time so i want to thank the american constitution society and the panelists for a great presentation. [applause] >> see you next year. we'll see whose predictions are right. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> welcome to c-span2's booktv. every weekend we bring you 48 hours of books on history, biographies, and public affairs by nonfiction authors. ..

>> taking your phone calls october 2nd. get the complete weekend schedule at booktv.org. >> well, up next on booktv, cameron mcwhirter recounts the violence against african-americans in 1919, a precursor to the civil rights movement ott 1950s and '30s. -- 1950 and '60s. african-american soldiers returned to the u.s. only to be met by resistance leading to deadly riots across the country. this is about an hour.

[applause] >> thank you for coming. thanks very much for coming out here today. i want to start with a poem, um, and 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 black men he worked on the railroad. and he was terrified because every time 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 when they would go to a location, they would run to their hotels with their involves just -- revolvers just to make it safely. he was so traumatized by this one day he went into a railroad bathroom and scratched out this

sonnet which he called, "if we must die." though far outnumbered, let us show us brave, and for their thousand blows, deal one death blow. like men we'll face the murderous pack, pressed to the wall dying but fighting back. now, that poem doesn't mention race at all, and it was publish inside 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. because 1919 was the year black america woke up politically and fought back with politics and in 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 a story on one level as 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 tenets of the constitution in terms of i have the right to a fair trial, i have the right to buy a home where i can afford to live, i have a right to be paid as much as the 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 in 1919. i could easily talk for five hours, i probably have to my wife about this subject. [laughter] i have gone through a 12-step program to not do that, so i'm really going to try to rein it in tonight. [laughter] i'm going to talk briefly about

some of the key points of that summer, and then i'm going to talk about one riot, and i could -- i chose to talk about washington, d.c. in july of 1919, and then i'm going to take any questions you want, and thank you again for coming. we all know about race riots, and if i met a black or a white person in the street and said tell me about a race riot, they're going to start talking about the '60s, or they might talk about 1992 in los angeles. and i'd ask them, what is a race riot? and they would say it's black kids breaking into a korean shoe store in los angeles, or black teenagers fighting with national guardsmen in detroit. the truth is in the breadth of american history, overwhelmingly race riot has meant white mobs attacking either black individuals or black communities. and that is certainly the case, the apex of that was in 1919.

and james wheldon johnson who i'm going to rave about later because i think he's 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, w.e. duboise, ore political -- other political leaders, it really helped shape their politics. so 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, i grew up with a lot of prejudice toward the south. the south is, that's where racial violence happens. that's where sheriffs attack black people. and certainly that did happen, there's no question of it. but i didn't, i grew up and i studied history. i didn't know about the chicago riot of 1919 which devastated the city for a week. i didn't know about riots in washington, d.c. or omaha,

nebraska, or connecticut or san francisco or business by, arizona. and these race riots swept across the country. thankfully, i don't have a powerpoint because i would mess it up, but i would love to have just brought a map of the united states and pointed to the places where there was racial violence in 1919. it was unprecedented, and it was in the north, in the west, everywhere. and i want to talk about, there was a lot of violence in the south, too, and i'll go into that, but there were a lot of reasons for this. and 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 trying to craft the league of nations. he was giving flower ri speeches about how democracy had

triumphed, and we were entering a new age of peace. back at home it was absolute chaos. there was chaos all over the world. the soviet union had risen, there was, there were, you know, jewish people were being killed in the ukraine, armenians were being killed in turkey, british colonial forces in india were shooting people. it was absolutely a time of chaos. europe was enflamed. in the united states, there was runaway inflation, huge labor strikes, lots of talk by anarchists and communists about overthrowing capitalism, and there was just anxiety everywhere. there was a political cartoon that ran at the time which shows the globe in bed just biting his fingernails while all of these terrible things are circling around his head. everybody was anxious. and the racial conditions that were already existing in the

