Neil Evans. History Today. Volume 51, Issue 2, February 2001.
If the nineteenth century was the age of great cities, Chicago was its international symbol. Aspiring cities were referred to as the Chicago’ of their particular country or region. Cardiff was often called ‘the Chicago of Wales’. In the summer of 1915) the two cities would be linked by more than civic ambitions, though in ways that reflected the dynamics of their urban growth. In these two cities the wave of race riots that swept through Britain and America at the end of the First World War reached their respective peaks. In the United States there were riots in twenty-two towns and cities in a period of less than six months. So much blood was spilled on the streets that James Weldon Johnson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People referred to it as ‘the red summer.’ In all over 120 people died in these clashes. In Britain the riots were confined to ports and were not as bloody as in the US, though at least live deaths occurred. There had already been a series of riots in the United States in 1917, the deadliest of these occurring at East St Louis, Illinois, in July 1917. This episode had had its transatlantic parallel in a series of violent racial clashes in France in that year which apparently claimed twenty lives.
The outbreaks of 1919 were the pinnacle of a period of intensified racial conflicts across the north Atlantic world which was rooted in the established patterns of migration but which was brought to a head by the First World War. Given the differing histories of race relations in the British Empire and the United States, perhaps this coincidence is surprising—particularly as comment in Europe often revolved around the, need to avoid American-style lynchings and race riots. The black civil rights activist Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching lecture tours in Britain in 1893 and 1894 seem to have left an indelible impression of this aspect of American behaviour. But one of the many social changes induced by war was a challenge to the racial hierarchies in the world. Violence was one attempt at restoration of the status-quo.
War accelerated the formation of racial minority communities in industrial cities. One of the long-term consequences of the abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere in the course of the nineteenth century was the shift of former slaves and their descendants towards cities. This was most marked in the United States where the movement of southern blacks to northern industrial cities began in earnest in the 1890s. For many freed people there was little to commend the south. Pogroms against free blacks, lynchings, and the denial of effective political rights were complemented by the economic effects of the boll weevil and natural disasters on cotton crops. In the period 1900-1910 New York’s black population rose from 66,666 to 91,709, while between 1890 and 1915 Chicago’s rocketed from 15,000 to 50,000.
The impact of such movements on Britain and France was far less marked and operated through the colonial system. France was ‘the melting pot of Europe’ but the immigrant labour it absorbed to compensate for its almost static population was overwhelmingly from Europe rather than its colonies. A few colonial subjects could be found, however. mainly in Paris. In Britain some colonial subjects had made their way into the merchant fleet. Britain’s dominance of world shipping meant that a significant minority of black sailors had resulted in the creation of small communities of Arabs, West Indians, West Africans, Chinese and Lascars in ports such as Liverpool, South Shields and Cardiff.
These communities provided a foundation, on both sides of the Atlantic, for the creation of more substantial urban black communities in the course of the war. In the United States immigration from Europe became a trickle compared with its pre-war flood, while the demand for labour was sustained by its role in supplying the European war effort. Blacks already had many reasons for leaving the south but now there was the pull of industrial jobs being open to them in northern cities. Steel mills and stockyards had normally been closed to blacks before the war, unless they entered as strikebreakers, but now relatively well paid jobs became more easily available. The black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, did much to publicise the opportunities on offer in the north and quickly the city acquired the reputation of being ‘top of the world’ for black people in America. Those who went north wrote letters home which generally emphasised their success, quoting high wage rates and stressing the educational facilities available (in non-segregated schools). Such encomia brought new waves of recruits. There is no totally accurate measure of the numbers of southern blacks who took advantage of this situation, and racists frequently exaggerated the numbers involved. Yet as many as 450,000 blacks migrated during the war: and the exaggerated figures which were thrown about say something about perceptions of the size of the movement. Chicago’s black population doubled during the course of the First World War from 50,000 to 100,000 while New York’s rose by 60 per cent in 1910-1920. Such movement coincided with a virtual halt in building leading to great overcrowding as well as competition for jobs and education. Trade unions continued to see blacks as actual or potential strike-breakers.
