The 1919 Red Summer: Black Washington Fights Back

In the summer of nineteen nineteen, the Washington Post published a series of articles under lurid headlines about an alleged assault on a white woman. The accounts were disputed; the suspects described changed between editions. On the evening of July nineteenth, groups of white servicemen, many recently returned from the battlefields of France, moved into Black neighborhoods in the capital and began attacking residents. People were pulled from streetcars. Men were beaten on sidewalks.

The attacks continued for four days. An estimated six to forty people died, a range that reflects how poorly officials documented Black casualties in nineteen nineteen. The federal government did not immediately intervene.

What the standard account of the Washington riot has sometimes omitted is what happened on the third and fourth days.

Black veterans who had served in the same war as their attackers, who had returned from France knowing what organized armed resistance could accomplish, fought back. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People documented the counterattack. The fighting was organized, not random. It stopped the rampage. The NAACP field secretary James Weldon Johnson, who had been touring the South documenting what he was already calling Red Summer, came to Washington to report on what he found. He found a community that had not simply absorbed the violence.

The Washington Post's role in inflaming the riot was documented in subsequent journalism and historical scholarship. Their crime coverage in the days before July nineteenth had directly contributed to the mob's organization. The paper did not acknowledge this at the time.

Washington's nineteen nineteen riot was one of more than two dozen that summer. It is distinguished in the historical record by the organized character of the Black response and by the fact that, unlike in many other cities that summer, the violence eventually stopped because the defenders made it costly enough to stop.