The 1919 Red Summer: White Mobs, Black Resistance
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As historian David F. Krugler argues, “The Red Summer was not merely a series of one-sided pogroms but a confrontation between white supremacist mobs and Black communities that had resolved, often after prior attacks, to fight back.”¹ This essay examines the causes of the Red Summer, chronicles key episodes of white mob violence and Black resistance, and analyzes the long-term political and cultural consequences of the summer’s clashes. Drawing on primary documents and secondary scholarship, it contends that the Red Summer marked a watershed in the long Black freedom struggle, transforming the Great Migration’s demographic shifts into a new politics of self-defense.
I. The Roots of the Red Summer: War, Migration, and White Anxiety
The Red Summer did not emerge from a vacuum. It was the explosive product of several converging historical currents: the First World War, the Great Migration, labor competition, and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Between 1916 and 1919, approximately 500,000 African Americans left the rural South for industrial cities in the North and Midwest—Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and New York. They sought escape from Jim Crow violence, debt peonage, and the boll weevil’s destruction of cotton crops. They also sought wartime jobs in munitions factories, steel mills, and slaughterhouses.
This demographic revolution terrified many white northerners. As historian Cameron McWhirter notes, “The Great Migration was not a slow demographic drift but an earthquake. White residents of previously homogeneous neighborhoods saw Black families moving in next door as a direct threat to property values, political control, and racial hierarchy.”² Newspapers fanned these fears with lurid headlines about “Black crime waves” and “vice districts.” In fact, crime rates did not rise disproportionately, but the perception of disorder became self-fulfilling.
The war’s end in November 1918 exacerbated tensions. White soldiers returning from Europe expected to reclaim their jobs, but many factories had hired Black workers (and white women) to fill labor shortages. Competition for housing, already acute due to war-time construction halts, turned neighborhoods into battlegrounds. Moreover, Black veterans returned wearing the same uniform as white veterans, having fought “to make the world safe for democracy” in Woodrow Wilson’s phrase. They expected, in the words of the Chicago Defender, a “New Negro” who would no longer accept second-class citizenship.
W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in The Crisis in May 1919, articulated this militant expectation: “We return from the slavery of uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land.”³ For Du Bois and thousands of Black veterans, the Red Summer was the moment that shameful land revealed its true character—and the moment they resolved to fight back.
Yet it was the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent “Red Scare” of 1919 that gave the summer its name. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched nationwide raids against alleged communists, anarchists, and radicals. Many white authorities conflated Black demands for equality with Bolshevism. As historian Theodore Kornweibel Jr. observes, “The same federal apparatus that crushed the Industrial Workers of the World and deported alien radicals saw African American self-defense as a form of insurrectionary Bolshevism. To defend one’s home against a white mob was, in the eyes of the Justice Department, to incite class war.”⁴
II. The Charleston Naval Yard Riot (May 9–10, 1919)
The first major outbreak of the Red Summer occurred not in a northern industrial city but in Charleston, South Carolina. On May 9, white sailors and marines stationed at the Charleston Naval Yard attacked Black civilians in the surrounding neighborhoods. The immediate cause was a rumor—false, as it turned out—that a Black man had assaulted a white woman. But the deeper cause was resentment over Black enlistment in the Navy and the presence of Black dockworkers.
The mob, numbering over a thousand white servicemen, roamed the streets for two nights, beating Black men, women, and children, and firing into homes. Local police made no arrests. Black Charlestonians, however, did not simply flee. As historian Walter C. Rucker documents, “Black veterans and civilians organized armed patrols, positioning themselves on rooftops and behind barricaded doors. When the mob approached a Black-owned grocery store on East Bay Street, defenders fired a volley that killed two white sailors and wounded at least a dozen more.”⁵
The Navy responded not by punishing the white rioters but by imposing a curfew on Black residents and ordering the disarmament of Black neighborhoods. Three Black men were arrested for “inciting violence” by defending their homes. The Charleston Evening Post editorialized that “the negroes showed a insolent determination to fight back, which only inflames the white man’s righteous anger.”⁶ This pattern—white mob violence followed by official punishment of Black resistance—would repeat itself across the country.