Meanwhile, over 3,000 miles away, Britain and France both drew heavily on colonial labour and fighting men to win the war. Britain mobilised over a million colonial troops, 800,000 of whom were from India. About 150,000 of these went to France in fighting units while many thousands of other black men were enlisted in labour battalions. France also drew heavily on its colonies because of its long-standing population deficit compared with Germany, with over half-a-million troops recruited and around 225,000 black labourers. These workers came from its colonies in North Africa, the Caribbean and Indo-China and from tropical Africa or China. Britain took in relatively few labourers from its colonies but recruited significant numbers of black seamen to supplement its merchant fleet and fill gaps left by the recruitment of white merchant seamen into the Royal Navy. Existing black settlements in the ports expanded, but as in all these cases of war-time ghetto formation there was little house building to offset it. As in America, there was potential for conflict over scarce facilities.
Yet the immediate issues were more basic and less tangible. In many colonies—as in the United States under slavery—black women were sexual prey to white men. The recruitment of black labour into the imperial metropolises threatened to invert this established pattern. Almost all the black migrants were men, and from the beginning great efforts were made to keep them away from white women, lest white supremacy should be compromised through mixed-race relationships involving white women.
British colonial troops were subject to curfews and were only allowed on leave in Britain in closely supervised groups. There was no such supervision of black seamen, but religious groups, suffragists and the National Union of Women Workers ran campaigns aimed at preserving established sexual morality. Some of these aimed specifically at black sailors while others provided the context for such concerns. The Chief Constable of Cardiff objected in 1917 to the sexual allure that black men gained from playing cricket in flannels rather than their workaday corduroy. He protested against white girls being allowed ‘to admire such beasts’. In France the colonial workers were generally not free to associate with local civilians. They were subject to a regime of encadrement (regimentation) and kept in barracks away from the local population.
Such precautions were meant to avoid volcanic eruptions of racial hatred such as that which rocked East St Louis in July 1917. Anti-black riots were hardly a novelty in the northern portion of the United States and had their roots in early nineteenth-century migrations of free blacks. But after the Civil War they had become a characteristic of the south rather than the north. Ghetto formation led to the resurgence of racially-motivated protest north of the Mason-Dixon line. Violence erupted in New York in the hot summer of 1900. White crowds attacked blacks on the streets leaving many badly injured, while the police looked on with studied indifference, or even led the crowds of assailants. The riots in Springfield in 1908 occurred, ironically, in Lincoln’s home town. ‘Lincoln freed you, now we’ll show you where you belong’ was a frequent cry of white rioters who lynched two black people and lost four of their number to the defensive fire of the black community. East St Louis was in Lincoln’s home state.
The situation was associated with the bloody episode of July 1917 was compounded by local political corruption, entwined with the Democratic victory in the 1912 presidential election: some claimed that black migration to the city was a plot to increase the Democratic vote. The city also seems to have been affected by memories of past slave insurrections and by fears of a black uprising which would lead to white throats being slit. This urban manifestation of a Grande Peur seems to have been unique among all the race riots, both in Europe and America, in this period, but the taking up of arms by the black population would be a crucial factor in all of them. The era of racial attack against a largely defenceless black population had given way to the age of the riot in which black defensive capabilities were more developed. The immediate issue that triggered the unrest was the frustration of trade union organisation within the aluminium works and the stockyards, for which blacks were blamed. This was quickly followed by attacks on black people in the streets, but the local authorities took no effective action to prevent further trouble. In this uneasy situation rumours that a black uprising would occur on July 4th spread. Clearly some whites decided that ‘pre-emptive’ action was necessary.
The trouble began with a dark-coloured car driving through the black ghetto scattering shots around (marking the first use of motorised terror in the twentieth-century American race riot). Later a similar-looking vehicle—actually a police car on patrol in the area—was mistaken by the black population for the car carrying the racist attackers. The ghetto population fired at the car, and killed two policemen. This act of retaliation fuelled massive hostility and allowed white assailants to claim: ‘The niggers started it and the whites did the finishing’. Starting and finishing meant nine white deaths and around thirty-nine black ones. Blacks in the central area were attacked, shot, beaten and lynched. The main black community was too large and well-defended, so white assailants concentrated their attacks on fringe inhabitants of the ghetto.
