Never Been a Time (36 page)

On July 26, not long after a jury had acquitted the men who had lynched Robert Prager, President Woodrow Wilson finally issued a statement condemning lynching and “the mob spirit which [has] frequently shown its head among us, not in any single region, but in many and widely separated parts of the country.”

Although the carefully worded statement contained no specific references to lynching of blacks, the
New York Times
seemed to read Wilson's mind in reporting that the president was moved to condemn lynching not only by “mob action against those suspected of being enemy aliens or enemy sympathizers” but by “lynchings of negroes in the South.” The paper explained, “It is known that the lynchings of negroes, as well as attacks upon those suspected of being enemies or enemy sympathizers, have been used by the German propaganda throughout Central and South America as well as in Europe, to contend that the stand of the United States as a champion of democracy is a sham. Deeply concerned by the situation, the president decided to address his fellow countrymen, and to declare that ‘every mob contributes to German lies about the United States.'” The NAACP printed and distributed fifty thousand copies of the president's address, although W. E. B. Du Bois wondered rhetorically why it had taken the death of a white man to inspire the president finally to speak up when so many hundreds of blacks had been lynched over the years.
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Ironically, on the very day that the president condemned lynching and mob violence, a race riot broke out in Philadelphia, which had seen its share of them over the decades. Indeed, the previous year, a brutal race riot with several deaths had struck Chester, Pennsylvania, just southeast of the city. In the war years, thousands of blacks had crowded into the southern part of Philadelphia, lured by jobs in a new shipbuilding complex. The immigrants pushed the boundaries of established black neighborhoods. Beginning in late June, blacks were attacked in the streets by their white neighbors. On the last Friday in July, after a black woman—a city probation officer—had moved into a house she had recently bought in a white neighborhood, a white mob gathered on the street, chanting and cursing and throwing stones through the windows. The terrified woman fired a warning shot from a second-story window, bringing police, who were finally able to break up the crowd.

Further attacks on African Americans on Saturday, in the main ignored by police, led to pitched battles in the streets between blacks and whites armed with guns, clubs, razors, and bricks. The riot lasted four days. A white
policeman was shot and killed trying to take a pistol away from a black man who was defending himself from a white mob, and another white man was killed when a black man fired into a crowd of whites that was chasing him. The third person killed in the riot, a black man, was shot by a policeman while in custody. In the riot's immediate aftermath, black leaders formed a Colored Protective Association and protested the prisoner's killing and other police actions—and inactions—charging the “incompetent police force” with “hobnobbing with the mob” during and “for a long time” before the riot, ignoring “the beating up of Negroes, the stoning of their homes and the attacking of their churches.” The black leaders' persistent complaints in the wake of the riot eventually led to a major shakeup of the Philadelphia police department.
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There were small, comparatively brief racial clashes that year in several other cities, including New York, where blacks battled whites in both Brooklyn and Harlem, but relatively few fatalities and no large-scale arson resulted, nothing approaching the horror of East St. Louis. In part, perhaps, that relatively low level of violence came because so many young men had left home for the military. By the time of the armistice in November of 1918, four million Americans were in uniform. Also, the United States was increasingly preoccupied with “disloyalty” at home. And, in the second half of 1918, the nation was stunned by the influenza epidemic, which killed half a million Americans in less than a year.

But by the spring of 1919, the influenza epidemic had run its course and millions of former soldiers, including 350,000 African Americans, were home, having been trained in warfare and the use of weapons. The blacks had served their country in wartime and were impatient for the so-called democracy their president had promised the world. As for the whites, according to James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP, “Reports from overseas had come back warning that the returned Negro soldiers would be a dangerous element and a menace [who] had been engaged in killing white men, that… they had frequently been given the treatment accorded only to white men in America and, above all, that many of them had been favorably regarded by white women. One of the chief recruiting slogans of the Klan was the necessity of united action to keep these men in line.”
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There were eighty-three cases of lynching in America in 1919, nineteen more than the year before. And there were many race riots. The generally
accepted figure is roughly two dozen, and the
New York Times
reported in October of 1919 that there had been “38 race riots and clashes in cities and other communities in various parts of the country” so far that year. The summer of 1919 was so racially violent that James Weldon Johnson named it “the Red Summer.” The reference was to the color of blood, although America was also at the peak of a “red scare,” as right-wing congressmen and federal officials found Bolsheviks under the beds and inside the skin of every militant labor leader, pacifist, and advocate of black civil rights.
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The two most notorious riots of the Red Summer were in Chicago and Washington, although the deadliest may have been in Phillips County in Arkansas's cotton belt, where black tenant farmers who were essentially slaves to their debt tried to organize to get a fairer deal from landowners. After a rumor spread that the county's blacks were planning a massacre of whites, a sheriff's posse fired on a meeting of tenant farmers and in the resulting melee a white deputy sheriff was killed. White mobs went on a rampage reminiscent of the worst days of Redemption. Officially, fourteen blacks were killed, but James Weldon Johnson contended that “between two hundred and three hundred Negroes were hunted down in the fields and swamps to which they fled, and shot down like animals.” Blacks were blamed for the riot, and in subsequent trials in Arkansas seventy-nine blacks were speedily convicted of murder. Twelve of them were sentenced to death. The NAACP fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the seventy-nine men had been denied the right to a fair trial, and freed them.
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The 1919 riot in Washington, D.C., once a rare refuge of hope for blacks but now, with Woodrow Wilson in the White House, an increasingly segregated Southern city with very high black unemployment, began on a hot, muggy night in mid-July. The story is a tragically familiar one. The four daily newspapers, including the
Washington Post
, had been stirring up the city's white population with repeated lurid stories about a “Negro Fiend” who was attacking white women. A few days before the riot, the NAACP sent warnings to the four papers that they were “sowing the seeds of a race riot by their inflammatory headlines.”

