a precursor to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. he describes the following world war i african-american soldiers are continuing with expectations of full citizenship only to be met by resistance leading to deadly riots across the country. this is about an hour. >> thank you for coming. thanks for coming out here today. i want to start with a pole. let me set the stage for it. there was a young black man, he was a railroad porter in 1919, like a lot of young black men. and he was terrified. every time he and his friends traveled from town to town they didn't know if they would be arriving to a race riots. so they started carrying guns and then when they would go to a location they would run to their

hotels with their revolvers, just to make it safely. he was so traumatized by this that one day he snuck off and went into a railroad bathroom and scratched out this site which he called if we must die. and the last lines of the sonnet read the far outnumbered let us show is great, and for the thousand blooms, deal one deathblow. and though before sliced the open grave, like men will face the pack, pressed to the wall's dying but fighting back. that poem doesn't mention race at all. and it was published in a little socialist magazine in july 1919. as soon as it was published every black publication in america republish it in every black person newly. they knew it for a reason. 1919 was the year that black america will cut politically and fought back with politics in

court and also in the streets. and to me it's an amazing part of american history that has been forgotten, and this book is an effort to try to recover it because i think he 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 was taking to streets with a rifle was fighting for the constitution but they were fighting for the principals, the basic tenets of the constitution in terms of i have a right to a fair trial. i have a right to live, buy a home where i can afford to live. i have a right to be paid as much as the person next to me. there were organizations 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 the subject. i have concrete 12 step program, do not do that. [laughter] i'm going to try to rein in tonight and talked briefly about some of the key points of that summer and then i will talk about one riot, because i chose to talk about washington, d.c., july 1919. then i'm going to take any questions you want. thank you again for coming. we all know about race riots. if i met a black or white person in the street and said tell me about a race riot, they will talk about the '60s. they might talk about 1992 in los angeles, and i would ask them what is a race right. and they would say black kids breaking into a korean shoe store in los angeles, or a black teenagers fighting with national guardsmen in detroit.

the truth is in the breath of american history, overwhelmingly race riot has meant white mobs attacking the black individuals or black communities. that is certainly the case, the apex of that was in 1919. james weldon johnson who i'm going to write about later, isn't understood enough, called it the red summer because it was so bloody. it traumatized him and helped formulate his politics, really help shape the politics. so from april through november lled across the united states. and, of course, we were living in the south as tony pointed out, i grew up in chicago. i grew up with a lot of prejudiced towards the south. that's where racial violence happened. that's where sheriffs attack to

black people. and certainly that did happen. there's no question of it but i grew up and studied history, i didn't know about the chicago od the city for a week. washington, d.c. or omaha, nebraska coneicu or francisco, r rzona. these iots swe acrss the untry. thankfully, i don't have a powerpoint because i would mess it up but i would love to just brought a map of the united states and pointed to different places where there was racial violence in 1919. it was unprecedented, and it was in the north, the west, everywhere. i want to talk about them, there was a lot of violence itself. there were a lot of reasons fr this. broadly was happening in 1919 we had one the war in world war i. democracy has triumphed.

so it should've 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 fiery speeches about how democracy has triumphed and we were in a new age of peace. back at home, there was absolute chaos. there was chaos all over the world. the soviet union had risen. jewish people were being killed in the ukraine. armenians were being killed in turkey. there was unrest in india. british colonial forces were shooting indian people. it was absolutely a time of chaos. europe was in flames. in the united states there was runaway inflation, huge labor strikes, lots of talk by arctic is in common is about overthrowing capitalism. and there was just anxiety everywhere. there was a political cartoon that ran at the time that showed

the globe in bed, just biding its fingernails, all these terrible things are circling. everybody was anxious. race, the racial conditions that were already existing in the united states flared up as a result. 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 lead to great racial conflict. number one, black soldiers had fought in world war i. they had fought extremely bravely. many of them had worked in support units, but many have fought on the front lines and won medals in 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'm at a "baltimore sun" reporter who told me he had interviewed one of the last living

african-american world war i veterans. the man described one of his greatest memories was being served as cargo by french farmers and these great meals that were presented to the soldiers. this was fantastic, and the black soldiers were being told all the time you're fighting for democracy. we are here to win the war for democracy. when they got back there was a much different message. there's a letter i quote in the book, a document from the u.s. rail administration were black soldiers had just come back from europe are traveling in a car, and it railroad car. assumes across as 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. a fight ensues because some of the white men say wait a minute, these guys just bought for our country. these kind of incidences were

