The Atlanta Compromise and the Niagara Movement
Compilation and commentary
By Lucy Maness Warner
November 26, 2016


From Salon.com, below: “As the late Joel Olsen described in The Abolition of White Democracy, white riots against black Americans and other people of color were a way of creating a sense of communal identity across lines of class and ethnicity. Thus, “whiteness” was nurtured and in many ways created by white violence against non-whites generally, and African Americans in particular.”


This is the clearest and most persuasive discussion I’ve seen of the causes of Racial/Ethnic/Religious hatred which has plagued humankind since we and the apes diverged from the common ancestors millions of years ago. In saying that I “forgive” us for the innate sin of jealous rage against “the Other,” I don’t for a minute think that, just because it comes naturally to us to be otherwise, we should stop TRYING to “JUST GET ALONG.” We also shouldn’t stop trying to maintain FAIRNESS in our relations to others.

Neither race should dominate and abuse the other. We should keep in mind that we are more intelligent than the apes, and should be able to do better than they do. The American ideals are not merely words on a piece of paper (our Constitution), they sprang into the minds of our founding fathers from an inborn natural impulse in those of us who are intelligent, decent and mentally healthy to improve the world rather than destroy it in a fit of rage.

It’s a shame that American Whites don’t usually take African American Studies courses in college, nor read about the subject, either. The Atlanta Compromise tells a great deal about our current problems of racial strife. It was meant to be a solution to what should have been a temporary problem, but found its’ way into the power structure, based on cultural ignorance and assumptions about individuals as being “inferior.”

I started reading a news report showing Ajamu Baraka, Jill Stein’s chosen Vice Presidential candidate, delivering an impressive speech. In Googling Stein’s new push to a Wisconsin recount of the 2016 Presidential election ballots as one of three suspected problematic states, one of which is Wisconsin. While Googling Baraka, a striking-looking man with long white hair, I found his praise of WEB Dubois an African American scholar, whose name I then Googled, and finding there a section called “The Atlanta Compromise.” Having never heard of that, I started reading. It is the shocking story of how the politically entwined Black/White conflict emerged and became a part of our current laws.

After Blacks were freed and given the vote, they were populous, living in poverty, and for the most part lacking a basic education. To make one thing clear, during slavery, in some or perhaps most places, it was ILLEGAL to teach a slave to read and write. It’s like the anti-feminist recommendation by some men in the South when I was young, “Keep ‘em pregnant and barefoot.” Of course, that was said as a joke, but the sentiment is appalling. The goal is to make it virtually impossible for those two rebellious and dangerous populations – Blacks and women -- to shed their bonds. Reconstruction was the Federal solution to continued white violence and the “Black problem,” and from it came Jim Crow laws. The Atlanta Compromise was a key to that development.

In the ‘60s and ‘70s Civil Rights was more than a theoretical argument. It was a huge movement that affected me and other young people to a high degree. I was in college at UNC-CH at that time, and “the action” was happening all around me. I have been deeply involved in the issue since that time. To set up the context, see President Johnson’s commission on the racial strife below.




1968 KERNER COMMISSION REPORT:

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/kerner-commission-report-released

1968
Kerner Commission Report released

The President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders releases its report, condemning racism as the primary cause of the recent surge of riots. The report, which declared that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white–separate and unequal,” called for expanded aid to African American communities in order to prevent further racial violence and polarization. Unless drastic and costly remedies were undertaken at once, the report said, there would be a “continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.”

The report identified more than 150 riots or major disorders between 1965 and 1968 and blamed “white racism” for sparking the violence–not a conspiracy by African American political groups as some claimed. Statistics for 1967 alone included 83 people killed and 1,800 injured–the majority of them African Americans–and property valued at more than $100 million damaged or destroyed. The 11-member commission, headed by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in July 1967 to uncover the causes of urban riots and recommend solutions.



FOR HISTORY AND OPINIONS ON BLACK/WHITE CONFLICTS, SEE THE ARTICES BELOW.


http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/atlanta-compromise-speech

New Georgia Encyclopedia
History and Archaeology, Late Nineteenth Century, 1877 to 1900
Atlanta Compromise Speech
Original entry by Derrick P. Alridge, University of Georgia, 01/23/2004
Last edited by NGE Staff on 10/29/2015

Photograph -- African Americans at 1895 Cotton States Exposition
Photograph – Booker T. Washington
Photograph – Booker T. Washington is depicted at a White House dinner with U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt on October 17, 1901.
Washington and Roosevelt

On September 18, 1895, the African American educator and leader Booker T. Washington delivered his famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. Considered the definitive statement of what Washington termed the "accommodationist" strategy of black response to southern racial tensions, it is widely regarded as one of the most significant speeches in American history.

