If you are one of those people who notes the county designations on Georgia license plates, then pay attention the next time you see “Jenkins” on a plate of a passing car.
In the spring of 1919, one of the nation’s most violent chapters in race relations began in that rural eastern county of once rolling cotton and sugar cane fields. By that summer, the violence had spread from Jenkins County, across Georgia to cities around the country, from Chicago to San Francisco. It engulfed the streets surrounding the White House. By fall, hundreds of African-Americans and dozens of whites were dead. Thousands were seriously injured.
What rose from that terrible season of lynchings, burnings at the stake and race riots, however, was a new political awareness among African-Americans that led to the modern civil rights movement of the 1960s.
The events are painstakingly detailed in author Cameron McWhirter’s new book “Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America.” McWhirter writes for The Wall Street Journal and is a former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter.
For the most part, that summer’s riots have been forgotten. Many who might have lived through the tumult, even as children, have passed away. In some cases, the trauma was so severe that survivor stories were not passed down. Instead, those tales are found in photographs, news clippings and other historical records buried deep in state archives and museums across the land.
McWhirter first came across the stories of the “Red Summer” while on a fellowship a few years ago at Harvard University. “Our modern understanding of race riots,” he said, “is black kids breaking into a shoe store in Los Angeles. But the overwhelming number of race riots in the country were white mobs attacking black communities. I wondered, ‘How could society degenerate to that level?’”
The phrase “Red Summer” was coined by James Weldon Johnson, the poet, diplomat, NAACP field secretary and Atlanta University graduate. There was no other way to describe such a bloody time.
McWhirter’s account begins with an April 13, 1919, church anniversary festival in Jenkins County. What started as the celebration of a 52-year-old church soon devolved into a showdown between black congregants and two local police officers. When it was all over, the church was burned to the ground by local white vigilantes who shot two black men and threw them into the flames. Their remains were so charred they couldn’t be identified.
From there the violence spread.
Tipping point
What caused it to envelop the nation, however, was a confluence of issues and events around the world, McWhirter maintains. Women had just won the right to vote. World War I was over, but many saw a threat to capitalist democracy in the budding communist and socialist movements here. Colonial forces were massacring protesters in India. Bolsheviks were revolting in Russia.
It all contributed to a growing climate of fear. Race proved the tipping point, McWhirter said, for the panic to turn into violence.
Three things happened for blacks that summer that were deemed as threatening. First, black soldiers were returning from France, where they had been treated well.
“It infuriated white Southern officers because it threatened and questioned their notions that blacks were subservient,” McWhirter said. “The question became, ‘Now how would they behave when they got home?’”
Second, the great migration of blacks out of the Jim Crow South in search of opportunities in the North caused a labor shortage in the South. While not welcome in Northern labor unions, blacks built vibrant communities in many Northern cities and would not return South in droves for almost 90 years.
Third, cotton prices in 1919 skyrocketed, bringing unheard of prosperity to the remaining black farmers and sharecroppers in the South, including some in Jenkins County, who used that money to buy property “and train tickets north,” McWhirter said.
“All of this completely discombobulated whites,” he said.
Pivotal for NAACP
What McWhirter found remarkable was not simply the violence, but the African-American response to it. In cities such as Chicago and Washington, blacks mounted armed defenses of their neighborhoods. It was during this time that the NAACP came into its own. The organization led by Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois and Atlantan Walter White led a robust anti-lynching campaign through the black press, in proposed legislation and in speeches around the country.
“When I started this book I thought the NAACP had devolved and that it hadn’t really done much until King, the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] and the [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] came along and won the day,” McWhirter said. “But that’s just not true. After 1919 it went into the 1920s and 1930s with a lot of muscle. If you didn’t have 1919 and the political reaction to it you wouldn’t have had the civil rights movement.”
What also surprised McWhirter was the lack of leadership President Woodrow Wilson showed through the entire period, even when riots were taking place near the White House.
“The idea of blacks complaining to him about mistreatment irked him,” McWhirter said. “His whole focus was getting the League of Nations passed in Congress, to the detriment of the social order of the country. He obstructed black political progress.”
Certainly the summer of 1919 was not the only time blacks in this county rose up in defense of their communities and livelihoods. But it was that period after World War I that was most pivotal in the nation’s move toward a more equal society for all, McWhirter said.
“I don’t think we’ll ever see that kind of violence again,” he said. “The landscape has shifted.”
Meet the author:
Cameron McWhirter discusses “Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America.”
7 p.m., Wednesday, Jimmy Carter Library, 441 Freedom Parkway N.E., Atlanta.
www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov.
1 p.m. Aug. 13, Eagle Eye Books. 2076 N. Decatur Road, Decatur. 404-486-0307. www.eagleeyebooks.com
About the Author
