SYMHC Classics: Red Summer 1919

This 2019 episode marked 100 years since a wave of racist violence in the U.S. that became known as Red Summer. In many ways, Red Summer was a response to (but NOT caused by) two earlier events: the Great Migration and the return of black soldiers who had fought in World War I.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. In this week's episode about the Memphis massacre,
we talked about that massacre being part of a pattern.
While we mentioned some other similar massacres, we really didn't
spend a lot of time on the pattern part. So
for today's Saturday Classic, we have chosen an episode that
does spend more time on that. It's our June third,

(00:22):
twenty nineteenth episode on the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. This year is the one hundredth anniversary of

(00:43):
the wave of racist violence in the United States that
came to be known as Red Summer. And we talked
about this just a little bit in our twenty fifteen
episode on the Harlem hell Fighters, but that was a
long time ago, and it was just like a little
bit in part three of the episode, not really enough
to do it justice. And honestly, it was a whole summer.

(01:03):
You could do an entire podcast just on this, but
with one hundred anniversary, it seemed like a good time
to return to it. In a lot of ways, the
violence of Red Summer was a response to two earlier
and sometimes overlapping events, and those were the Great Migration
and the return of black soldiers who had fought in
World War One to the United States. And to be clear,

(01:24):
neither of these things caused Red Summer. Red Summer was
a backlash to them. These returning veterans and migrating families
were not to blame for what happened. But since this
is part of the historical context, today's episode is going
to start off with a little bit about those two
events before getting into the violence that stretch the summer
and fall. And in case it is not clear, this

(01:44):
episode includes a lot of violence, including sexual violence. Some
of it is just particularly horrifying in nature. The Great
Migration was a mass relocation of Black Americans out of
the South and into the cities in the north end Midwest.
It peaked in the mid to late nineteen teens, but
the same pattern of migration continued for decades afterward. There

(02:08):
was also migration within the South from rural areas into
southern cities. Most of the people who were moving had
been sharecroppers, doing essentially the same work as their enslaved
ancestors had done, sometimes even on the same land and
for the same landowners. Sharecroppers rented the land that they
lived and worked on, and then they paid their rent
by giving a share of their crop to the landowner.

(02:31):
But it was almost impossible to make a decent living
as a sharecropper. Many sharecroppers were in debt to their landlords,
owing money for things like the tools and supplies that
they needed to do their jobs. Unscrupulous landlords could make
this situation much worse. But even if a person's landlord
was honest and fair, a sharecropper often earned a subsistence

(02:53):
level living at best. Sharecroppers faced the same threats to
their livelihoods as any other farmer did, including pests and
bad weather and fluctuating prices. The bowl weavil, which had
been introduced to the United States and the late eighteen hundreds,
spread farther and farther into cotton territory in the nineteen teens,
destroying the crop as it went, and then in nineteen fifteen,

(03:14):
widespread flooding affected many of the same areas that had
just been ravaged by weavils. As the Southern economy shifted
after the Civil War, white farmers had also been caught
up in this same system of sharecropping. It was exploitive
regardless of who was doing the farming, but the system
was stacked most heavily against black sharecroppers, who faced the

(03:35):
additional hardships of systemic discrimination in racism, including segregation, political oppression,
and racist violence. In the nineteen teens, black Southerners started
hearing about new opportunities and a potentially better life in
the North and the Midwest. This included jobs with better
wages and better educational opportunities for their children. People heard

(03:57):
about these opportunities through word of mouth from friends or
family who had already moved. Word also came through advertisements
placed by businesses and organizations that were hoping to attract
new workers to their area. After the United States entered
World War One, some of these jobs were specifically connected
to the war effort. Between nineteen fourteen and nineteen twenty,

(04:17):
roughly five hundred thousand Black Americans left the South and
moved to urban areas elsewhere. In nineteen twenty, m at J.
Scott described it this way, quote, they were in the
frame of mind for leaving. They left as though they
were fleeing some curse. They were willing to make almost
any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket, and they left

(04:38):
with the intention of staying. This led to labor shortages
in the South, and sometimes entire communities were abandoned. That
also dramatically shifted the racial demographics of cities like Detroit, Chicago,
New York, and Philadelphia. Will be returning to that shift
in just a bit. The United States became involved in
World War One as the Great Migration was happening. The

