{"id":9014,"date":"2020-07-18T18:45:19","date_gmt":"2020-07-18T18:45:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/pandemicbook\/?page_id=9014"},"modified":"2021-11-12T21:28:05","modified_gmt":"2021-11-12T21:28:05","slug":"07-18","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/pandemicbook\/07-18\/","title":{"rendered":"07-18"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t

Saturday, July 18<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tUS Cases 3.72 million
US Deaths 140,834<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

Jul 18: The World Health Organization reports<\/a> <\/span>a new record in daily global coronavirus cases for the second consecutive day, tallying 259,848 infections in a 24-hour period that also saw 7,360 new deaths. News outlets report <\/span><\/a>that Joe Biden is holding a 15 point lead over Trump in polls. Thousands sign <\/a>a petition to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in honor of the civil rights icon, John Lewis.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\tFrom the Cutting Room Floor ...\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

In the summer of 1919, the United States experienced what Cameron McWhirter and many other scholars have described as the \u201cworst spate of race riots and lynchings\u201d in its history.[1]<\/a> A ragtag gathering of a dozen men started the \u201cmovement\u201d when they gathered around a burning cross on Stone Mountain, Georgia in 1915. They were motivated by films like D.W. Griffith\u2019s Birth of a Nation, <\/em>which supposedly told the \u201ctrue\u201d story of American history after the Civil War. It painted a picture of the American South overrun by radical Republicans, hell bent on imposing Black rule and social equality. The film portrayed Black men as animals driven to marry white women. In response, it provided a justification for white Southerners forming the Ku Klux Klan in order to defend their women. In the words of Melvyn Stokes, \u201cgallant Klansmen eventually managed to subdue the aggressive Southern blacks, and white supremacy was restored.\u201d[2]<\/a> The film was a huge success, shot on elaborate sets with a massive budget. It was the first film to be screened in the White House and the first modern blockbuster. For whites across America, the movie provided an attractive historical narrative for white Protestants who needed a grievance to nurse and a moral crusade to wage. By 1919, thousands had joined the \u201cbenevolent society\u201d of the KKK under the leadership of William J. Simmons.<\/span><\/p>\n

[read_more id=”1″ more=”Read more” less=”Read less”]<\/p>\n

The whole world was heading back home after four years of catastrophic war. In those years, populations that had previously been relegated to the outskirts of power, Black people and women in particular, had found ways to participate in society like never before. Women had left home to work in armaments factories and around 380,000 Black soldiers had served in the European theatre. While many were forced into manual labor exclusively, not least of which because their white supremacist president wanted it that way, Black units like 369th Infantry Regiment of the 93rd Division, the \u201cHarlem Hellfighters\u201d distinguished themselves repeatedly on the French battlefield.[3]<\/a> Returning home in uniforms pinned with medals created a problem, however. In a nation that prided itself on venerating its soldiers and degrading the Black man, the image of a Black war hero was incompatible with the established social order. <\/span><\/p>\n

Granted, white violence against strong Black people defending their rights was regular even before the First World War. Self-defense by Black families against white rabble rousers could turn into pogroms, like the one in East St. Louis in the summer of 1917 when 250 African Americans were murdered by white mobs. But the return of uniformed African Americans set off a paroxysm of white rage that ricocheted from large cities to rural communities across the country. Whites began their reign of terror immediately after troops started arriving home, with hooded men lynching Private Charles Lewis still in uniform on December 16, 1918. It was, as one Louisiana newspaper put it, an attempt to \u201cNip It in the Bud\u201d\u2014to show African American servicemen than their sacrifice for the country meant less than their permanent relegation to an inferior caste.[4]<\/a> And, as Isabel Wilkerson has shown, it was a caste system that was written in stone and reinforced through violence.[5]<\/a> What did Black veterans find upon their return to America, the land that they bled for? As W. E. B. Dubois, who initially prodded African Americans to enlist in 1917 admitted two years later, \u201cThis country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt lynches<\/em>.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Over fifty documented cases of anti-Black violence engulfed the United States over the next year, killing hundreds. \u2126 White mobs committed at least a dozen of those killings against returning Black war veterans. Some occurred in rural Southern areas. But some of the most destructive both in money and lives occurred in Connecticut, New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington D.C., and Chicago\u2014where white mobs set whole neighborhoods on fire after a Black teenager floated onto a whites-only beach on Lake Michigan.<\/span>[7]<\/a> And though most of the mobs were not explicitly Klan-affiliated, \u201cmasked\u201d or \u201chooded\u201d men participated in much of the violence.<\/span>[8]<\/a> James Weldon Johnson, field secretary of the NAACP and author of \u201cLift Ev\u2019ry Voice and Sing,\u201d dubbed 1919 the \u201cRed Summer\u201d for all the blood of Black men that flowed through American streets.<\/span>[9]<\/a><\/p>\n