united states flared up as a result. and there were three things occurring in the united states at the time. they were all, on the surface, good for black people, but they led to great racial con flint. -- conflict. sorry. number one, black soldiers had fought in world war i, and they had fought extremely bravely. many of them had worked in support units, but many had fought on the front lines and won medals and all of 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 reporter who told me he had interviewed one of the last-living world war i veterans, and the man described one of his greatest memories was describing being served escargot by french farmers and these great meals, 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 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, hey, what's this? these guys have to go back into the segregated car. and a fight ensues because some of the white men said, wait a minute, these guys just fought for our country. these kind of small incidents were happening all over, and they would quickly become larger. the second major thing that was happening seems counterintuitive, but sharecroppers, the quintessentially downtrodden class of american society, did

well in 1919. because commodity prices had gone through the roof. so cotton, which, you know, they would always take their cotton to be weighed, and they would be ripped off almost invariably. in 1919 even if they were getting ripped off, they still made a lot of money relatively. so they were able to buy cars, they were buying clothes, fancier clothes, they were buying land when he could, and this caused a lot of friction throughout the south. there were efforts in some parts of the south to organize into cooperatives, the black farm, black sharecroppers would organize into cooperatives. that caused tremendous tensions. and then thirdly, there were, the great my fraition was out of -- migration was out of control. the great migration had begun with, before world world war i,t once world war i began, immigration from europe stopped, so northern industry had to turn

to the south, and black workers willingly came up north because they were paid better, and they escaped jim jim crow. one of the benefits for northern industry was they were nonunion, and the unions were incredibly ray at the time and were not allowing black people to join often, and that caused a lot of tension. 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 it caused lots of problems in the north because they were incredibly restricted on where black people could live. so, for example, in chicago there was a strip of the south side called the black belt where black people could live. and if they tried to move outside of that area, 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. there were riots by other workers in chicago, for example, other workers in the stockyards of the factories, irish people, germans, lithuanians joined in the rioting against black people had moved in -- who had moved 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 a, the local farmer. in austin, texas, the then-white leader of the naacp visited in the summer and was beaten by a white mop 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 even be showing up in this town. so just briefly i want to talk about two kinds of, there were two kinds of racism that were sort of permeating american society at the time. one is the one we all know which is the longstanding view from the time that people were brought over as slaves, you know, black people are lazy and simultaneously threatening. the sort of confused view that is still around today, the sort of standard bigotry. but there was also this new kind of racism that had evolved which was based loosely on darwin, you know, this idea that the world was divided into ethnic groups and these races were competing and that white people dominated the world, white civil sietion dominated the world, and these color races were threatening us. and these books were not obscure

panel pletts -- panel pletts -- pamphlets, they were incredibly powerful. a subtle title by a man who, you know, harvard university magna cum laude, delivering speeches in, you know, lecture halls up and down the east coast. there's another man named madison grant who headed the new york zoological society and argued that a pygmy should be on exhibit, a human being. that was an interesting approach to the zoo. but he, you know, these views were widely held and very, very popular, and i'm going to read one section from stoddard's book. democratic ideals among the homogeneous population of nordic blood is one thing, but it is quite another for the white man to share his blood with or entrust his ideals to brown,

yellow, black or red men. this is suicide pure and simple, and the first victim of this amazing folly 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 rose to the challenge this year. and they really did amazing work. there's been lots written about marcus garvey who was rising at this time and later in the '20s there were 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 where very young j. r hoover was working for the attorney general, and he globbed right on to any political black activity had to equate, there had to be some radical white venn galley, maybe a jewish communist underneath manipulating it all.

