Red Summer Of 1919

Civil rights movement born in 1919

When one thinks of the American civil rights movement, the 1950s and '60s are typically the years that first spring to mind.

However, the movement's groundwork was laid decades earlier, as Wall Street Journal reporter Cameron McWhirter recounts in "Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America" (Henry Holt and Co.), his engrossing narrative history of a particularly shameful period of race relations in this country.

The book picks up at the end of World War I, when African-American GIs returned from the trenches of Western Europe with the sense that their service on behalf of their country would open the doors to first-class citizen status. Instead, what they encountered was an unprecedented level of white-instigated violence between April and November 1919. Hundreds died, and thousands more were injured.

In the South, that bloodshed manifested itself in a succession of grisly lynchings perpetrated by racists incensed by, among other things, the growing economic prosperity of black sharecroppers.

Meanwhile, in the large industrial cities of the North and the Midwest, to which poor Southern blacks were migrating in huge numbers, the violence came in the form of large race riots. In Chicago, for instance, the mayhem was perpetrated by European ethnic groups angry about non-union black workers taking their manufacturing jobs.

In contrast to the nonviolent resistance employed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his cohorts in the middle part of the 20th century, blacks during the Red Summer responded to their attackers with fists, knives and guns.

While President Woodrow Wilson did little to quell the violence, the black community found much-needed political leadership that summer in the form of the fledgling NAACP, led by W.E.B. Du Bois and the often-overlooked James Welden Johnson.

There were heroic whites, too, including Edward Parsons Smith, the progressive Omaha, Neb., mayor who stood up to a white mob in that city and was severely beaten as a result.

"They were among the quintessential heroes that summer," said Mr. McWhirter, who brings the summer's madness to vivid life with unadorned, finely detailed prose culled from several years' worth of archival research on the subject.

Because of the courage of these people, the march toward the legislative triumphs of the 1960s had begun.

"The movement that arose out of that violence never went away," Mr. McWhirter said. "It wasn't the end of the war. It was more akin to Lexington and Concord than Yorktown.

How the 'Red Summer' of 1919 Sparked the Civil Rights Movement ...

Many of us trace the Civil Rights movement back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Rosa Parks' arrest in 1955. But the true beginning may have been during the summer of 1919, remembered as "Red Summer," when race riots erupted across the country. At that time, NAACP membership grew exponentially, as black World War I veterans returned from fighting for democracy abroad and demanded freedom at home. Despite President Woodrow Wilson's promise to further human rights in the U.S., the federal government turned a blind eye and did little to even to protect African-Americans from racial violence.

On the Laps of Gods, The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation

Race riot, Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919

Race riots and resistance, the Red Summer of 1919

"The monsters we defy": Washington, D.C. in the Red Summer of 1919

Red Summer, The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America