World War I and the New Negro Movement

Understanding a National and Global Red Scare/Red Summer Through the Local Invention of Solidarities

“…Krugler noted that, in addition to the ten major riots he examined, the Red Summer period had "dozens of minor, racially charged clashes, and almost 100 lynchings." 12 According to data compiled by Florence Peterson for the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1937, the number of striking workers in 1919 dwarfed anything seen in the 1880 to 1936 period that she examined (historian David Montgomery has estimated it to be nearly a quarter of all manual and service non-household workers), even though the actual number of strikes was about the same as in 1918 and 1920 and lower than in 1917. 13 This reinforces the same "big event" Red Summer tendency for the Red Scare because there was an unprecedented number of large strikes, not total strikes, and thus conflicts that did not paralyze an entire critical industry or large city seem less worthy of inquiry and connective, era-defining study.…”

“…4 The period that Kerlin studied as it unfolded, according to historian David F. Krugler, contains eight of the ten large-scale race riots of the era that also featured the highest levels of organized black resistance. 5 Because the largest concentration of these key clashes, four of the ten, occurred in July, this phenomenon (including also an impossible to comprehensively catalog number of smaller-scale incidents of black repression and resistance) has long been referred to as Red Summer, a common acknowledgment not just of its bloodiness, but of the importance of it coinciding with the Red Scare even if the connections are sometimes unclear. 6 In the first, and perhaps still the best, scholarly study focused on just one of the major riots, historian William M. Tuttle, Jr. noted in his 1970 book on the Chicago violence that "It is not coincidental that the summer of 1919 also marked the beginning of the xenophobic and hysterically antiradical 'Red Scare.'…”