Hip Hop's Amnesia by Rabaka Reiland

Author:Rabaka, Reiland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

THE NEW NEGRO MOVEMENT: CONSERVATISM AND RADICALISM IN EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICA

As with the Lost Generation, World War I had a profound impact on the young radicals of the Harlem Renaissance. Following W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1918 Crisis dictum “Close Ranks,” African Americans faithfully joined the war effort, genuinely believing that fighting for freedom and democracy abroad would translate into freedom and democracy for black folk back home (see Du Bois 1995b, 697). Sadly, nothing could have been further from the truth. The Great War’s ending was in many ways the beginning of what James Weldon Johnson termed the “Red Summer of 1919.”[2]

Several factors contributed to the situation where more than three dozen U.S. cities erupted in anti-black racist violence in 1919. First, there was the Great Migration of African Americans out of the rural South to the urban North between 1910 and 1930. Reports from this period estimate that between two and three million African Americans moved North during the first three decades of the twentieth century; a second Great Migration took place between 1940 and 1970 in which five million or more African Americans moved to even more diverse destinations, including the Midwest, the Southwest, and the far West.[3]

As African Americans fanned out across the country in the early years of the twentieth century most thought very little of the Red Scare of 1919, but anti-communism quickly translated into xenophobia, and xenophobia almost immediately mutated into fickle forms of anti-black racist violence that in many ways rivaled the horrors African Americans endured during the 1880s and 1890s—a period that noted historian Rayford Logan, in The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 (1954), famously characterized as “the nadir of American race relations.” African Americans had many reasons for migrating to the North, including to escape lynching, Jim Crow laws, anti-black racist restrictions on their voting and civil rights, and the collapsing economy of the rural South, where the boll weevil was devastating cotton crops. By most accounts the Red Summer of 1919 began in May in Charleston, North Carolina, where a white sailor shot an African American civilian to death. The “race riot” that ensued left seven African Americans dead and more than thirty-five wounded, as well as three white sailors and one policeman injured.

Ellisville, Mississippi, exploded in late June. There a fanatical gang of white men fatally wounded an alleged black rapist by the name of John Hartfield as he sought to escape from capture by way of a cane field. Reports indicate that a local white physician fiendishly kept Hartfield alive so that he could be “properly” lynched the next day. The local newspapers gleefully announced the time and place of Hartfield’s lynching, while the then governor of Mississippi, Theodore Bilbo, callously remarked that “[n]obody can keep the inevitable from happening.” On the day after Hartfield’s lynching the local newspapers shamelessly reported that more than three thousand townspeople and “upstanding” citizens gathered at the appointed tree and, after fervently debating the “best”

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