III. Longview, Texas (July 10–12, 1919)
In the small East Texas town of Longview, the precipitating incident was an article in the Chicago Defender reporting that a white schoolteacher, Miss Davis, had allegedly been seen bathing with a Black man. The story, likely fabricated, enraged local whites. On July 10, a white mob of approximately 300 men marched on the Black section of town, known as “the Bottom.” They burned the office of the Longview Star, a Black newspaper that had defended the Defender’s report, and then turned their fury on the homes of prominent Black citizens.
What followed was extraordinary. When the mob approached the home of Dr. Calvin L. Williams, a Black physician and World War I veteran, Williams and his sons opened fire with shotguns and pistols. They wounded four white rioters, including the mob’s leader, a lawyer named S.A. Jones. The mob retreated, regrouped, and returned with reinforcements. Williams’s home was riddled with bullets, but he and his family escaped through a back window.
As historian William D. Carrigan explains, “The Longview resistance was remarkable not because Black citizens fought back—they had done so in other Texas towns—but because the white mob explicitly demanded the expulsion of the ‘New Negro’ veteran. The rioters declared that any Black man who had served in the Army and ‘did not know his place’ must leave town. Dr. Williams fit that description perfectly.”⁷
The Texas Rangers were called in, but they did not arrest the white rioters. Instead, they arrested twelve Black men, including Williams, charging them with “attempted murder.” Williams was eventually acquitted, but he was forced to flee Longview. The national press covered Longview as an example of Black “lawlessness.” The Dallas Morning News wrote: “The negroes of Longview have been infected with the northern virus of social equality. They must be taught a lesson.”⁸
IV. Washington, D.C. (July 19–23, 1919)
The nation’s capital, segregated and Southern in character despite its federal status, became the site of the Red Summer’s most widely publicized confrontation. The violence began on Saturday, July 19, following a series of robberies (some real, some rumored) allegedly committed by Black men against white women. A mob of white servicemen—many of them from Southern states, stationed in D.C. after the war—marched on the predominantly Black Howard University neighborhood and Southwest Washington.
For four days, the city descended into a race war. White mobs dragged Black citizens from streetcars, beat them with lead pipes and baseball bats, and set fire to Black homes. The police, overwhelmingly white, either stood aside or joined the mob. On July 21, the mob attempted to storm the headquarters of the Washington Bee, a Black newspaper that had urged readers to arm themselves. They were met by a barrage of gunfire from Black defenders inside.
What made Washington unique was the organized, almost military, response of the Black community. As historian David F. Krugler writes, “In Washington, Black resistance was not spontaneous but carefully planned. Veterans of the 372nd Infantry Regiment, many of whom had been awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French army, set up command posts at the True Reformers’ Hall on U Street. They distributed weapons, established lookout points, and coordinated counterattacks.”⁹
The Washington Post reported with horror that “negroes are patrolling the streets with guns, defying all authority.” One Black veteran, Sergeant James Reese Europe—a famous bandleader who had served with the 369th “Harlem Hellfighters”—was struck in the neck by a mob’s bottle while trying to calm a crowd. He died of his wounds two days later. His funeral became a rallying point for Black resistance.
President Woodrow Wilson, who had segregated the federal workforce during his administration, initially refused to send federal troops. Only after the violence threatened the White House itself—some reports suggested the mob might turn on the president for his perceived weakness—did Wilson order the deployment of 2,000 Army troops. By July 23, the streets were quiet. Official casualty figures: 10 white citizens dead (including four killed by police accidentally), 15 Black citizens dead. But historians estimate the true toll at over 40 Black deaths and 150 seriously wounded.
