They Left Great Marks on Me by Kidada E. Williams

Author:Kidada E. Williams [Williams, Kidada E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Discrimination
ISBN: 9780814795361
Google: 9HnI422eq24C
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2012-03-12T22:17:24+00:00

Conclusion

The race conflagrations during and following the First World War were signs of the enduring significance of the vernacular history of racial violence and African Americans’ increasing political mobilization. Public figures publicized racial violence. They advised blacks to defend themselves and counseled white citizens and federal officials to play a role in ending violence. Though public figures’ entreaties to white people may have fallen on deaf ears, their directives to black people did not.

The intensity of black people’s responses to racial violence in 1919 stunned Americans who had previously dismissed and ignored black public figures’ efforts to publicize victims’ and witnesses’ testimonies of violence and to educate Americans on the impact of violence on black people and its potential implications for the nation. These riots exposed Americans’ anxieties about race, sex, labor, and politics, anxieties that the conditions of the war had exacerbated. Ordinary racial violence, legal disfranchisement, and segregation had not been enough to quell black people’s defiance of white supremacy, so whites resorted to greater attempts to demonstrate their racial superiority in response to black people’s insistence on protecting their civil and political rights. Black public figures contextualized the riots in terms of African Americans’ suffering from the hydra of white supremacy. For black people’s long-term pain and for their wartime patriotism, black public figures reported that black people expected an end to the violence and to white people’s efforts to resubjugate them. When black women and men returned violence with violence, some public figures celebrated it. These people expressed the cumulative weight of racial violence, the limits of African Americans’ endurance of it, and the federal government’s apathy toward their plight. Black public figures even started to enjoy more support from such white progressives as James E. Gregg, who was principal of the Hampton Institute and penned an essay describing the “alarming, ominous” riots and offering suggestions to “prevent such horrors from ever happening again.” Gregg argued, “These race riots of 1919 ought to be the last that disgrace the United States; and it is the duty of us all to see that this ideal is made fact.” Gregg attributed the riots to a history of neglected opportunities to cultivate mutual respect and understanding between blacks and whites. Gregg argued that black and white rioters should be brought to justice.80

Black people’s actions during the riots brought public figures’ predictions about the consequences of the hydra of white supremacy to fruition. African Americans’ resistance during the riots sent ripples throughout a shocked nation as white citizens and local, state, and federal officials pondered the possibility of a black rebellion. Black people’s willingness to defend themselves precipitated white-supremacist retribution that was more violent and government action that was intended to suppress “Negro radicalism.” What the nation learned from the public figures during the Great War was that when blacks returned fighting, they would do so with every weapon in their arsenal, including self-defense. As black people’s defensive stance during the riots showed, public figures were not the only blacks who resisted racial violence.

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