Remembering ‘Red Summer,’ when white mobs massacred Blacks from Tulsa to D.C.
The U.S. was gripped by a reign of racial terror after World War I, when whites rose up to quash prosperous Black communities.
BY DENEEN L. BROWN
A group of white women beat a group of Black women with sticks and stones as they begged “for mercy,” Hurd wrote. But the white women “laughed and answered the coarse sallies of men as they beat the negresses’ faces and breasts with fists, stones and sticks.”
The East St. Louis Massacre launched a reign of racial terror throughout the U.S. that historians say stretched from 1917 to 1923, when the all-Black town of Rosewood, Florida, was destroyed. During that period, known as the Red Summer, at least 97 lynchings were recorded, thousands of Black people were killed, and thousands of Black-owned homes and businesses were burned to the ground. Fire and fury fueled massacres in at least 26 cities, including Washington, D.C.; Chicago, Illinois; Omaha, Nebraska; Elaine, Arkansas; Charleston, South Carolina; Columbia, Tennessee; Houston, Texas; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/06/remembering-red-summer-white-mobs-massacred-blacks-tulsa-dc/#close
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