“Red Summer” — Black Empowerment and White Rage in the Early Twentieth Century
Chapter Eleven of A Family History of Whiteness: American Roots of Racial Injustice
Blatantly hateful and dehumanizing words should shock and appall us. We should question the integrity and intentions of anyone who voices such words. And yet, as the rhetoric of the 2024 presidential campaign heats up, supporters of the presumptive GOP nominee do not flinch — indeed they respond with raucous ovations — as their favored candidate sinks deeper and deeper into demagogic hate-mongering.
How can so many Americans support such a petulant and childish man? How can they trust him after so many lies? How is it possible to respect someone so full of hate?
Actually, I can understand how it is possible, at least a bit of it. I know how it feels to love someone even as they say hateful things, even as they express thoughts that are hurtful and wrong.
My maternal grandparents were a big part of my life growing up. During my childhood, my family often made the hour-long drive south down Highway 51 to visit my mother’s parents in Pana, Illinois.
When I was a toddler, relatives noted how much Grandpa Culberson and I were alike. I was a burly toddler and Grandpa was a bear of a man with the shoulders of a linebacker and heavily-muscled forearms from a lifetime in heavy construction. Everyone expected me to grow up to be just like my Grandpa. That’s me in the photo below at age four in 1959, with my older brother and grandparents. Grandpa Culberson is the one looking down at me.
For the most part, I liked being compared to my Grandpa. I had been named after him. I wanted to grow up to be big and strong like he was. But sometimes he said things that confused and frightened me, bitter and hateful words aimed at Black people.
During those 1960s Sunday visits to Pana, after a hearty lunch, while my mother, aunts, and Grandma swapped stories and talked over each other, Grandpa would sit quietly in his easy chair idly opening and closing a tiny pocket knife. If I happened to get within arms reach, he might pull me in for a bare-knuckled rub on my buzz-cut scalp.
Most of the time Grandpa was as inert and outwardly calm as a meditating monk and sometimes he dozed. But if the subject of labor unions or requirements to hire Black workers on state jobs came up, his face would redden with anger. I would see the muscles of his jaw rippling with tension as he grumbled about “goddam, good-for-nuthin’ N[…..]s!”
An uncle might nod in agreement and one of the aunts might chuckle uncomfortably and say “Oh, Dad! That’s racist!” As I recall, my mom and dad would not respond at all. For my part, I wouldn’t show any outward signs of distress, but inside I would feel myself shrink into a protective ball, stung by the harsh words hanging in the air.
I loved my grandfather. His anger and anti-Black hostility perplexed and saddened me.
As I grew older, I wondered where the racial hatred my grandfather expressed had come from. Like me, my Grandpa Culberson grew up in rural Illinois. We lived in the tolerant North, not the bigoted South, or so I assumed as a child. I had little awareness of the racial politics of early twentieth-century Illinois, no real window on the social and historical contexts which might have shaped my grandfather’s racist thinking.
I knew Pana was a “sundown town” — a place where Black people were not welcome. I had heard stories about a turn of the century coal miner strike and fighting with Black strikebreakers in Pana.
The story of the coal miner strike pointed in the direction of where my grandfather’s racist ideas might have come from, but I felt there had to be something else, something in his formative years responsible for his lifelong racial animus and bigotry.
Grandpa Culberson was born in the spring of 1908. As it happens, his early life coincided with a low point in American race relations — a time of increasing anti-Black violence in Illinois and elsewhere and a turning point in organized Black resistance to White suppression, a period historian Rayford Logan dubbed “The Nadir.”
In mid-August 1908, during the first summer of my Grandpa’s life, the city of Springfield, Illinois erupted in a two-day spasm of anti-Black mayhem, bloodshed, and destruction.
The Springfield Race Riot of 1908 began when a White mob, about five thousand strong, began to systematically loot and burn Black-owned businesses and homes. The mob had formed to lynch two Black men held in the city jail and they were frustrated and angered when they discovered the men had been taken out of town.
White journalists of the time expressed bewilderment at such fierce anti-Black hostility in a Northern city, in Springfield no less, the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator.” Participants in the White mob said they were concerned about crime and were driving “bad Negroes” out of town, but the explanation made no sense, as the mob specifically targeted for destruction the homes and businesses of well-to-do Black people.
Motivated by the Springfield Race Riot, in January 1909, Mary White Ovington met in New York with William English Walling and Henry Moskowitz to discuss forming an organization to promote the “advancement of colored people.” These three White people convened a larger meeting in February that included prominent Black leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Wells-Barnett, Archibald Grimké, and Mary Church Terrell. It was the start of the NAACP.
In the spring of 1917, not long after Grandpa Culberson turned nine, Black neighborhoods in East St. Louis, Illinois were attacked by White mobs. More than a hundred Black residents were murdered in the streets and thousands were displaced after their homes were burned.
By 1917, the NAACP had grown into a sizable national organization, in large part due to the organizing efforts of James Weldon Johnson. On July 28, 1917, as White mobs continued attacks on Black people in East St. Louis, the NAACP organized in New York City a silent march down Fifth Avenue of roughly eight thousand Black people to protest lynchings and anti-Black violence.
In the summer 1919, a few months after Grandpa Culberson turned eleven, anti-Black violence erupted again, this time in Chicago and in more than thirty other locations across the U.S., from Connecticut to California and from Washington, DC to rural Arkansas. The anti-Black terrorism of 1919 came to be known as “Red Summer.”
The White supremacist anger and hatred fueling the violence of the “Red Summer” were fed by a number of converging social trends and events. Emboldened Black veterans returning to the U.S. after the Great War and eager to secure equal rights were seen by White people as a threat to jobs and as potential carriers of what were seen as dangerous and radical new political ills such as socialism and anarchism.
Many Black people were radicalized by the “Red Summer,” but not so much in the ways White supremacists imagined them to be. As detailed by Cameron McWhirter in Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black American, by 1919, Black leaders of the NAACP “found they needed more than paternalistic or maternalistic aid” from well-meaning Whites and were galvanized to take the fight for civil rights into their own hands.
McWhirter and other historians of the “Red Summer” tell us the White mobs attacking Black people in 1919 were not made up primarily of members of racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan — though the Klan did grow tremendously in the 1920s. The mobs were made up of ordinary White Americans, people not unlike my Grandpa Culberson’s childhood family, friends, and neighbors.
In 1919, D. W. Griffith’s 1914 movie, “Birth of a Nation,” remained popular and was still widely shown in theaters. The popularity of the movie with its heroic depiction of the Ku Klux Klan and extreme racist portrayal of Black people as rapists and buffoons speaks to the strength of White supremacist ideology within American popular culture of the time. Minstrel shows in which White performers in Blackface enacted demeaning stereotypes of Black people were regularly staged throughout the country in venues large and small.
This was the social and cultural environment in which my Grandpa Culberson matured and became a man. Although the sources of his racial prejudices are evident and understandable, it saddens me that he was never able in the course of his lifetime to acquire a new perspective, to see a Black person as his equal, as fully human and deserving of his respect.
My Grandpa Culberson was born more than one hundred fifteen years ago. Few, if any, of his generation remain alive today. But the legacies of the White supremacist extremism of the 1910s and 1920s are still with us.
More than a century after the “Red Summer,” on January 6, 2021, an angry and mostly White mob attacked the U.S. Capitol. Now, in 2024, the man who incited the mob is once again spewing hate-filled rhetoric and stirring anger and violent passion among his supporters.
As a nation we have faced down this mob before. Now, to preserve civil rights, human dignity, and the rule of law, we must confront and defeat it once more.