(05:00):
war directly affected the nation's black citizens as well. After
the United States declared war on Germany in nineteen seventeen,
people were eager to enlist in the military. This included
at least twenty thousand black men who volunteered in April
and early May. This actually presented a problem for the military,
though the Marines didn't accept black recruits at all. The

(05:23):
Navy and the Coastguard technically did, but only in menial roles.
So overwhelmingly black men were serving in the Army, which
at least in theory, accepted black men in most areas
of the service and practice, though the army was racially segregated,
with only a very few all black units in existence
at that time, So after the declaration of war on Germany,

(05:43):
the Army reached its quota for black recruits in just
about a week. In May of nineteen seventeen, Congress passed
the Selective Service Act, which required men regardless of race
to register for the draft. The Army began creating new
all black units and trained War one class of black
officers at Fort des Moines in May of nineteen seventeen,

(06:04):
sending most black officer candidates after that point to train
at camps in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, or Panama. Ultimately,
about three hundred and seventy thousand black men served in
the US Army in World War One. These men faced
persistent discrimination during their service. All Black units were often
assigned to menial work like digging trenches and unloading cargo

(06:28):
and removing unexploded ordnance. And while it's true that this
was all work that needed to be done and somebody
had to do it, disproportionately, the people doing the Army's hardest, dirtiest,
and most degrading work were black. Black soldiers also experienced
day to day harassment and discrimination throughout the war. There's
more about all this in that past episode about the

(06:49):
Harlem hell Fighters. Support for participation in the war wasn't
universal within the black community. One line of thought was
that it made no sense for people to put their
lives on the line for a country that at best
treated them as second class citizens. This was especially true
because the United States had framed its involvement in the
war as making the world safe for democracy, so it

(07:11):
seemed hypocritical to fight for a country that was refusing
to do the same within its own borders. But many
civil rights leaders and organizations really took the opposite stance,
arguing that this was a chance for black citizens to
demonstrate to the rest of the nation that they were
human beings and patriots worthy of respect who were actively
making a positive contribution to the nation. The experience of

(07:34):
military service during the war motivated many of these soldiers
to actively fight for equal rights after they returned home. W. E. B.
Du Boys described it this way in the NAACP's magazine
The Crisis quote, we are returning from war the Crisis,
and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into
a great struggle for bleeding France and what she means

(07:56):
and has meant and will mean to us and humanity,
and against the threat of German race arrogance. We fought
gladly into the last drop of blood for America and
her highest ideals. We fought in far off hope. For
the dominant Southern oligarchy entrenched in Washington. We fought in
bitter resignation. And the sedatorial boys went on to describe

(08:18):
the United States as a shameful land, saying that it
lynches and disenfranchises its citizens, encourages ignorance, and steals from
and insults black citizens. He concluded by saying, quote, we return,
we return from fighting. We return fighting make way for democracy.
We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah,

(08:38):
we will save it in the United States of America.
Or know the reason why. James Weldon Johnson, who coined
the term red Summer, described it this way in his
nineteen thirty three autobiography, quote, the colored people throughout the
country were disheartened and dismayed. The great majority had trustingly
felt that because they had cheerfully done their bit in

(08:59):
the life war, conditions for them would be better. The
reverse seemed to be true. Earlier civil rights advocacy had
tended toward a conciliatory approach, but after the war, Dubois
and other civil rights leaders were increasingly direct lobbying very
aggressively for equal rights legislation and for anti lynching laws.
This advocacy became part of what came to be known

(09:21):
as the New Negro movement, which was rooted in assertiveness
and confidence and was also connected to the Harlem Renaissance.
Membership in the NAACP really surged from about nine thousand
members before the war to one hundred thousand afterward. Compounding
that many of the people who moved from the South
did not find the North to be what they imagined

(09:42):
it to be. Many schools, neighborhoods, and public accommodations were
still segregated by custom, if not by law. Many industries
were closed to black workers, and many of the ones
that weren't involved manual labor or service work. Discrimination and
harassment may have been less overt in in some ways,
but they were still there. All of this folded back

(10:04):
into that growing advocacy for equal rights and equal treatment.
So it was a whole system in which people who
had moved, or people who had come back from war,
or people who had done both of those things were
finding themselves still facing all of this discrimination. And then simultaneously,
people of all races in the United States were competing

(10:24):
for scarce jobs and housing. Immediately after the war, the
first Red Scare was going on, and that created a
climate of fear of communism and Bolshevism. Also, immediately after
the war, the nation was very nationalistic and xenophobic, and
all of this together fed into this backlash that came
to be known as Red Summer. We'll start talking about

