Red Summer of 1919: Elaine Massacre, a Chicago Raft and Moore v. Dempsey

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James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP coined the term Red Summer for the wave of white supremacist violence that hit more than three dozen American cities and rural areas in 1919. The episode traces its roots to World War I: mobilization and the halt in European immigration pulled about half a million Black Southerners north in the first Great Migration, where the American Federation of Labor largely excluded them and employers used them as strikebreakers. When four million soldiers came home to inflation and no federal plan for jobs, the tension broke open. In Washington, D.C., white mobs that included men in uniform pulled Black residents off streetcars while police stood aside, and Black veterans organized barricades and armed defense of their neighborhoods for four days until Woodrow Wilson called in the National Guard.

In Chicago, Eugene Williams drowned after a white crowd stoned him when his raft drifted into a customarily white stretch of Lake Michigan, and police refused to arrest the men witnesses identified. Thirteen days of violence left 38 dead and a thousand Black families homeless. In Elaine, Arkansas, sharecroppers organizing the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America were attacked, and an estimated 100 to 240 Black people were killed while 79 Black residents were tried and 12 sentenced to death. Federal officials and newspapers blamed Bolshevik agitators, and J. Edgar Hoover's Radical Division set aside a Labor Department report on the riots and surveilled Black organizations instead.

• Washington's four days of fighting ended with 15 dead, ten of them white, one of the rare riots where white deaths outnumbered Black deaths.
• W.E.B. Du Bois's May 1919 essay Returning Soldiers declared, We return fighting.
• Chicago's Irish athletic clubs, effectively political street gangs, led coordinated attacks into the Black Belt.
• In Moore v. Dempsey the Supreme Court ruled the mob-dominated Elaine trials violated the 14th Amendment's due process guarantee.
• George Edmund Haynes of the Labor Department documented 38 riots and more than 40 lynchings in 1919 alone.