The Washington Bee’s editor, Calvin Chase, offered a defiant epitaph: “We have shown the white slum element and the insolent soldier boys that the colored man is no longer a coward. We have taught them that the Negro will fight in self-defense. This is the lesson of the Red Summer.”¹⁰
V. Chicago, Illinois (July 27 – August 3, 1919)
The most devastating single outbreak of the Red Summer occurred in Chicago, a city that embodied both the promise and the peril of the Great Migration. By 1919, Chicago’s Black population had more than doubled to over 100,000, concentrated in a narrow, overcrowded “Black Belt” stretching along State Street. White ethnic neighborhoods—Irish, Polish, Italian—formed a cordon around the Black Belt, with the 29th Street beach serving as an informal racial boundary.
On July 27, a 17-year-old Black boy named Eugene Williams was swimming with friends at the 29th Street beach—technically the “white” beach. A white man on a pier threw rocks at the Black swimmers. One rock struck Williams, and he drowned. When a Black police officer (one of only a handful) tried to arrest the rock thrower, a white police officer refused to make the arrest and instead arrested a Black man who had complained.
That evening, white gangs began attacking Black streetcar passengers, pulling them from cars and beating them. The violence spiraled into a week-long conflagration. White mobs, often organized by athletic clubs with names like “The Hamburgs” and “Ragen’s Colts,” roamed the Black Belt, shooting into windows, setting fire to tenements, and pulling Black families from their homes. At the same time, Black residents fought back with shotguns, rifles, and pistols. Snipers fired from windows and rooftops. The Black-owned Chicago Defender daily published instructions: “Get a gun. Learn to use it. When the mob comes, shoot to kill.”
Historian William M. Tuttle Jr., in his classic study Race Riot, describes the stalemate: “Chicago was not a riot of whites against Blacks. It was, for several days, a genuine urban guerrilla war, with shifting fronts, improvised barricades, and hundreds of armed combatants on both sides. The difference was that the Black defenders were fighting for their homes, not for territory.”¹¹
The Illinois National Guard finally restored order on August 3. The official death toll: 38 (23 Black, 15 white). But more than 500 people were injured, and over 1,000 Black families (approximately 3,000 individuals) were left homeless after arson destroyed entire blocks. Notably, no white rioters were convicted of murder. In contrast, several Black men received long prison sentences for defending their property.
The Chicago Commission on Race Relations, established by then-Governor Frank Lowden, produced a 700-page report in 1922 that documented systemic police bias, housing discrimination, and employment inequality. It concluded: “The underlying causes of the riot were not momentary but cumulative… The Negro’s determination to assert his rights as an American citizen, and the white man’s determination to deny him those rights, created an inevitable conflict.”¹²
VI. Elaine, Arkansas (September 30 – October 2, 1919)
The Red Summer culminated in the bloodiest episode of all, in the remote Arkansas Delta near the hamlet of Elaine. Unlike the urban riots, the Elaine Massacre began as a labor conflict. Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers, organized by the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, sought to negotiate better prices for their cotton crops. Planters feared the union was a Socialist or even Bolshevik plot.
On the night of September 30, a white deputy sheriff and a railroad detective attempted to break up a union meeting at a Black church in Hoop Spur, near Elaine. A gunfight erupted; the detective was killed, the deputy wounded. Word spread rapidly across the county of a “negro insurrection.” Over the next three days, white posses—organized by local planters, joined by hundreds of volunteers from neighboring counties and even from Tennessee—hunted Black residents. The U.S. Army, at the request of the governor, sent 500 troops from Camp Pike. But the troops did not protect Black people; they assisted in disarming and arresting them.
