Freedom Facts and Firsts. Jessie Carney Smith

       Race riots exploded in more than 25 cities across the nation.

      It was King’s speech, “Give Us the Ballot,” however, that became the highlight of the event and elevated him to greater prominence, as it was his first address before a national audience. He had been virtually unknown outside of Georgia and Alabama, until his leadership during the Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott drew national and international attention. Wilkins was not pleased when the press began touting King as the “top black leader” afterwards, especially with the NAACP underwriting a good portion of expenses for the gathering. The Prayer Pilgrimage provided valuable experience for leaders and organizers in the various civil rights organizations, in terms of working through differences, coordinating efforts and resources, and in preparing for future civil rights activities.

      Fletcher F. Moon

      Red Summer (1919)

      The summer of 1919 was given the moniker Red Summer by James Weldon Johnson because it ushered in one of the greatest periods of interracial discord in U.S. history. Referring to the summer and fall of 1919, race riots exploded in more than 25 cities across the nation, regardless of region. Some were large and others were small. All the racial riots were indicative of a complete meltdown in American race relations. Incited by racism, unemployment, and inflation, indigenous terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan urged the riots on by terrorizing African Americans into submission. Competition for employment also helped to inflame relations between the races. White Americans did not want to compete for jobs with African Americans. Additionally, the Red Scare fueled racial unrest, and African Americans who saw equality as a constitutional right were branded as radicals.

      Among the riots that took place in 1919, the three most violent incidents occurred in Chicago (July 27), Washington, D.C. (July 19), and Elaine, Arkansas (October 1). Other cities of note where riots occurred in 1919 are: Charleston, South Carolina (May 10); Longview, Texas (July 13); Knoxville, Tennessee (August 30); and Omaha, Nebraska (September 28). Although rioting persisted for the next few years, not many of the racial eruptions equaled in proportion to those of 1919. In June 1921, interracial conflict broke out between Africans and whites in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Two years later, in January, a white mob from a neighboring community annihilated the predominately African American town of Rosewood, Florida, burning it to the ground. Those who escaped the Rosewood massacre did not break their silence until the early 1980s. In 1994 Florida’s legislative body provided reparations of $150,000 to each of the survivors. Detroit joined the pandemic of racial unrest in 1925, when an African American physician purchased a home in a white neighborhood.

      In the post-World War I environment, African Americans prepared to fight and die in their own defense introduced a new dynamic into America’s most deep-seated societal dilemmas. No longer was it the case of one race intimidating another race into submission. In 1919 one of the Harlem Renaissance’s outstanding poets, Jamaican Claude McKay, captured the feelings of many African Americans in his poem “If We Must Die,” writing: “If we must die, let it be not like hogs hunted and penned in an inglorious spot…. If we must die; oh let us nobly die. dying but fighting back.” Unlike previous race riots that took place in American history, these riots were among the first to project an organized African American rejoinder. The NAACP conducted an investigation of the crimes committed against African Americans. In 1919 the NAACP published its findings in Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918. The report indicated 3,224 people were lynched in the 30-year period. Of these, 702 were white and 2,522 were African American.

      The Red Summer of 1919 galvanized the NAACP and its supporters to lobby for the passage of a federal law against lynching. Late in 1919, the NAACP took the first steps toward securing the passage of a federal law against lynching. Although the Dyer Anti-Lynching bill ultimately failed in Congress, its supporters succeeded in bringing attention to and generating greater condemnation of lynching. On June 13, 2005, Congress officially apologized for failing to pass anti-lynching legislation early in the twentieth century, when it passed a non-binding resolution introduced by two senators from the South: Democratic Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu and Republican Senator George Allen of Virginia.

      Linda T. Wynn

      Reparations

      The concept of reparations, which is compensation for injuries against a nation or people, was not a twentieth-century phenomenon among African Americans. Near the end of the nineteenth century, Callie House, a former slave from Tennessee, emerged as a leader in the movement to petition the U.S. government for pensions and reparations for African Americans formally held in involuntary servitude. Traversing the South, she organized the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association to build a reparation movement among former slaves. This movement met its demise after the U.S. attorney general charged House with using the mail to defraud people. Arrested in 1916 and later convicted, she was given a one-year prison term in 1917.

      SNCC executive secretary James Forman issued the “Black Manifesto” insisting on reparations for African Americans (Fisk University).

      The death of House’s movement did not terminate the call for redress for the inequities wrought by American slavery and Jim Crow laws, however. Reparations to blacks was a subject of debate in the early 1960s, when James Forman, executive secretary of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, issued his “Black Manifesto” to white churches, Jewish synagogues, and racist institutions. Near the end of the 1960s, remediation to Japanese Americans revived African Americans’ demands to receive reparations for enslavement. In 1989 U.S. Representative John Conyers, an African American Michigan Democrat, introduced HR 40 to the House of Representatives; the bill would establish the Commission to Study Reparations Proposals for African Americans. It failed to pass then and in every session of Congress since it was first introduced. However, in 1994 the state of Florida allocated $2 million to nine black survivors of the 1923 Rosewood race riot. In addition, the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 recommended that survivors and their descendants be paid reparations. In 2000 Randall Robinson argued in The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks that the United States owes major reparations to the descendants of slaves. Two years later, attorneys filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Deadria Farmer Paellmann against Fleet Boston Financial, the CSX Railroad firm, and Aetna Insurance Company, seeking reparations for the descendants of slaves in America. The suit charged the companies with conspiracy, human rights violations, unjust enrichment from their corporate predecessors’ roles in the slave trade, and conversion of the value of the slaves’ labor into profit. The concept of reparations, which had its beginnings in the nineteenth century to indemnify the descendants of American slaves, continues into the twenty-first century.

      Linda T. Wynn

       President Johnson ignored [Resurrection City] and Congress closed its governmental coffers.

      Resurrection City (1968)

      Resurrection City was a temporary shantytown constructed at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It housed the citizens of the Poor People’s March on Washington, which sought to place the problems of the poor at the seat of the federal government. The campaign was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) last major initiative as it attempted to broaden the Civil Rights Movement to include an economic plank for all poor people regardless of race. Despite the death of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the SCLC under the leadership

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