small Florida town torched houses and hunted down African Americans, killing at least six in the Rosewood Massacre. Police and state authorities refused to intervene, and the town of Rosewood vanished from the map.

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