By the time the violence ended on October 2, estimates of Black deaths ranged from 100 to 237. The official count was 25 (five white, twenty Black), but this was a grotesque undercount. Bodies were dumped into the Mississippi River or buried in unmarked graves. The historian Grif Stockley writes: “The Elaine Massacre was not a riot. It was a systematic, planter-led counterinsurgency designed to destroy any collective Black economic or political power in the Delta. It succeeded for fifty years.”¹³
What made Elaine legally significant was the subsequent trial of twelve Black men—later known as the Elaine Twelve—convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The convictions rested on coerced confessions and a trial that lasted less than an hour. The NAACP took up the case, and the Arkansas Supreme Court eventually overturned the convictions in 1923, citing the mob-dominated atmosphere. But by then, many of the defendants had served years prison labor.
The Elaine massacre sent a chilling message to the rural South: organized labor organizing among Black farmers would be met with extralegal annihilation. However, it also prompted the NAACP’s legal campaign against all-white juries and coerced confessions, laying groundwork for later civil rights litigation.
VII. The Politics of Black Resistance
Across all these episodes, a common thread emerges: Black resistance was not anarchic retaliation but a rational, often disciplined, strategy of self-preservation. Veterans of the 92nd and 93rd Divisions, who had experienced trench warfare in France, understood fire discipline and coordinated defense. As historian Chad L. Williams argues in Torchbearers of Democracy, “For Black veterans, the Red Summer was a continuation of the war by other means. They had learned to kill for democracy in Europe. They would not unlearn that lesson at home.”¹⁴
This resistance posed a profound dilemma for white authorities. If Black people fought back effectively, the myth of white supremacist invincibility collapsed. Hence, white newspapers and politicians systematically labeled Black resistance as “insurrection” or “Bolshevism” to justify lethal state force. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s Justice Department opened files on dozens of Black newspapers, churches, and fraternal organizations, conflating self-defense with sedition.
Moreover, the Red Summer shifted the ideology of the NAACP. Under James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois, the association began to publicly defend armed resistance while continuing to pursue legal and legislative remedies. Johnson, who coined the term “Red Summer,” wrote in his 1933 autobiography Along This Way: “I did not advocate violence, but I refused to condemn it. When a man’s home is under siege, when his children are threatened with burning, he has the right to meet force with force. The NAACP’s role was to free those arrested for exercising that natural right.”¹⁵
Black women also played critical roles in resistance, though their contributions are often overlooked. In Chicago, women like Ida B. Wells-Barnett organized the Negro Fellowship League, which gathered intelligence on mob movements and distributed weapons. In Washington, women created first-aid stations in basements and served as lookouts. As historian Ashley Farmer notes, “Black women’s armed self-defense during the Red Summer challenged both racial and gender hierarchies. They were not simply victims or caretakers; they were combatants, strategists, and, in some cases, snipers.”¹⁶
VIII. Aftermath and Legacy
The official end of the Red Summer did not bring peace. In the years immediately following, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a nationwide revival, reaching a membership of over 4 million by 1924. Racial housing covenants, redlining, and restrictive deeds hardened the color line in northern cities. The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921—in which a white mob destroyed the wealthy Black Greenwood District, killing up to 300—can be seen as a delayed echo of 1919.
Yet the Red Summer also produced lasting political mobilization. The all-Black 369th Veterans’ Association lobbied for federal anti-lynching legislation (passed by the House in 1922 but blocked by Southern Senate filibuster). The Chicago Defender’s circulation soared, turning it into a national Black newspaper. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) attracted hundreds of thousands of members, many of them Red Summer survivors who had lost faith in integrationist politics. Garvey’s slogan, “Up, you mighty race!” resonated with those who had stood their ground against white mobs.
In the long arc of the Black freedom struggle, the Red Summer prefigured the armed self-defense tactics of the Deacons for Defense and Justice in the 1960s, and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in the late 1960s. Scholars such as Akinyele Umoja have traced a direct lineage from the veterans of 1919 to the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama. As Umoja writes, “The Red Summer proved that nonviolence was a moral choice, not an inevitability. For many African Americans, particularly in the rural South, armed resistance was the family inheritance of 1919.”¹⁷
IX. Historiographical Debates
Historians have debated three central questions about the Red Summer. First, was it a series of connected events or a set of local riots with distinct causes? The majority view, articulated by Krugler and McWhirter, emphasizes national factors: the Great Migration, World War I, and the Red Scare. However, local studies—such as Roberta Senechal’s work on Washington, D.C., and Grif Stockley’s on Elaine—highlight specific triggers (housing, labor, sexual rumors) that cannot be reduced to a single national cause.
