applause. >> thank you for coming. thanks very much for coming out here today. i want to start with a poem. let me set the stage for it. there was a young black man named claude mckay. he was a railroad porter in 1919. like a lot of young blackmen, he worked on the railroad, and he was terrified because everytime he and his friends traveled from town to town they didn't know if they were going to be arriving in a race riot. so, they started carrying guns and then when they would go to a

location, they'd run to their hotels with the revolvers, and he was so traumatized by this, one day he snuck off of work and went into a railroad bathroom, and scratched out this sonett which he called, if he must day. the last line is the far outnumbered, let us show -- men will face the murderous cowardly pack, pressed to the walls, dying but fighting back. that poem doesn't mention race at all. and it was published in this little socialist magazine in july of 1919. and as soon as it was published, every black publication in america republished it and every black person knew it, and they knew it for a reason. 1919 was the year that black america woke up politically and

fought back in -- with politics and the courts and also in the streets, and to me it's an amazing part of american history that has been forgotten or -- and this book is an effort to try to recover it because i think it played a crucial role in the creation of the civil rights movement that came later. it really is the story on one level of a fight for the constitution of the united states of america. not everyone who was taking to the streets with a rifle was fighting for the constitution, but they were fighting for the principles, the basic tenants of the constitution in terms of, i have the right to a fair trial. i have the right to live by h -- buy a home where i can afford to live. i have a right to be paid as much as this person working next to me. and there were organizations like the naacp that were fighting exactly for the fulfillment of the constitution, and that battle began 1919.

i could easily talk for five hours. i probably have to my wife about this subject. i have gone through a 12-step program to not do that. i'm just going to really going to try to reign it in tonight. i'm going to talk briefly about the key points of the summer and then talk about one riot. i could -- i chose to talk about washington, dc in july of 1919. and then i'm going to take any questions you want. thank you again for coming. we all know about race riots, and if i met a black or white person in the street and said, tell me bat race riot, they're going to start talking about the '60s or 1992 in los angeles, and i'd ask them, well, what is a race riot, and they would say, oh, it's black kid breaking into korean shoe store in los angeles, or a black teenagers fighting with national guardsmen in detroit.

the truth is, in the breadth of american history. overwhelmingly race riot meant white mobs attacking black individuals or black communities and that's certainly the case. the apex of that was in 1919. and james well don johnson, who i'm going to rave about later because i think he is an amazing person, who isn't understood enough, called it the red summer because it was so bloody, and it traumatized him and helped formulate his politics. dubois, other political leaders, shaped their politics. from april to november of 1919, this racial unrest rolled across the united states, and of course we're living in the south, as tony pointed out, i grew up in chicago. we -- i grew up with a lot of -- the south is where racial

violence happened, where sheriffs attacked black people and certainly that happened. no question of it. but i grew up and i studied history. i didn't know about the chicago riot of 1919, which devastated the city for a week. didn't know about riots in washington, dc or omaha, nebraska, or connecticut, or san francisco. or arizona, and these race riots swept across the cup trip. thankfully i don't have a power point because i would mess it up, but i would have loved to have brought a map of the united states and pointed to different places where there was racial violence in 1919. it was in the north and the west, everywhere. and i want to talk about there - there was a lot of violence in the south, and there were a lot of reasons. broadly what was happening in 1919, we had won the war in world war i. democracy had triumphed.

and so it should have been this great moment for the united states. president wilson, woodrow wilson, was in paris. he was working on the versailles treaty. he was giving speeches how democracy triumphed and we were in a new age of peace. at home it was chaos. there was chaos all over the world. the soviet union had risen. jewish people were being killed in ukraine, armenians were being killed in turkey, british colonial forces were shooting indian people, absolutely a time of chaos. europe was in flames. in the united states, there was runaway inflation, huge labor strikes. lots of talk by anarchist about overthrowing capitalism and

anxiety everywhere. a political cartoon at the time ran which shows the globe in bed, just biting its fingernails, all these terrible things circling. everybody was anxious, and race -- the racial conditions that were already existing in the united states flared up as a result, and there were three things that were occurring in the united states at the time. they were all on the surface good for black people but they led to great racial conflict. number one, black soldiers had fought in world war i and fought extremely bravely. many of them had worked in support units but many had fought on the front lines and won medals and had been -- all black soldiers in france had been treated extremely well by the french people. i was just up in baltimore giving a talk, and i met a baltimore sun reporter, who told me he interviewed one of the