happening all over, they quickly become larger later. the second major thing that was happening was, seemed counterintuitive, but sharecroppers quintessentially downtrodden class in american society did well in 1919. because commodity prices have gone through the roof, so cotton, which they would always take the cotton to the weight in they would be ripped off almost in bravely. in 1919 even if they're getting ripped off they still made a lot of money, relatively. so they were able to buy cars. they were buying clothes. they were buying land when they could. this caused a lot of friction throughout the south. there were efforts in some parts of the south to organize into cooperatives. these black sharecroppers would organize into cooperatives that should cooperatives. then thirdly, the great

migration was out of control. the great migration had begun with, or before world war i, but once world war i began immigration from europe stop. northern industry had to turn to the south. and black workers willingly came up both because they were paid relatively better and they escape jim crow. they face 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 a lot of tension. they certainly, industry use that to break strikes whenever they're trying to break a strike they would bring in lots of black workers knowing there would be racial tensions are also caused lots of problems in the north because they were incredibly restrictive were black people could live.

so for example, in chicago, south side there was a strip of the south side called the black belt or black people could live. if they tried to move outside of that area, their homes would be bombed and any attempts to break out of it would cause 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, irish people, germans, lithuanians joined in writing against black people who have moved in. in charleston, in washington, and connecticut it was soldiers and sailors rioting. and in the south in places like knoxville, tennessee, and other places there were mostly white mobs that could include everybody from a judge, a sitting judge, down to the local farmer.

in austin, texas, the thin white layer of the naacp visited in the summer and was beaten by a wipeout that included sitting judge and others. the governor the next he defended it and said these troublemakers shouldn't be showing up in this town. so, i want to talk about to kind of racism that was sort of permeating americans aside at the time. one is the one we all know which is the sort of long-standing view from the time that people were brought over as slaves, you know, black people aren't lazy and simultaneously threatening. all this sort of confused views that are still around today, sort of standard big three. but there's also this this new kind of racism that had involved which was based loosely on darwin. this idea that the world was

divided into ethnic groups and these races were competing. why people dominate the world. white civilization dominated the world and is colored races were threatening us. these books were not after pamphlets. they were encoded popular books. one book was called the rise cash that the rising tide of color against white world supremacy. very subtle title. [laughter] by a man, and harvard university magna cum laude he, delivering speeches in lecture halls up in the northeast coast. another man who was the head of the new york zoological society in argued that a pygmy should be on exhibit, a human being. that was a approach to the zoo. these views were widely held and very, very popular. i'm going to read one section

from his book. democratic ideals among the homogeneous population of nordic blood as in england or america is one thing, but it's quite another for the white man to share his blood with or to trust his ideals to brown, yellow, black or red been. this is suicide, pure and simple. the first victim of this amazing folic 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. and they really did amazing work. this in lots written about -- later in the '20s they were black people to join the communist movement. 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 hoover was working for the attorney general, and he lobbed

right on to any political, black political activity had to equate, had to be some radical white svengali, maybe a jewish svengali underneath money doing it all. he didn't really let go of that idea for decades to actually until he died. but that idea was born in 1919, and he really, he and others propagated it. the media played a role in it. there would be a riot and accord has would be destroyed, and a black man would be lynched, for example, in omaha, nebraska. and the next day the headlines will be talking about that iww were infiltrating among blacks and string up trouble. the equation, there's a disconnect in terms of reality, in terms of what was actually happen. but the naacp was not a radical organization by any modern

standards, but they really became very, very active that year. if there is a key role or heroes of the book, it is the members and the leadership of the naacp. prior to 1919 and naacp had for the most part been sort of a well-meaning group of white do-gooders with one black person, w.e.b. du bois on their board. they didn't do much. they stayed in manhattan. they would write pamphlets about how lynching is bad. 1916, w.e.b. du bois convinces james weldon johnson to join the organization. he is an incredible person on many levels. i'll go off on a slight tangent. he cowrote lift every voice, which is the anthem for african-americans. and he wrote poetry. he wrote novels. he spoke fluent spanish. he was a diplomat.

