The riots of the summer of 1919 occurred between the months of April and October. This is now called the Red Summer. There were many events that led to and caused the Red Summer. When African American soldiers returned to the United States after the war, they were “politically, socially, and artistically awakened as never before” and wanted their freedom. They had just finished fighting for the freedom of a country in which they themselves had no rights. Most of them ended up moving to the North. This caused a lot of fights for jobs. African Americans were already considered second class and inferior; the blacks didn't want to go any lower. Then the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) grew dramatically in numbers. Before 1914 the association had only about 9,000 members, of which 8,700 lived in the North. By the early 1920s they had 100,000 members nationwide, and the majority of members lived in the South. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Other events leading up to the riots that summer included the racial conflict of the time, labor shortages, and the Great Migration. Labor shortages occurred in industrial cities that profited from World War I in the North and Midwest and occurred due to men leaving for war. When they left, the United States stopped European immigration. The Great Migration was born from the lack of manpower. “At least 500,000 African Americans moved from the South to cities in the North and Midwest.” Other reasons they left the South were Jim Crow laws, segregation in schools, and a lack of job opportunities. Racial conflict occurred when white workers living in Northern and Midwestern cities did not want to have African American workers as competitors. Red Summer consisted of approximately twenty-five anti-black riots that occurred in many different states in the United States. although there were so many riots, federal troops did not help. In fact, they joined the whites against the African Americans. Some passing white African Americans would join the white crowd as spies to obtain information. The riots occurred between April and October 1919. The worst of the riots occurred in Chicago, Illinois; Washington DC; and Elaine, Arkansas. The week of 27 July to 3 August 1919 will always be remembered as one of the worst riots during the Red Summer. On July 27, a black man named Eugene Williams was stoned and drowned in Lake Michigan. He was swimming there with his friends and had accidentally crossed the line between blacks and whites. The white men who were on the beach threw stones at him and he drowned. This started even more intense clashes between gangs and mobs than there had been before. Between July 27 and August 3, fifteen whites and 23 blacks had died in Chicago alone. Chicago's mayor at the time, Richard J. Daley, was also a gang leader. The gang was called the Hamburg Athletic Club. They played sports but they were really a gang. Members of the Hamburg Athletic Club were the people who started the race riots that week. Of course, since Mayor Daley was the leader of the club, he would not have stopped the riot. It is said that in just one week more than a thousand families were left homeless, more than five hundred people were injured and more than fifty were killed. There were later housing shortages and even more labor strife and post-war unemployment. In Washington D.C., on July 19, 1919, a black man was accused of sexually assaulting a woman who was the wife of aNavy man. When word spread among the white men who were sailors, marines and soldiers who were hanging out in downtown Washington DC, they were not happy. Many white men began to beat up African Americans at random. They randomly pulled them out of trams and sidewalks to beat them. Late at night, a mob of white men descended on the southwest Washington area. They took their lead pipes, clubs and pieces of wood to a predominantly black neighborhood to beat them. Eventually they began not only going to their neighborhoods, but also beating them in the Central Market and in front of the White House. The police in the area did nothing. The next night, African Americans began to fight back. At the end of the fighting there were fifty-five people who died or were seriously injured. Even in Elaine, Arkansas, there was a lot of violence in another part of the country. The African-American sharecroppers in Elaine were quite unhappy with the low wages they received for doing their work. They met in a small church on September 30, 1919 with a lawyer from Little Rock. They were trying to organize a union so they could express their concerns and concerns to the growers. That night some white men discovered him and at eleven o'clock they shot up the church. There were about three or four hundred white men shooting. The sharecroppers knew they were at risk when they met and were ready to return fire. It lasted until the next day. Over two hundred people died. They then shared their proposal with the planters. The planters opposed their organization. These three examples are only a small part of everything that happened in the summer of 1919. There were more than twenty-five major riots and even smaller, not so recognizable ones. Many homes of black families were set on fire. Throughout the summer, of all those who died, more than 60 percent were black. After all the major riots were over, whites wanted to enact official segregation laws. Woodrow Wilson blamed white people for all of this, but didn't want to do anything about it. In Chicago, though, people organized the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. The organization consisted of six white men and six black men. Those twelve men talked about many different issues and drafted a complaint. Many different issues, including African Americans “denied the vote in the South, trapped in a sharecropping system that precluded economic mobility, excluded from countless jobs, denigrated as biologically and culturally inferior, subject to harassment and violence and relegated to segregated facilities that were demonstrably inferior to their white counterparts” – were all part of the bill. The NAACP still functions today. They work on many cases with African Americans because still not everyone is the same. During that summer, the police either participated in the killing of black people, or they saw what was happening and did nothing to try to stop it. There can be a lot in the news today about police violence because they target African Americans instead of looking at everyone equally. It's not just the police who do this. Take Stephon Clark for example. He was in his grandmother's backyard when he was shot by police. Sacramento police received a 911 call saying he was smashing the car's windows. When they saw him from the helicopter, he was in his grandmother's backyard. The police then followed him and shot him twenty times. He was shot eight times in the back. Saheed Vassell was also killed by the police. Vassell was mentally ill and lived in Crown Heights in Brooklyn. Five police officers, only two of whom were in uniform, followed him and shot him ten times.