Red Summer, 1919

In the summer of 1919, a wave of racist violence played out in the U.S. In many ways, the violence of 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly
Fry and Tracy. Before we get to the show today,
we have a little business to talk about an upcoming

(00:23):
live show. We were lucky enough to be invited to
participate in Great Conversations at Gettysburg, which is a series
of programs that they have there that draw on the
themes of Gettysburg. And that's going to take place on
June at the rough House History Center and it's free.
You can just go see us chat. There is cool

(00:44):
programming going on all day long. That day, we are
going to have our live podcast, which is called Fearless,
Feisty and Unflagging the Women of Gettysburg at four pm.
But if you're up for a day of interesting history,
there is a lot of other stuff to check out
that day, so coming see us. Uh So, now to
the topic at hand. This year is the hundredth anniversary

(01:06):
of 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 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.

(01:26):
You could do an entire podcast just on this, but
with the Hundreds anniversary, it seemed like a good time
to return to it. Uh. 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

(01:46):
be clear, 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 it going to start off with a little bit
about those two events before getting into the violence that
stretched the summer and fall. And in case it is

(02:06):
not clear, this 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 and Midwest. It peaked in the mid to late
nineteen teens, but the same pattern of migration continued for

(02:29):
decades afterward. There was also a 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

(02:50):
they paid their rent by giving a share of their
crop to the landowner. 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

(03:11):
if a person's landlord was honest and fair, a sharecropper
often earned a subsistence 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 weevil,
which had been introduced to the United States in the
late eighteen hundreds, spread farther and farther into cotton territory

(03:32):
in the nineteen teens, destroying the crop as it went,
and then in nineteen fifteen, widespread flooding affected many of
the same areas that had just been ravaged by weevils.
As the Southern economy shifted after the Civil War, white
farmers had also been caught up in this same system
of sharecropping. It was exploited regardless of who was doing

(03:53):
the farming, but the system was stacked most heavily against
black sharecroppers, who faced the 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.

(04:14):
This included jobs with better wages and better educational opportunities
for their children. People heard 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 interered World War One, Some of
these jobs were specifically connected to the war effort. Between

(04:38):
nineteen fourteen and nineteen twenty, roughly five hundred thousand Black
Americans left the South and moved to urban areas elsewhere.
In nineteen twenty, Emmett 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,

(05:00):
and they left 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

(05:21):
Migration was happening, and the 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

(05:44):
accept black recruits at all. The Navy and the Coast
Guard 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,

(06:06):
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 one class of black officers
at Fort des Moines in May of nineteen seventeen, sending

(06:28):
most black officer candidates after that point to train at
camps in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, or Panama. Ultimately,
about three hundred seventy thousand black men served in the U. S.
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 and removing

(06:51):
unexploded ordinance. 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 in the army's hardest, dirtiest,
and most degrading work, we're 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

(07:12):
Harlem Hellfighters. 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 seemed

(07:35):
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 military

(07:57):
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 in double
a CPS 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

(08:18):
what she means 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

(08:40):
to describe the United States as a shameful land, saying
that it lynches and disenfranchises at 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 in France, and by

(09:01):
the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United
States of America. Or know the reason why. James Weldon Johnson,
who coined the term. Read 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 trusting lye felt that because they had cheerfully done

(09:22):
their bit in the 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,
du Boys 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

(09:44):
be known as the New Negro movement, which was rooted
in assertiveness and confidence and was also connected to the
Harlem Renaissance. Membership in the Double a CP really surged
from about nine thousand members before the war to a
hundred thousand afterward. Compounding, many of the people who moved
from the South did not find the North to be

(10:04):
what they imagined 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 some ways,
but they were still there. All of this folded back

(10:27):
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

(10:47):
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

(11:07):
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

(11:28):
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

(11:51):
were often reported in both black and white newspapers, although
with completely different interpretations of the events. The Double a
c P 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

(12:14):
to mob violence. Some communities conducted investigations later on or
convened 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

(12:35):
to start with this pattern of lynching. A lynching is
an extra judicial murder of someone who has been accused
of a crime or some of their 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

(12:57):
white Americans who 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

(13:21):
really had taken place, 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 eight ninety

(13:42):
eight Wilmington's 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,

(14:05):
a mob 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

(14:25):
it was part of a pattern in terms of what
happened and how it played out. On May fourteenth and 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 Maddie Hudson. She had
been presented with a lineup earlier in the day, and