The city was crowded with soldiers and sailors home from the Great War, and the mood of drunken celebration turned ugly when the rumor circulated that a man suspected of being the Negro Fiend had been arrested and then released by Washington police. The morning of the riot, the
Post
published a front-page article headlined MOBILIZATION FOR TONIGHT. The story reported, erroneously, that all service personnel in the city were to report to Seventh Street and Pennsylvania Avenue at nine P.M.. for “clean-up” duty. That evening, a white mob that included many servicemen formed in a seedy saloon district off Pennsylvania Avenue and began chasing and beating black men and women. Whites dragged hundreds of blacks off of streetcars and beat and shot them. More than five hundred guns were sold to whites at pawnshops, and black veterans, many of whom had brought weapons back from France, fought back. What ensued was not so much a riot as a small-scale race war. Officially, at least thirty-nine blacks and whites were killed.
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Two weeks later, Chicago exploded in riot. The black population of Chicago had virtually doubled in the war years, inevitably pushing the boundaries of the so-called Black Belt on the South Side. Racial antagonism had been intensified by the hiring of black strikebreakers to replace white stockyard and slaughterhouse workers. That summer, there were frequent attacks on blacks with little response from police. Black homes were torched, along with the offices of real estate agents who sold to blacks. Chicago black leader Ida B. Wells-Barnett cried out to city officials and the public, “I implore Chicago to set the wheels of justice in motion before it is too late, and Chicago be disgraced by some of the bloody outrages that have disgraced East St. Louis.”

The riot began on Sunday, July 27, after a white man threw a rock at a black boy who was swimming close to what whites considered to be a white-only beach on Lake Michigan. The rock struck the boy on the head and he drowned. Fights between blacks and whites broke out on the beach and spread into the city. Roving white mobs attacked badly outnumbered blacks. Whites in automobiles sped through black neighborhoods, firing at people on the street and into homes. Black snipers fired back. The riot, which ranged into the Loop and across much of the city, lasted five days. A thousand black families were left homeless by the burning and destruction, and thirty-eight people—twenty-three of them black—were killed, at least officially. Black leaders charged that many more than that had died and that black bodies had been thrown into the Chicago River and its tributaries and burnt up in the hundreds of buildings that were reduced to cinders and rubble.
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It is worth noting that, with the addition of Chicago to East St. Louis and Springfield, three of the worst race riots of the first two decades of the
twentieth century took place in Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln and the first martyr of abolition, Elijah Lovejoy.

After the Chicago riot, W. E. B. Du Bois, continuing on the course he had set after visiting a devastated city at the other end of Illinois two years before, wrote a declaration that made him a hero to generations of black radicals: “For three centuries we have suffered and cowered. No race ever gave Passive Resistance and Submission to Evil longer, more piteous trial. Today we raise the terrible weapon of Self-Defense. When the murderer comes, he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed. When the mob moves, we propose to meet it with bricks and clubs and guns.”
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Once again, as in 1917, the attacks on blacks in the Red Summer of 1919 led thousands of blacks and white liberals to strengthen their commitment to civil rights for African Americans. Membership in the NAACP more than doubled to ninety-one thousand between the end of 1918 and the end of 1919, boosted in part by the publication of the NAACP study
Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918
, which stated that 2,522 blacks and 702 whites had been lynched in thirty years, many more than had been legally executed in the same period.
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With the lynching study as added ammunition, in 1919 James Weldon Johnson and the NAACP began intense lobbying in support of the Dyer Bill, which designated lynching as a federal crime. The bill had evolved from discussions between black leaders and Republican congressman L. C. Dyer of St. Louis in the aftermath of the East St. Louis race riot. After years of stalling, in January of 1922, the U.S. House of Representatives finally passed the bill by a vote of 230 to 119. The bill was subsequently reported favorably out of committee in the Senate, but it was killed by a filibuster of Southern Democrats.
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Numerous similar bills went down to defeat in years and decades to come. Those few that passed the House died in the Senate. Finally, in 2005, the U.S. Senate approved a resolution that, in effect, apologized for never passing an antilynching law, expressing “the deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of the victims of lynchings, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity, and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States.” The resolution, which was passed by a voice vote, was cosponsored by eighty of the one
hundred members of the Senate. Among the twenty nonsponsors—nineteen Republicans and one Democrat—was former Senate majority leader Trent Lott. The Mississippi Republican, who had lost his leadership position because of remarks seen as racially divisive, said of the resolution, “Where do we end all this? Are we going to apologize for not doing the right thing on Social Security?”
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In the spring of 1921, the final major race riot of the World War I era hit Tulsa, Oklahoma. The city's black population had grown from just under two thousand in 1910 to almost nine thousand in 1920, and blacks, who made up about 12 percent of the populace, were blamed for much of the crime in the vice-ridden oil-patch city. On May 31, riot fever was stirred up in the white population by an inflammatory, misleadingly lurid news story about a young black man's “assault” on a white woman on a downtown elevator. Apparently, the elevator lurched, they were thrown together, and she screamed and accused him of attacking her. Police arrested the young black man. That evening, a rumor swept through the city's black community that a lynch mob was gathering downtown near the city jail and courthouse, and some blacks headed that way to defend the prisoner. A counter-rumor spread like an oil-field fire among the city's whites—that a gang of armed blacks was on the way downtown to break the black prisoner out of jail before the whites could lynch him. Whites broke into sporting goods and hardware stores, grabbing hundreds of rifles and guns and cases of ammunition, and began shooting and beating blacks. They invaded Tulsa's black section, Greenwood, setting fire to homes.