and he didn't really let go of that idea -- [laughter] for decades, actually, until he died. but that idea was born in 1919, and he really, um, he and others propagate canned 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, and the next day the headlines would be talking about the iww, the wobblies, were infiltrating among blacks and stirring up trouble. i don't -- you know, the equation, there was a disconnect in terms of reality, in terms of what was actually happening. but the naacp was not a radical organization by any modern standards, but they really became very, very active that year. and if there is a hero or heros of that book, it is the members and the 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 of-gooders with one black person, w.e. duboise, on their board. they really didn't do much, they stayed in manhattan, they would write pamphlets about how lynching was bad. 1916, w.e. duboise convinces james wheldon johnson to join the organization. he is an incredible person on many levels. i'll go off on a slight tangent. he wrote, co-wrote lift your voice and sing which is the anthem for african-americans, and he wrote poetry, he wrote novels, he spoke fluent spanish, he was a diplomat, he was a trained lawyer. and these were all things he kind of did on the side while he was also an incredible journalist. and w.e. duboise convinces him to join as field secretary of the naacp. he joins and is a dynamo. and when 1919 hits, he is 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 argument is, basically, the constitution has certain protections for every american. and we, black people get those as well. and one of the key things he did which is really, i think, vital and completely unexplored is he started walking up and down the halls of congress which was at that time all white. there was 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. this one other guy in the group that i want to mention in the

naacp, a 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 looks -- you see pictures of him, he looks white. and he was an incredible salesman. and james wheldon johnson met him and said, i've got to get this guy into the naacp. he says you're not going to make as much money, but it'll be exciting. and it was because he was white, and he could pass for white. they used him to go into areas where there had just been riots or lynchings, and he would gather information. and he was incredibly good at it. sometimes a little cocky, and sometimes he -- i mean, he regularly risked his life to do so. one story i'll tell you, in 1919 he's in arkansas, and he, there's a terrible what can only be described as a slaughter of black sharecroppers this. 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 one day and says, hey, come into the alley with me, i've got to talk to you. and the guy says, they know who you are. you've got to get out of here. so white high tails it to the railroad, jumps on a train, and he's leaving town, and the porter, the white porter comes through to collect the tickets, and he goes, why are you leaving town? at that time they used the term yellow negro. and he says they were just going to lynch a yellow negro, it was going to be a great show. and white's like, oh, i had -- [laughter] but, i mean, that's how close he took it. and that sort of, 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 really physically or mentally the same afterward.

and he was beaten simply because he showed up. he showed up, 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, peaked 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 publish a page of all their political agenda every month, and it's exactly what martin luther king was arguing for. same thing. i'm going to read, let me 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 he sounds like malcolm x, and at another point he sounds like martin luther king. i know we can't settle this race trouble by taking a shotgun and shooting up people, but it will go a long way towards settling this thing if we shoot back when we're shot at. that's malcolm x. and later in that same speech he says, we've got to wake up the conscious of the american people. to hold a mirror before the nation -- the people and let the nation see itself, a 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. he knows he is right, and he has god almighty on his side, and he 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, d.c. had the largest black population of any major city at that time, and it was a very bustling city because the war had just ended. lots of bureaucrats, lots of soldiers, lots of soldiers being decommissioned. very crowded, it's very hot in washington. i was just up there sweating like a dog. [laughter] 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 had been publishing articles about crimes that had been occurring. they were all 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 allegations. and they would say things, they would literally have head lines that would say, you know, black brute. black brute attacks white woman. and the naacp was so concerned about this that they went and met with the newspaper editors and said, you know, you're really throwing gasoline on a fire here. what are you, you know, if you know the facts, print the facts. but why are you doing this? they had no effect. james wheldon johnson met with them, it had no effect. so they kept writing these articles. and then on july 18th of 1919, people were coming home from work, and a white woman was walking down the street. and no one knows exactly what happened, but she had an umbrella, and it was jostled by two black men. nobody knows what happened, but there was an exchange, an altercation, they passed words, and one of the black men, a cop was brought over and took him into custody and was later

released because nothing happened. but a rumor had spread among the white sailors and soldiers was black guys just raped a white naval officer's wife. and rioting immediately began. and they began pulling people off of trolley cars, going into restaurants and pulling waiters out, beating them and mayhem 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 was pick up the phone and make one call and thousands of disciplined troops would come in and stop the riot, right? no. was he didn't -- because he department do that. woodrow wilson has, we could talk, i could give a whole lecture about my views on woodrow wilson. he was not -- i have sort of this paternalistic view of him. he was sort of this prof soil guy can, that was my view of