last living african-american world war i veterans, and the man described one of his greatest memories was describing being served escargot by french farmers and great elaborate meals they would present to the soldiers, and this was fantastic, and the black soldiers were being told all the time, you're fighting for democracy. we're here to win the war for democracy. when they got back, it was a much different message. there's a letter i quote in the book, a document from the u.s. railroad administration, where a black soldiers who have just come back from europe are traveling in a car, in a railroad car, and as soon as it crosses the mason dixon line, half the white men stand up and say, thieves guys have to go back into the segregated car. and a fight ensuze because some of the white men say, these men just fought our our countries.

these kinds of incidents were happening all over and would quickly become large incidents later. the second major thing that was happening seems counterintuitive but share crop errs, the downtrodden clast in american society did will 1919, because cotton -- the would take their cotton be weighted, and even if they were being ripped off, they were making a lot of money. so they were able to buy cars, they were buying clothes and land, and this caused friction in the south. there were efforts in some parts of the south to organize into cooperatives. the black sharecroppers were organizing into cooperatives. that caused tremendous tensions.

thirdly, there were the great migration was out of control. it was -- the great migration had begun with -- before world war i, but once world war i began, immigration from europe started. so northern industry had to turn to the south. and black workers willingly came up north because they were paid relatively better and they escaped jim control they faced segregation in the north but not anywhere on the level of what they were facing down here. and one of the benefits for northern industry was they were nonunion, and the unions were incredibly racist at the time and were not allowing black people to join often and that caused tension, and certainly industry used that to break strikes whenever they were trying to break a strike, they would bring in lots of black workers, knowing there would be racial tensions. also caused lots of problems in the north because there were

incredibly restricted where black people could live in chicago, the south side there was a strip of the south side called the black belt where black people could live, and if they tried move outside of that area, bombs -- their homes would be bombed and any attempts to break out of that area caused huge problems. so, there were major riots that erupted that year. riots by other workers in chicago, for example. other workers in the stockyards, the factories. irish people. germans, lithuanians joined in the rioting against black people who moved in. in charleston, in washington, in connecticut, it was soldiers and sailors rioting. and in the south, in places like knoxville, tennessee, and other places, it was mostly white mobs that could include everybody from a judge, a sitting judge, down to the local farmer.

in austin, texas, the white -- then-white leader of the naacp visited in the summer, and was beaten by a white mob that included a sitting judge and the local constable. and then the governor the next day absolutely defended it and said these troublemakers shouldn't be showing up in this up to. so, just briefly i want to talk about -- there were two kinds of racism permeate american society. one is the one we all know, which is the long-standing view from the time that people were brought over as slaves, of black people are lazy and simultaneously threatening, this confused view that is still around today, this sort of standard bigotry. but there was also this new kind of racism that evolveed which was based loose lie on darwin,

this idea that the world was divided into ethnic groups and races were competing, and that white people dominated the world, white civilization dominated the world, and these colored races were threatening us, and these books were not obscure pamphlets. they were incredibly popular books. one book was called the risings tide of color against white world supremacy. a very title title. by a man named stoddard. harvard university, magna cum laude de. another man named madison grant, the head of the zoological society, and argued a pig -- pygmy should be on display. but these views were wildly held

and very popular, and i'm going to read one section from stood dar's book. democratic ideals is one thing but it's quite another for the white man to share his blood with or entrust his ideals to brown, red, yellow men, and the first victim will be the white man himself, and this panic among white people was prevalent. so, who met all this? to me it was the naacp really rows to the challenge this year and they did amazing work. they're been lots written about marcus garvey, and later in the 20s, black people who joined communist movements, but to me this is a little bit of a distortion of history because i think certainly at the time, a very young j. edgar hover was

