Silent Parade

The Negro Silent Protest Parade, commonly known as the Silent Parade, was a silent march in New York City on July 28, 1917. The parade was organized to protest murders of African Americans, including the recent East St. Louis massacre and lynchings in Waco and Memphis. Organizers of the parade included several African American organizations, led by the recently formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Starting at 57th Street, the parade route proceeded down Fifth Avenue, ending at Madison Square. An estimated 8,000 to 15,000 African Americans marched in silence, accompanied by a muffled drum beat. The parade was widely publicized and drew attention to violence against African Americans. Parade organizers hoped the parade would prompt the federal government to enact anti-lynching legislation, but president Woodrow Wilson ignored the demands of the African Americans. The federal government would not pass an anti-lynching law until 2022, when the Emmett Till Antilynching Act was passed, over a century after the Silent Parade.
Lynching was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and continued until 1981. Along with disenfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination, lynching was one of many forms of racism inflicted on African Americans. Lynchings were often perpetrated to enforce white supremacy and intimidate ethnic minorities. A significant number of lynching victims were accused of murder, attempted murder, or rape – these accusations were often used as a pretext for lynching African Americans who were accused of violating Jim Crow era etiquette or engaged in economic competition with whites. The frequency of lynchings steadily increased after the Civil War, peaking in 1892. They remained common into the early 1900s, accelerating with the founding of the Second Ku Klux Klan in 1915. One study counted 3,265 African American victims of lynching from 1883 to 1941.
The Silent Parade took place at a time when lynchings were beginning to be widely publicized – particularly by the NAACP, under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois. During the two years preceding the Silent Parade, the NAACP's magazine The Crisis published a series of articles covering lynchings. In 1915 an article titled "The Lynching Industry" was published, which included a year-by-year tabulation of 2,732 lynchings, spanning the years 1884 to 1914. The April 1916 issue of The Crisis described a group lynching of six African Americans in Lee County, Georgia. The July 1916 issue described the Lynching of Jesse Washington, a mentally impaired 17-year-old African American, in Waco, Texas, on May 15, 1916. Washington was repeatedly lowered and raised onto a fire for two hours in front of 15,000 white spectators. Just a few months before the Silent Parade, Ell Persons was lynched in Memphis, Tennessee. The lynchings of Washington and Persons served as immediate precursors to the Silent Parade.
The specific events that precipitated the Silent Parade were riots that took place in East St. Louis from May to July 1917. The rioting, by white residents, originated when the mostly white employees of the Aluminum Ore Company voted in Spring 1917 for a labor strike and the Company recruited hundreds of African Americans to replace them. In May, thousands of white men descended on East St. Louis and began attacking African Americans and destroyed buildings. The rioting died down in June, only to flare up again in July when thousands of whites rioted in the city, beating and killing African Americans. Estimates of the number of African Americans killed range from 39 to 150.
W. E. B. Du Bois and activist Martha Gruening visited the city after the massacre and spoke with witnesses and survivors. They wrote an essay describing the riots in the September 1917 issue of The Crisis, using unusually explicit descriptions. After the riots, many African Americans were discouraged, and felt that it was unlikely that the United States would ever permit African Americans to enjoy full citizenship and equal rights. The brutality of the attacks by mobs of white people, coupled with the failure of police to protect the African American community, led to renewed calls for African American civil rights from leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Hubert Harrison, and Marcus Garvey.
Soon after World War I began in Europe in 1914, anti-war activists held a silent parade in New York on August 14, 1914. One of the co-leaders of the parade was Fanny Garrison Villard, a co-founder of the NAACP. This anti-war parade would later serve as an inspiration for the 1917 Silent Parade.
In April 1917, one month before the East St. Louis massacre, the United States declared war on Germany and joined the allied powers in WW I. The mobilization effort dominated the headlines in the United States, and served as a backdrop to the events leading up to the Silent Parade. African Americans soldiers were of that era were treated as second-class citizens, and were segregated from white troops. African Americans had mixed feelings about the war: some recognized military service as an opportunity to demonstrate their worth; others viewed it as yet another situation where they would be exploited by their country. Some African American leaders, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, voiced pro-war sentiments, and encouraged African Americans to join the military.
James Weldon Johnson, the Field Secretary of the NAACP, worked with a group of influential community leaders at the St. Philip's Church in New York to determine how best to protest the violence against African Americans. The concept of a silent protest was suggested by Oswald Garrison Villard in a 1916 NAACP Conference. Villard's mother, anti-war activist Fanny Garrison Villard, had organized a silent march in New York in 1914. One month before the Silent Parade, African American women in New York participated in a silent parade, alongside white women, to support the Red Cross.
Unlike the anti-war parade of 1914 and the red cross parade of 1917, organizers of the Silent Parade felt that it was important that only African American people participate, because they were the primary victims of the recent violence.
The parade was advertised in The African American newspaper The New York Age, where it was described as a "mute but solemn protest against the atrocities and discrimination practiced against the race in various parts of the country." The official name of the parade was the Negro Silent Protest Parade, although some contemporary sources referred to it as the Negro Silent Parade. Men, women and children alike were invited to take part. It was hoped that around ten thousand people would be able to participate, and that African Americans in other cities might hold their own parades. During the week before the parade, major newspapers in several states contained articles announcing the parade.
The parade was organized by the Harlem branch of the NAACP, with the help of several church and business leaders. Two prominent members of the New York clergy served as the executives for the parade: the president was Hutchens Chews Bishop, rector of the city's oldest African American Episcopal parish; and the secretary was Charles Martin, founder of the Fourth Moravian Church. Frederick Asbury Cullen served as vice president.
