Sunday, December 1, 2019

David Neiwert recalls the Red Summer of 1919

Dave Neiwert has a three-part post commemorating the racial violence of 1919, which civil rights leader and songwriter James Weldon Johnson labelled as the Red Summer, "red" in this case referring to the blood spilled. The was a "Red Scare" under way, as well, but that red was about anything that liberals and rightwingers thought was kind of Bolshevik-y.

The three parts of "The Red Summer, 100 Years Later" post are here:
As he writes:
These events were in many ways the fevered culmination of the long campaign after the Civil War to reverse its outcome by putting the now-freed slaves in a continued state of submission by other means - violent ones.

The centerpiece of this campaign was lynching. As a form of terrorism intended to keep black people from participating in the political process or from even objecting to their subjugation under Jim Crow laws, it was brutally effective. Between 1870 and 1930, literally thousands of black people were summarily executed by their white neighbors, most often for the crime of being somehow “uppity” - that is, a threat to the whites’ own social status in one way or another.
Whites rioting against blacks in Chicago, 1919 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Anti-black mass violence took place during 1919 in Chicago, Omaha, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and various other places. He describes several horrifying instances like this one, in which class hostilities played notable role:
None of these events, however, approached the events of Sept. 30-Oct. 1 in Elaine, Arkansas - in many ways the horrifying climax of the Red Summer - for sheer lethality: An estimated 100 to 237 black people, most of them poor farmers, were killed, along with five white men. The Elaine Massacre was fueled by racial animus, but the ongoing system of economic oppression in the South was also key: At a Sept. 30 gathering of about 100 sharecroppers for a Progressive Farmers and Household Union event, gunfire broke out in the front lot.

Even before this gathering, whites had been fed a bizarre set of vicious smears about the Progressive Farmers organization - such as a headline in a Helena, Arkansas, paper describing it as “established for the purpose of banding Negroes together for the killing of white people.” Two white men who had pulled up in a car were shot, one of them fatally. A posse estimated at as many as 1,000 men arrived to put down the “insurrection.” Troops intervened, so the white mobs spread out across the countryside and began slaughtering black people.

It was indiscriminate slaughter. Even the troops who had been sent to stop the rioting wound up shooting black people randomly. It only ended after troops had been there several days. Afterward, black landowners claimed their land was stolen, too. [my emphasis]
In the third part, he describes the subsequent heritage of the Red Summer's violence, which was part of the long history of often murderous white hostility to black citizens after the Civil War.

The first part of Dave's post brings up the connection of the Red Summer events to the discussion over reparations for slavery and segregation. I've written some in this blog about the practical difficulties even a serious attempt to create a reparations program would face. But incidents like the lynchings and so-called race riots do open a way to understanding the concept of reparations. Defining something so broad as the legacy of slavery from the start of the African slave trade to the Civil War in a way that could be translated into a meaningfully related reparations program would be an incredibly daunting task, even assuming the political will and consensus to do it. Which is not to say it shouldn't be attempted.

But in the case of post-First World War riots in a city like Omaha, for instance, many of the victims were identified. Their descedants can be traced and compensated directly. Or some meaningful action could be taken that would benefit the current African-American community. That's not to say it would necessarily be easy. But it is easier to envision how the government could design reparations for a particular event of violence with the identities of the victims documented than to think about how to say, make reparations for people who were enslaved in 1800. Although it's important to add that slaveowners did keep extensive records identifying their slaves, as Caitlin Rosenthal explains in her Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (2018). She even credits Southern planters for inventing the accounting concept of depreciation, measuring how the value of an owned asset declines over time, because they wanted to keep track of the current market value of their human property.

Additional pieces on the Red Summer:
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