The Race Riot of Nineteen Nineteen and the Red Summer

In the summer of nineteen nineteen, at least twenty-five race massacres and riots occurred across the United States in what the writer and NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson named the Red Summer. Washington's outbreak began on the night of July nineteenth and continued for four days.

The proximate cause was a report in the white Washington newspapers, later found to be false, that a Black man had assaulted the wife of a Navy sailor. White servicemen and civilians, many still in uniform from the war that had ended eight months earlier, gathered on Pennsylvania Avenue and began attacking Black pedestrians. The violence spread to Black neighborhoods east of the Capitol and north along Seventh Street.

What happened on the second and third nights was different from most of the Red Summer's massacres: Black Washingtonians, many of them also veterans who had served in France, fought back. They fired from windows. They returned to streets they had been driven from. The historian Cameron McWhirter has documented in detail how Washington's Black community, unlike those in many other cities that summer, mounted an armed resistance.

The riot required federal troops to suppress, with President Wilson ordering soldiers to restore order on July twenty-second. Wilson, who had resegregated the federal civil service in nineteen thirteen after decades of partial integration, had offered nothing to Black Americans throughout his presidency. The troops restored order by force. No one was prosecuted for the deaths of the Black residents killed during the riot.

The poet Claude McKay published his sonnet If We Must Die in the summer of nineteen nineteen, written in direct response to the Red Summer. Winston Churchill read it aloud, without identifying the author, to the British Parliament in nineteen forty-one.