Thread by @michaelharriot

This is not surprising to me. You can't teach 6th graders about "liberty and justice for all" then tell them their country started a race war

Nah, not the Civil War

The war against Black people in 1919 had MORE BATTLES than the entire Civil War

A thread:

https://twitter.com/vicariousdrama/status/1312178010330525697

First of all, let me say:

I don't know how many people died.
I don't know how many incidents happened.
I don't know a lot about 1919 because NO ONE DOES. People are still putting it together.

I don't even like the term the "Red Summer"

The term came about because people started using a collective term for a bunch of separate "riots." But there weren't a bunch of separate riots. It was all one thing.

First, you gotta remember when this was, It seems like an entirely different era than the Civil War.

But it was essentially 50 years after Emancipation. Some of the people doing all this violence had PARENTS who owned slaves. Many LIVED THROUGH reconstruction.

The second thing people rarely mention is that EVERY AMERICAN CHILD thought black people were inferior.

That wasn't an opinion. By the early 1900s, schools began to teach Darwin's theory of evolution. There was one problem: Charles Darwin was racist AF.

Yes, natural selection exists. But everyone in academia also accepted Darwin's opinion that Caucasians were more advanced.

So if you Then WWII happened.

How did that fuel racism? Well, for the first time, there were hundreds of thousands of Black men who had experienced a semblance of Equality fighting in Europe and all over the world.

They came back with a sense of pride.

They also didn't accept their status as second class citizens under Jim Crow.

Also, after the Civil War, the government built land-grant HBCUs. For the first time in American history, there were educated black people everywhere. They also didn't accept their 2nd class status.

They weren't taking shit either.

We learn about the Civil Rights era because it ended with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. We don't learn about the Black rights movement of the early 1900s because it ended differently:

They just started killing black people.

Also, you have to know that there was another factor that fueled this:

We had a president who was a white supremacist.

Sound familiar?

Seriously, Woodrow Wilson's dog whistles make Donald Trump sound like Ghandi.

When he was PRESIDENT at Princeton, he wrote a series of History books basically arguing that this was meant to be a white nation and that ending slavery fucked everything up.

Seriously, he called the 15th Amendment (the right to vote) "radical" & said the KKK rose because:

"The white men of the south were around by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes ignorant negroes"

Needless to say, the Klan LOVED Wilson

So how did he become president?

Well, remember, everyone thought black people were inferior. Remember that black men were acting equal. Remember that immigration was increasing. Remember the NAACP had just begun. Remember the FIRST civil rights movement tried to end Jim Crow

He appealed to racism.

And he delivered.

See, those civil rights groups had actually won a few battles. a few battles. The federal government had unofficially been desegregated for a while but after he got into office, he RESEGREGATED.

And to celebrate, he had movie night.

On February 18, 1915, Wilson hosted the premiere of the first moving picture at the White House. His family and his cabinet attended and the movie. Historians generally regard it the first "blockbuster movie" in history

The movie's title sparked a new era of an old organization

See, it would later be known as "Birth of a Nation," but that night at the White House, it was shown under its original name:

"The Clansman"

All of a sudden, the Ku Klux Klan was cool again. Membership soared.

THIS, not the post-Civil War Klan, is the one you know

This was when they started burning crosses. This was when they started wearing white hoods. By the mid-1920s, one out of every seven white men in the US was a member of the Klan. The anti-nativist movement was just beginning

This is the environment that was bubbling in 1919.

So when those uppity Black heroes came back to the US looking them white people in the eyes and enrolling in college, white people got scared AF and just held mass lynchings*

*You won't find these incidents in history books under "lynchings" or "racist wypipo going HAM"

That's because they called them "riots."

Historically, whenever white people do some shit to black people and black people don't lay down and take it, they just term it a "riot" and start killing us.

(You might wanna remember that. It just seems like a useful fact.)

By October ONE REPORTER for the NYT had counted 60.

I have literally never read a history book that has ALL the same events that happened in 1919. There are people still discovering some.

AND THAT'S HOW IT WORKS.

For instance, the first "riot" in Jan. that year supposedly happened in New Bedford, TN. No one knows what happened.

On April 5, veteran Daniel Mack brushed up against a man on Market day. They sentenced him to 30 days in jail. A white mob broke into the jail, hung him & left.

Mack survived by playing dead but no one was ever arrested bc, it turned out, the people in Sylvester Ga. "rioted" all the time.

It never made the newspapers.

In Port Arthur, Tex. They lynched a black man for "smoking near a car in which white women were sitting.

In Macon, Miss, they beat every black person they found find who was employed because they heard that black workers had asked for better working conditions and brought up a crazy idea called a "minimum wage."

They whipped all the blacks and literally turned the town all-white.

Shit was crazy in the South, right?

Sheeeeit... In Baltimore there were two riots against Black people who tried to move into white neighborhoods. There were at least 5 in Philly. There was an actual battle in Bisbee AZ.

In DC, uppity Howard students called for desegregation

So a newspaper reporter had a bright idea. He started reporting, out of thin air, that "negro fiends" were roaming the streets raping white women.

Well one night, the wife of a man who worked for the Navy was "jostled" by a negro. I don't know what the fuck "jostling" is but...

Apparently, white people do.

That's because white people rounded up a posse and started attacking black people. They got the cops to do the same.

Well, DC niggas don't play that shit.

Thet were like: "Oh, yall muhfuckas wanna jostle? Aight."