President Wilson, the first southern occupant of the White House since the Civil War, responded to news of the trouble with much hand wringing, but no condemnation. His rhetoric about making the world safe for democracy had stoked the hopes of many blacks, while simultaneously his administration introduced segregation into the civil service. Wilson had also (initially at least) endorsed D.W. Griffith’s racist film, Birth of a Nation, in 1915, a notable fomenter of racial antagonism in its own right.
In the riot that erupted in Houston, Texas, in the following month, black people showed they were prepared to fight back against racial assault in a manner previously unseen. When black soldiers stationed in the city were targeted in a series of racial attacks, culminating in the beating of a black soldier by a white policeman, around a hundred black soldiers marched into town fully armed and in the ensuing fight killed sixteen white people, including five policemen. Nineteen black soldiers were subsequently executed for their part in the conflict and others received lengthy prison sentences.
Across the Atlantic similar disturbances occurred in France despite the segregation of colonial workers from the indigenous population. The outbreaks coincided with, and were the product of, war weariness in the spring and summer of 1917. Colonials were accused of enjoying an easy life while French men went to the front. The shortage of white men was then seen as leaving white women vulnerable to the advances of the imported workers. A report by the Ministry of the Interior recorded typical conversations in munitions factories:
If this continues there will not be any men left in France, so why are we fighting? So that Chinese, Arabs and Spaniards can marry our wives and daughters and share out the France for which we’ll all sooner or later, get ourselves killed at the front.
From the spring there were isolated attacks on colonial workers in Paris but incidents of collective violence followed shortly after. In June at Dijon a drunken French sergeant told a Moroccan mandolin player to stop playing. The musician’s command of French was insufficient for him to understand and an altercation broke out, followed by attacks on the Moroccan barracks by crowds of up to 1,500 French. Many were seriously injured, but in this instance no one was killed. The worst riot occurred in the same week at Le Havre. Here colonial dock workers had been imported but they were not regimented, adding strain to the stiff competition for housing and jobs. Around fifteen people died after an exchange of insults on the streets led to fighting. The intervention of police and soldiers was required before order was restored. Six weeks later there was a bloody outbreak in Brest. French civilians attacked Arab and Kabyle workers in a flea market in a fray which rapidly escalated involving colonial troops, police and soldiers, with random shooting and bayoneting. Three people were killed outright, while of the thirty-four wounded, another two subsequently died.
The first ‘red summer’ hardly concerned Britain, apart from a riot in the East End of London against colonial seamen. The year 1918 was quieter but minor outbreaks occurred in France and the US, as well as a series of disturbances in a military hospital in Liverpool. In America the rash of incidents contributed to an atmosphere of growing fear; in France the incidents would end with the armistice. Following this, colonial workers and troops were quickly repatriated, and some of the latter were transferred to Germany. The notorious ideological war over the ‘Black Watch on the Rhine’—when German propaganda sought to capitalise on the use of French colonial troops in the occupation, may have arisen in part from a desire to remove colonial troops from France.
In Britain, by contrast, the most severe incidents took place after the war was over and with demobilisation. The trouble was concentrated among seamen in the ports, though some colonial troops were victims, as were some black munitions workers in Liverpool. Clashes over jobs started almost immediately with disturbances in Glasgow and South Shields in January and February 1919. The issue rumbled on until much more violent riots exploded in Liverpool and South Wales in June.
In Liverpool much of the conflict was between Scandinavian and black colonial sailors. Violent attacks on black sailors went on for days resulting in the death of one, Charles Wootton. Though accounts of his death vary, it is likely that he was pushed into the docks and either allowed to drown or was stoned until he did. A threat by armed black sailors that they would ‘kill the white race’ was widely reported in the press. As these riots subsided they were overlapped by the beginnings of trouble in Barry and Newport. In Barry a black man killed a white man who had accosted him, while the property of many black seamen was destroyed in Newport after violent assaults on their homes. In Cardiff the riots reached their peak with four nights of assault on black people and their property followed by a further period of unrest.
