This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the Red Summer and the 1919 Race Riots. These were a series of violent riots that took place during the summer of 1919 – some of the most notable being in Chicago, Washington DC, and Omaha – as a result of particularly high racial tensions in the United States at the time. These riots, lasting over a series of months, became known as the Red Summer because of how much blood was shed in such a short period of time.
We are of course going to discuss what all of those factors were (The Great Migration, the return of Black World War I veterans being treated like shit after serving the country, segregation, and so on and so forth). The factors that were most poignant in the Summer of 1919 were multiple likely-false allegations of sexual assault by Black men against white women. In Chicago in particular, the moment that ignited the fire that summer took place on July 27th when a seventeen-year-old Black boy was swimming in Lake Michigan. He floated across the invisible line (one that didn’t exist outside of fake social constructs) that divided the white side of the beach from the Black side of the beach. When he did this, a white man threw a rock at him, eventually causing him to drown. Do I need to tell you that the white man wasn’t arrested for the boy’s murder?
As a result, a week-long riot broke out in Chicago, leading to the deaths of 38 people, more than five hundred people injured, and more than 1,000 Black residents losing their homes. And that’s just in Chicago—that isn’t even touching on the other riots that took place that summer in Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, South Carolina, Washington, D.C., and more.
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