The Red Summer of 1919: When Returning Black Veterans Were Murdered for Wearing Their Uniforms

In the spring and summer of 1919, the United States of America — fresh from its victory in the war that was supposed to make the world safe for democracy — conducted a domestic campaign of racial violence so widespread, so sustained, and so savage that the NAACP’s James Weldon Johnson gave it the name that history would remember: the Red Summer. Between April and November of that year, racial massacres erupted in at least twenty-six cities and communities across the United States. Hundreds of Black Americans were killed. Thousands were displaced. Homes and businesses and churches were burned in communities from Elaine, Arkansas, to Chicago, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., to Knoxville, Tennessee, to Omaha, Nebraska. The violence was not random. It was not spontaneous. And it was not about crime, or housing, or any of the pretexts that were offered at the time and have been repeated since. It was about the 380,000 Black men who had just returned from fighting in the First World War, and the intolerable fact that they came home expecting to be treated like the citizens they had proven themselves to be.

The connection between Black military service and white racial violence is the most consistent pattern in American history, and it is the pattern that American education is most determined to ignore. Every war this nation has fought has been followed by a period of intensified racial terrorism directed at the Black veterans who fought in it. The Revolution, the Civil War, the First World War, the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam — each produced Black men who had demonstrated courage, competence, and leadership under the most extreme conditions imaginable, and each was followed by a concerted effort to reimpose the racial subordination that their service had implicitly challenged.

The Men Who Came Home

Approximately 380,000 Black soldiers served in the United States military during the First World War. They served in segregated units, were commanded almost exclusively by white officers, and were subjected to racial humiliation that was official military policy. The Army classified Black soldiers as unfit for combat and assigned the majority to labor battalions — the Services of Supply — where they unloaded ships, built roads, dug trenches, and buried the dead. The assumption was that Black men lacked the courage and intelligence for combat. This assumption was contradicted by every Black unit that saw action.

The 369th Infantry Regiment, the “Harlem Hellfighters,” served 191 days in combat on the front lines — longer than any other American unit. They never lost a man to capture, never gave up a foot of ground, and received the Croix de Guerre from the French government for their valor at Méuse-Argonne. The 370th Infantry Regiment, the “Black Devils,” fought in the final Allied offensive and captured a German train. The 371st and 372nd Regiments, fighting under French command because the American military refused to deploy them in American sectors, earned unit-level Croix de Guerre citations and individual medals for bravery.

The French, who were losing the war and needed every soldier they could get, were willing to fight alongside Black Americans. The American military command was so disturbed by this that General John Pershing’s headquarters issued a secret memorandum to French officers, titled “Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops,” warning them not to treat Black soldiers as equals, not to eat with them, not to shake their hands, and not to commend them too highly, because such treatment would give them “intolerable pretensions” when they returned home. The memorandum was leaked and published in The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois. Its contents confirmed what Black Americans already knew: the United States military considered the dignity of Black soldiers a greater threat than the German Army.

“We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.”
— W.E.B. Du Bois, "Returning Soldiers," The Crisis, May 1919

The Cities That Burned

The violence of the Red Summer was continental in scope and remarkable in its viciousness. In Chicago, the violence began on July 27 when Eugene Williams, a seventeen-year-old Black boy, was stoned to death by white men while swimming in Lake Michigan because he had drifted past an invisible line that separated the “white” beach from the “Black” beach. When police refused to arrest any of the white attackers, Black residents protested, and the city erupted. Over the next seven days, thirty-eight people were killed — twenty-three Black and fifteen white — five hundred were injured, and more than a thousand Black families were left homeless after white mobs set fire to homes in the Black Belt. The Illinois National Guard was eventually called in, but only after the worst of the violence had occurred.

In Washington, D.C., the violence began in July after white newspapers ran sensationalized and largely fabricated stories about Black men assaulting white women. White mobs, including uniformed servicemen and Marines, attacked Black residents across the city for four days. But Washington was different. This was the first major racial conflict in which Black residents organized systematic armed self-defense. Black veterans, many still possessing their service weapons, took up positions in the U Street corridor and returned fire on white attackers. The organized resistance shocked white Washington and is widely credited with limiting the violence to the areas where Black neighborhoods were most vulnerable.

In Elaine, Arkansas, the death toll exceeded all other Red Summer events combined, though the exact number will never be known. Black sharecroppers in Phillips County, organized by the Progressive Farmers and Household Union, had been meeting to discuss pooling resources to hire a lawyer to negotiate fair cotton prices with the white landowners who were systematically cheating them. On September 30, white men fired into a church where the sharecroppers were meeting. When Black men returned fire, white mobs descended on the county, supported by federal troops dispatched by the governor. Over the next several days, an estimated two hundred or more Black people were killed — some historians put the number significantly higher. Twelve Black men were sentenced to death; sixty-seven were sentenced to prison terms of up to twenty-one years. No white person was charged with any crime. The Supreme Court eventually overturned the convictions in Moore v. Dempsey (1923), one of the Court’s few interventions on behalf of Black defendants during this era.

The Uniforms They Died In

The targeting of Black veterans was deliberate and explicit. Across the South, returning Black soldiers were warned not to wear their uniforms in public. In many communities, they were ordered to change into civilian clothes before disembarking from trains. Those who refused — or who simply walked down a street in the uniform of the nation they had fought for — were beaten, shot, or lynched. At least ten Black veterans were lynched in 1919 alone. The message was unmistakable: military service did not earn citizenship. Fighting for America did not make you American. Wearing the uniform of the United States Army was, for a Black man in the American South, an act of provocation that could be punished by death.

