First of all, let me say: I don't know how many people died. I don't know how many incidents happened. I don't know a lot about 1919 because NO ONE DOES. People are still putting it together. I don't even like the term the "Red Summer"
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The term came about because people started using a collective term for a bunch of separate "riots." But there weren't a bunch of separate riots. It was all one thing. First, you gotta remember when this was, It seems like an entirely different era than the Civil War.
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But it was essentially 50 years after Emancipation. Some of the people doing all this violence had PARENTS who owned slaves. Many LIVED THROUGH reconstruction. The second thing people rarely mention is that EVERY AMERICAN CHILD thought black people were inferior.
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That wasn't an opinion. By the early 1900s, schools began to teach Darwin's theory of evolution. There was one problem: Charles Darwin was racist AF. Yes, natural selection exists. But everyone in academia also accepted Darwin's opinion that Caucasians were more advanced.
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So if you Then WWII happened. How did that fuel racism? Well, for the first time, there were hundreds of thousands of Black men who had experienced a semblance of Equality fighting in Europe and all over the world. They came back with a sense of pride.
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They also didn't accept their status as second class citizens under Jim Crow. Also, after the Civil War, the government built land-grant HBCUs. For the first time in American history, there were educated black people everywhere. They also didn't accept their 2nd class status.
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They weren't taking shit either. We learn about the Civil Rights era because it ended with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. We don't learn about the Black rights movement of the early 1900s because it ended differently:
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They just started killing black people. Also, you have to know that there was another factor that fueled this: We had a president who was a white supremacist. Sound familiar? Seriously, Woodrow Wilson's dog whistles make Donald Trump sound like Ghandi.
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When he was PRESIDENT at Princeton, he wrote a series of History books basically arguing that this was meant to be a white nation and that ending slavery fucked everything up. Seriously, he called the 15th Amendment (the right to vote) "radical" & said the KKK rose because:
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"The white men of the south were around by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes ignorant negroes" Needless to say, the Klan LOVED Wilson
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So how did he become president? Well, remember, everyone thought black people were inferior. Remember that black men were acting equal. Remember that immigration was increasing. Remember the NAACP had just begun. Remember the FIRST civil rights movement tried to end Jim Crow
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He appealed to racism. And he delivered. See, those civil rights groups had actually won a few battles. a few battles. The federal government had unofficially been desegregated for a while but after he got into office, he RESEGREGATED. And to celebrate, he had movie night.
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On February 18, 1915, Wilson hosted the premiere of the first moving picture at the White House. His family and his cabinet attended and the movie. Historians generally regard it the first "blockbuster movie" in history The movie's title sparked a new era of an old organization
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See, it would later be known as "Birth of a Nation," but that night at the White House, it was shown under its original name: "The Clansman" All of a sudden, the Ku Klux Klan was cool again. Membership soared. THIS, not the post-Civil War Klan, is the one you know
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This was when they started burning crosses. This was when they started wearing white hoods. By the mid-1920s, one out of every seven white men in the US was a member of the Klan. The anti-nativist movement was just beginning This is the environment that was bubbling in 1919.
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So when those uppity Black heroes came back to the US looking them white people in the eyes and enrolling in college, white people got scared AF and just held mass lynchings* *You won't find these incidents in history books under "lynchings" or "racist wypipo going HAM"
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That's because they called them "riots." Historically, whenever white people do some shit to black people and black people don't lay down and take it, they just term it a "riot" and start killing us. (You might wanna remember that. It just seems like a useful fact.)
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By October ONE REPORTER for the NYT had counted 60. I have literally never read a history book that has ALL the same events that happened in 1919. There are people still discovering some. AND THAT'S HOW IT WORKS.
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For instance, the first "riot" in Jan. that year supposedly happened in New Bedford, TN. No one knows what happened. On April 5, veteran Daniel Mack brushed up against a man on Market day. They sentenced him to 30 days in jail. A white mob broke into the jail, hung him & left.
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Mack survived by playing dead but no one was ever arrested bc, it turned out, the people in Sylvester Ga. "rioted" all the time. It never made the newspapers. In Port Arthur, Tex. They lynched a black man for "smoking near a car in which white women were sitting.
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In Macon, Miss, they beat every black person they found find who was employed because they heard that black workers had asked for better working conditions and brought up a crazy idea called a "minimum wage." They whipped all the blacks and literally turned the town all-white.
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Shit was crazy in the South, right? Sheeeeit... In Baltimore there were two riots against Black people who tried to move into white neighborhoods. There were at least 5 in Philly. There was an actual battle in Bisbee AZ. In DC, uppity Howard students called for desegregation
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So a newspaper reporter had a bright idea. He started reporting, out of thin air, that "negro fiends" were roaming the streets raping white women. Well one night, the wife of a man who worked for the Navy was "jostled" by a negro. I don't know what the fuck "jostling" is but...
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Apparently, white people do. That's because white people rounded up a posse and started attacking black people. They got the cops to do the same. Well, DC niggas don't play that shit.
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Thet were like: "Oh, yall muhfuckas wanna jostle? Aight." So they raised $14,000 (basically $180,000 today) and bought guns and just PASSED THEM OUT TO BLACK FOLKS. BRUH, these DC niggas were shooting at white people out of cars and off of rooftops. They shot a police HORSE!
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Now, I don't necessarily believe this one, but one cop said a group of black people drove by him in a car and shot the hat off his head! Anyway, they were the ones who wanted to jostle. Of course you know about the Elaine Massacre (If you don't go look it up. It's too much)
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In Caldwell, Ga, they burned three churches WITH PEOPLE IN THEM. Then they lynched a black man. His crime? They heard someone was telling Black people to "rise up and wipe out the white people. That's not the worst part The dude they killed? He just "looked like a leader."
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But there is a story that I halfway told on this website that bears repeating. Most people don't know that the current street gangs in America were modeled mostly after the Irish gangs in Chicago. In 1919, the Hamburgs and Ragens Colts ran Chicago.
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But black people were moving in and taking their jobs. To keep them away, they just made up a line that ran through the city and said: "This area is off-limits to the Black people." Now, I don't know if white people know this, but white people aren't that much fun to be around
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But one black kid, Eugene WIlliams, was floating on a raft in Lake Michigan and crossed this imaginary line IN THE LAKE! A white man threw a rock at him and Eugene drowned. A cop saw it and wouldn't do shit. But here's what happened:
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