Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the
Awakening of Black America
by Cameron McWhirter, St. Martin's, 2011
Reviewed by John Ramsbottom
Who under the age of 30 can say what the title NAACP stands
for? Not only is the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (founded 1909) too easily overlooked today, its
early history seems to coincide with a period of defeat for black
Americans. The main effect of Cameron McWhirter's deeply felt
narrative is to remind us that, given the entrenchment of Jim Crow
in the South and pervasive discrimination in the North, the
precedent set by the NAACP at the end of World War I was essential
to ensuring a different outcome in the wake of World War
II.
During the summer of 1919, violence on a scale not seen since
the Civil War was visited on communities across the US, from Texas
to Washington, D. C. Abetted by the ongoing campaign against
"Red" subversives, white mobs targeted black neighborhoods;
the difference now was that ordinary citizens, many of them
veterans, armed themselves and fought back. Leaders of the
NAACP, both white and black, tirelessly crisscrossed the country,
building the total membership to nearly 100,000 while defending
blacks falsely accused of "massacring whites."
Although circumstances varied, one factor was constant-the
reluctance of officials, including President Wilson, to
intervene. Citing the toll of lynchings and destruction over
a few months, McWhirter argues convincingly and in harrowing detail
that, without a national organization dedicated to denouncing
racial injustice, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s-60s could
well have failed in the face of local hatreds and political
indifference.
- John Ramsbottom is a Visiting Professor of Global and
Historical Studies at Butler University.