A Blood Red Summer: The Story of 1919

              There are some books that make you not want to ever even approach a keyboard again.  Their authors dazzling skill and undeniable talents make direct you to other pursuits, the lawn perhaps.  Finishing an Olympian Saul Bellow novel or a page of Martin Amis gives me my fingers the freeze.  Why bother?  Yet, some authors--much more human--ignite a desire to run to your room and begin research on your bottom drawer efforts.  Cameron McWhirter's Red Summer:  The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America  has written such a book.  The author, a Wall Street Journal reporter, does what some of the best journalists have been able to do:  produce a piece of social history in a clear and focused style that reanimates a moment of our shared past.

              McWhirter extracts about ten specific cases of lynching that occurred in the uncertain months after the close of the First World War.  The world had been blasted into the 20th century over a decade late.  By 1919, people were limping from trench warfare, partaking in or cracking down on revolutions, or reeling from influenza, genocide, and the undead legacy of the American Civil War.  For American blacks, the war had been an Event, a unique opportunity.  Hundreds of thousands of black soldiers bravely served their country both in and out of uniform during Wilson's "war to end all wars."  Many were induced northward by the glowing lure of industrial jobs and northern "freedoms."  Others dug ditches behind the lines or fought in the forests and holes of France in Democracy's name only to return, be denied the right to march in victory parades, and (in some cases) strung up in their hometowns.
              Novels like Blood on the Forge excellently portray the plight of the black strikebreakers used by industrialists to crack unions.  Race divisions, the iron wedge between workers in America, precipitated the lousy 20s where unions were weak and humiliated.  And it presaged critical moments such as the PATCO strike during the Reagan years, an event freighted with racially divided air-traffic controllers unable to unite.  The workers' divisions enabled symbolic victories that cost labor dearly, then and now.  Blacks were often met with racism and obstinate white rejection by rank and file membership (though often welcomed by union leaders).  Thus, blacks were in the tragic position of  "standing tall" with dignity and pride in the vile form of scabbing for corporate cynics.  Often, when strikes were settled, the industrialists discarded the scabs as quickly as they hired them.  For the blacks in uniform, the freedoms of France--a place the punchy intellectual W.E.B. Dubois felt truly at home--were an escape from the petty torments of southern life and inspired the demand for a postwar life without Jim Crow.  And the gallantry and sacrifice of their efforts (not to mention the Constitutional guarantees and the unfinished legacy of Reconstruction) demanded as much.  Southern whites, predictably, thought otherwise.  Both groups acted accordingly.
               The bugaboo for most southern white men, the idea that their precious wives and delicate daughters would be ravished by bloodthirsty, well-hung black men arose almost as soon as slaves disembarked.  More than any real rapes or horrors, this nightmare was the itchings and prickings of guilty conscience.  Generations of African-American families had been broken and subjugated to the worst forms of brutality, rape, murder, and depersonalization.  Much of this in the name of "liberty," or as Samuel Johnson indelibly asked:  "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?"  (I once raised this point in a discussion with a right-wing libertarian I had the misfortune to work with.  After mentioning to him that our mostly-black students would still be bent in the fields if his principles of "smaller government", "the Constitution", "individual liberty", and the "free market" were strictly applied in 1861.  He called me a "race baiter" and told me he'd knock my teeth out.)  Even today, one can walk the South and hear the discomfort at interracial marriage and the untold horrors of de-segregated public schools where "blacks get riled up" when talking about history and, as one blowhard colleague of mine in a Louisiana public school said,   "Them black boys was raping white girls left and right."
               McWhirter expertly demonstrates that 1919 truly was an awakening--not to argue that blacks were "asleep"--but to point out that organizations like the NAACP swelled with new members while energized scribblers in the black press acidly pointed out absurd injustices among America's 12 million African-Americans.  1919 felt like the beginning of something new.  There was an emergent feeling, a sense of possibility and pride in a black experience not tethered to sharecropping and subjugation.  Or as one white woman in Shady Dale, Georgia put it, "There's no managing the neegahs now, the's got so biggety since the war."  The "biggety" sense was cultural, artistic, and political.
                The possibilities for America after 1919 were manifold and thus leads me to the what ifs:  What if Woodrow Wilson hadn't been such an unregenerate racist scumbag?  What if the unions had (like the lumber union in Bougalusa) ignored race and stood in solidarity? What if state militias and federal troops had been deployed quickly and impartially?  And what if the nearly unanimously racist and biased press had ignored rumor, heresay, incitement, and lies and done the basic work of journalism:  standing up for the victims of systemic assault?  Could the Civil Rights era have risen a generation earlier?
                The chapter on the riots in Knoxville did much to unweave my rainbows.  How could such a bloody and violent event occur in a modern city with a progressive leadership?  Riots in Chicago might have been expected.  As the most segregated city in the North, the colorlines were not drawn as much as they were seared into the lakefront cityscape.  White gangs, one of which included the future Mayor Daley, used any excuse to maraud and loot black neighborhoods and shops while African-Americans were forced to arm and disguise themselves, even to walk to work.
                The effort to revive some of the (then) marginalized and obscure black press should inspire all independent media whose work for posterity is invaluable.