In many ways, the 1919 massacres extended and deepened half a century of racial terrorism against African Americans. Beginning immediately after the Civil War with 1866 massacres in New Orleans and Memphis, the Reconstruction era featured a number of these horrific white supremacist attacks, including one on July 4th, 1876 in Hamburg, SC that targeted parading African-American militia men. The next decades would see many more such violent events, from singular massacres like those in Wilmington, NC (1898), Atlanta (1906), and East St. Louis, IL (1917) to the ongoing communal violence of the lynching epidemic.
Yet even against this backdrop of continual violence, the Red Summer of 1919 stands out. Partly that’s due to the sheer number of riots and massacres: between the February 8 attack in Blakely, GA and the October 1-2 massacres of African-American communities in Elaine, AR and Baltimore, the year saw a total of 40 discrete such events. Nearly half of them took place in July alone, an orgy of summer violence that extended from Bisbee, AZ to Norfolk, VA, from Port Arthur, TX to Syracuse, and that was punctuated by week-long attacks on African American communities in Washington, DC (July 19-24) and Chicago (July 27-August 3).
Exemplifying the organized, purposeful white supremacist terrorism of these attacks were the July 10-12 events in Longview, TX, a small town east of Dallas. In mid-June, a white mob abducted and lynched Lemuel Walters, an African-American man accused of making “indecent advances” toward a white woman (with whom he was apparently in a romantic relationship). A local African-American journalist and civic leader, Samuel Jones, contributed to a July 5 Chicago Defender article that highlighted Walters’ innocence and murder, and on July 10 a mob set upon and savagely beat Jones. The white rioters did not stop there, extending their rampage to the town’s sizeable African-American neighborhood (which comprised about 30 percent of Longview’s population). By the evening of July 12, another African-American man (60-year-old Marion Bush) was dead, many more were injured, much of the town’s African-American neighborhood had been burned to the ground, and many remaining African-American residents were escorted from town by the National Guard (ostensibly for their safety, but they were advised never to return). Samuel Jones moved to Chicago, where he helped write a report on the riot that was published in the NAACP magazine The Crisis in October.