The Red Summer of 1919

Black soldiers came home from France in 1919 having been told they were fighting for democracy. They came home to a country where white mobs attacked Black neighbourhoods in roughly two dozen cities and counties between April and October. James Weldon Johnson, then field secretary of the NAACP, named the season the Red Summer.

The pattern repeated with little variation. A rumour of a Black man assaulting a white woman, or of a Black community organising for better pay, moved through white saloons and white newspapers. A mob formed, often made up of servicemen still in uniform. Police stood aside, joined in, or arrested the people being attacked. What made 1919 different from the decades of lynching before it was that Black communities fought back in force - in Washington, in Chicago, in Longview - and that the violence reached northern and western cities that had told themselves this was a southern problem.

Almost nobody was punished. Grand juries indicted hundreds and convicted a handful; all-white juries acquitted the rest. Where Black residents had defended themselves, they were the ones prosecuted: in Phillips County, Arkansas, twelve Black men were sentenced to death after a massacre of their neighbours, and their appeal produced Moore v. Dempsey, the first time the US Supreme Court held that a trial under mob domination violates due process.

This map does not yet hold every place. The entries here are the incidents with the fullest surviving record; the Library of Congress counts massacres in more than twenty cities from 1919 to 1923, and the Handbook of Texas counts twenty-five major racial conflicts in 1919 alone. The gap between that number and the number of pins is a gap in this map, not in the history.