The Cardiff troubles started on the evening of June 11th with an assault by a white crowd on a brake carrying black seamen and their wives back from an excursion. Shots were fired in self defence and around the same time a white ex-soldier was found with his throat cut—allegedly, but never proved—by a black man. In subsequent attacks a white man was shot through the heart and an Arab killed after being hit over the head either by a white rioter or by a policeman. The police cordoned off Butetown, the centre of black settlement in the city, and protected this area but not the outlying areas of black settlement.
The issues that sparked these outbreaks were broadly the same throughout: competition for jobs in the post-war recession, competition for houses and competition for women. In Britain and France there was a (false) belief that white people had made sacrifices for the war effort while blacks had benefited. Arrests were made on both sides in Britain and some severe sentences were handed out, in contrast with France where apparently there were no arrests whatsoever in 1917.
American conflicts ran alongside these but with an even greater degree of brutality. The 1919 riot in Washington in July was another shock to American opinion, partly because of its proximity to the White House. As with many of the riots it arose over accusations of sexual attacks on white women, and the presence of servicemen in the city was crucial. White servicemen played a leading role and as in the East St Louis riot, cars were used to spread death and destruction. Seven people died as a result of these clashes. Worse was to follow in Chicago when days of violence occurred after a black bather who had drifted onto a white area on a beach was stoned and subsequently died from his injuries. Matters were exacerbated by a long-standing competition for houses and a series of bombing incidents in which twenty-seven properties owned by blacks were destroyed with dynamite. Postwar unemployment and the ejection of blacks from industrial jobs added to the tensions. In Chicago blacks began to attack white people on the streets and there were incipient signs of the all-out race war which some feared would erupt. More riots followed in the remaining portion of 1919 and a few broke out in the early 1920s. In Britain there was some tension in the ports but no violence comparable with that of the summer of 1919.
Despite the differences in circumstance and traditions on either side of the ocean, social strains arising from the Great War, and a hostile reaction to rapidly expanding black populations, were common to both Europe and the US. However, such explanations do not account for all outbreaks of violence: Washington’s black community had grown only moderately during the First World War, while some large black communities escaped being the target of racist anger. Other issues such as the nature of policing, the differing responses of the press, and the local political situation must also be considered.
In many cases the riots marked out the boundaries between ethnic groups in the cities they affected. Attacks on outlying black inhabitants served to consolidate ghettos. This was as true in Cardiff as it was in Chicago: entrenchments as deep as those on the Western Front were created. There were many consequences in the European empires too. In the West Indies, particularly in Trinidad, black attacks on white property were partly the result of the stories told by returning West Indians of the assaults on them in British ports. In the French empire there had already been riots to greet the first recruiting moves in 1916-17. In both cases these were violent expressions of a more general process of questioning the legitimacy of colonial rule. Colonial subjects who had been to the metropolises had sometimes had sexual relationships with white women and they had seen working-class communities—poor white men and women—to challenge their image of imperial authority.
The British and French empires were enlarged by the world conflict but they were hardly strengthened by it. In the United States the riots showed how far race was now a national issue rather than a sectional southern one. The defence made by the black population grew out of, and enhanced, a self respect which had been growing in some northern ghettos. It was a central part of a new assertiveness in black America, expressed in Claude Mckay’s poem ‘If We Must Die’, published just before the Chicago riot, which stressed manly self defence rather than abject surrender.
Although race riots erupted sporadically on both sides of the Atlantic for much of the twentieth century, it was never again with the concentrated energy of those of 1917-19. The conflicts of 1960s America and 1980s Britain were ghetto rebellions, rather than race riots. In no sense has the violence of some white people against black people ended since then: but violent communal assertions of white supremacy seem to have ended with the British outbreaks of 1958-61.