The Red Summer, 1919

As a white person who grew up in the 1960s and ’70s, I was taught that "race riot" meant black people rioting. I was 5 years old when the Watts riots happened, and 8 during the riots that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

What I was barely taught, though, was that — beyond the mostly unmentioned lynchings that terrorized black people throughout the country for most of a hundred years — there were many other race riots where white people killed black people and destroyed their property. One example was the Wilmington Massacre; another was the Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which destroyed the wealthiest black community in the U.S. at the time (1921). But the biggest cluster of riots was the Red Summer of 1919, one hundred years ago this year.

The "cause" of the riots was unrest related to black soldiers returning from World War I and economic changes as black people tried to assert their right to equality, all in the midst of the Great Migration of black people from South to North and fear of Bolshevism among political elites. White violence against black people took place in many months that year, but today, July 19, was the beginning of a series of riots in Washington, D.C., that lasted for four days. The largest death toll — possibly as high as 242 — was on September 30 in Elaine, Arkansas.

Claude McKay's poem, "If We Must Die," was written as a response to the attacks throughout the Red Summer.

If We Must Die
By Claude McKay

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

I learned that poem in high school, and probably some of this context, but I'm not sure it stuck with me the way contemporary media portrayals of the 1960s riots did. A Life magazine picture is worth many thousands of words.