these all kind of things he did on the sidelines also an incredible journalist and w.e.b. du bois convinces him to join as phil secretary of the treasury. he joins and when 1996, he is all over the country. he travels from california to new york to boston, all of 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. 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 that one black person in office. 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 and 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 want to mention in the naacp, a young man from atlanta, walter white. and he lived up to his name because he could pass for white. he had blue eyes. you see pictures of him and he looks white. he was an incredible salesman, and james weldon johnson met him and said i've got to get this guy in the naacp, and he says cannot going to make as much money but it will be exciting. and it was because he was white and he could pass for white. they used him to go into areas where they had just been riots, which is been lynchings, and he would gather information to and he was incredibly good at it. sometimes a little cocky and sometimes he really, i mean, he

regularly risked his life. one story i will tell you, in 1919 he's in arkansas, and there's a terrible, what can be described as a slaughter of black sharecroppers. he goes to the town to investigate. and he is walking around town talking to people, and a black man passes industry one day one day and says, hey, come into the alley with me i've got to talk to you. they go into the alley and he says they know who you are. you've got to get out of here. so white hightails it to the railroad, jumps on a train, catches a train and he's leaving town. the border, the white border comes to to collect tickets and he goes, why are you leaving town? at that time to use the term yellow negro for someone with light skin. he said you leaving town? they're just going to lynch a yellow negro. is going to be a great show. and white was like, i had -- [laughter] but i mean, that's how close he took it.

they, all of them were risking their lives. the white leader of the naacp really got the hell beaten out of him in austin, texas, was never really physically or mentally the same afterwards. he was beaten simply because he showed up. he showed up and down and he was trying to stop the state from shutting down naacp. naacp branches in the town. so, again i could talk about lots and lots of rides. these men did amazing work. they doubled leadership in the naacp. the crisis which was the magazine of the naacp it was at 100,000 circulation. they were doing and making recruiting and amazing lobbying. and it was a change, if you read the crisis from that period you can see they would publish a page of their political agenda every month. and it's exactly what martin

luther king started, same thing. i'm going to read, let me read to quick quote from james weldon johnson. and he gave a speech in november 1990 as the riots were dissipating in boston, and to me, these quotes in one speech at one point sounds like malcolm x and another point he sounds accord with the king. these were both delivered before either men were born. so on self-defense he said i know we can't so this race trouble by taking a shotgun and going out and shooting at people. but i will say will go a long way towards settling this thing if we shoot back when we were shot at. that is malcolm x. and later in that same speech he said we've got to wake up the conscious of the american people. hold a mirror for the nation, the people and that the nation's itself, a city 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 incessantly for what he believes is his right. no one is more competent than the american negro for he knows he is right and he is god almighty on his side and can't lose. that's martin luther king, in my opinion. so i'm going to talk about one right that happen, just to show you the breath of what was taking place. so washington, d.c., have the largest black population at the major city at that time. and it was very bustling city because of the war had just ended. loss of bureaucrats can lots of soldiers, lots of soldiers being decommissioned. very crowded, very hot. in washington, i was just out there sweating like a dog, 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 a critic they're all trying to outcompete each other in terms of crime coverage. they would report on alleged assaults by blackman against white women. but the black man, no one was ever taken into custody so these were allegations. they would say things, they would literally have headlines that would say blackbird, or something like that. black crude attacks white woman. and naacp was so concerned about is that they went and met with a newspaper editors and said you're really throwing gasoline on the fire, if you know the facts, print the facts. why are you doing this? and they had no affect. they kept writing these articles. been on july 18 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 been.

nobody knows what happened but there was an exchange, an altercation. they passed words and one of the black man, a cop was brought over and took him into custody but he was later released because nothing happened. that was a. but the rumor that spread among the soldiers of the white soldiers and sailors in washington was black guys just raped a white naval officer's wife. and the writing immediately began. they begin pulling people off trolley cars, going into restaurants and bowling waders out and beating them. and mayhem ensued. now, luckily it was a federal district so the president of the united states who is in the white house, all had to do was pick up the phone and make one call and thousands of discipline troops would come in and stop the riot, right? no. because he didn't do that. woodrow wilson, i could give a

whole lecture about my views on woodrow wilson. he was not, i've sort of this paternalistic view of him, sort of his professorial befuddled guy. that was my view of him. he was a big it. he was a loop. he was utterly unconcerned with anything at that point except his own legacy which he thought was the league of nations. so he ignored it. he had stomach trouble at the time to do is lying in bed. gunshot going on outside. people are being out on 10 people are being beaten outside white house. this is all over washington. he does nothing. his district commissioner keeps pleading with him, you know, my police can't handle this. the police were immediately overwhelmed. and he absolutely does nothing. finally, after four or five days of mayhem, he finally calls in

the troops. the troops are there and within an hour it is shut down. this is an important point because of the summer and i think this these to '60s as well, the reason for writing are manifold. we can talk on and on, but stopping a ride is pretty easy. discipline troops are impartial on the street corners and a point of the people who are writing and say go home. if you do that, people go home. because the mob doesn't want to attack discipline troops. whenever that did occur in 1990, for example, charleston, south carolina, the riots were over in half an hour. to be over immediately. whenever it didn't happen, like chicago or washington or knoxville, or omaha, things ran out of control very, very quickly.