(14:48):
two different times 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 seventy,

(15:10):
two year old Berry Washington was in jail in Milan, Georgia.
Two white men had reportedly come into his neighborhood and
tried to assault two teenage girls. 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 white men who abducted Washington from the jail,

(15:32):
hanged him, and shot him repeatedly. The mob then terrorized
the area's black residents and looted black owned businesses. On
June sevente 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

(15:55):
woman had been having a consensual relationship. There was a
riot in long View 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, a mob lynched John Hartfield
of Ellisville, Mississippi, on the grounds that he had, according

(16:17):
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. On August, a mob dragged Eli Cooper out

(16:39):
of his home in Caldwell, Georgia. This mob's rationale 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
shot in a church, and then his body was set

(17:01):
on fire. A few days later, a mob in Bogaloosa,
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 nine, and thirty three
black men were lynched in Montgomery, Alabama, over the span

(17:23):
of about twelve hours. A mob abducted Rayleius Phifer and
Robert Crosskey as they were being transported to jail after
being accused of assaulting a white woman. Phifer was a
veteran and was reportedly in uniform at the time. The
mob shot both Phifer and cross Key, and then, in
a separate incident, an officer tried to arrest Will Temple

(17:43):
and 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 eight three recorded
lynchings in the sum Are in fall of nineteen nineteen,
and there were certainly others that were not recorded. And

(18:05):
the 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

(18:26):
when 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

(18:48):
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 nine nineteen riots, which we
will talk about after break. The other major hallmark of

(19:09):
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, that suggests that people
of two or more races were fighting against each other
as equal aggressors, and that's really not what was happening

(19:32):
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

(19:52):
or wrongdoing allegedly committed by a black person, usually a
black man, But often these criminal allegations were complete, lee false,
or the response from the white community was way out
of proportion to what it 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

(20:14):
black man smoking in a street car 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

(20:34):
documented examples of these riots between April and November. You'll
see numbers that ranged 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,

(21:00):
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 woman,

(21:20):
and we're 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, nineteen nineteen. A black man

(21:42):
had been detained and then released by Washington d C
Police under suspicion that he hit 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. Unemployment was a

(22:04):
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

(22:24):
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

(22:47):
street and black residents fighting back. More than one 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 one, as black residents took
up arms to defend themselves because the police were not

(23:09):
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 one ten white and
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

(23:30):
that might not be enough, But the troops got help
from a heavy rain storm that drove many of the
people who had been fighting back indoors. The riot ended
on May twenty four, by which point close to forty
people had been killed and hundreds injured. The riot ended
on July twenty four, by which point close to forty
people had been killed and hundreds injured. And then the

(23:52):
Chicago riots started just days later on July 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

(24:12):
the swimming area and white residents who demanded that they leave.
As this was happening, a group of boys was swimming
from a raft and accidentally crossed into the whites only
part of the lake. Someone through 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

(24:32):
slightly different account that he was not struck, but that
because of the stones being thrown, he was forced to
stay underwater 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

(24:54):
to spread through the city about exactly what had happened,
and as rumors tend 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. Three thirty eight people were killed,

(25:17):
fifteen white and twenty three black. Five hundred thirty seven
were injured. Of those, one 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

(25:39):
part because white officers were biased toward the white rioters. Eventually,
six 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

(26:00):
were in predominantly black neighborhoods when it happened. Some were
injured or killed when black residents defended themselves, but others
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 and I for an Eye,
mentality developed on both sides the Third Riot were discussing

(26:23):
it took place in a lane, Arkansas, and it was
more of a massacre than a riot. It started after
black sharecroppers started trying to organize for better pay. On September,
about a hundred of them met with representatives of the
Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. They met in
a church in Hoopspur, which was kept under armed guard

(26:44):
during the meeting in the hope of preventing the kind
of violence that had been so common over the previous months.
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,

(27:08):
some people fired into the church from outside, kind of
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 the Lane's white residence, this transformed

(27:29):
the meeting from an implicit threat to an armed insurrection
actively 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 a Lane
to deal with the supposed threat, and local authorities asked
the governor to deploy the National Guard. A mob burned

(27:52):
down the church where the meeting had happened, and together
these vigilantes and the National Guard troops took hundreds of
black residents of a Lane 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.