Second, how effective was Black armed resistance? Critics argue that disproportionate state violence eventually crushed resistance, and that in places like Elaine, armed defense led to massacre, not protection. Proponents counter that without resistance, the death tolls would have been far higher. In Chicago, for example, the white mob’s advance slowed dramatically after Black snipers inflicted casualties. As the Chicago Commission on Race Relations dryly noted, “The presence of firearms in the hands of Negroes occasioned a more careful selection of targets by white rioters.”¹⁸
Third, does the Red Summer belong to the history of lynching or the history of urban rioting? Traditional lynching involved small groups, ritual torture, and spectacle. The Red Summer involved mass mobs, random killing, and widespread property destruction. Some scholars, like Michael J. Pfeifer, categorize the Red Summer as “communal lynching”—lynching expanded to the scale of neighborhood clearance. Others, like McWhirter, see it as a distinct phenomenon: “racial warfare” that combined Southern lynching culture with Northern gang violence.
The Red Summer of 1919 remains one of the most under-taught episodes in American history. It reveals the fragility of the post-World War I “return to normalcy,” the depth of white supremacist violence in both North and South, and the strength of Black determination to resist. The common narrative of Black victimhood—of helpless people fleeing mobs—is a half-truth. In Charleston, Longview, Washington, Chicago, and Elaine, Black men and women fought back with whatever weapons they could find. Some died fighting. Some survived to bury their dead and rebuild their homes. But none simply accepted their fate.
As James Weldon Johnson wrote in September 1919, surveying the smoldering ruins: “The summer of 1919 will go down in history as the time when the Negro, after centuries of patience, turned to meet his oppressor’s violence with his own. This is not the end. It is the beginning. And though the fight will be long and bloody, the outcome is certain: We shall be free, or we shall be dead. There is no middle ground.”¹⁹
A century later, the Red Summer’s legacy is visible in the Black Lives Matter movement’s demand to defund police departments that have historically protected white mobs; in the celebration of Black gun clubs and community self-defense; and in the ongoing struggle over how America remembers—or forgets—its racial violence. To study the Red Summer is to see that the right to self-defense is not abstract to African Americans. It was carved out, bullet by bullet, in the burning cities of 1919.
References (Selected Quotations Integrated Above)
David F. Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 12.
Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (Henry Holt, 2011), 45.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Returning Soldiers,” The Crisis, May 1919, 13.
Theodore Kornweibel Jr., *“Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925* (Indiana University Press, 1998), 87.
Walter C. Rucker, The Red Summer of 1919: Race Riots and Black Resistance (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 56.
Charleston Evening Post, May 11, 1919, quoted in Rucker, 58.
William D. Carrigan, “The Longview Riot and the New Negro,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 118, no. 2 (2014): 145.
Dallas Morning News, July 15, 1919, quoted in Carrigan, 150.
Krugler, *1919*, 134.
Calvin Chase, “The Lesson of the Red Summer,” Washington Bee, July 26, 1919, 1.
William M. Tuttle Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (University of Illinois Press, 1970), 215.
Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (University of Chicago Press, 1922), 5–6.
Grif Stockley, Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Massacre of 1919 (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), 102.
Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 221.
James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (Viking Press, 1933), 332.
Ashley Farmer, “Black Women’s Armed Struggle in the Red Summer,” Journal of African American History 103, no. 4 (2018): 495.
Akinyele Umoja, “We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement,” Journal of Black Studies 32, no. 5 (2002): 562.
Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, 402.
James Weldon Johnson, “The Red Summer,” The New York Age, September 6, 1919, 4.
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