him. he was a bigot, he was aloof, he was utterly unconcerned with anything at that point in his life except his own legacy which was, he thought, the league of nations. so he ignored it. he was, he had stomach trouble at the time, he's laying in bed, there's gunshots going on, people are being beaten outside of the white house. this is all over washington. and he does nothing. and his district commissioner keeps pleading with him, you know, my police can't handle this. the police are completely and immediately overwhelmed. and he absolutely does nothing. finally, days after -- after four or five day of mayhem he finally calls in the troops, and the troops are this, 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, the reasons for

rioting are manifold, and we can talk on and on about them. but stopping a riot is pretty easy. you get disciplined troops or impartial on the street corners, and they point guns at people who are rioting and say 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 ran out of control very, very quickly. um, but in the black neighborhoods of washington during all this mayhem, 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

university, and they covered their area. they fought back. and that was, um, after the riot finally did end, black people in america were ecstatic. they were writing letters to the crisis and other places saying, about time. this is great, this is fantastic. we fought back, we showed 'em. and h.l. mencken who was 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. you know? and gene toomer who was a very young man at the time wrote an article, and he wrote 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 it woke up a lot of people that we can't, 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 accommodation, a new understanding of black presence in american society and what it is going to mean for our nation. and, but one aside. so there's a riot in washington, it's mayhem. the capital of the democracy that just won the war, right? so this hits, 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 editorial which translates as the black peril. that was the title of the editorial. again, it was a great title. and they write this: the disorders now reported are but a beginning. if negroes can find a leader or -- perhaps they have one -- we might yet experience all sorts of things.

perhaps someday a black president. that was terrifying, you know? oh, my god. [laughter] that would never happen. but it did, so -- um, so 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 enlightening, you know, 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 rein them in. they started to send troops out immediately when this stuff started to happen. but there was, there were some, there was some political awakening, and people started to particularly in some northern large cities started to accommodate black political leaders and the idea of accommodating where black people can live. and that started to change. again, 1919 was not the end of the civil rights movement by any stretch of the imagination.

it was the beginning. as i write in the book, it was much more akin to lexington and concord than yorktown. it was the beginning of something. and the landscape really was forever changed. you saw lynchings at a high point, and from that point on they begin to diminish. from that point until today. and you saw riots, there was a few more -- there was a major race riot in tulsa, there was the incident in rosewood, in the 1943 there's a major incident in detroit that is sort of a white and black riot, and then you have some incidents, obviously, during the civil rights movement there was violence. i'm not -- that's obvious. but it was nothing compared to 1919. in 1919 there was a black man named john hartfield who was lynch inside public with a crowd estimated as large as 10,000 people in ellisville, mississippi. he was accused of assaulting a

white woman. he'd been captured, shot, mortally wounded, kept alive by a doctor just so they could lynch him the next day and then publicly get the word out in newspapers, etc., that they were going to have a lynching. the naacp pleaded with the federal government, they 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, the governor at the time in mississippi was a complete rayist, but he also said -- racist, but he also said, hey, what am i supposed to do? the guy committed a terrible crime. no, he didn't, there had never been a trial. so he's executed with 10,000 people in broad daylight in 1919, you know, a terrible crime was committed years later in money, 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 crow was on the defensive after 1919 is my argument, and i think, um, there's two, two quotes i'm going to end with, and then i'd love to have some questions. herbert -- [inaudible] was a little jewish guy who joined the naacp from new york, and he risked his life. he would go into places like vicksburg, mississippi, and interview people and write articles about riots, and he wrote a book about the violence he had 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 called upon to make, informing and maintaining social relations. shameful as was the year 1919 with bloodshed, lynching and