Two years earlier, Washington had spoken in Atlanta during the international meeting of Christian Workers. That audience, comprising northern and southern whites, responded favorably to his speech, in which he advocated vocational-industrial education for blacks as a means of improving southern race relations. In the spring of 1895 Washington traveled to Washington, D.C., with a delegation of mostly white Georgians to solicit support from Congress for an exposition on social and economic advances in the South. Washington pointed out to a congressional committee that since emancipation, blacks and whites had made advancements in race relations that should be highlighted in an exposition, and he urged federal support for the event, to be held in Atlanta. This speech, along with his 1893 address to the Christian Workers, prompted the exposition's board of directors to ask Washington to speak at its opening exercises.

Washington's speech responded to the "Negro problem"—the question of what to do about the abysmal social and economic conditions of blacks and the relationship between blacks and whites in the economically shifting South.

African American attendees of the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, held in Atlanta's Piedmont Park, are gathered in front of the Negro Building, where Booker T. Washington delivered his Atlanta Compromise" speech on September 18. The speech detailed Washington's accommodationist strategy of achieving racial equality, primarily through vocational training for African Americans.

Appealing to white southerners, Washington promised his audience that he would encourage blacks to become proficient in agriculture, mechanics, commerce, and domestic service, and to encourage them to "dignify and glorify common labour." Steeped in the ideals of the Protestant work ethic, he assured whites that blacks were loyal people who believed they would prosper in proportion to their hard work. Agitation for social equality, Washington argued, was but folly, and most blacks realized the privileges that would come from "constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing."

Washington also eased many whites' fears about blacks' desire for social integration by stating that both races could "be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Washington's speech also called for whites to take responsibility for improving social and economic relations between the races. Praising the South for some of the opportunities it had given blacks since emancipation, Washington asked whites to trust blacks and provide them with opportunities so that both races could advance in industry and agriculture. This shared responsibility came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise.

The speech was greeted by thunderous applause and a standing ovation. Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, moved forward to the speaker's platform and proclaimed the speech to be "the beginning of a moral revolution in America." Washington's words, telegraphed to every major newspaper in the country, were greeted enthusiastically by whites—both northern and southern—and by most African American leaders.

The speech also cemented Washington's status as the most influential black leader and educator in the United States between 1895 and 1915. Due partially to his conditional acceptance of racial subordination, Washington served as an advisor to U.S. presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, both men with deep racial biases. Washington was able to help Roosevelt and Taft select black candidates for nominal, traditionally black political positions. Washington also advised rich industrialists on how best to direct their money to support black education in the South and, in so doing, largely controlled the funding of most black southern schools.

But Washington had his critics, none more aggressive than another leading black educator and scholar of his day—W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois, a native of Great Barrington, Massachusetts,
Booker T. Washington in his office at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama.

Booker T. Washington was educated at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the University of Berlin in Germany. In 1897 he accepted an appointment to the faculty of Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University) and moved to Atlanta. Although Du Bois recognized Washington's speech as important, he soon came to see Washington's ideas of gradualism for civil rights as acquiescence to many southerners who wanted to maintain the inferior status of blacks. In Du Bois's view, "Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission. . . . [His] programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races."

Du Bois's upbringing in New England and his exposure to liberal democratic views elicited a very different response to the Negro problem. That different response crystallized with the publication of Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. Du Bois believed that blacks should launch legal and scholarly attacks on racism and discrimination without hesitation, and he called for education of the most talented blacks to lead this struggle. The "talented tenth," he believed, should represent the antithesis of gradualism and should seek to free blacks in the present. The Souls of Black Folk rallied opposition to Washington in black intellectual circles. Leaders of the black community were polarized into two camps: the "conservative" supporters of Washington's accomodationism, and the "radical" critics of Washington. Du Bois, harnessing radicals' unhappiness with Washington, founded the Niagara Movement in 1905, which advocated for civil rights for black people and led to the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The Atlanta Compromise represented Booker T. Washington's strategy for addressing the Negro problem and has long served as the basis for contrasting Washington's views with those of Du Bois. Even today, scholars and educators debate the utility of Washington's educational ideas. Most agree that to understand Washington's speech, it is necessary to place his thinking within its historical context, at a time when African Americans were struggling to transition economically from the legacy of slavery. Despite the continued debates over the speech and the criticisms of Washington by many black progressive thinkers, his address continues to be one of the most important speeches in American letters.


FURTHER READING:

Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993).

Robert J. Norrell, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).

Theda Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).

Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1901).

Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).




http://www.blackpast.org/aah/niagara-movement-1905-1909

BlackPast.org, an Online Reference Guide to African American History
Niagara Movement (1905-1909)


The Niagara Movement was a civil rights group organized by W.E.B. DuBois and William Monroe Trotter in 1905. After being denied admittance to hotels in Buffalo, New York, the group of 29 business owners, teachers, and clergy who comprised the initial meeting gathered at Niagara Falls, from which the group’s name derives.

The principles behind the Niagara Movement were largely in opposition to Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of Accommodationism. Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian, had publicly reprimanded Washington at a Boston, Massachusetts meeting in 1903. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), DuBois had also condemned Washington for his lowered expectations for African Americans. The Niagara Movement drafted a “Declaration of Principles,” part of which stated: “We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults.”

The Niagara Movement attempted to bring about legal change, addressing the issues of crime, economics, religion, health, and education. The Movement stood apart from other black organizations at the time because of its powerful, unequivocal demand for equal rights. The Niagara Movement forcefully demanded equal economic and educational opportunity as well as the vote for black men and women. Members of the Niagara movement sent a powerful message to the entire country through their condemnation of racial discrimination and their call for an end to segregation.

While the movement had grown to include to 170 members in 34 states by 1906, it also encountered difficulties. W.E.B. DuBois supported the inclusion of women in the Niagara Movement, William Monroe Trotter did not. Trotter left the movement in 1908 to start his own group, the Negro-American Political League.

The Niagara Movement met annually until 1908. In that year a major race riot broke out in Springfield, Illinois. Eight blacks were killed and over 2,000 African Americans fled the city. Symbolically important because it was the first northern race riot in four decades and because it was in the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, black and white activists, including members of the Niagara Movement, felt a new more powerful, interracial organization was now needed to combat racism. Out of this concern the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed. The Niagara Movement was considered the precursor to the NAACP and many of its members, such as W.E.B. DuBois, were among the new organization’s founders.

Sources:

Kate Tuttle, “Niagara Movement,” Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Susan Altman, “Niagara Movement,” The Encyclopedia of African American Heritage (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 1997); Scott Kirkwood, “And Justice for All” National Parks (Washington: Summer 2006).

Contributor:

Christensen, Stephanie
University of Washington
Entry Categories:

20th Century Accommodationists Civil Rights Groups\Organizations NAACP New York
- See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/niagara-movement-1905-1909#sthash.opOm2fur.dpuf




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Summer

Red Summer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Red Summer of 1919)


The Red Summer refers to the summer and early autumn of 1919, which was marked by hundreds of deaths and higher casualties across the United States, as a result of race riots that occurred in more than three dozen cities and one rural county. In most instances, whites attacked African Americans. In some cases many black people fought back, notably in Chicago. The highest number of fatalities occurred in the rural area around Elaine, Arkansas, where five whites and an estimated 100-240 black people were killed; Chicago and Washington, D.C. had 38 and 15 deaths, respectively, and many more injured, with extensive property damage in Chicago.[1]

The riots resulted from a variety of postwar social tensions related to the demobilization of veterans of World War I, both black and white, and competition for jobs and housing among ethnic white people and black people. In addition, it was a time of labor unrest in which some industrialists used black people as strikebreakers, increasing resentment. The riots were extensively documented in the press, which along with the federal government feared Socialist and communist influence on the black civil rights movement following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. They also feared foreign anarchists, who had bombed homes and businesses of prominent business and government leaders.

Civil rights activist and author James Weldon Johnson coined the term "Red Summer;" he had been employed as a field secretary since 1916 by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1919, he organized peaceful protests against the racial violence of that summer.[2][3]

Context[edit]

With the manpower mobilization of World War I and immigration from Europe cut off, the industrial cities of the North and Midwest experienced severe labor shortages. Northern manufacturers recruited throughout the South and an exodus of workers ensued.[4] By 1919, an estimated 500,000 African Americans had emigrated from the Southern United States to the industrial cities of the North and Midwest in the first wave of the Great Migration, which continued until 1940.[1] African-American workers filled new positions in expanding industries, such as the railroads, as well as many jobs formerly held by whites. In some cities, they were hired as strikebreakers, especially during the strikes of 1917.[4] This increased resentment against them among many working-class whites, immigrants or first-generation Americans. Following the war, rapid demobilization of the military without a plan for absorbing veterans into the job market, and the removal of price controls, led to unemployment and inflation that increased competition for jobs.

During the First Red Scare of 1919-20, following the Russian Revolution, anti-Bolshevik sentiment in the United States quickly replaced the anti-German sentiment of the war years. Many politicians and government officials, together with much of the press and the public, feared an imminent attempt to overthrow the US government to create a new regime modeled on that of the Soviets. Authorities viewed with alarm African Americans' advocacy of racial equality, labor rights, or the rights of victims of mobs to defend themselves. In a private conversation in March 1919, President Woodrow Wilson said that "the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America."[5] Other whites expressed a wide range of opinions, some anticipating unsettled times and others seeing no signs of tension.[6]

Early in 1919, Dr. George Edmund Haynes, an educator employed as director of Negro Economics for the U.S. Department of Labor, wrote: "The return of the Negro soldier to civil life is one of the most delicate and difficult questions confronting the Nation, north and south."[7] One black veteran wrote a letter to the editor of the Chicago Daily News saying the returning black veterans "are now new men and world men, if you please; and their possibilities for direction, guidance, honest use, and power are limitless, only they must be instructed and led. They have awakened, but they have not yet the complete conception of what they have awakened to."[8] W. E. B. Du Bois, an official of the NAACP and editor of its monthly magazine, saw an opportunity: "By the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land."[9] In May 1919, following the first serious racial incidents, he published his essay "Returning Soldiers":[10]

"We return from the slavery of uniform which the world's madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land....

We return.

We return from fighting.

We return fighting."


Events[edit]

Following the violence-filled summer, in the autumn of 1919, Haynes reported on the events as a prelude to an investigation by the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. He identified 38 separate riots in widely scattered cities, in which whites attacked black people.[1] Unlike earlier race riots in U.S. history, the 1919 events were among the first in which black people in number resisted white attacks and fought back. A. Philip Randolph, a civil rights activist and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, publicly defended the right of black people to self-defense.[2]

In addition, Haynes reported that between January 1 and September 14, 1919, white mobs lynched at least forty-three African Americans, with sixteen hanged and others shot; while another eight men were burned at the stake. The states appeared powerless or unwilling to interfere or prosecute such mob murders.[1]

Riots[edit]

"The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?"
-NAACP telegram to President Woodrow Wilson
August 29, 1919

After the riot of May 10 in Charleston, South Carolina, the city imposed martial law.[1] US Navy sailors led the race riot; Isaac Doctor, William Brown, and James Talbot, all black men, were killed. Five white men and eighteen black men were injured. A Naval investigation found that four U.S. sailors and one civilian—all white men—initiated the riot.[11]

In early July, a white race riot in Longview, Texas led to the deaths of at least four men and destroyed the African-American housing district in the town.[1]

On July 3, local police in Bisbee, Arizona attacked the 10th U.S. Cavalry, an African-American unit founded in 1866 and known as "Buffalo Soldiers".[12]

In Washington, D.C. starting July 19, white men, many in the military and in uniforms of all three services, responded to the rumored arrest of a black man for rape of a white woman with four days of mob violence against black individuals and businesses. They rioted, randomly beat black people on the street, and pulled others off streetcars for attacks. When police refused to intervene, the black population fought back. Troops tried to restore order as the city closed saloons and theaters to discourage assemblies, but a summer rainstorm had more of a dampening effect. When the violence ended, a total of 15 people had died: 10 white people, including two police officers; and five black people. Fifty people were seriously wounded and another 100 less severely wounded. It was one of the few times in 20th-century riots of white people against black people when white fatalities outnumbered those of black people.[13]

The NAACP sent a telegram of protest to President Woodrow Wilson:[14]

...the shame put upon the country by the mobs, including United States soldiers, sailors, and marines, which have assaulted innocent and unoffending negroes in the national capital. Men in uniform have attacked negroes on the streets and pulled them from streetcars to beat them. Crowds are reported ...to have directed attacks against any passing negro.... The effect of such riots in the national capital upon race antagonism will be to increase bitterness and danger of outbreaks elsewhere. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People calls upon you as President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the nation to make statement condemning mob violence and to enforce such military law as situation demands...

In Norfolk, Virginia, a white mob attacked a homecoming celebration for African-American veterans of World War I. At least six people were shot, and the local police called in Marines and Navy personnel to restore order.[1]

Starting July 27, the summer's greatest violence occurred during rioting in Chicago. The city's beaches along Lake Michigan were segregated by custom. Eugene Williams, a black youth, swam into an area on the South Side customarily used by whites, was stoned, and drowned. When the Chicago police refused to take action against the attackers, young black men responded violently. Violence between mobs and gangs lasted thirteen days, with white rioting led by the well-established ethnic Irish, whose territory bordered the black neighborhood. The resulting 38 fatalities included 23 black people and 15 whites. The injured totaled 537, and 1,000 black families were left homeless.[15] Other accounts reported 50 people were killed, with unofficial numbers and rumors reporting more. White mobs destroyed hundreds of mostly black homes and businesses on the South Side of Chicago; Illinois called in a militia force of seven regiments: several thousand men, to restore order.[1]

At the end of July, the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, at an annual convention, denounced the rioting and burning of negroes' homes and asked President Wilson "to use every means within your power to stop the rioting in Chicago and the propaganda used to incite such."[16] At the end of August, the NAACP protested again to the White House, noting the attack on the organization's secretary in Austin, Texas the previous week. Their telegram said: "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?" [17]

August 30–31, the Knoxville Riot in Tennessee broke out when a white mob gathered after a black suspect was arrested on suspicion of murdering a white woman. A lynch mob stormed the county jail searching for the prisoner. They liberated 16 white prisoners, including suspected murderers.[1] They moved on and attacked the African-American business district, where they fought against the district's black business owners, leaving at least seven dead and wounding more than 20 people.[18][19][20]

Will Brown, Victim of Omaha, Nebraska violence[21]At the end of September, the race riot in Omaha, Nebraska erupted when a mob of more than 10,000 ethnic whites from South Omaha attacked and burned the county courthouse to force the police to release a black prisoner accused of raping a white woman. They destroyed property valued at more than a million dollars. The mob lynched the suspect, Will Brown, and burned his body. They spread out, attacking black neighborhoods and stores on the north side. After the mayor and governor appealed for help, the government sent Federal troops from a nearby fort. They were commanded by Major General Leonard Wood, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, and a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 1920.[22]

On October 1, a race riot broke out in rural Elaine, Arkansas in Phillips County. Distinctive because it occurred in the rural South rather than a city, it arose from white minority resistance to labor organizing by black farmers and fear of socialism. Black sharecroppers were meeting in the local chapter of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. Planters opposed their efforts to organize and tried to disrupt meetings. In a confrontation, a white man was fatally shot and another wounded. The planters formed a militia to arrest the African-American farmers, but the mob got out of hand and attacked black people at random. In the riot they killed an estimated 100 to 237 black people, and five whites also died in the violence. Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough appointed a Committee of Seven to investigate. The group was composed of prominent local white businessmen. They concluded that the Sharecroppers' Union was a Socialist enterprise and "established for the purpose of banding negroes together for the killing of white people."[23]

That report generated headlines such as the following in the Dallas Morning News: "Negroes Seized in Arkansas Riots Confess to Widespread Plot; Planned Massacre of Whites Today." Several agents of the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation spent a week interviewing participants, but they spoke to no sharecroppers. They also reviewed documents. They filed a total of nine reports stating there was no evidence of a conspiracy of the sharecroppers to murder anyone.

The local government tried 79 black people, who were all convicted by all-white juries, and 12 were sentenced to death for murder. (As Arkansas and other southern states had disenfranchised most black people at the turn of the 20th century, they could not vote, run for political office, or serve on juries.) The remainder of the defendants accepted prison terms of up to 21 years. Appeals of the convictions of six of the defendants went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed the verdicts because of failure of the court to provide due process. This was a precedent for heightened Federal oversight of defendants' rights in the conduct of state criminal cases.[24]

Chronology[edit]
Based on Haynes' report as summarized in the New York Times, except as noted.[1]

See Chart at website for events and cities.


Responses[edit]

"We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."

-National Equal Rights League to President Woodrow Wilson
November 25, 1919

In September 1919, in response to the Red Summer, the African Blood Brotherhood formed in northern cities to serve as an "armed resistance" movement.

Protests and appeals to the federal government continued for weeks. A letter in late November from the National Equal Rights League appealed to Wilson's international advocacy for human rights: "We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."[26]

Haynes report[edit]

The report by Dr. George Edmund Haynes of October 1919[1] was a call for national action; it was published in the New York Times and other major newspapers. He noted that lynchings were a national problem. As President Wilson had noted in a 1918 speech: from 1889–1918, more than 3,000 people had been lynched; 2,472 were black men, and 50 were black women. Haynes said that states had shown themselves "unable or unwilling" to put a stop to lynchings, and seldom prosecuted the murderers. The fact that white men had been lynched in the North as well, he argued, demonstrated the national nature of the overall problem: "It is idle to suppose that murder can be confined to one section of the country or to one race."[1] He connected the lynchings to the widespread riots in 1919:

"Persistence of unpunished lynchings of negroes fosters lawlessness among white men imbued with the mob spirit, and creates a spirit of bitterness among negroes. In such a state of public mind a trivial incident can precipitate a riot."Disregard of law and legal process will inevitably lead to more and more frequent clashes and bloody encounters between white men and negroes and a condition of potential race war in many cities of the United States."Unchecked mob violence creates hatred and intolerance, making impossible free and dispassionate discussion not only of race problems, but questions on which races and sections differ."[1]


Press coverage[edit]

Headline of The Gazette, Elaine, Arkansas, October 3, 1919
In mid-summer, in the middle of the Chicago riots, a federal official told the New York Times that the violence resulted from "an agitation, which involves the I.W.W., Bolshevism and the worst features of other extreme radical movements."[27] He supported that claim with copies of negro publications that called for alliances with leftist groups, praised the Soviet regime, and contrasted the courage of jailed Socialist Eugene V. Debs with the "school boy rhetoric" of traditional black leaders. The Times characterized the publications as "vicious and apparently well financed," mentioned "certain factions of the radical Socialist elements," and reported it all under the headline: "Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt."[27]

In response, some black leaders such as Bishop Charles Henry Phillips of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church asked black people to shun violence in favor of "patience" and "moral suasion." Phillips opposed propaganda favoring violence, and he noted the grounds of injustice to the black people:[28]

I cannot believe that the negro was influenced by Bolshevist agents in the part he took in the rioting. It is not like him to be a traitor or a revolutionist who would destroy the Government. But then the reign of mob law to which he has so long lived in terror and the injustices to which he has had to submit have made him sensitive and impatient.

The connection between black people and bolshevism was widely repeated. In August 1919, the Wall Street Journal wrote: "Race riots seem to have for their genesis a Bolshevist, a Negro, and a gun." The National Security League repeated that reading of events.[29] In presenting the Haynes report in early October, The New York Times provided a context which his report did not mention. Haynes documented violence and inaction on the state level.

The Times saw "bloodshed on a scale amounting to local insurrection" as evidence of "a new negro problem" because of "influences that are now working to drive a wedge of bitterness and hatred between the two races."[1] Until recently, the Times said, black leaders showed "a sense of appreciation" for what whites had suffered on their behalf in fighting a civil war that "bestowed on the black man opportunities far in advance of those he had in any other part of the white man's world."[1] Now militants were supplanting Booker T. Washington, who had "steadily argued conciliatory methods." The Times continued:[1]

Every week the militant leaders gain more headway. They may be divided into general classes. One consists of radicals and revolutionaries. They are spreading Bolshevist propaganda. It is reported that they are winning many recruits among the colored race. When the ignorance that exists among negroes in many sections of the country is taken into consideration the danger of inflaming them by revolutionary doctrine may [be] apprehended.... The other class of militant leaders confine their agitation to a fight against all forms of color discrimination. They are for a program on uncompromising protest, "to fight and continue to fight for citizenship rights and full democratic privileges.

As evidence of militancy and Bolshevism, the Times named W.E.B. Du Bois and quoted his editorial in The Crisis, which he edited: "Today we raise the terrible weapon of self-defense.... When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed." When the Times endorsed Haynes' call for a bi-racial conference to establish "some plan to guarantee greater protection, justice, and opportunity to negroes that will gain the support of law-abiding citizens of both races," it endorsed discussion with "those negro leaders who are opposed to militant methods."[1]

In mid-October government sources provided the Times with evidence of Bolshevist propaganda appealing to America's black communities. This account set Red propaganda in the black community into a broader context, since it was "paralleling the agitation that is being carried on in industrial centres of the North and West, where there are many alien laborers."[30] The Times described newspapers, magazines, and "so-called 'negro betterment' organizations" as the way propaganda about the "doctrines of Lenin and Trotzky" was distributed to black people.[30] It cited quotes from such publications, which contrasted the recent violence in Chicago and Washington, D.C. with:"[30]

...Soviet Russia, a country in which dozens of racial and lingual types have settled their many differences and found a common meeting ground, a country which no longer oppresses colonies, a country from which the lynch rope is banished and in which racial tolerance and peace now exist.

The Times noted a call for unionization: "Negroes must form cotton workers' unions. Southern white capitalists know that the negroes can bring the white bourbon South to its knees. So go to it."[30]

Coverage of the root causes of the riot in Elaine, Arkansas evolved as the violence stretched over several days. A dispatch from Helena, Arkansas to the New York Times datelined October 1 said: "Returning members of the [white] posse brought numerous stories and rumors, through all of which ran the belief that the rioting was due to propaganda distributed among the negroes by white men."[31] The next day's report added detail: "Additional evidence has been obtained of the activities of propagandists among the negroes, and it is thought that a plot existed for a general uprising against the whites." A white man had been arrested and was "alleged to have been preaching social equality among the negroes." Part of the headline was: "Trouble Traced to Socialist Agitators."[32] A few days later a Western Newspaper Union dispatch captioned a photo using the words "Captive Negro Insurrectionists."[33]

Government activity[edit]

During the Chicago riot, the press learned from Department of Justice officials that the IWW and Bolsheviks were "spreading propaganda to breed race hated."[34] FBI agents filed reports that leftist views were winning converts in the black community. One cited the work of the NAACP "urging the colored people to insist upon equality with white people and to resort to force, if necessary.[29] J. Edgar Hoover, at the start of his career in government, analyzed the riots for the Attorney General. He blamed the July Washington, D.C., riots on "numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women."[13] For the October events in Arkansas, he blamed "certain local agitation in a Negro lodge."[13] A more general cause he cited was "propaganda of a radical nature."[13] He charged that socialists were feeding propaganda to black-owned magazines such as The Messenger, which in turn aroused their black readers. He did not note the white perpetrators of violence, whose activities local authorities documented. As chief of the Radical Division within the U.S. Department of Justice, Hoover began an investigation of "negro activities" and targeted Marcus Garvey because he thought his newspaper Negro World preached Bolshevism.[13] He authorized the hiring of black undercover agents to spy on black organizations and publications in Harlem.[34]

On November 17, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer reported to Congress on the threat that anarchists and Bolsheviks posed to the government. More than half the report documented radicalism in the black community and the "open defiance" black leaders advocated in response to racial violence and the summer's rioting. It faulted the leadership of the black community for an "ill-governed reaction toward race rioting...In all discussions of the recent race riots there is reflected the note of pride that the Negro has found himself. that he has 'fought back,' that never again will he tamely submit to violence and intimidation."[35] It described "the dangerous spirit of defiance and vengeance at work among the Negro leaders."[35]

Arts[edit]

Claude McKay's sonnet, "If We Must Die",[36] was prompted by the events of Red Summer.[37]

See also
African Blood Brotherhood
First Red Scare
Mass racial violence in the United States
King assassination riots
Racial Equality Proposal



http://www.salon.com/2015/05/01/white_ americas_racial_amnesia_the_sobering_truth_ about_our_countrys_race_riots_partner/

White America’s racial amnesia: The sobering truth about our country’s “race riots”
White pogroms against blacks are a fixture of American history. Someone please inform our major news networks
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA, ALTERNET
FRIDAY, MAY 1, 2015 04:00 AM EDT

TOPICS: ALTERNET, BALTIMORE, FREDDIE GRAY, GORE VIDAL, POLITICS NEWS

Photograph, (Credit: AP/Matt Rourke) – Showing an NYPD officer in riot setting
Video -- Police arrest dozens in NYC protest


This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

AlterNet Baltimore’s young people responded to the police theft of Freddie Gray’s life with protests that eventually grew into a spasm of violence. While the direct motivator, Gray’s death is not the only direct cause of the uprising. The protests and violent exhalations by Baltimore’s black youth (and others) are the result of a long pattern of police abuse, harassment and violence toward that city’s African-American community in the context of systemic class inequality, custodial citizenship and mass incarceration.

The causes of black urban unrest in the United States are not “unknown unknowns.” Rather, they were described in great and compelling detail by the 1968 Kerner Commission, which was tasked by President Johnson with determining the causes of the urban riots during the 1960s.

The reasons young people in Baltimore and other parts of the United States have been moved to street protests in response to police violence are only mysteries to those American policymakers and members of the public who choose to live in a state of denial.

(White) America is a country with a limited historical perspective and a very short-term memory. As Gore Vidal famously said, “We live here in the United States of Amnesia. No one remembers anything before Monday morning. Everything is a blank. They have no history.”

Thus, the American people are robbed of any meaningful social or historical context for the police abuse in Baltimore, Ferguson, and the many other locales where police thuggery and state violence are routinely visited upon black and brown Americans, as well as the poor and the mentally ill, with relative impunity.

White riots and pogroms against Black Americans are a fixture of American history. But the corporate news media enables many white Americans’ intentional forgetting and mass amnesia.

Here, the uprising and righteous anger of black young people in Baltimore (and elsewhere) is almost by default described as a riot. Deeper questions about class inequality and racism are removed from the dominant media frame and replaced by tired, trite and profoundly unsophisticated claims that the uprising in Baltimore was caused by absent black fathers, broken homes and an urban culture of poverty and violence. In everything but name, Baltimore’s black youth have been branded by the news media and American opinion leaders as feral street urchins: this is the language of racialization and dehumanization.

Many Americans in the news media and elsewhere are reluctant to acknowledge how the angry and violent response by Baltimore’s young people against the illegitimate, cruel and repeated acts of police brutality and killings in their community could be logical and wholly reasonable—and solidly within the American political tradition.

The White Racial Frame—a system of belief that legitimizes and normalizes white dominance and privilege in North American society—has produced the language of “riots,” “black pathology,” “thugs,” and “criminals” that is commonly used to describe the Baltimore uprising. The White Racial Frame does the work of white supremacy and helps to maintain political, social and economic systems of white privilege and unearned advantages. The White Racial Frame also distorts historical fact by erasing America’s long tradition of white-on-black violence across the colorline.

The language of “riots” to describe “urban unrest” as something unique to black Americans is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that can be traced back to iconic images of burning cities in the aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination and the tumult of the 1960s. But the use of phrases such as “riot” or “mob” can also be seen in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries to legitimize mass white racial violence against black Americans during the era of Jim and Jane Crow. Newspapers such as the New York Times featured headlines such as “Mobs of Blacks Retaliate for Riots”; “Negro Mob Terrorizing the Citizens of Jacksonville”; “Negro Mob in South Shouts for Lynching”; and “Negro Mob Killed Sheriff.”

The racist news narrative continues in the present, where the urban uprising against police violence and brutality in Baltimore has been described by right-wing propaganda sites such as the Drudge Report and other media outlets as a “race war” and/or “anti-white” violence.

In fact, in the United States, “rioting” and “race wars” against people of color are almost exclusively the domain of white Americans.

During the 1863 New York City draft riots, white people ran amok, killing black Americans and destroying the African-American community’s churches, orphanages, businesses and schools.

In 1921, over a 24-hour time period, whites destroyed the prosperous black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. White rioters used machine guns and dropped bombs (in what may be one of the first recorded uses of a plane for that purpose) on the black community. Conservative estimates suggest that at least several hundred black people were killed.

In East Saint Louis, whites engaged in a pogrom against the black community. Like Chicago, this was part of the “Red Summers” in which whites attempted to reassert their control and dominance over the black community in the aftermath of World War I.

Scholars such as James Loewen estimate that as many as 3,000 black communities were “ethnically cleansed” by white violence and other means of intimidation

Historian Gregory Downs has suggested that as many as 50,000 black Americans were killed by white racial terrorism in the 30 years following the end of the American Civil War. This total may not even include at least 4,000 blacks who were victims of lynchings by whites across the South and other parts of the United States.

As the late Joel Olsen described in The Abolition of White Democracy, white riots against black Americans and other people of color were a way of creating a sense of communal identity across lines of class and ethnicity. Thus, “whiteness” was nurtured and in many ways created by white violence against non-whites generally, and African Americans in particular.

White riots and other types of mass violence against the black community enriched white Americans through land theft, the destruction of black businesses and as a way of enforcing a regime of racial terrorism that economically and politically oppressed the black community in such as a way as to directly (and indirectly) fill white America’s coffers.

By most empirical measures (land taken, people killed and number of occurrences—there were 26 white-on-black race riots during the year 1919 alone) white Americans are the country’s most successful, adept and skilled rioters. White America is an expert on rioting and race wars; black America is a neophyte amateur with little to no experience in such matters by comparison.

Nevertheless, the corporate news media has recycled Ronald Reagan’s and the Republican Party’s language of “law and order” and “black pathology,” and obsess over images of black young people “rioting” against the Baltimore police. Many in the corporate news media will also emphasize what they believe is wrong with the “black family,” “black culture,” and the black community’s supposed inability to “control” young black people in the aftermath of the Baltimore uprising.

The right-wing media and its politicians will heavily emphasize this narrative. Fox News host Bill O’Reilly told his viewers that:

“The facts then dictate that racial persecution really isn’t the problem in Baltimore. Something else is in play. And that something else is personal behavior…These idiotic thugs who are rioting and looting are hurting their own people, and because the entire world sees pictures of blacks rampaging, all African Americans are affected…It is long past time for police agencies in America to have a no tolerance policy towards brutality on the part of officers…But it is also long past time for African-American communities across America to begin to police themselves.”

Republican 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul suggested that the Baltimore uprising was caused by absent black fathers:

“The thing is that really there’s so many things we can talk about, it’s something we talk about not in the immediate aftermath but over time: the breakdown of the family structure, the lack of fathers, the lack of sort of a moral code in our society. And this isn’t just a racial thing, it goes across racial boundaries, but we do have problems in our country.”

Paul’s and O’Reilly’s comments are part of what is known as the Southern strategy, which was created by the Republican Party in the aftermath of the civil rights movement with the goal of using white racial resentment and anti-black and brown bias to win over white working- and middle-class voters.

However, much more important questions will not be asked by pundits and politicians.

How are America’s police pathological in their violence, racism and brutal killings of black people?

Are America’s police deranged in how they imagine unarmed black and brown people as some type of imminent threat to be dispatched with due haste and extreme prejudice?

Is America’s police culture sick and pathological in how citizens have been tortured to death, sexually assaulted and otherwise violated and abused by police officers?

If there are only a few bad apples in America’s police departments, why don’t the good cops throw them out en masse?

Are America’s police more like a street gang than public servants?

It is easy for the mainstream news media to opine and lecture about “pathological” black communities that are supposedly plagued by “bad culture.” It is far more difficult to talk about America’s broken police and its culture of violence and disrespect toward non-whites and poor people that led to the killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and so many other black men and women across the United States of America.


Chauncey DeVega
Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.



RACIAL RIOTS AND SEGREGATION ACROSS THE COUNTRY – MORE ARTICLES

*http://www.infoplease.com/us/history/race-riots.html

Major Race Riots in the U.S.
Read about some of the most violent riots in U.S. history, beginning in 1898 at Wilmington, NC, and ending in Baltimore, 2015.


Mass racial violence in the United States - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_States

Mass racial violence in the United States, also called race riots, can include such disparate .... The riots in Newark spread across the United States in most major cities and over 100 deaths were reported. ... of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968 also led to nationwide rioting across the country with similar mass deaths.


List of ethnic riots - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_riots

This is a list of ethnic riots, sectarian riots, and race riots, by country. Contents. [hide]. 1 Africa ..... (California): A war between Latino and black prison gangs set off a series of riots across California; 2008: Locke High School riot (Los Angeles, ...


http://www.salon.com/2014/12/14/the_north_isnt_better_than_the_south_the_real_history_of_modern_racism_and_segregation_above_the_mason_dixon_line/

The North isn’t better than the South: The real history of modern racism and segregation above the Mason-Dixon line

The North celebrates its liberalism, but that disguises a complicated relationship with discrimination, inequality
JASON SOKOL

SUNDAY, DEC 14, 2014 12:30 PM EST