but in the black neighborhoods of washington doing all this mayhem, black veterans might just come back from world war i went up on the rooftops and marked, created barricades, cordoned off the neighborhoods near howard university, and they covered their area. they fought back. and that was, after the riots finally did end, black people in america were ecstatic that they were writing letters to places saying it's about time, this is great, this is fantastic. we fought back, we showed them. h.l. mencken him who was certainly bigoted in his own ways wrote a letter to a white friend of his that black people were eager, quote eager for the man to play, and that scared him. and jean toomer who is a very young man at the time wrote an article, and he wrote after the

washington riots, the outstanding feature remains not that the negro will fight but that was the 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 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. but one side, so there's a riot in washington, mayhem, the capital 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 translated the black peril, that was the title of the editorial.

again, it was a great title. they write this, the disorder are at the beginning. the negroes can find a leader, perhaps they have one, we might yet expect all sorts of things. perhaps someday a black president. that was terrifying. my god. that would never happen. [laughter] but it did. 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 and lightning, awakening by white political leaders, but the idea that it's really bad, these rights were entirely bad publicity. so they started to rain today, start to send troops out immediately when this stuff started happening. but there were some of political, there was some political awakening, and people

started him to go into northern large cities started to accommodate black political leaders, and the idea of accommodating where black people could live. and that started to change. again, 1919 was at the end of the civil rights movement by any stretch of the imagination, the beginning as a right in the book, it was much more akin to lexington and concord in yorktown, it it was the beginning of something. 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 were a few more, a major race riot in tulsa. there was an incident in rosewood in 1943. there was a major incident in detroit that is so that a white and black riot, and then have some incidents obviously during the civil rights movements that were violate. that's obvious, but there was

nothing compared to 1919. and 1919 does a black man named john who was lynched in public with a crowd estimate as large as 10,000 people, a public festival in mississippi. he was accused of assaulting a white woman. he 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, et cetera, 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 that go years later, and the governor at the time in mississippi was complete races but he also said what am i supposed to do? the guy committed a terrible crime. know he did and he had been convicted. there was no trial.

there had never been a trial. so he's executed with 10,000 people in broad daylight in 1919, you know, emmett till, a terrible crime was committed years later in mississippi, and that's done in the middle of the night, all the guys have to swear to secrecy with a different landscape. i think there's two quotes i'm going to end with. i would love to have some questions. herbert salomon was a little jewish guy who joined the naacp from new york, and he risked his life. are going to places like vicksburg, mississippi, after a riot and interview people and write articles about it. he wrote a book about the violence he had seen in 1919 during the red summer, and he wrote this.

race relations constitute democracies most essential problem. the problem compounded of all of the adjustments which freeman are called upon to make in maintaining social relations. shameful as was figure 1919 with blood show, lynching and race riding in the united states, the functional still to bring the attention of all the nations that a national problem long unsolved demanded serious attention. then the last quote is from, there was a british journalist who was traveling the country at the time named stephen graham and his writing sort of a travelogue history of the united states. and at one point he goes to georgia. shady dale. i've been there. it's not paris. [laughter] don't confuse it with a major european capital. but he needs a white woman there, an old white woman there.