race riot in the united states, its function was still to bring before the attention of all the nation that a national problem long unsolved demanded serious attention. and then the last quote is from, there was a british journallest who was traveling the country at the time named stephen grant, and he was writing sort of a travel log, history of the united states, and he, at one point he goes to shady dale, georgia. anybody been to shady dale? yeah. i've been there. it's not paris. [laughter] and don't confuse it with, yeah, a major european capital. but he meets a white woman there, an old white woman there, and he's talking to her about all this chaos, and the woman's shaking her head. and she -- i can't speak in a southern accent, so i'm just going to read -- he wrote it

phonetically. he said the woman says with great disappointment: there's no managing the neejahs. they got so bigoty since the war. and 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've moved up north and have jobs that are paying much better money than they were ever paid, and they're not going to go back to the jim crow restrictions you wanted them to be in. it's going to be -- 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 anyways, thank you very much for coming. [applause] any questions? >> we're going to do questions for about 20 minutes or so, and

as i said earlier, please, wait until the microphone comes to you, and you can just watch it hang right there in front of you. in fact, why don't we start since the microphone's over there, why don't we start with some questions over there. cam will recognize you. >> yep. sorry about that contraption over your head. [laughter] >> in your research did you determine how much influence woodrow wilson's wife had on his attitudes since he came from princeton, new jersey, and helped recession regate the hospitals -- recession regate the hospitals, nursing staff and government workers and all that in washington at that time? >> right. um, i think there's been -- i actually was in washington giving a talk, and a woman who worked at the the wilson house there -- woodrow wilson house had to sort of portray him that he had this why have that gave him racial attitudes that aren't acceptable today. i think he was very comfortable

being a racist on his own. if he had been a bachelor, he would have been a total racist. he loved to tell darky jokes, he watched, as everyone has noted, he watched "birth of a nation" in the white house, and it was a very popular movie at the time so, oh, maybe you could forgive him for that. no. people were complaining about that, to testing -- protesting that film, and he's quoted in it his history about the south, he has, you know, passages in which he praises what was then the first ku klux klan and that they were doing the right thing, and that's quoted, you know, toward 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 got into office, he's recession regating, you know -- recession

regating -- people from the tuskegee institute, etc., you've got to say something about this, you've got to speak out against this. and his answer was invariably, you know, this is really a state issue. talk to your governor, see what your governor has to say. there's one quote in all my -- he was delivering tons of speeches across the country at the time to try to get ther versailles treaty passed. he, i found one speech in montana he makes sort of a passing reference the aren't these riots terrible, and that's it. so i, i don't know what his wife was like, but he, he was a racist on his own. >> [inaudible] >> yeah. rome, right? 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. >> only 20% off. >> okay. [laughter] >> and 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. um, 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, because i wanted to find out what this awakening was. >> right. >> because in 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 me 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. and so i wondered to what that referred. >> no, no, i think -- we wrestled with that, the editors rest where led with that, and -- wrestled with that, and i think 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 since that thety where they -- cincinnati where they fought back, but they were always overpowered because their numbers were too small. so i don't mean by that title to imply at all that suddenly, you know, 1919 black people like, wait a minute, whoa, this isn't fair. [laughter] no. obviously, black people knew that it wasn't fair. in 1919, in 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 -- like 1906 in atlanta black people are defending their neighborhoods when the riot occurs. after that, but in 1919 they're really, 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're recruiting people from the south like they've never done before. so that's what i meant by that. um, but i didn't mean to imply that black people didn't realize that the situation wasn't good. >> [inaudible] >> yeah. >> but, i mean, there have been other times in history, particularly during the civil war when black people -- >> black soldiers, obviously. reconstruction -- >> using the system to kind of parlay that into legislature and other kinds of things. i mean, again, in my mind, and

i'm going to, obviously, read the book and find out more about what you're talking about. [laughter] >> good. >> but it just seemed a little 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 the year that you didn't -- again, the political, the breadth of the political activity was extraordinary. even if, i mean, look at marcus garvey. that's the year his organization really takes off. so over, you know, there's black publications sprouting up everywhere, you know? kansas city to the chicago defender. these publications are really becoming popular everywhere. it was an extraordinary awakening. so was it the only time black people were awake politically? no, but it was an extraordinary awakening that, i think, led directly to the civil right movement.