working for the attorney general and he globbed right on to any black political activity, had to equate with -- there had to be some radical white screen svngal i underneath manipulating it all and he didn't really let go of that idea for decades, actually until he died. that idea was born in 1919. and he and others propagated it. the media certainly played a role in that, too. there would be a riot and a courthouse would be destroyed and a black man would be lynched, for example, in ohm harks nebraska and the next day the headlines would talk about how the iww was the -- the wobblies were infiltrating among blacks and stirring up trouble. the equation -- there was a disconnect in terms of reality, in terms of what was actually happening. the naacp was not a radical

organization by any modern standards. but they really became very, very active that year, and if there was a hero or heroes of that book it's the members and leadership of the naacp. prior to 1919, the naacp had for the most part been a sort of a well-meaning group of white do-gooders with one black person on their board. they really didn't do much. they sunny day manhattan. they would write pamphlets about how lynching was bad. 1916. dubois con vinces johnson to join the organization. he is an incredible person, i will go off on a slight tangent. he cowrote the anthem for african-americans, and he wrote poetry, novels, he spoke fluent

spanish, diplomat, a trained lawyer, and these were all things he kind of did on the side while he was also an incredible journalist, and dubois convinces him to join as field secretary of the naacp. he joins and is a dynamo, and when 1919 hits he's all over the country. he travels from california to new york to boston to -- all over the south, recruiting tens of thousands of members. he writes amazing essays which everyone should read, and his argue. is basically the constitution has certain protections for every american. and we -- black people get those as well, and one of the key thinks he did, which is really i think vital and completely unexplored, is he started walking up and down the halls of congress, which was hat time all white. not one black person in office. and he started building a coalition, meeting with republicans, a handful of republicans who would listen to him and hear his message about

trying to create federal pressure on southern states to stop lynching and on all states to stop this mob violence that was exploding all over the country. there's one other guy in the group that i want to mention in the naacp, very young man from atlanta. walter white. and he lived up to his name because he could pass for white. he had blue eyes. he look -- you see pictures of him, he looks white. and that was -- he was an incredible salesman, and james johnson met him and said i got to get this guy into an naacp. he said you're not going to make as much money but it would be exceeding, and it was, they used him to go into areas where there had just been riots or just been lynchings, and he would gather information, and he was incredibly good at it. sometimes a little cocky, and

sometimes he would regularly risk his life to do so. one story i'll tell you, in 1919, he is in arkansas, and he -- there's a terrible -- what can only be described as a slaughter of black sharecroppers there. he goes to the town to investigate, and he is walking around the town talking to people, and a black man passes him in the street and says, hey, come into the alley with me. i got to talk to you. the guy goes, they know who you are. you got to get out of here. so, white high tails it to the railroad, jumps on the train, catches the train and is leaving town, and the porter, the white porter comes through to collect tickets and goes, why are you leaving town? at that time they used the term yellow negro a black who is white skinned. he said, why are you leaving town? they were just going to lynch a yellow negro, it's going to be a great show. and white said, i had to get out

of up to. that's howe close he took it. and that h they were all of them were risking their lives. the white leader of the naacp got really got the hell beaten out of him in austin, texas, was never mentally or physically the same afterwardswards and he was beaten simply because the showed up in town. he was trying to stop the state from shutting down naacp branches in the town. so, again, i could talk about lots and lots of riots. these men did amazing work. they doubled membership in the naacp. the crisis, which was the magazine of the naacp, peeked at 100,000 circulation. they were doing amazing recruiting, and amazing lobbying, and it really changed -- if you read the crisis from that period you can see they would push -- publish a page of their political agenda

every month and it's exactly what martin luther king was doing. same thing. i'm going read two quick quotes from james wheldon johnson. he gave a speech in november of 1919 as the riots were dissipating in boston, and to me these two quotes in one speech, at one point sounds lie mall coming x and another opinion he sounds like martin luther king, and on self-defense she said i know we can't settle this race trouble by taking a shotgun and shooting people but it will good a long way towards settling this thing if we shoot back when we are shot at. that's malcolm x. later in the same speech he says, we've got wake up the conscience of the american people. to hold a mirror before the people and let the nation see itself. the sinning nation for the american spirit is not dead. we need an organization of the white people and the black people to save america from mob

