So in Chicago during 1919, there's a confrontation at a beach.
A young man seemingly crosses a line
the white community sees as a white space.
He is confronted and there are stones thrown at him and he ultimately drowns.
The young man who was killed, his name was Eugene Williams and as a result
there is a confrontation that happens between the black and white citizens.
There is a black police officer who attempts to arrest one of the white men involved in the death of this young person
and he's prevented from doing so and tensions continue to rise and you start to see where white
mob violence escalates.
There's a lot of chaos, people are very angry on both sides and the rumours
get wild very fast.
Violence just starts erupting all over Chicago and this was an incredibly
important economic powerhouse for the country.
The stockyards provided meat for the nation basically
and suddenly the city's immobilized.
The violence ranged. You'd have these gangs running around
attacking people with rocks, knives, guns ...
And there are people who go into communities basically
killing random black people, burning down homes and preventing fire trucks to come
in and put out fires.
They destroy a whole area in Chicago where African-Americans lived, worked and played.
So for literally for days, the second largest city in the country was in total chaos.
Around 1915, you have president Woodrow Wilson who screens Birth of a Nation in the White House,
a film that depicts African-American men as brutal beings, desirous of white women and the protectors
of society and these white women are the Klan.
So the racial climate in the United States during
the period of 1917 to early 1920s was society viewing African-Americans as second-class citizens.
People in positions of authority oftentimes were also members of the Klan.
There's the daughters of the confederacy creating curriculum, painting a narrative of the lost cause and leaving out
African Americans in terms of their contributions to society.
There's the American Historical Association at Columbia University and William Dunning essentially reiterating black people
needing to know their place.
There was definitely many examples where the press played a pretty bad
role in repeating rumors that were unfounded.
Headlines that would say 'negro riot' when in fact
the riot was white mobs attacking black people.
That happened over and over and over again.
For months media had been reporting incidents of attacks on white women.
They would use these animalistic terms in their coverage: a black brute had attacked a white woman here ...
To the point where the NAACP wrote letters and met with the press and said come on you're inciting violence here.
Then one day a white woman is walking home, nobody knows exactly what happened but two African-American
men are walking the other way and they jostled the woman or she jostled them and they exchanged words.
Pretty minor incident but that gets translated in the rumour mill to 'did you hear about the two black
men who just raped a white woman?' and it becomes a call to arms and there was actually a newspaper
report saying all these men are going to be gathering at the peace monument in Washington DC
and that's where they chose to gather and hundreds of soldiers and sailors gathered there and began
rioting and just attacking African Americans.
Left and right pulling people out of trolleys going
into restaurants where a lot of African-American men worked as waiters and beating them up.
Just total mayhem.
Gunfire erupted all over the place, the commissioner of the district didn't want to
accept the police couldn't handle it and he didn't want to ask Woodrow Wilson to send in the troops.
Woodrow Wilson meanwhile just tried to ignore the entire red summer and when he eventually does
send in troops, they're led by a pretty seasoned commander and order's restored in hours but if
you don't get in troops that are disciplined and impartial, you're going to have mayhem.
So Chicago,
there's an exhaustive investigation.
That race commission did a really thorough, meticulous job
of investigating what happened in Washington.
They just brush it under the rug.
You have African-American men who return home after fighting for democracy abroad to a nation
that's racist and segregated and you see these men returning to communities that they help build,
returning to families and businesses they helped establish and now they're having to defend these communities.
I think that African Americans, for the most part, wanted to become Americans, fully.
They thought World War One was this great test and we've passed the test, we fought for
democracy, we're part of this country.
We're part of this economy and we are here to get what we
are owed which is simply equal rights and that led to a massive backlash.