and then the red summer....
When dozens of brutal race riots erupted across the U.S. in the wake of World War I and the Great Migration, black veterans stepped up to defend their communities against white violence.
www.history.com
Funny how those blacks, were being targeted by Southern White Democrats who voted for Woodrow Wilson...
Woodrow Wilson campaigned against war and for improving treatment of blacks, which is why even W.E.B. DuBois originally campaigned for him, but Wilson betrayed almost every one of his progressive and liberal reform promises before, during and after WWI.
Wilson was the first southern-born & bred President since the Civil War, and he was steeped from infancy in “Lost Cause” racist mythology and Jim Crow practice. Once elected he quickly re-segregated Washington D.C. government offices. By the end of the war he was characterizing black returning soldiers who merely wanted their democratic rights ... as the most dangerous “agents of Bolshevism” in the U.S.
African-American veterans bravely resisted white racist mobs in the summer of 1919 as this article shows, and the NAACP subsequently grew. Black internal migration of southern sharecroppers (and southern whites) into northern cities also continued as industry expanded (there had been no immigration into the country during WWI), and the “Harlem Renaissance” gave hope and new cultural and intellectual ferment.
But the freedom movement was essentially
defeated in this period. It saw some of its most hopeless days in the post-WWI decades, as also did the labor movement during and after the famous Palmer Raids. New unionizing efforts were crushed and did not recover until midway into the Great Depression, even though industry grew and the stock market at first boomed. In the twenties the KKK was reborn as a powerful national organization, with tremendous influence even in Congress. Desperate working class blacks gravitated to the “Back to Africa” Garvey Movement, which the smaller NAACP under DuBois opposed. The huge Marcus Garvey “Back to Africa” movement was the product of disappointment, despair and hopelessness.
Needless to say the Spanish Flu, tuberculosis and countless other diseases hurt the poorest Americans most, and among these were new southern-born black migrants to northern cities. They lived in terrible tenements and were systematically prevented from working at decent and upwardly mobile jobs in industry and government.
www.nytimes.com