(10:44):
how it unfolded after a sponsor break. The two main
hallmarks of Red Summer were lynching and mass violence against
whole communities of black residents, which were often described as
race riots. These weren't unique to nineteen nineteen. The same

(11:08):
types of violence happened before and after Red Summer, but
during that summer and fall of nineteen nineteen both were
really at a peak. And although the great migration that
we just talked about was from the South into urban
parts of the North and Midwest, these incidents happened all
over the country. However, details are hard to track down
for some of these incidents today. At the time, they

(11:31):
were often reported in both black and white newspapers, although
with completely different interpretations of the events. The NAACP and
other civil rights organizations also conducted investigations into as many
of them as they could, but often there was no
formal investigation by law enforcement and no official record of
what actually happened, especially when it came to mob violence.

(11:55):
Some communities conducted investigations later on or convene truth and
reconciliation commissions to document what happened and make recommendations for restitution.
But in cases where that didn't happen at this point,
the people who remember the events have since died, so
many details are lost. So we're going to start with

(12:16):
this pattern of lynching. A lynching is an extra judicial
murder of someone who has been accused of a crime
or some other perceived wrongdoing. Anyone can be the victim
of lynching, although most often in the United States, lynching
victims have been members of a racial, ethnic, or religious minority.
In the United States, in the early twentieth century, most
victims of lynching were black Americans or white Americans who

(12:39):
had been working for civil rights. In nineteen nineteen, there
were eighty three recorded victims of lynching, at least eleven
of whom were veterans of World War One. That was
up from sixty four in nineteen eighteen. Victims of lynching
had often been accused of a crime against a white person,
especially a white woman. Sometimes a crime really had taken place,

(13:02):
but in other cases the allegations were completely fabricated. Regardless
of whether anyone had committed a crime, the idea of
a crime was used as justification for murder. It was
often the idea of a white woman having been allegedly
assaulted by a black man, something we talked more about
in our two parter on the eighteen ninety eight Wilmington

(13:23):
Coup and one of Red Summer's first incidents, a black
man named Benny Richards allegedly shot his ex wife and
her sister on May second, nineteen nineteen. His ex wife died,
and Richards also allegedly wounded the sheriff and other white
men who arrived on the scene. We have to say allegedly,
because Richards was not brought to trial. Instead, a mob

(13:46):
of between one hundred and three hundred white men apprehended him,
in part by dumping gasoline into the swampy area surrounding
his home and setting fire to it to try to
drive him out. After they captured Richards, the mob hanged him,
shot his body, and set it on fire. This was
not a remotely isolated incident, and it was part of

(14:06):
a pattern in terms of what happened and how it
played out. On May fourteenth, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a mob
of between eight hundred and one thousand people broke into
the jail and took twenty two year old Lloyd Clay
out of his cell. Clay had been accused of assaulting
a white woman named Mattie Hudson. She had been presented
with a lineup earlier in the day. In two different times,

(14:29):
she had said that Clay was not the man who
assaulted her, but after the mob removed him from his cell,
they asked her one more time to identify him as
her assailant, and she did. The mob poured oil over
Clay's head and hanged him over a bonfire while also
shooting him repeatedly. On May twenty fourth, seventy two year

(14:51):
old Berry Washington was in jail in Milan, Georgia. Two
white men had reportedly come into his neighborhood and tried
to assault to teenage els. Washington had tried to defend
them and had killed one of the men in the process.
A local Baptist minister led a mob of roughly one
hundred white men who abducted Washington from the jail, hanged him,

(15:13):
and shot him repeatedly. The mob then terrorized the area's
black residents and looted black owned businesses. On June seventeenth,
a white mob in Longview, Texas, murdered Lemuel Walters. According
to reports in white newspapers, he had robbed the home
of a white woman and assaulted her, but according to
an article in the Chicago Defender, Walters and this woman

(15:35):
had been having a consensual relationship. There was a riot
in Longview shortly thereafter, which started with a white mob
assaulting a black journalist that they believed had written this
article in the Chicago Defender, and then burning down his home.
On June twenty six, a mob lynched John Hartfield of Ellisville, Mississippi,

(15:56):
on the grounds that he had, according to them, raped
a white woman. His family members and friends maintained that
it was because he had a white girlfriend. This lynching
was announced ahead of time on the front page of
the Jackson Daily News under the headline John Hartsfield will
be lynched by Ellisville mob at five o'clock this afternoon.