and he's talking to her about all this chaos, and the woman shaking her head, and dashed the i can't speak in a southern accent so i'm going to read, he wrote it phonetically. he said, the woman says with great disappointment, there's no managing the knickers in a, he spelled it differently, they got some big ed since the war. that to me sums up the book. that, they did. do 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 nothing much better better money than everybody. sharecroppers are making more money and they're not going to go back to the jim crow restrictions that you want them to be in. there is a war on, and the war is to eliminate jim crow, and that quote to me sums up where

things were headed. but anyways, thank you very much for coming. [applause] >> any questions? we're going to do questions for 20 minutes or so. and as i said earlier, please wait into the microphone comes to you, and you can just watch it and right in front of you. in fact, why don't we start with some questions over there. >> in your research did you determine how much influence woodrow wilson dasher woodrow wilson's wife had on his attitudes as he came from princeton, new jersey, and help re-segregated the hospitals, the nursing staff, government workers and all that in washington at the time? >> i think there's been, i was

actually in washington giving a talkhim and he went to work at the woodrow wilson house tried to sort of portray him as, you know, he had his wife engage in racial attitudes that are not acceptable. i think he was very comfortable being a racist on his own. if he had been a bachelor he would've been a total racist. he loved to tell dark jokes. he watched, everyone noted, he watched birth of the nation in the white house. he screened it. and people, it is very popular movie at the time so maybe could forgive them for that. no. people are complaining about that, protesting that film. one of the reasons he liked the film is he is quoted in a. his history about the south, he has passages in which he faces what would've been the first ku klux klan and that they were doing the right thing. that is quoted toward the end of the movie which unfortunately i had to watch.

he was, you know, he made promises to political leaders, black political leaders when he first ran. and when he got into office he is re-segregating sections of bureaucracy. throughout 1919 people were pleading with him sending telegrams, people, you've got to say something, you've got to do something about this. you got to speak out against this. and his answer was invariably, you know, you should talk to your governors. see which are 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 the versailles treaty past. i found one speech from montana he makes a passing reference, are these rides terrible? that's it. so i don't know what his wife was like, but he was a racist.

[inaudible] >> she was from rome, i think. >> i happen to have come across a book a couple weeks ago at one of the borders closings -- 5 spent i won't ask what the price was spent only 20% off. and i almost didn't buy it because i wondered to myself, 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 because i want to find out what that was. because in my understanding of black history, particularly as it has to do with fighting for

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

a fair. know, i do say black people knew it wasn't there. and 1919 in my opinion from my research i believe that was the year that they realize they have political power and fighting back could be more than simply shooting. like 1906 in atlanta, black people are defending their neighborhoods when the riot occurs. after that, but in 1919 almost 100,000 members of the naacp. the convention, the naacp convention in cleveland of that year is by far the largest they had ever had, and it's overwhelming black people coming up from the south, recruiting people from the south like they've never done before. so that's what i meant by that. but i didn't mean to imply that black people didn't realize that the situation was a good. [inaudible] there have been other times in

history, particularly during the civil war when black people -- >> black soldiers. >> using this isn't the kind of parlay that into legislation and other kind of things. i mean, again in my mind, and i'm going to read the book and find out more about what your talking about, but it just seemed a little odd to me. >> no. i mean, black people had i visited been working forever to not be in an oppressive state, but i think that that year, 1919 was the year again, the political, the breath of the activity was extraordinary. look at marcus garvey. that's the year his organization really takes off. black publications are sprouting up everywhere. kansas city to the chicago defender, the publications are really becoming popular

everywhere. it was an extraordinary a awakening. so was the only time people were awake politically? no. but it was an extraordinary way i think that led directly to the civil rights movement. >> thank you. i appreciate your scholarship. i'm going to ask, what do you see as some of the contemporaries parallels today with 1919? you mentioned the war. you mentioned economics. there's the job situation. you didn't go into some of the social politics. the attack on the image of black men in the presidency. so what are the parallel issues? >> do you mean, i mean, i think

one thing which would jump out at me is 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. they were newcomers and i think that to me as i was doing research parallels some of the things that have happened in this country, regarding illegal immigrants now today. people from mexico and other countries. there's a lot of tension over that that seems to be fueling a lot of, a lot of it is based on economics. that will be the main thing that would jump out at me. >> how effective do you think black soldiers at that time were, as far as the awakening is

concerned? >> i think they played an incredibly active role. there are letters i have in the book from black soldiers who returned to chicago, writing about how their experiences for ever change 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 we're in before. w.e.b. du bois 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 is also attending the pan african congress. he goes out to dinner one night with white friends and he writes an essay about it, about the joy of this great experience. they went and ate and talked and had an interesting conversation. he writes about how angry that

making because he knew they could never have that experience in the united states. there will always be colored there is immediately imposed upon him. and i think certainly soldiers felt the same. you are treated one way and you come back and retreated another way. .. >> that which was trailing off at that time, but had killed tens of millions -- millions and millions of people across the planet. and, you know, if atlanta