>> thank you, and i appreciate your scholarship. i want to ask, what do you see as some of the contemporary parallels today with 1919? you mentioned war, you mentioned economics, you mentioned job situation. >> um, you didn't go into some of is social politics, the attack on image of black men as in the presidency. so what are pair parallels that you see? >> do you mean -- well, i mean, i think one thing that would jump out at me would be how the debates over immigration, not about black people at all. i would say i think that's a big issue in terms of how, certainly, the racial violence in chicago that year it was

against black people as immigrants, as migrants. you know, they were newcomers. and i think 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, and it seems to be fueling a lot -- and a lot of it's 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 are letters that i have in the book from black soldiers who have returned to chicago writing about how their experiences forever changed them. and i think that is, was 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. w.e. duboise goes over to write articles about the treatment of black soldiers because they were mistreated in france by mostly white southern officers, and he's writing articles about that, and he's in paris. and he's also attending a pan-african congress. and he goes out to dinner one night with white friends, and writes an essay about it, about the joy of this great experience. they went and ate and talked and had an interesting conversation. and he, he writes about how angry that made him because he knew that he could never have that experience in the united states, that it would always be color, there will always be 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 as to repeat questions? >> oh, i'm sorry, yep. >> um, well, 1919 is less than a year after the great unflew wednesday saw -- influenza pandemic, and so i'm wondering how that affected the climate. the proximity is so obvious. >> yeah, i mean, i should have thrown that in when i was talking about the world biting its fingernails. the question is what about the pandemic, the influenza pandemic which was trailing off at that time but had killed tens of millions, millions and millions of people across the planet. and in atlanta, there's a cemetery, a place where they just threw the bodies, i mean, by the hundreds. so the answer is it just added, it added to this general center

of, oh, my god, the world's collapsing. all social order is falling apart. and this definitely added to, you know, the anarchy that was generally felt by, 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, hence, the popularity of these books like the passing of the great race. and by that he meant white people. [laughter] yeah. >> when you talk about the, you know, the things like the lynchings and all the many anecdotes you can give, i'm always sitting here asking myself the question, and i'm trying not to make this sound too naive, but i'm always asking the question, you know, how could things like that have happened and gone on for so

long? and, of course, growing up in the generation that 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 a 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 some ways, but if you could do your best. [laughter] >> actually, 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? i had, as a younger man, i spent time in africa, and 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 ugandan border

in a remote village, and i was walking in the market, and i had just come from the united states, i'd never been to africa before, and my father who was taking me around -- not my real father, but my sort of stay father there finish -- was taking me around, and he saw a man drop a coin. he goes, look at that black man over there, a kikuyu's going to pick it up. and i'm like, what black guy? everybody's black. this is a sea of black people in my mine. but very shortly after, a few weeks, i quickly picked up all the prejudices, you know? oh, there's a luo, oh, yeah, you know how they are. i had them all in my head. and when i came back to the united states, you know, this is the same prejudices that we have were transferred in africa. so, oh, you know, views of jewish people or, you know, italian people or black people, they have the same prejudices

applied. and when you have society under great economic stress or turmoil, these tensions, people become very tribal. and i think the great strength of organizations like the naacp in that year was to not go the route of marcus garvey who wanted to be tribal for black people. okay, we're going to move to africa. okay, fine. that sort of tribalism, they rejected it, and they said, no. here's a document, it's called 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 there'll be an element of atonement. i'm a white guy, i grew up in america, white man, but the more i did the research for this book, the emotion that i found myself feeling more was pride at

these americans who i wish i'd known a lot more about earlier in my life like james wheldon johnson who were doing this amazing work. >> can you describe how you first became aware of this vast wave of racial violence in the year 1919 and your thought process when you realized, i've got to write a book about this in. >> i was on a fellowship, and 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, the you learn the history of those communities, you learn about a race riot. there's a major race riot there. so i figured i would start to research that, and as you do that, 1919 jumps out because it

