Hot Summer Pt 3
Channel: MentalHouse TV w/Khadijah
Date: 2021-06-10

African Americans endured a renewed wave of riots, massacres, and acts of racial terrorism between 1917 and 1923. All too often, rising black aspirations were met with violence. The peak period of recorded violence occurred during the tumultuous months between April and October 1919, a season James Weldon Johnson called the “Red Summer.” Race riots broke out in Washington, D.C.; Charleston, South Carolina; and Long-view, Texas, among other places. Lynching was also prevalent during these years. Eleven African-American men were burned alive at the stake in 1919. In the same year lynch mobs murdered sixty-nine black people, including ten World War I veterans whose military service was viewed by some whites as a threat to the racial status quo. Antiblack race riots were often waged over the course of several days, and garnered international attention. The riots cost hundreds of lives and incalculable property damage. The riots also undermined the political and economic status of African Americans in numerous communities across the nation.


The intensity of these riots may be explained in part by examining the social context of violence in this period. White rioters enjoyed an almost universal immunity from prosecution, whereas their black counterparts were often incarcerated for defending their homes and neighborhoods. White citizens who shot or beat a black person to death in broad daylight had little to fear from law enforcement authorities, who in any case often participated in vigilante activities themselves.

Race riots were not inspired by blind racist hatred. White citizens who rioted were motivated by political and economic, as well as social, factors. For example, the 1920 Election Day massacre of African Americans who attempted to vote in Orange County, Florida, was

designed to enforce black disfranchisement. The East St. Louis Race Riot of 1917 was aimed in part at keeping African Americans from moving up the occupational ladder. The Tulsa, Oklahoma, Race Riot of 1921 destroyed a thriving black business district, and white rioters explicitly targeted properties owned by African Americans. Remembering the years she spent building up a successful hairdressing practice in Tulsa, Mabel Little recalled decades later, “At the time of the riot, we had ten different business places for rent. Today, I pay rent” (Hirsch 2002, p. 8). Riots in small towns and rural areas drove African Americans off the land and often allowed white residents to take control of black property for drastically reduced rates or for nothing at all. The massacre and forced removal of the African-American community in Rosewood, Florida, in 1923 wiped out generations of black land ownership.




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