The uniformed Black veteran was terrifying to the white South for a simple reason: he embodied the refutation of every premise upon which white supremacy was built. He had demonstrated physical courage, which the racial mythology insisted Black men lacked. He had operated sophisticated equipment, which the racial mythology insisted Black men could not learn. He had functioned within a hierarchical organization, which the racial mythology insisted Black men were incapable of navigating. He had killed white men — in combat, with the sanction of the state, and had been decorated for doing so. He was, in his very person, an argument against the system, and the system responded in the only way it knew how: with violence aimed at destroying the argument.

If We Must Die

The Red Summer produced something that the architects of the violence did not anticipate and could not control: organized Black resistance. For the first time in American history, Black Americans responded to racial massacres not only with flight and appeals to federal authority but with systematic armed self-defense. In Washington, in Chicago, in Knoxville, in communities across the country, Black veterans and civilians fought back. They organized neighborhood defense committees. They stood guard on rooftops. They returned fire.

The literary expression of this new posture came from Claude McKay, a Jamaican-born poet living in Harlem, who published “If We Must Die” in The Liberator in July 1919. The poem, written in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, called on Black Americans to face their attackers with dignity and resistance rather than passive submission. “If we must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,” McKay wrote. “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” The poem was reprinted in Black newspapers across the country and became the anthem of a generation that had decided — having fought and bled for democracy in France — that they would no longer accept its absence at home without resistance.

The significance of this shift cannot be overstated. The Red Summer marks the moment when the strategy of accommodation that had characterized Black leadership since the end of Reconstruction began to give way to the strategy of confrontation that would eventually produce the Civil Rights Movement. The veterans who fought back in 1919 were the direct precursors of the veterans who would organize voter registration drives in Mississippi in the 1960s, who would march in Birmingham and Selma, who would form the backbone of the movement that would finally force the nation to extend the democracy that their grandfathers had been murdered for demanding.

The Pattern That Never Breaks

The Red Summer was not an anomaly. It was an iteration of a pattern that has repeated after every American war. After the Revolutionary War, Black soldiers who had been promised freedom in exchange for service were returned to slavery in many states. After the Civil War, the Black veterans who had saved the Union were subjected to the organized terrorism of Reconstruction’s overthrow. After World War II, Black veterans returning from defeating fascism in Europe were denied GI Bill benefits in the South, excluded from the suburban housing developments that the GI Bill financed, and subjected to continuing segregation in the military until Truman’s executive order in 1948. After Vietnam, Black veterans returned to communities devastated by deindustrialization, faced unemployment rates double those of white veterans, and were disproportionately affected by the heroin and crack epidemics that followed.

The PTSD that nobody counted is another dimension of this history that has been systematically ignored. Black veterans of every American war have returned not only with the combat trauma that all veterans carry but with the additional psychological burden of having risked their lives for a country that does not regard them as full citizens. This dual trauma — the trauma of combat and the trauma of returning to a society that treats your service as irrelevant to your status — has never been adequately studied, treated, or even acknowledged by the military medical establishment. The term “moral injury,” which describes the psychological damage caused by participation in events that violate one’s moral beliefs, applies with particular force to Black veterans who fought for freedom abroad and returned to unfreedom at home.

What 1919 Demands of Us

The Red Summer of 1919 demands that we reckon with a truth that is as uncomfortable as it is undeniable: the violence directed at Black Americans has never been a response to Black behavior. It has been a response to Black advancement. The veterans of 1919 were not murdered because they were criminals, or vagrants, or threats to public order. They were murdered because they had proven themselves the equals of white men on the battlefield, and they had the uniforms and the medals and the bearing to prove it, and this proof was intolerable to a society that required Black inferiority as its organizing principle.

This pattern — violence as a response to advancement — is the thread that connects 1919 to 1921 (Tulsa) to 1923 (Rosewood) to the bombings of prosperous Black homes in the 1950s to the assassinations of civil rights leaders in the 1960s to the backlash politics that followed every period of racial progress in the decades since. Understanding this pattern is essential to understanding the present, because the pattern has not ended. It has been refined. The violence is less overt but the function is the same: to ensure that Black advancement does not translate into Black power, that Black competence does not challenge white supremacy, that the lessons of the battlefield do not apply on the home front.

But 1919 also teaches something that the perpetrators of the violence did not intend to teach: that resistance works, that organized self-defense changes the calculus of terrorism, that a people who refuse to be slaughtered without fighting back force their attackers to reconsider the cost of the attack. The Black veterans and civilians who fought back during the Red Summer did not stop the violence. But they changed its character. They established the precedent that racial terrorism would be met with resistance, and that precedent — carried forward by the Deacons for Defense, by Robert Williams, by the armed guards who protected civil rights marchers in the South — was an essential component of the movement that would eventually force the nation to extend the democracy that the veterans of 1919 had been murdered for expecting. They earned it in the trenches of France. They demanded it in the streets of Washington and Chicago. And though the nation denied it to them in their lifetimes, the demand itself — fierce, armed, and unapologetic — echoed through the century that followed and has not yet been silenced.