violence. patience is a virtue but not always. i want to see the negro patient but i want to see him fight for what he believes is his right. no one is more confident than the american negro for he knows he is right and has god al-mighting on his right and can't lose. that's martin luther king, in my opinion. so, i'm going to talk about one riot that happened. just to show you the breadth of what was taking place. so, washington, dc, the largest black population of any major city at that time. and it was very bustling city because the war just appeared. lots of boy,s and soldiers, lots of soldiers being decommissioned. very crowded, very hot. in washington. i was just up there, sweating like a dog. it's a very hot city in the summer. and for weeks, leading up to july of 1919, the newspapers in that town, the white newspapers

harked been publishing article about crimes occurring. they were trying to outcompete each other in terms of crime coverage, and they would report on alleged assaults by black men against white women. but the black men -- no one was ever taken into custody. so these were alwayses. and they would say this will -- they would have headlines that would say black brute or something like that, black brute attacks white woman, and the naacp was so concerned this, they went and met with the newspaper editors and said you're really throwing glen on the fire here. if you know the facts, principle the facts, but why are you doing this? and it had no effect. johnson met with them to no effect. so they kept writing these article. on july 18, 1919, people were coming home from work, and a white woman was walking down the street and no one knows exactly what happens, but she had an umbrella, and it was jostled by

two black men. nobody knows what happened but there was an exchange, an altercation, the passed words and one of the black men, a cop was brought over and took the man into custody. he was later released because nothing happened. that was it. but the rumor spread among the white soldiers and sailors was a black buy -- guy just raped a white officers wife, and a riot began. they began going into restaurants and pulling waiters out and beating them and may hem ensued. now, luckily it was a federal district. so the president of the united states, who was in the white house, all he had to do is pick up the phone and make one call and thousands of disciplined troops woman could in and stop the riot. right? no. because he didn't do that.

woodrow wilson has -- we could talk -- i could give a whole lecture about my views on woodrow wilson. he was not -- i had sort of this paternalistic view of him, this professorial, befuddled guy. my view of him. he was a big -- bigot. he was aloof, utterly unconcerned with anything in his life other than his own leg legacy, which he thought was the league of nations. so he ignored it. people are being beaten outside of the white house. this isn't in a certain portion of washington, dc. this is all over washington. and he does nothing. and his district commissioner keeps pleading with him, my police can't happen this. the police are completely and immediately overwhelmed. and he absolutely does nothing.

finally, days after four or five days of mayhem, he finally calls in the troops, and the troops there are and within an hour it's shut down. and this is an important point because throughout this summer, and i think this speaks to the '60s as well, and the reasons for rioting are manifold, but stopping a riot is easy. get disciplined troops and tell people to go home, and if you do that. people go home because a mob doesn't want to attack disciplined troops. and whenever that did occur in 1919, for example in charleston, south carolina, the riots were over in half an hour. they would be over immediately. whenever it didn't happen, like chicago, or washington, or knoxville, or omaha, things ranch out of control very, very

quickly. but in the black neighborhoods of washington, during all this may hem, black veterans, who had just come back from world war i, went up on the rooftops and marked -- created barricades and cordoned off their neighborhoods near howard yard ask they covered their area. they fought back. and that was after the riot finally did end, black people in america were ecstatic. they were writing letters to places saying, about time. this is great. this is fantastic. we fought back. we showed them. and hl menkin, who is certainly bigoted in his own way. wrote a letter to a white friend of his that black people were, quote, eager for the band to play, and that scared him. and gene tomorrowor, wrote an

article, and he rode, after the washington riot, the outstanding feature remains not that the negro will fight but that he will fight against the american white. and that had a real political resonance with a lot of people and woke up a lot of people, that you can't just have the old standard white mob attacking people anymore. it's not going to work there had to be a new understanding of black presence in american society and what it is going to mean for our nation. and one aside. so, there's a riot in washington. at it mayhem. the capitol of the democracy that just won the war -- right? so, this hits newspapers all over the world. and in germany, where they had just fought african-american soldiers and lost, there was a black newspaper wrote an article, an editorial, which translates as the black peril.

the title of the editorial. and again, it was a great title. and they write this. the disorders now reported are beginning. if the anything grows confronted the leader, perhaps they have one, we might yet experience all sorts of things, perhaps some day, a black president. that was terrifying. oh, my god! that would never happen. but it did. the red summer trailed off and came to an end, for a bunch of reasons. but one of the main reasons, i think, was not some great racial awakening by white political leaders, but the idea that if we keep -- it's really bad publicity. these riots were incredibly bad publicity, and so they started to reign them in, started to send troops out immediately when this stuff happened. but there was some political

awakening and people started to -- particularfully northern large cities, started to accommodate political black leaders and the idea of accommodating where bleak people can live, and they started to change. again, 1919 was that the end of the civil right movement. it was the beginning. it was much more akin to lexington and concord than yorktown. it was the beginning of something, and the landscape really was forever changed. ...