(16:17):
On August twenty eighth, a mob dragged Eli Cooper out
of his home in Cadwell, Georgia. This mob's rational is
not clear. In some accounts he had made a pass
at a white woman, and others she had made a
pass at him. A newspaper report from the time said quote,
he had been talking for some time in a manner
that was very offensive to the white people of the
community in which he resided. He was either hanged or

(16:40):
shot in a church, and then his body was set
on fire. A few days later, a mob in Bogolusa,
Louisiana killed veteran Lucius McCarty, who had been accused of
trying to rape a white woman. His assailants shot him
hundreds of times before dragging him behind a car and
burning his body. On September twenty ninth and thirtieth, three

(17:01):
black men were lynched in Montgomery, Alabama, over the span
of about twelve hours. A mob abducted Railias Pfeiffer and
Robert Krosskey as they were being transported to jail after
being accused of assaulting a white woman. Pfeiffer was a
veteran and was reportedly in uniform at the time, the
mob shot both Pfeiffer and Krossky, and then in a
separate incident, an officer tried to arrest will Temple and

(17:24):
two other people for disorderly conduct. Temple resisted arrest, fatally
shooting the officer and being injured himself in the process.
A mob murdered him in his hospital ward. And these
are of course just samples from the eighty three recorded
lynchings in the summer and fall of nineteen nineteen, and
there were certainly others that were not recorded. And the

(17:46):
reason none of the perpetrators are named is that overwhelmingly
we do not know who they were. It was incredibly
rare for the perpetrators of lynching to face any kind
of criminal charges. Sometimes members of law enforcement were even
part of the lynch mob. Occasionally law enforcement offered a
reward for information or tried to arrest perpetrators, but when

(18:07):
that happened, the white community often reacted with outrage. Afterward,
members of the mob frequently took souvenirs with them from
the scene, as well as taking photos which were later
distributed as postcards. These were also not just some random,
haphazard actions. They were part of a pattern of really
gruesome racist violence committed by the white community in order

(18:29):
to terrorize, punish, and humiliate the black community and in
the minds of the perpetrators quote, keep them in their place.
The same was true of nineteen nineteen's riots, which we
will talk about after a break. The other major hallmark

(18:50):
of Red Summer was mass violence perpetrated by white mobs
against black people and the neighborhoods where they lived and worked.
These incidents are often described as race riots, and that's
a term whose meaning has shifted in various ways over
the decades, but to many people it suggest that people
of two or more races were fighting against each other
as equal aggressors, and that's really not what was happening

(19:14):
during Red Summer. Often black communities did try to defend
themselves or fight back, and occasionally black residents went on
the attack themselves, but overwhelmingly, even when this happened, the
primary instigators were the white mob. As was the case
with lynchings, these riots often followed some kind of crime

(19:34):
or wrongdoing allegedly committed by a black person, usually a
black man, but often these criminal allegations were completely false
or the response from the white community was way out
of proportion to what had really happened, and in some cases,
the perceived wrongdoing wasn't a criminal act at all. In
Port Arthur, Texas, a riot followed objections to a black

(19:55):
man smoking in a streetcar in front of a white woman.
In multiple instances, the purported transgression was black veterans appearing
in public in their uniforms. In one of the incidents
that we're going to talk about in a moment, it
was a response to sharecroppers trying to organize for fairer treatment.
There were at least twenty six documented examples of these

(20:17):
riots between April and November nineteen nineteen. You'll see numbers
that range from like twenty four to thirty. It kind
of depends on how people are defining the window of
time and exactly what constitutes a riot. They definitely occurred
in Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska,

(20:41):
New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington,
d C. And we're going to talk about three of
the most notorious. They have a lot of similarities, but
they also illustrate the range of purported causes. Riots in Washington,
d C. Followed rumors of an attack on a white

(21:02):
woman and were largely carried out by soldiers and veterans.
In Chicago, Illinois, riots followed a breach of the city's
unofficial rules about segregation, and in Elane, Arkansas, they followed
black sharecroppers attempts to organize. We will go chronologically, starting
with the Washington, d C. Riot, which started on July nineteenth,

(21:22):
nineteen nineteen. A black man had been detained and then
released by Washington, d C Police under suspicion that he
had assaulted a white woman. The woman was a sailor's wife,
which led servicemen, sailors, and veterans to try to seek revenge.
Rumors about this incident spread through the city saloons and
pool halls, which were a popular hangout for returning veterans.