2020 doesn\u2019t have the same version of coordinated anti-Black mob violence as 1919. But Americans are marching in the streets for racial justice now, just as then.[10]<\/a> They are witness to mass violence against Black and Brown bodies now, as they were then. In 1919, white supremacists raised monuments and statues honoring the Lost Confederate Cause. Now, in 2020, while some of those monuments are coming down, others are being defended by whites hell bent on returning to DW Griffith\u2019s version of \u201cAmerican Greatness.\u201d\u2126 And, as in 1919, disease still stalks the land. Coronavirus exploits the same lines of discrimination that were set up in northern American cities beginning that year.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whites rolled back whatever gains African Americans had made during the Great War. In what is perhaps the most pernicious parallel between 2020 and 1919, politicians and police connected the reaction against anti-Black mob violence to \u201cred\u201d communist and socialist agitation.<\/span><\/p>\n


<\/span><\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America<\/em> (Henry Holt and Company, 2011), 15.<\/span><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Melvyn Stokes, D.W. Griffith\u2019s the Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time<\/em> (Oxford University Press, USA, 2007), 6.<\/span><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Michael E. Ruane, \u201cAfrican American World War I Soldiers Served at a Time Racism Was Rampant in the U.S.,\u201d Washington Post<\/em>, July 22, 2017, https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/retropolis\/wp\/2017\/09\/22\/african-american-world-war-i-soldiers-served-at-a-time-racism-was-rampant-in-the-u-s\/.<\/span><\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Equal Justice Initiative, \u201cLynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans\u201d (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, October 2017), https:\/\/eji.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/lynching-in-america-targeting-black-veterans-web.pdf.<\/span><\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents<\/em> (New York: Random House, 2020).<\/span><\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> BlackPast, \u201c(1919) W.E.B. Du Bois, \u2018Returning Soldiers,\u2019 Editorial from The Crisis,\u201d April 7, 2019, https:\/\/www.blackpast.org\/african-american-history\/w-e-b-dubois-returning-soldiers-editorial-from-the-crisis-may-1919\/.<\/span><\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Eric Arnesen, \u201c\u2018Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America\u2019 by Cameron McWhirter,\u201d Chicago Tribune<\/em>, November 18, 2011, https:\/\/www.chicagotribune.com\/entertainment\/books\/ct-xpm-2011-11-18-sc-ent-books-red-summer-mcwhirter-20111118-story.html.<\/span><\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> \u201cFOR ACTION ON RACE RIOT PERIL; Radical Propaganda Among Negroes Growing and Increase of Mob Violence Set Out in Senate Brief for Federal Inquiry,\u201d The New York Times<\/em>, October 5, 1919, sec. Archives, https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1919\/10\/05\/archives\/for-action-on-race-riot-peril-radical-propaganda-among-negroes.html.<\/span><\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Matthew Wills, \u201cThe Mob Violence of the Red Summer,\u201d JSTOR Daily, May 14, 2019, https:\/\/daily.jstor.org\/the-mob-violence-of-the-red-summer\/.<\/span><\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Olivia B. Waxman, \u201cThe Forgotten March That Started the National Civil Rights Movement Took Place 100 Years Ago,\u201d Time, July 28, 2017, https:\/\/time.com\/4828991\/east-saint-louis-riots-1917\/.<\/span>
[\/read_more]<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\tImages\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t
<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNPR announcing the death of John Lewis\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNPR. \u201cNPR on Twitter: \u2018BREAKING: John Lewis, an Icon of the Civil Rights Movement, Has Died at 80. Https:\/\/T.Co\/AJyydTtXnI\u2019 \/ Twitter.\u201d Twitter, July 17, 2020. https:\/\/twitter.com\/NPR\/status\/1284339170052313091.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t
<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJuly 17, 1919, news article \"World-Wide Ship Strike, Plan of Reds.\" Image brought to you by Library of Congress and the National Digital Newspaper Program\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNew York Tribune. \u201cWorld-Wide Ship Strike, Plan of Reds.\u201d New York Tribune, July 17, 1919.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t
<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tIncreased construction of Confederate monuments correlates with periods of white backlash against civil rights\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSPLC. \u201cWhose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy.\u201d Southern Poverty Law Center, February 1, 2019. https:\/\/www.splcenter.org\/20190201\/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\tVideo\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t