0.3 Great war (part ii)  (Page 13/16)

Armed black and white men attacked each other. Throughout the country massive race riots exploded in the summer of 1919. In Chicago white gangs attacked black neighborhoods. The National Guard eventually ended the attacks and counter attacks that resulted in the death of at least 38 people, nearly 500 wounded, and the destruction of hundreds of homes and businesses. A similar even unfolded in the nation’s capital, resulting in nearly 200 casualties.

What made the riots in Washington, DC particularly disturbing was that many white US military personal, freshly back from defending the liberty of England and France, turned against their own countrymen, women, and children. A few years later, whites in Tulsa attempted to remove all blacks from their town. The NAACP investigated the incident and reported that the prime reason why whites attacked blacks was because of the fear of “radicalism” among black residents. When questioned closely, the NAACP discovered that by “radical” white citizens of Tulsa meant that black citizens were refusing to follow the Jim Crow era codification of racism and “were asking that the Federal constitutional guaranties of “‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ be given regardless of color.”

Although race riots will decline as the 1920s ramble on, lynchings will increase to include lynchings of blacks in northern towns such in Duluth, Minnesota when three black men will be lynched on suspicion of rape: Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie. Ray Stannard Baker, a reporter, author, biographer of Wilson as well as Wilson’s press secretary at the Versailles peace conference and once said that “Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to the question of rape.” Even outside of the South, whites justified rape on the suspected grounds that the lynched person had raped or tried to rape and that the victim was a white woman.

Walter White, a writer and the Executive Secretary of the NAACP published an article in The Crisis in which he outlined the reasons for these race riots, to include the attitudes of African-American veterans:

These men, with their new outlook on life, injected the same spirit of independence into their companions, a thing that is true of many other sections of America. One of the greatest surprises to many of those who came down to “clean out the niggers” is that these same “niggers” fought back. Colored men saw their own kind being killed, heard of many more and believed that their lives and liberty were at stake. In such a spirit most of the fighting was done.

Racial tension, violence, and death during the “Black Scare” of the 1920s are but precursors to the racial tension, violence, and death that will characterize the civil rights movement following World War II and culminating with forced bussing of the 1970s.

Simultaneously, Americans attacked (real and imagined) Socialists, Communists, and those who sympathized with Socialists or Communists. Sometimes those attacked fought back. Unions, union activists, and eastern Europeans in general (especially Poles and Germans) had been intimately linked with Socialism and Communism ever since the Haymarket Square incident in 1886. Unions had typically been viewed in this country as un-American because of the collective nature of unionism seemed to counter the individualistic nature of the United States.