was out of control. and there have been a few books written about particular riots, so there's a book that's now 40 years old about the chicago riot, there's a book about, some good books about the arkansas incidents, but all this other stuff nobody had really written about. and i felt that it needed to be told. he's good. [laughter] >> there was one man who wrote a little bit about it, though, his name was sandburg. >> oh, yeah. >> and the riots in chicago. just a couple comments. one is look at the context of that period of time. we're getting ready to put legislation on the books that'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. and he was talking about

italian-americans, german-americans -- >> that doesn't include wasps. >> that's not hyphenated. that's an acronym. but at the same time he, with hoover, hoover wasn't -- where he was brought up was in the palmer raids which happened in november, but actually palmer went before congress in june of 1919 and asked for powers to begin to throw out all these radicals. >> well, that's an important point regarding hoover and regarding palmer. so alexander -- 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 that's released to congress in the fall of that year. and it has this huge, long rant about the anarchists. so emma goldman and those people. we've got to get rid of these

people, they need to be deported, look at this crazy stuff they're writing. and that's, basically, the majority of the document. and then there's this huge part at the end that's tacked on, suddenly they start talking about these black publications and their radical writings. and if you read those quotes that they listed, by every stretch of the imagination today they would be considered benign. things like you should shoot back if you're being shot at, you know? that's sort of -- whoa! that's radical. and that was really, it's sort of bizarrely tacked on, it's disjointed from the flow of this legal argument that he's making, and it's just sort of there. and, um, that's sort of my view of how the federal government was approaching black political activism at the time. they didn't know what to make of it. so, oh, it must be something radical. it must somehow be involved with the communists. and, in fact, i have quotes in

the letter, in the book from radicals arguing, you know, why aren't we making better inroads among black people? we're bombing with black people. they're not embracing our message. and later they would try harder to do that. but they had up until 1919, they had utterly failed to do so. >> but on the reverse side is when you come into the south, and i've interviewed -- they're all dead now, but many sleeper car reporters -- porters that worked with a. phillip randolph and james wheldon johnson are from the same town. 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, one, been around white women, that was a fear, you know? and the other fact is they had

used guns in a way rather than just hunting possum. >> before, when world war i had started, the idea of recruiting black soldiers was disputed by a white congressman from the south had said, wait a minute, whoa, you're going to train black people to to shoot guns. >> general per,king didn't want -- >> right. i have a letter in the book from a black soldier who comes back to arkansas, and he writes that he comes home, and he's sneered at by white businessmen who didn't go fight, by the way, and he's so disgusted that he moves to st. louis, and he said i felt safer in the trenches than i did in arkansas. and that was a common -- >> let's do about two more questions. >> okay, sorry. yep. >> i appreciate what you said about something different happening in 1919 that, um, seemed to indicate that there

was an awakening and, you know, things started generating, but i'm wondering how you came to the conclusion that it was black america waking up and finally realizing that they'd been oppressed and they should be fighting back instead of white america realizing, and it might have been the beginning of their conscious that might have kept growing -- >> i mean, i'd like to, i think that the reaction, 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 have had violence in the past. um, and -- but in 1919 they're literally organizing, they're shooting back, they're forming political organizations to pressure political leaders locally and nationally, and they're taking steps that weren't, that they hadn't been taking before. and i would argue that they take

over an organization called the naacp. because before that it was all white people. you know? and by the end of that year james wheldon johnson is basically running it. w.e. duboise is running "the crisis" and all the editorial product, and walter white is this crazy dynamo risking his life all over the country. and so the organization becomes this black organization, and it remains so. and, um, there were, 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 a political force in this country, we're a social force in this country, and we're not going to be put back in the boxes that you've defined for us. yes, ma'am. >> i have my daughter here today, and i wanted to ask for her as an african-american student today