(28:13):
Walter White, assistant secretary of the n w a c P,
and past podcast subject it to b Wells Barnett each
investigated what had happened in the lane. Both found that
the quote armed insurrection being hyped in the white press
just simply did not exist, and if Elane's black community
had been planning an armed insurrection, it seemed as though

(28:34):
the death toll logically would have been much different. None
of the white participants in this 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

(28:54):
they were not given the death penalty, and all white
jury found them all guilty, and the judge handed down
sentences of death for all of them. 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 Double A CP backed a
series of appeals that finally made their way to the U. S.

(29:17):
Supreme Court as More versus Dempsey in nine. Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes authored the majority opinion that the defendants constitutional
rights had been violated. This was a major victory for
the Double A c P 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

(29:40):
at all the end of racist violence in the United States.
We have talked about similar riots and massacres that happened
afterward on the show before, including the destruction of Greenwood, Oklahoma,
in and the massacre in Rosewood, Florida in n three,
but they didn't happen with the same frequency as they
had during the Red Summer. We talked at the start

(30:01):
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 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

(30:24):
Migration was still going on, and by the end of
it millions of people would 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 nine, the white majority had increasingly started to
see these incidents as part of an unacceptable pattern. There

(30:46):
had been elected officials and other civic leaders who had
denounced the events from the very beginning, but these calls
became louder and more frequent. Law enforcement officials started taking
more steps to make sure that mobs can'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,

(31:10):
newspapers started taking a less sensationalistic and incendiary approach to
discussing race related violence. Civil rights organizations also started working
towards building more positive relations between black and white communities.
For example, after the Chicago riyot, the city established the
Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which investigated the riot and

(31:32):
made recommendations to prevent something similar from happening again. It
published its report The Negro in Chicago, A Study of
Race Relations and a Race Riot in ninety 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,

(31:54):
there were other commissions 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 work
to stop it. So that's sort of the highlights of
highlights is not even a good words like low lights. Yes,
that's sort of a a quick look at Red Summer.

(32:15):
Like I said, this could be there could be a
whole podcast that 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

(32:36):
this like white mob took, and then how things usually
ended without any kind of formal acknowledgement or investigation. Do
you have a little bit of listener, may you? Yeah?
I do, and it's a little happier we've talked about today.
This is from Kathleen. Kathleen says, hi too. I'm a

(32:57):
huge fan of the podcast. Y'all have been such a
source of joy, and I've learned so much over the years.
I had to write in after the Julian of Norwich episode.
I have a master's degree in theology and she was
such a source of comfort during graduate school. It was
kind of funny listening to the episode because I could
look around my living room and see quite a bit
of Dame Julian's swag. I have a statue, a framed

(33:18):
quote of all Shelby Well and an icon. I've attached
a photo of the icon. Y'all covered so much great
stuff about her. I was rooting Mother Christ, Mother Christ,
and then you went there. I don't know about the
historic veracity of it. I'm guessing it's just a legend,
but there's some speculation that Julian's companion was a kitty,
and so in the weird circles I move in, she
has become the unofficial patron saint of cats. When my

(33:41):
beloved cat died suddenly, the first thing I did was
head to the bookstore at the Cathedral of St. Philip
in Atlanta and purchase a statue of Julian cradling a
cat in her arms. I have to say, there are
times when hanging out with a cat and only dealing
with people through a window sounds like a life I
can get on board with. When I saw the icon,
I had to get it. It's Julian hanging out with
a kitty who bears a striking resemblance to my cat Francis,

(34:04):
who's named after Saint Francis, despite being the least saintly
feline ever. I thought you might appreciate the kitty connection
to my favorite mistic Thank you so much for all
your hard work on the podcast, Kathleen. Thank you so much, Kathleen.
I had meant to get into cats a little bit
in the podcast and then forgot it. Slash also had
a lot of other stuff I wanted to make sure

(34:25):
to get in there. Um, there are a lot of
like stained glass windows that have Julian with a cat
or depictions of Julian with a cat. She's associated with
cats a lot, and that's one of those things that
seems to be an association that developed later. Um, Like,
there's nothing in her writing or other people's accounts of
her that mentions a cat. And that doesn't mean that

(34:45):
she didn't have a cat. It's just one of the
many things about her that's been sort of like associated
with her, even though we know very very little about
her personal life and how she lives. So thank you again, Kathleen.
I also can tell totally see the appeal of just
hanging out with a cat and not having people around.

(35:06):
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(35:28):
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(35:51):
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