>> it was a public festival in mississippi. he was accused of assaulting a white woman. he'd be captured, shot, mortally wounded, kept alive by a doctor so they could lynch him the next day and get the word out in newspapers, ect., that they were going to have a lynching. the naacp pleaded with the federal government, pleaded with the governor, and everybody said, hey -- the federal government said this is a local matter. that would obviously echo years later, and the governor at the time in mississippi was complete racist, but he said, hey, what am i supposed to do? the guy committed a terrible crime. no, he didn't. he was not convicted of it.

there was no trial. there had never been a trial. he's executed with 10,000 people in broad daylight in 1919. a terrible crime committed years later in muddy, mississippi, and that's done in the middle of the night, all the guys have to swear to secrecy. it was a different landscape. jim you -- jim crow was on the fence is any argument in 1919. there's two quotes i'll end with, and then i'd love to have questions. herbert was a little jewish guy who joined the naacp in new york and he risked his life going into places in mississippi after a riot, and interview people and write articles about it, and he wrote a book about the violence he'd seen in 1919 during the red

summer, and he wrote this, "race relations constitute democracy's most essential problem, a problem compounded of all other adjustments which free men are making informing and maintaining social relations. as shameful as the year 1919 was with bloodshed, lynching, and riots, it brought to the nation that a problem long unsolved demanded serious attention." the last quote is from -- there's a british journalist traveling the country at the time named steven grahm writing a travel log history of the united states, and he at one point goes to shadydale, georgia. anybody been there? yeah. i've been there. it is not paris. [laughter] don't confuse it. yeah, with a major european

capitol, but he meets an old white woman there, and he's talking to her about all this chaos, and the woman's shaking her head, and she's -- i can't speak in a southern accent so i'll read what he wrote. the woman says with great disappointment, "there's no managing the neggas now. they got so biggity since the war." that to me summed up the book. yeah, they did. they're not going to go back to where you wanted them to be because they fought in the war. they moved up north and have jobs that are paying much better money than they paid. sharecroppers are making more money. they're not going back to the jim crow restrictions you wanted them to be in. there's a war on, and the war is to eliminate jim crow, and that

quote to me summed up where things were headed, but any ways, thank you very much for coming. [applause] any questions -- [applause] >> we'll do questions for 20 minutes or so, and as i said earlier, waiting in the microphone -- wait until the microphone comes to you, and watch it hang there in front of you. in fact, let's start with some questions over there. cameron will recognize you. >> yep. sorry about that contraption over your head. [laughter] >> yeah, in your influence did you determine how much influence woodrow wilson's wife had on his attitude since he was from normings and help resegregate the nursing staff, hospitals, and government workers, and all

that in washington at that time? >> yeah. i was in washington giving a talk and a woman working in the house there tried to portray him as he had this wife who gave him racial attitudes that are not acceptable today. i think he was very comfortable being a racist on his own. if he was a bachelor, he would have been a total racist. he loved to tell darky jokes. he watched "birth of a nation" in the white house. he screened it. it was a popular movie at the time so maybe you can forgive him for that, but no, people were complaining and protesting that film. why he liked the film is because he's quoted in it. his history about the south -- he has passages praising what was then the first ku klux klan and they were doing the right thing, and that's quoted towards the end of the movie which unfortunately i had to watch,

and he was -- he was -- you know, he made promises to political leaders, black political leaders when he first ran and when he's in office, he's resegregating sections of the bureaucracies without a whim. throughout 1919, people were pleading with him, sending telegrams, people from the institute, ect., saying, you got to say something about this, speak out against this, and his answer was invariably, you know, this is a state issue. talk to your governor. see what your governor has to say. there's one quote in my -- he was delivering tons of speeches across the country at the time to get the treaty passed. he -- i found one speech in montana making a passing reference to around these riots terrible? that's it. and so i -- i don't know what his wife was like, but he was a racist on his own.