Parade marshalls included J. Rosamond Johnson, A. B. Cosey, Christopher Payne, Everard W. Daniel, Allen Wood, James Weldon Johnson, and John E. Nail. W. E. B. Du Bois and G. M. Plaskett also marched within the group of parade leaders.
The goal of the parade was to protest lynching in particular, and violence against African Americans in general. Organizer Charles Martin prepared a flyer which was distributed before the parade as an invitation, and during the parade to bystanders. The flyer had a section titled "Why We March" which read, in part:
The flyer was signed by Martin "Yours in righteous indignation."
In the midst of a record heat wave in New York City on Saturday, July 28, an estimated 8,000 to 15,000 African Americans marched in silent protest. The march began at 57th Street, and proceeded down Fifth Avenue, ending at Madison Square. Mounted police escorted the parade.
Eight hundred children led the parade, followed by women dressed in white, then men dressed in black. Their attire was formal and uniform, and they marched in rows. Academic Soyica Colbert analyzed the performative aspects of the parade: "...the deliberate refinement of the clothing reinforced the relationship between rights and respectability. The protestors presented themselves as citizens while affirming the look of citizenship."
People of all races looked on from both sides of Fifth Avenue. The New York Age estimated that 15,000 African Americans watched the parade. African American boy scouts handed out flyers describing why they were marching. During the parade, white people stopped to listen to African Americans explain the reasons for the march and other white bystanders expressed support and sympathy. Many spectators were moved by the spectacle; in his autobiography, organizer James Johnson wrote “the streets of New York have witnessed many strange sites, but I judge, never one stranger than this; among the watchers were those with tears in their eyes.”
Although the marchers were silent, many of them carried placards that described contributions of African Americans to American society, or gave reasons for the protest. Some of the placards were:
Many of the placards contained slogans highlighting military service by African Americans, reflecting the fact that the country had just entered WW I. Some signs and banners appealed directly to President Woodrow Wilson. One notable banner displayed an African American family in the ruins of East St. Louis, pleading with Wilson to bring democracy to the U.S. before he brought it to Europe (WW I was in progress at the time). Police deemed the banner in "poor taste", so parade organizers withdrew the banner before the parade began.
The New York Times described the parade in an article published the following day:
The parade was the first large, exclusively African American protest in New York; and was the second instance of African Americans publicly demonstrating for civil rights.
Media coverage of the march helped to counter the dehumanization of African Americans in the United States. The parade and its coverage depicted the NAACP as well-organized and respectable, and also helped increase the visibility of the NAACP both among white and black people alike.
A silent parade of at least 1,000 African American men took place in Providence, Rhode Island, later in the same year.
Another large silent parade took place in Newark, New Jersey in 1918. On the day before the parade, members of the NAACP spoke at local churches about the parade and the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. Women from the New Jersey Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (NJFCWC) marched along with men and other women carrying signs. A large meeting was held in the Newark Armory when the parade was complete.
Marchers hoped to influence President Wilson to implement anti-lynching legislation and promote African American causes. Four days after the silent parade, a group of NAACP leaders traveled to Washington D.C. for a prearranged appointment with the Wilson. The appointment was not kept, as the group of leaders were told that Wilson had "another appointment." They left a petition they had prepared for Wilson, which reminded him of African Americans serving in WW I and asked him to take steps to prevent riots and lynchings in the future. Wilson did not do so, although in July 1918 he did issue a written statement discouraging mob violence. Federal discrimination against African Americans significantly increased under the Wilson administration.
The Silent Parade failed to reduce the number of lynchings of African Americans: the number of lynchings per year increased after the parade. It was not until 1923 that the number of lynchings fell below the 1917 quantity. Lynchings continued into the 1960s.
Nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, but none passed. In 2022, 67 years after Emmett Till's killing and the end of the lynching era, the United States Congress passed anti-lynching legislation in the form of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.
As WW I drew to an end, there was considerable social tension as returning veterans of all races tried to find work, and black veterans struggled to gain better treatment after their war service. During the summer 1919, later called the Red Summer, racial riots of whites against blacks broke out in numerous industrial cities during these tensions and economic strife. Unlike the East St. Louis massacre, the 1919 events were among the first in which black people fought back against the attackers.
In October 1919, African American sociologist George Edmund Haynes, an employee of the federal government, published a detailed report outlining the white-on-black violence of the summer, and noted that states were unwilling to intervene. The report urged the U.S. congress to take action. The report identified 38 separate racial riots against blacks in widely scattered cities, in which whites attacked black people. In addition, Haynes reported that between January 1 and September 14, 1919, white mobs lynched at least 43 African Americans, with 16 hanged and others shot; and another 8 men were burned at the stake.
Seventy two years after the Silent Parade, another NAACP-sponsored silent march took place in Washington DC on August 26, 1989, to protest recent Supreme Court decisions which restricted affirmative action programs. The U.S. Park Service estimated over 35,000 people participated. The march was organized by NAACP director, Benjamin L. Hooks.
Several events commemorated the one hundredth anniversary of the parade, July 28, 2017. On that day, Google commemorated the Silent Parade in a Google Doodle. Many people stated that they first learned about the Silent Parade because of the Google Doodle.
In East St. Louis, a week-long commemoration of the riots and Silent Parade was held in July 2017, on the 100th anniversary of the riots. Around 300 people marched from the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Higher Learning Center to the Eads Bridge. Everyone marched in silence, with many women in white and men wearing black suits.
A group of artists, along with the NAACP, reenacted the silent march in New York on the evening on July 28, 2017. The event, with around 100 people and many participants wearing white, was not able to march down Fifth Avenue because the city would not grant access due to Trump Tower being located there. The commemoration took place on Sixth Avenue instead, and the group held up portraits of contemporary victims of violence by both police and vigilantes in the United States.