there's westview cemetery for those of you who have been out there, there's a place where they just threw the bodies by the hundreds. so the, the answer is it just added, it added to this general tenor of, oh, my god, the world's collapsing, all social order is falling apart x. this definitely added to, you know, the anarchy that was generally felt mostly by white people who felt like they didn't understand the world anymore. it was changing in a way that they couldn't grasp p. and that's, 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, you know, all of the many an ec totes about

that -- anecdotes you can give, i'm always asking myself the question, you know, how could things like that have happened? and 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] >> no, no, i actually have -- 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 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 boarder in a very remote village, and i was walking in the market. and i had just come from the united states. hyde never been to africa before, and my father who was taking me around -- not my real father, but my sort of stay father there -- was taking me around, and he saw a man drop a coin, and he goes hook at that black -- look at that black guy over there. you drop a coin, and a kikuyu's going to pick it up. and i'm like, what black guy? everybody is black. it is a sea of black people in my mind. but very shortly after, a few weeks, i quickly picked up all the prejudices. i mean, i had them all in my head. and be when i came pack to the

united states, i'm like, oh, 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 apride. 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 said, no, they rejected it. here's the united states constitution, i get the same rights you do. and their ability to 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 atone m. you know -- atonement. you know, i'm a white guy, i grew up in america, white man. but the more i did the research for this book, the more emotion i found myself feeling was pride at these americans who i wish i'd known a lot more about earlier in my life 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? >> 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. so i figured i would research that. and as you start to do that, 1919 jumps out because it was just out of control. i mean, there have been some -- and there had 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, 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 that wrote a little bit about it though. his name was sandberg. >> oh, yeah. >> and the riots of, in chicago. and that was, but just a couple quick comments. one is to 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. >> yeah. but it's not hyphenated, it's an acronym. but at the same time, he -- with hoover, hoover where he was brought out 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 releelsed to congress in the -- released to congress in the fall of that year. and it has this huge, long rabbit -- rant about the anarchists. we've got to get rid of these people, look at the crazy stuff they're writing. and that's, base chi, the majority of the document. and then there's this huge part at the end, sudden ply they start talking about look at these radical black basketballly cases and their writings. if you look at the quotes they listed, by every stretch of the imagination today they would be considered benign, you know? thing it is like you should shoot back if you're being shot at. that sort of -- whoa, that's radical. and that was really, um, it sort of bizarrely was tacked on, it's disjointed from the flow of this legal argument that he's making, and it's just sort of there. and 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. must be something radical. they must somehow be involved with the communists. and, in fact, i have quotes 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 war porter -- car car porters, t 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, 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. >> well, then, before the -- when world war i had started, the idea of recruiting black soldiers was disputed by white congressman from the south had said, wait a minute, whoa, you're going to train black people to shoot guns? whoa, let's not do that. >> general pershing didn't want to do it. >> right. but 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, thicks started -- things started generating, but i'm wondering how you came to the conclusion that it was black america waking up 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 through the 1960s? >> i mean, i'd like to -- i think that the reaction, the reaction, the most participant part of the -- important part of the story in 1919 in my mind is black political reaction to this violence. so this violence starts to erupt, and they had had violation in the past, and, but in 1919 they're literally organizing, they're shooting

back, they're forming political organizations to pressure political leader locally and nationally, and they're taking steps that with respect, that they hadn't -- that weren't, that they hadn't been taking before. and i would argue 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.b. duboise is running the crisis, and walter white is this crazy dynamo risking his life all over the country. so the organization becomes this black organization, and it remains. so and 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 were 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. >> [inaudible] and i wanted to ask for her as an african-american student today and a youth of color, okay? what would you like youth in her age bracket to take away about your book? >> that's a great question. >> [inaudible] >> oh, the question was, she brought her daughter here today, and she wants to know what would i like a young african-american woman, teen to take away from this book. and i guess the question, i would answer that by saying political activity can work and did work and that there are these amazing people in your, in america's past. i mean, i would -- i fez i'd first -- 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 wheldon johnson. the guy's amazing.

there's a statute to martin luther king that's about to be unveiled in washington, d.c., great, that's fantastic, but there should be a statute to james wheldon johnson. these guys were amazing, and everyone should know about them. my daughter is learning about them whether she likes it or not. [laughter] but she's going to learn about it more, and so is my son. i mean, 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 unite. the united states. so that would, i guess, be my answer. thank you. [applause] >> to find out more, visit the author's web site,