(21:44):
Unemployment was a real issue, so as the rumors swirled,
the people who heard them were mostly unemployed, intoxicated, and frustrated. Ultimately,
a mob of about four hundred men, many of them drunk,
made their way southwest into Washington's majority black neighborhoods, gathering
up improvised weapons as they went, and some of them

(22:06):
were still in uniform. This mob attacked black residents indiscriminately,
and police really did very little to respond. When local
law enforcement did arrive, they mostly arrested the mob's black
victims rather than the white perpetrators. This first day of
street fighting bled into more than four days of rioting,
with mobs of soldiers and sailors attacking people on the

(22:28):
street and black residents fighting back. More than one hundred
and fifty people were physically attacked and at least nine
people died during the initial wave of fighting, but the
situation quickly got worse. More than five hundred firearms were
sold in the city on July twenty first, as black
residents took up arms to defend themselves because the police

(22:49):
were not or in some cases to seek restitution for
the earlier violence. At least fifteen people were killed or
mortally wounded just on the night of the twenty first,
ten White five black President Woodrow Wilson finally deployed about
two thousand troops to try to restore order. By that point, though,
the city had become so violent that people really thought

(23:11):
that might not be enough, but the troops got help
from a heavy rainstorm that drove many of the people
who had been fighting back indoors. The riot ended on
May twenty fourth, by which point close to forty people
had been killed and hundreds injured. The riot ended on
July twenty fourth, by which point close to forty people
had been killed and hundreds injured, and then the Chicago

(23:34):
Riot started just days later on July twenty seventh, nineteen nineteen,
after an altercation at a swimming area, and the swimming
area was not officially segregated, but local white residents thought
of it as for their use only. First, there was
an altercation on shore between black residents who wanted to
use the swimming area and white residents who demanded that

(23:56):
they leave. As this was happening, a group of boys
was swimming from a raft and accidentally crossed into the
white's only part of the lake. Someone threw a rock
at them and hit seventeen year old Eugene Williams in
the head. He lost consciousness and drowned. The coroner's jury
has a slightly different account that he was not struck,
but that because of the stones being thrown he was

(24:19):
forced to stay under water until he was just too
exhausted to keep swimming. When police arrived on the scene,
white officers refused to arrest the man that black witnesses
identified as the stone thrower. Increasingly, angry crowds gathered at
the lake, and then rumors started to spread through the
city about exactly what had happened, and as rumors tend

(24:40):
to do, they spiraled as they went. Eventually, a black
man named James Crawford fired into a group of policemen
and injured one of them. They returned fire and killed Crawford.
This led to widespread violence throughout the city that lasted
until August third. Thirty eight people were killed, fifteen white
and twenty three black. Five hundred thirty seven were injured.

(25:04):
Of those, one hundred ninety five were white and three
hundred forty two were black. White mobs also burned down
about one thousand homes in Chicago's black neighborhoods. The Chicago
police force was not at all effective at stopping this violence,
in part because it was understaffed and in part because
white officers were biased toward the white rioters. Eventually, six

(25:26):
thousand troops from the state militia were deployed to try
to restore order, and then, as had happened in Washington,
they were helped by a sudden heavy rain. This wasn't
quite as one sided as many of Red Summer's riots.
Many of the white residents who were injured or killed
were in predominantly black neighborhoods when it happened. Some were
injured or killed when black residents defended themselves, but others

(25:49):
were white merchants or other business people who worked in
black neighborhoods and were attacked as people sought restitution for
earlier violence. As it happened in the later days of
the Washington d c Riot, an eye for an eye
mentality developed on both sides. The third riot we're discussing
took place in a lane, Arkansas, and it was more
of a massacre than a riot. It started after black

(26:11):
sharecroppers started trying to organize for better pay. On September thirtieth,
about one hundred of them met with representatives of the
Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. They met in
a church in hoopsbur which was kept under armed guard
during the meeting, in the hope of preventing the kind
of violence that had been so common over the previous months.

