Surely, in the face of the recent assaults upon the law and the courts, from the East St. Louis Riots down to this orgy of fire and blood in Omaha, the time has come when it is incumbent upon the Federal Government to assume jurisdiction and set its hand to the task of stamping out the spirit of outlawry with which the state and local authorities have manifested their inability to contend. The Atlanta Constitution, October 1919. Amid postwar labor upheavals and the “red scare,” the United States was forced to confront racial disorders of a magnitude not seen since the end of Reconstruction. Changes in American society, however, were transforming the racial tensions that had once been almost exclusively confined to the south into a nationwide phenomenon. In the course of 1919 alone, between twenty and twenty-five separate outbreaks of rioting and racial violence marked what one prominent journal labeled “our own race war.” Once again, as in the anti-Chinese incidents of 1885 and 1886, the Army was called to restore order, this time between two groups of citizens who had developed into two separate, unequal, and sometimes hostile societies. The Background of the 1919 Riots World War I caused many social and economic changes within the United States, especially in regard to the 10 percent of the population that comprised the black minority. Black America emerged from the war as a community with rising expectations. No longer willing to accept passively the indignities and abuses of Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination practiced in the south, blacks showed a new determination to gain a practical realization of constitutional and civil rights granted a generation earlier in the years following the Civil War. World War I gave birth to what scholars have often referred to as the “New Negro,” more aware of discrimination and more active in opposition to it. The industrial expansion brought on by the war, and the concomitant drop in the numbers of white workers and European immigrants, meant more jobs in northern industries for blacks and a corresponding expansion of employment opportunities in areas from which they had previously been excluded. The prospect of a better way of life, steady employment and increased financial opportunity, and an atmosphere incorrectly thought relatively discrimination-free spurred a mass migration of southern blacks to northern industrial cities between 1914 and 1919, most being actively recruited by northern industries seeking cheap labor to fill war orders. Almost 500,000 blacks moved north between 1916 and 1918 alone. The wartime military service of some 380,000 other blacks stood as a source of immense pride and satisfaction to many in the minority community. Over 140,000 black servicemen went to France, and of this number, 42,000 served in two all-black combat units, the 92d and 93d Infantry Divisions. The vast majority, however, had noncombat roles in supply, stevedore, engineer, and labor battalions, in a marked and unwelcome departure from the elite black units of earlier wars. Of the black combat troops, only half served with the American Expeditionary Forces, and the four regiments of the 93d were put exclusively under French command and control. ] blackwallstreet.freeservers/red%20summer%20riots.htm
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 03:01:21 +0000
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