>> [inaudible] >> yeah, rome, she was from rome i think. yeah? >> i happen to come across your book a couple of weeks ago at one of the borders closings -- [laughter] >> i won't ask what the price was, but okay. continue. [laughter] >> only 20% off. >> okay. [laughter] >> i almost didn't buy it because i kind of wondered to myself, wow, what could be so different about that year as opposed to other years, but something in the title struck me. the subtitle, and the awakening of black america. it kind of bothered me a little bit, and i wanted to buy the book to read it to find out what the awakening was -- >> right. >> because of my understanding of black history, particularly as it has to do with fighting

for freedom and fighting for rights, black folks have never been asleep. >> yeah. >> and so it kind of -- it really kind of took my by surprise because, again, i just know in my history black folks from the first time they set foot on this continent have never been asleep, so i wonder to what that refers. >> no, no. we wrestled with that, the editors wrestled with that, and i think that there's no doubt that as soon as black people got here, they were number one trying to become free, whatever, you know, in relative standards immediately, and building free black populations in cities in this country, and then being attacked, and fighting back, so there were examples in cincinnati where they fought back. there were examples where they would fight back, but they were always overpowered because the numbers were too small. i don't mean by that title to imply at all sudden by 1919

black people are like, wait a minute, woah, this is not fair. [laughter] obviously black people knew it wasn't fair. in 1919 from my opinion and from my research, i believe that that was the year that they realized they had political power, and that they -- that fighting back could be more than simply shooting and then running. like 1906 in dlapt, black people defend their neighborhoods when the riot occurs. after that, but in 1919, i mean, almost 100,000 members of the naacp. the convention in the naacp convention in cleveland of that year is by far the largest they've ever had, and it's overwhelmingly black people coming up from the south. they recruited people from the south like they had never done before. that's what i mean by that. i didn't mean to imply people didn't know the situation wasn't

good. >> there have been other times in history, particularly during the civil war when black people realized -- >> black soldiers obviously. >> not just fighting in the war, but using the system to parlay that into legislature and other kinds of things. i mean, again, in my mind, and i'm obviously going to read the book and find out more about what you're talking about -- [laughter] but it just seemed odd to me. >> no, i mean, black people have been obviously working forever to not be in an oppressed state, but i think that that year, 1919 was a year that you -- again, the breath of the political activity was extraordinary. i mean, look at markus garby, that's the year his organization takes off. a black publication are sprouting up everywhere. you know, kansas city to the chicago defender. these publications are really

becoming popular everywhere. it was an extraordinary awakening. was the it the only time people were awake politically? no, but it was an extraordinary awakening that led directly to the civil rights movement. >> thank you, and i appreciate your scholarship. may i ask what do you see as some of the contemporary parallels today with 1919? you mentioned the war. you mentioned economics. your job situation. >> yeah. >> you didn't go into some of the social politics that we find especially in the section of the union. the attack on the image of black men and the president, so what are the parallels you see?

>> do you mean -- well, i think one thing that would jump out at me would be how the debates over immigration, not about black people at all. i think that that's a big issue in terms of how -- certainly the racial violence of chicago that year was against black people as immigrants, as migrants. they were newcomers, and that, to me, as i was doing research parallelled some of the things that have happened in this country regarding illegal immigrants now today, people from mexico and other countries. you know, there's a lot of tension over that that -- and it seems to be fueling 5 lot -- and a lot of it is based on economics. that would be the main thing that would jump out at me. >> excuse me. thank you. how effective do you think black soldiers at that time were as

far as the awakening was concerned? >> i think they played an incredibly active role. there's letters i have in the book from black soldiers who returned to chicago writing about how their experiences forever changed them, and i think that is true for many, many, many soldiers. you can't go to france, be treated equally by white people and fight in a war for democracy and then come back to the situation you were in before. wadubois goes over to write articles about the treatment of black soldiers because they were mistreated in france by mostly white southern officer, and he's writing articles about that, and he's in paris, and he was attending a pan-african congress, goes to dinner with white friends, and he writes an essay about the joy of this great experience. they ate, talk, had interesting conversations, and he writes

