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Remembering Red Summer
---- Which Textbooks Seem Eager to Forget
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The racist riots of 1919 happened 100 years ago this summer. Confronting a national epidemic of white mob violence, 1919 was a time when African Americans defended themselves, fought back, and demanded full citizenship in thousands of acts of courage and daring, small and large, individual and collective.
Teen Vogue
featured a Zinn Education Project article by
Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
, on Red Summer as part of their OG History series that unearths history not told through a white, cisheteropatriarchal lens.
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JULY 19, 1919
Riot in Washington, D.C.
White mobs, incited by the media, attacked the African American community in Washington, D.C., and African American soldiers returning from WWI. This was one of many violent events that summer and it was distinguished by strong and organized Black resistance to the white violence.
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JULY 27, 1919
Riot in Chicago
Sparked by a white police officer's refusal to make an arrest in the murder of a Black teenager, Chicago's Red Summer violence lasted almost a week. At least 38 people were killed and thousands of Black homes were looted and damaged.
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AUGUST 30, 1919
The Knoxville Riot
In Tennessee, a group of whites rioted after forming a mob to lynch a Black man in custody for the alleged murder of a white woman.
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SEPTEMBER 28, 1919
The Omaha Courthouse Lynching and Riot
A white mob of between 5,000 to 15,000 lynched African American Will Brown. The Army arrested mob ringleaders. Even though photographs identified them, all of the suspects were eventually released.
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SEPTEMBER 30, 1919
Elaine Massacre
Black farmers were massacred in Elaine, Arkansas, for their efforts to fight for better pay and higher cotton prices. A white mob shot at them, and the farmers returned fire in self-defense.
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Additional Resources on Red Summer
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1919 ---- Poetic Reflections on the Chicago Race Riots
By Eve L. Ewing
In
1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919
---- which lasted eight days and resulted in 38 deaths and almost 500 injuries. Ewing's speculative and Afrofuturist poetry recounts the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city.
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1919, The Year of Racial Violence
By David F. Krugler
Krugler's book details the wave of racist violence that swept the United States in 1919 through the lens of Black armed resistance and freedom struggle. His scholarship reminds readers of the limitations of mainstream curriculum, which too often leaves out the tradition of armed self-defense in the long Black freedom struggle.
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PO BOX 73038, WASHINGTON, D.C. 20056
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