7.10: Racism and the Red Scare

Racial Tensions

The United States grappled with harsh postwar realities. Racial tensions exploded in the “Red Summer” of 1919 when violence broke out in at least twenty-five American cities, including Chicago and Washington, D.C. Industrial war production and massive wartime service had created vast labor shortages, and thousands of black Southerners had traveled to the North and Midwest to work in factories. But the Great Migration of Black people escaping the traps of southern poverty and Jim Crow sparked new racial conflict when white northerners and returning veterans fought to reclaim the jobs and the neighborhoods they believed were theirs alone.

Many Black Americans who had fled white supremacy in the South or had traveled halfway around the world to fight for the United States would not so easily accept postwar racism. The overseas experience of Black Americans and their return triggered a dramatic change in their home communities. W.E.B. Du Bois, a black scholar and author who had encouraged blacks to enlist, highlighted African American soldiers’ combat experience when he wrote of returning troops, “We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy!” But white Americans just wanted a return to the status quo, a world that did not include social, political, or economic equality for black people. And they were alarmed and frightened by the thought of fearless, capable black men who had learned to handle weapons and defend themselves on foreign battlefields.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): "Neighborhood children raiding an African American family's house after they were forced out during the 1919 Chicago Race Riots," Jun Fujita, Chicago History Museum, in the Public Domain.

Riots

In 1919, racist riots erupted across the country from April until October. The bloodshed included thousands of injuries, hundreds of deaths, and vast destruction of private and public property across the nation. The week-long Chicago Riot, from July 27 to August 3, 1919, considered the summer’s worst, included mob violence, murder, and arson. Race riots had rocked the nation before, but the Red Summer was something new. Recently empowered black Americans actively defended their families and homes from hostile white rioters, often with militant force. Figure 7.10.1 shows a large home with broken glass windows after being ransacked by a large group of children from the neighborhood. This behavior galvanized many in black communities, but it also shocked white Americans who interpreted black self-defense as a prelude to total revolution. In the riots’ aftermath, James Weldon Johnson wrote, “Can’t they understand that the more Negroes they outrage, the more determined the whole race becomes to secure the full rights and privileges of freemen?” In the fall, an organization called the African Blood Brotherhood formed in northern cities as a permanent “armed resistance” movement. The socialist orientation of its members rapidly led to an affiliation with the Communist Party of America. But the Russian-led Communist International (Comintern) had no interest in semi-independent groups like the ABB with their Afro-Marxist ideas. The Brotherhood’s members found their way to other organizations like the Workers Party of America and the American Negro Labor Congress.

The wave of widespread lynching and riots against African-Americans lasted into the early 1920s. One of the most prosperous Black communities in the United States, the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was burned to the ground and over a hundred people were killed by a white supremacist attack that included aerial bombing in June 1921.  Many white Americans felt threatened by African-American success and increased social mobility. The early 1920s also saw a resurgence of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan, which now added immigrant Jews and Catholics to the list of those who would destroy “traditional” white Protestant America. These ideas culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924, which lowered overall immigration to a small fraction of what it was before World War One while setting up a quota system based on the ethnic makeup in the U.S. in 1890, a time before many Jewish and Catholic immigrants arrived from southern and eastern Europe. This Act would later be used as inspiration for Nazi racial policies.

Review Questions

• What did the extension of racial conflict into the North after the war suggest about American attitudes regarding race?
• Why were Americans so afraid of communism in the early 1920s?