(26:33):
In this part of Arkansas. Black residents outnumbered white about
ten to one, and the white community found this inherently threatening.
This kind of organizing effort was even more so, especially
with the presence of armed guards. At about eleven PM,
some people fired into the church from outside, kind of

(26:53):
in the shadows where the guards couldn't see them. The
guards returned fire, and in the process a white man
named W. A. Atkins was killed. At some point during
all this, Phillips County Deputy Sheriff Charles Pratt was also wounded.
In the minds of Elaine's white residence. This transformed the
meeting from an implicit threat to an armed insurrection actively

(27:15):
being planned, and it wasn't just rumor. The white press
reported this supposed insurrection as a fact. Hundreds of white
residents from around Phillips County traveled to Elaine to deal
with the supposed threat, and local authorities asked the governor
to deploy the National Guard. A mob burned down the
church where the meeting had happened, and together these vigilantes

(27:38):
and the National Guard troops took hundreds of black residents
of Elaine into custody and held them in temporary stockades.
This mob, over the next couple of days, killed at
least two hundred people. The official toll may have been
much higher, but there wasn't a formal tally. Walter White,
assistant secretary of the NAACP, and past podcast subject I

(28:00):
to b Wells Barnett each investigated what had happened in
a Lane. Both found that the quote armed insurrection being
hyped in the white press just simply did not exist,
and if Elaine's black community had been planning an armed insurrection,
it seemed as though the death toll logically would have
been much different. None of the white participants in this

(28:21):
were ever tried for their roles in this massacre. Instead,
twelve black men were put on trial and the deaths
of the five white people who were killed. During the trials,
a white mob surrounded the courthouse and threatened to lynch
the men if they were not given the death penalty.
An all white jury found them all guilty, and the
judge handed down sentences of death for all of them.

(28:44):
These twelve were not the only people who were set
to stand trial. Another sixty five accepted plea bargains. After
that first wave of convictions and sentencing, the NAACP backed
a series of appeals that finally made their way to
the US Supreme Court as Voar versus Dempsey in nineteen
twenty three. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes authored the majority opinion

(29:06):
that the defendant's constitutional rights had been violated. This was
a major victory for the NAACP and for the civil
rights of Black Americans in general. After being granted new trials,
the twelve men were ultimately freed. Red Summer was not
at all the end of racist violence in the United States.
We have talked about similar riots and massacres that happened

(29:27):
afterward on the show before, including the destruction of Greenwood,
Oklahoma in nineteen twenty one, and the massacre in Rosewood,
Florida in nineteen twenty three, but they didn't happen with
the same frequency as they had during the Red Summer.
We talked at the start of the show about all
the factors that had primed the United States for all
this violence. So that leads to the question of why

(29:49):
did Red Summer end. The economy did start to improve,
and especially when it came to mob violence, The onset
of colder winter weather probably tempered things a little bit,
but a lot of those other factors were still present
or even growing. The Great Migration was still going on,
and by the end of it millions of people would

(30:10):
have moved to cities. This general atmosphere of nationalism and
xenophobia was still very present. A big part of it
is that by the fall of nineteen nineteen, the white
majority had increasingly started to see these incidents as part
of an unacceptable pattern. There had been elected officials and
other civic leaders who had denounced the events from the

(30:32):
very beginning, but these calls became louder and more frequent.
Law enforcement officials started taking more steps to make sure
that mobs couldn't just abduct people from the jail to
lynch them. The white press also started toning down some
of its rhetoric in terms of criminal allegations against black residents,
and then across the board, newspapers started taking a less

(30:54):
sensationalistic and incendiary approach to discussing race related violence. Civil
rights were organizations also started working toward building more positive
relations between black and white communities. For example, after the
Chicago riot, the city established the Chicago Commission on Race Relations,
which investigated the riot and made recommendations to prevent something

(31:15):
similar from happening again. It published its report The Negro
in Chicago, a Study of Race Relations and a Race
Riot in nineteen twenty two, which included not just a
thorough investigation of the riot, but also of relationships between
white and black communities in Chicago. Although not every riot
led to this sort of investigation, there were other commissions

(31:37):
and organizations that did the same types of work elsewhere
in the United States. In other words, the violence didn't
just play itself out. People actively worked to stop it.
So that's sort of the highlights of highlights is not
even a good word like low lights. Yes, that's sort
of a quick look at read Summer. Like I said,

(31:57):
this could be there could be a whole podcast. It
would just be about Red Summer that would go on
for many, many, many episodes, because there were so many
things that happened, but so many of them follow this
exact same pattern in terms of like the precipitating event
and then what transpired, the actions that this like white

(32:19):
mob took, and then how things usually ended without any
kind of formal acknowledgment or investigation. Thanks so much for
joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send
us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on

(32:42):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows