A hundred years ago, during the so-called Red Summer of 1919—a term coined by writer James Weldon Johnson, then field secretary for the NAACP—social conflict between blacks and whites turned violent in Chicago, D.C. (where riots broke out on July 19), Arkansas, and many other places. As I wrote for Slate a few years ago, “Red Summer” marked a new determination among black people to fight back against the aggression that white neighbors brought to their doors. Demobilized black veterans, who symbolized black advancement, were often direct targets of white violence; they also helped their communities fight back against it. Cheering on this new spirit, writers and journalists published jubilant exhortations in the black press. Poet Claude McKay’s sonnet “If We Must Die,” which ran in the socialist magazine the Liberator, called in stirring terms for resistance: “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/ Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”
The Red Summer was also the beginning of another tradition: the surveillance and redbaiting of black activists—or, really, just any black person who wanted social change. During and right after World War I, wrote historian Theodore Kornweibel Jr. in his book
Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925
, “any African Americans who spoke out forcefully for the race—editors, union organizers, civil rights advocates, radical political activists, and Pan-Africanists—were likely to be investigated by a network of federal intelligence agencies.” Whether or not these activists were actually sympathetic to socialism, communism, anarchism, or Bolshevism, their government was
extremely
convinced that they were. Whenever violence occurred during the Red Summer—especially in the instances when black people resisted that violence—investigators directed by then–24-year-old Justice Department official J. Edgar Hoover fanned out to interview participants and find out how they had been radicalized. Although his agents in the field didn’t often uncover evidence of such radicalization, Hoover asked them to try, again and again.
The linkage of even the slightest hint of black activism with “un-Americanism” began with American involvement in the war, in 1917. Wartime paranoia fed the growth of new government surveillance and intelligence agencies,
often aimed at surveilling dissidents and critics of the American government
. As historian Kenneth O’Reilly put it
in a review of Kornweibel’s book
, the nascent federal intelligence agencies “shared an … eminently simple assumption … that ‘second-class’ citizens would have second-class loyalties.” Reports in the white press hyped the idea that Germans were spreading pacifist propaganda among Southern black communities, inciting opposition to the war effort. Federal investigative agencies, historian Mark Ellis writes in his book
Race, War, and Surveillance: African Americans and the United States Government During World War I
, thought that any resistance to the abuses of Jim Crow might be evidence of German meddling.