about how angry that made him because he knew he could never have that experience in the united states. there's always color barriers immediately imposed upon him, and i think certainly soldiers felt the same thing. you're treated one way, and you come back and you're treated another way. >> could you be so kind -- >> oh, i'm sorry, okay. >> well, 1919 is less than a year after the great enflew sai influ ensai pandemic. the proximity is obvious. >> i should have thrown that in there with the world biting its fingernails. the question is what about the flu pandemic which was trailing off at that time but had killed tens of millions -- mills and

millions of people across the planet, and, you know, in atlanta, west view cemetery, i don't know if you've been there, but they just threw the bodies by the hundreds, so the answer is that it just added to this general tenor of oh, my god, the world's collapsing. all social order is falling apart, and this definitely added to, you know, the anarchy felt mostly by white people who felt they didn't understand the world anymore. it was changing in a way that they couldn't grasp, and that's hence the popularity of the books like "the passing of the great race," and by that, he meant white people. [laughter] yeah? >> well, when you talk about, you know, the things like the

lynchings and all the many antedotes you can give, and i'm trying not to sound too naive, but i ask the question, you know, how could things like that have happened? how could things like that have happened and gone on for so long, and, of course, you know, growing up in the generation i have my context and the context of the country is different, but at the same time i'm sitting here thinking that basic morality shouldn't be subject to context. i mean, certain things are always going to be wrong, and certain things are always going to be right. i know i'm asking you an unanswerable question in ways, but if you could do your best. [laughter] >> no, no -- [laughter] it's on page -- no. [laughter] no, your question is open ended, but it actually was a major motivation for me writing the book. how does society break down to that level? as a younger man, i spent time in africa in the situations

where there was a lot of ethnic strife, and i wondered how could that -- i don't want to go on too long of a jag about it, but how does that happen, and i remember being in a part of kenya near the border in a remote village, walking in the market, and i had just come from the united states. i had never been to africa before, and my father who was taking me around, not my real father, but my stay father there was taking me around, and he saw a man drop a coin, and he goes, look at that black guy over there, you know, you drop a coin, and they are going to pick it up. he's going to pick it up. i looked over, i was like what black guy? everybody is black. this is a sea of black people -- in my mind. but shortly after, a few weeks, i could -- i quickly picked up all the prejudices. you know, there's a luo, you know how they are. i mean, i had them all in my

head. when i came back to the united states, i was like, oh, here, this is the same, the same prejudices that we have were transferred in africa. so, views of jewish people or italian people or black people, they had the same prejudices applied, and when you have society under great economic stress or turmoil, these tensions, people are tribal, and i think the great strength of organizations like the naacp of that year was to not go the route of markus who wanted to be tribal for black people. we're going to move to africa, okay, fine. that tribalism, they rejected it. here's the united states constitution. i get the same rights that you do, and their ability to do that and fight for that in that chaotic situation to me was very, very impressive, and

inspiring. i think that i was part of writing this book when i started to do the research, i thought they'll be an element of atonement, a white guy, grew up in america, white man, but the more i did the research for this book, the motion i felt myself with these americans who i wish i knew more about earlier in my life who were doing this amazing work. >> can you describe how you first became aware of this vast way of racial violence in the year 1919 and your thought process when you realized i've got to write a book about this? >> i was on a fellowship, and i was up at a university for a year, and i wanted to research racial violence so because i had every city i'd ever worked in --

detroit, chicago, atlanta, cincinnati, anywhere -- if you learn the history of those communities, you learn about a race riot. there's a major race riot there. as you start to research that, 1919 jumps out because it was just out of control. i mean, there's been some -- there had been a few books written about particular riots, so there's books now 40 years old about the chicago riot. there's a book about the arkansas incidence, but this other stuff no one had wrote about, and i felt that it needed to be told. he's good. [laughter] >> there's one man who wrote a little bit about it though, and his name was sandberg. >> oh, yeah. >> the riots in chicago. but a couple quick comments.

