George Edmund Haynes, an educator employed as director of Negro Economics for the U.S. In a private conversation in March 1919, President Woodrow Wilson said that 'the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.' Other whites expressed a wide range of opinions, some anticipating unsettled times and others seeing no signs of tension. Authorities viewed with alarm African-Americans' advocacy of racial equality, labor rights, and the rights of victims of mobs to defend themselves. government to create a new regime modeled on that of the Soviets. Many politicians and government officials, together with much of the press and the public, feared an imminent attempt to overthrow the U.S. ĭuring the First Red Scare of 1919–20, following the 1917 Russian Revolution, anti-Bolshevik sentiment in the United States quickly followed on the anti-German sentiment arising in the war years. Jobs were very difficult for African Americans to get in the South due to racism and segregation.

Following the war, rapid demobilization of the military without a plan for absorbing veterans into the job market, and the removal of price controls, led to unemployment and inflation that increased competition for jobs. In the summer of 1917, violent racial riots against blacks due to labor tensions broke out in East St. They also feared foreign anarchists, who had bombed the homes and businesses of prominent figures and government leaders.īackground Great Migration The riots and killings were extensively documented by the press, which, along with the federal government, feared socialist and communist influence on the black civil rights movement of the time following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The time would also be marked by labor unrest, for which certain industrialists used black people as strikebreakers, further inflaming the resentment of white workers. The anti-black riots developed from a variety of post- World War I social tensions, generally related to the demobilization of both black and white members of the United States Armed Forces following World War I an economic slump and increased competition in the job and housing markets between ethnic European Americans and African Americans. Still, the highest number of fatalities occurred in the rural area around Elaine, Arkansas, where an estimated 100–240 black people and five white people were killed-an event now known as the Elaine massacre. Numerous African Americans fought back, notably in the Chicago and Washington, D.C., race riots, which resulted in 38 and 15 deaths respectively, along with even more injuries, and extensive property damage in Chicago. In most instances, attacks consisted of white-on- black violence. In 1919, he organized peaceful protests against the racial violence. The term 'Red Summer' was coined by civil rights activist and author James Weldon Johnson, who had been employed as a field secretary by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1916. Red Summer was a period in mid-1919 during which white supremacist terrorism and racial riots occurred in more than three dozen cities across the United States, and in one rural county in Arkansas.

Texarkana, Texas riot of 1919 (August 6).

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