So they raised $14,000 (basically $180,000 today) and bought guns and just PASSED THEM OUT TO BLACK FOLKS.

BRUH, these DC niggas were shooting at white people out of cars and off of rooftops. They shot a police HORSE!

Now, I don't necessarily believe this one, but one cop said a group of black people drove by him in a car and shot the hat off his head!

Anyway, they were the ones who wanted to jostle.

Of course you know about the Elaine Massacre (If you don't go look it up. It's too much)

In Caldwell, Ga, they burned three churches WITH PEOPLE IN THEM. Then they lynched a black man. His crime?

They heard someone was telling Black people to "rise up and wipe out the white people.

That's not the worst part

The dude they killed?

He just "looked like a leader."

But there is a story that I halfway told on this website that bears repeating.

Most people don't know that the current street gangs in America were modeled mostly after the Irish gangs in Chicago.

In 1919, the Hamburgs and Ragens Colts ran Chicago.

But black people were moving in and taking their jobs. To keep them away, they just made up a line that ran through the city and said: "This area is off-limits to the Black people."

Now, I don't know if white people know this, but white people aren't that much fun to be around

But one black kid, Eugene WIlliams, was floating on a raft in Lake Michigan and crossed this imaginary line IN THE LAKE!

A white man threw a rock at him and Eugene drowned. A cop saw it and wouldn't do shit.

But here's what happened:

That night, members of Ragens Colts and the Hamburgs heard about it, put on blackface and attacked ethnic immigrants in Chicago. The ethnic immigrants thought black people attacked them. Black people were already mad about Eugene. and that's how the Chicago "race riot" started

Now, again, no one thinks these are interconnected events even though ONE OUT OF SEVEN WHITE MEN were in the same organization. There was no conspiracy. It was just white people being white people...

Maybe.

Because here is something interesting.

There was a man who was a member of the Hamburgs who hung out at the headquarters every day until the day he died. He eventually became the president of the Hamburgs in 1924.

And then he became really powerful. He transformed the gang into a political machine that ruled Chicago

This is not something I discovered, it is widely known. He was a PROUD member.

Luckily, the city never experienced a riot like that until April 4, 1968, the day MLK was assassinated.

What's interesting is that the day before, that on April 3...

The Conservative Vice Lords, Inc. a Black gang that was transforming themselves just like the Hamburgs, opened a community center.

Now two years before that, MLK spent the summer in Chicago working for economic justice. He couldn't get anything done.

Then, one day, he had an ide. He met with all the gangs. But during the meeting, one of MLK's friends said he didn't know why they were meeting with gangs, and the gangs got up and left.

MLK set up ANOTHER MEETING

When MLK met with them, they were skeptical about that nonviolent shit. But they agreed to work with him. A few weeks later MLK held a march. And for some reason, a bunch of white people showed up and threw rocks and bottles, even hitting MLK

So what did the gangs do?

Nothing. They had given their word to MLK.
Well it turns out, that the people were paid to start a "riot" to set MLK up but it didn't work. He really had them in control.

So they met with MLK and made promises to change housing laws.

Two years later, MLK was dead.

Chicago rioted.

And to quell the riot, they created a task force that eventually killed the leader of the Black Panthers, Fred Hampton.

Years later FBI papers revealed that it was all planned... The "riot," Hampton's killing, EVERYTHING.

And the man who set it up was that old leader of the Hamburgs who transformed it into a legitimate organization:

Mayor Richard J. Daley.

Now the interesting thing is that Daley had a SUDDEN rise to power among the Hamburgs after the 1919 "riots."

He NEVER denied participating

But, the government NEVER did anything about the riots BECAUSE there was a racist president in the White House who helped ignite the second wave of the KKK.

Five years later, the KKK was EVERYWHERE.

On May 30, 1927, they even had a rally in Queens New York

It turned into a "riot" and the cops arrested seven men for failure to disperse. At the arraignment, they charged 6 of the men and let one go.

The 7th was the only one who had his case dismissed.

His name was Fred Trump.

There is no REAL conclusive evidence that Fred was a member of the KKK

But remember... ONE IN SEVEN MEN WERE MEMBERS.

And nearly a century later his son would become president using a slogan that was mentioned by a KKK leader at a congressional hearing and on a KKK banner.

In 1921, the House Rules Committee had a hearing to see what this Klan shit was about. The Imperial Wizard gave them an answer:

"It stands for AMERICA FIRST— first in thought, first in affections, and first in the galaxy of nations"

How did Wilson's federal government respond?

Well, Wilson did something.

In 1919, he hired a man to do something about it. First he put him in charge of the "radical division" of the Bureau of Intelligence.

But he didn't do anything.

So in 1920, the man was inducted as a freemason.

Then in 1921, he was put in charge of the Bureau of Investigation, which would become the FBI

His name was J. Edgar Hoover.

53 years later, stolen FBI papers would reveal that he worked with Daley to kill Fred Hampton.

He worked to start "riots." He had a paid informant at the 16th Street bombing. He had an informant giving guns to Black Panthers to start "riots." His paid informant attacked the Freedom Riders in Anniston AND Birmingham. His insiders KILLED a "rioter" at the Selma March.

It was always a war

This is not even a conspiracy theory. Nothing I've written is even disputed by historians. That's why I laugh my ass off when that white nationalist with COVID talks about "Law and Order."

And THAT IS EXACTLY WHY THEY DIDN'T TEACH YOU ABOUT THE RED SUMMER.