one is to look at the context of that period of time. we're getting ready to put legislation in the books. it's going to limit immigration. you have a president who literally hates not only blacks, but dislikes, as he says in one of his speeches, all hyphenated americans. he's talking about italian-americans. german-americans. at the same time, he, with hoover, hoover was brought out in the palmer raids in november, but palmer went before congress in june of 1919 and asked for powers to begin to throw out all these radicals. >> that's an important point regarding hoover an palmer. a. mitchell palmer was the attorney general at the time,

and one important point is he assigns hoover this special mission, and they draft a report released to congress in the fall of that year, and it has this huge long rapt about the anarchists and anna goldman and have to get rid of these people, deported, look at the crazy stuff they're writing. that's basically the majority of the document. there's this huge part at the end tacked on and talking about black publications and radical black publications and their radical writings. if you read the quotes that they listed, they're by every structure of the imagination today they are considered benign. things like you should shoot back if you're shot at. woah, that's radical. that was really bizarrely tacked on, disjointed from the flow of this legal argument that he's making, and it's just sort of

there, and that is sort of my view how the federal government was approaching blacks at the time. they didn't know what to make of it, must be radical, involved with the communists, and, in fact, i was quotes in the book from radicals arguing, you know, why are we not making better relationships with black people. they are not embracing our message. later they would try harder to do that, but up until 1919, they utterly failed to do so. >> i was going to say but on the reverse side is when you come into the south, and i interviewed -- all dead now -- but many sleeper car reporters, porters that worked with a. phillip randolph, but in interviewing them, they talked about this is way after 1919, in

the 20s how when black servicemen did come back into the south who had served because they didn't all go to chicago or whatever, quite often, they had a hard time because they had won, been around white woman. that was a fear, you know, and the other fact is they used guns in a way other than hunting. >> when world war i started, there actually will -- had been the idea of recruiting black soldiers that was disputed by white congressman from the south that said, well, wait a minute, woah, training black people to shoot guns 1234 woah, let's not do that. >> general persing didn't want to do it either. >> right. i have a letter in the book from a man, a black soldier, who comes back to arkansas, and he writes that he comes home and he is sneered out by white businessmen who didn't go fight, by the way, and he's so disgusted that he moved to

st. louis and said he felt safer in the trenches than in arkansas. that's a common mood. >> two more questions. >> okay, sorry, yep. >> i appreciate what you said about something different happening in 1919, that seems 20 indicate there was an awakening, and, you know, things started generating. how did you come to the conclusion it was black america waking up and finally realizing they were o prosessed and should be fighting back rather than white america realizing and may have been the beginning of their conscious that grew until the 1960s. >> you know, i'd like to -- i think the reaction that -- the reaction -- the most important part of the story in 1919 in my mind is black political reaction to the violence, so this violence starts to erupt, and they had had violence in the past, but in 1919, they're

literally organizing, shooting back, they're forming political organizations to pressure political leaders locally and nationally, and they are taking steps that weren't taken before, and they -- and i would argue that they take over an organization called the naacp because before that, it was all white people, you know? by the end of that year, james johnson is basically running it. wa debois is running other product, and there's the crazy dynamo risking his life across the country. it becomes a black organization, and it remains so. there were white people who were helping them, and there was a white awakening of sorts, but the real story was a black political awakening that we are

political force in this country, a social force in the country, and we're not going to be put back in the boxes that you've defined for us. yes, ma'am? >> i wanted to ask for her as an african-american student today and a youth of color. what would you like youth in her age to take away about your book? >> that's a great question. >> what was the question? >> she brought her daughter here today and wants to know what would i like a young african-american woman, teen, to take away from this book? i guess the question i would answer by saying political activity can work, and did work and that there are these amazing people in america's past. i mean, i guess i'd first say it doesn't really matter if your daughter's black. if your daughter's an american, she should learn about james

johnson. the guy's amazing. there's a statute to martin luther king that's about to be unvailed in washington, d.c., great. that's fantastic, but there should be a statue to johnson. these guys were amazing, and everyone should know about them. my daughter is learning about it whether she likes it or not. [laughter] she's going to learn about it more and so is my son, and, you know, these people transformed an organization and transformed i would argue later a country, and it's not -- we're talking about specific people, a man who grew up in jacksonville, florida and helped change the united states, so i guess that would be my answer. thank you. >> you know -- [applause]