Do You Know About Red Summers? (Patreon)

By Sam (@LiberationistMA)

From Wikipedia:

Red Summer is the period from late winter through early autumn of 1919 during which white supremacist terrorism and racial riots took place in more than three dozen cities across the United States, as well as in one rural county in Arkansas.

The link between racial violence against Black people and anti-communism is explicit yet erased. It culminated into the worst American massacres of Black people and continues to fuel anti-Blackness.

During the First Red Scare of 1919–20, following the 1917 Russian Revolution, anti-Bolshevik sentiment in the United States quickly followed on the anti-German sentiment arising in the war years. Many politicians and government officials, together with much of the press and the public, feared an imminent attempt to overthrow the U.S. government to create a new regime modeled on that of the Soviets. Authorities viewed with alarm African-Americans' advocacy of racial equality, labor rights, and the rights of victims of mobs to defend themselves. In a private conversation in March 1919, President Woodrow Wilson said that "the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America."

As the US "freed" Europe from tyranny in World War I, Black American soldiers came back to ethnic cleansing. How can something so horrific not be common knowledge?

You know why.

From "Hundreds of Black Americans Were Killed During ‘Red Summer.’ a Century Later, Still Ignored":

America in the summer of 1919 ran red with blood from racial violence, and yet today, 100 years later, not many people know it even happened.

It flowed in small towns like Elaine, Arkansas, in medium-size places such as Annapolis, Maryland, and Syracuse, New York, and in big cities like Washington and Chicago. Hundreds of African American men, women and children were burned alive, shot, lynched or beaten to death by white mobs. Thousands saw their homes and businesses burned to the ground and were driven out, many never to return.

It was branded "Red Summer" because of the bloodshed and amounted to some of the worst white-on-black violence in U.S. history.

Red Summers were the marriage of Red Scare and white supremacy where white society feared Black Americans might have a revolution against their "masters" just as Russia did.

"The people who were the icons of the civil rights movement were raised by the people who survived Red Summer," said Saje Mathieu, a history professor at the University of Minnesota.

The hate of socialism in the US was ALWAYS tied to white supremacy. Unlike Russia, the upper and lower caste in America was racialized. It was clear who were the oppressors and who were the oppressed.

Researchers believe that in a span of 10 months, more than 250 African Americans were killed in at least 25 riots across the U.S. by white mobs that never faced punishment. Historian John Hope Franklin called it "the greatest period of interracial strife the nation has ever witnessed."

The bloodshed was the product of a collision of social forces: Black men were returning from World War I expecting the same rights they had fought and bled for in Europe, and African Americans were moving north to escape the brutal Jim Crow laws of the South. Whites saw blacks as competition for jobs, homes and political power.

"Ethnic cleansing was the goal of the white rioters," said William Tuttle, a retired professor of American studies at the University of Kansas and author of "Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919." ''They wanted to kill as many black people as possible and to terrorize the rest until they were willing to leave and live someplace else."

The violence didn't start or end in 1919. Some count the era of Red Summer as beginning with the deaths of more than two dozen African Americans in East Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1917 and extending through the Rosewood Massacre of 1923, when a black town in Florida was destroyed. All told, at least 1,122 Americans were killed in racial violence over those six years, by Tuttle's count.

In 1919 alone, violence erupted in such places as New York; Memphis, Tennessee; Philadelphia; Charleston, South Carolina; Baltimore; New Orleans; Wilmington, Delaware; Omaha, Nebraska; New London, Connecticut; Bisbee, Arizona; Longview, Texas; Knoxville, Tennessee; Norfolk, Virginia; and Putnam County, Georgia.

In the nation's capital, white mobs — many made up of members of the military — rampaged over the weekend of July 19-22, beating any black they could find after false rumors of a white woman being assaulted by black men spread.

"In front of the Riggs Bank the rioters beat a Negro with clubs and stones wrapped in handkerchiefs; the bleeding figure lay in the street for over twenty minutes before being taken to the hospital," Lloyd M. Abernethy wrote in the Maryland Historical Magazine in 1963. "Sensing the failure of the police, the mob became even more contemptuous of authority — two Negroes were attacked and beaten directly in front of the White House."

Carter G. Woodson, the historian who founded Black History Month in 1926, saw the violence up close.

"They had caught a Negro and deliberately held him as one would a beef for slaughter, and when they had conveniently adjusted him for lynching, they shot him," Woodson wrote. "I heard him groaning in his struggle as I hurried away as fast as I could without running, expecting every moment to be lynched myself."

In Elaine, Arkansas, poor black sharecroppers who had dared to join a union were attacked, and at least 200 African Americans were killed.

Red Summers are Jim Crow America. Demonizing socialism and revolution (telling Black America to get that idea out of their heads) not only through scare tactics and violence but also through the media wasn't the only thing that came out of this period. You also had the suburbs.

Red Summer also marked a new era of black resistance to white injustice, with African Americans standing up in unprecedented numbers and killing some of their tormentors. Returning black soldiers from World War I led the charge, using skills they refined in Europe.

"The Germans weren't the enemy — the enemy was right here at home," said Harry Haywood in his autobiography, "A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle: The Life of Harry Haywood."

Divide the working-class and immigrant whites from Black Americans, and sell the idea of upward mobility and the American Dream, even to Black Americans. This plan will continue to succeed UNLESS we address our American past and analyze anti-communism.