The riots of the summer of 1919 occurred between the months of April and October. It is now called the Red Summer. Many events preceded and caused the Red Summer. When African American soldiers returned to the United States after the war, they were "awakened politically, socially, and artistically as never before" and wanted their freedom. They had just finished fighting for the freedom of a country in which they themselves had no rights. Most of them then ended up settling in the North. This led to many job struggles. African Americans were already considered second class and below; the blacks did not want to go lower. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) then experienced a scandalous growth in numbers. Before 1914, the association had only about 9,000 members, 8,700 of whom lived in the North. By the early 1920s, they had 100,000 members nationwide and the majority of them lived in the South. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay. Other events that led to the riots that summer included the era's racial strife, labor shortages, and the Great Migration. Labor shortages occurred in the industrial cities that benefited from World War I in the North and Midwest, and they occurred because of men leaving for the war. When they left, the United States stopped European immigration. The labor shortage gave rise to the Great Migration. “At least 500,000 African Americans left the South to settle in cities in the North and Midwest.” Other reasons they left the South were Jim Crow laws, segregation in schools, and lack of job opportunities. Racial conflict arose when white workers living in Northern and Midwestern cities did not want to have African American competitors. The Red Summer consisted of approximately twenty-five anti-black riots that occurred in many different states across the United States. although there were many riots, federal troops did not help. In fact, they joined forces with whites against African Americans. Some passing white African Americans joined white crowds as spies to obtain information. The riots occurred between April and October 1919. The worst of the riots occurred in Chicago, Illinois; Washington DC; and Elaine, Arkansas. The week of July 27 to August 3, 1919 will always be remembered as one of the worst riots of the Red Summer. On July 27, a black man named Eugene Williams was stoned and drowned in Lake Michigan. He was swimming there with his friends and had accidentally crossed the boundary between blacks and whites. The white men on the beach threw stones at him and he drowned. This sparked even more fighting between gangs and mobs than there had been before. Between July 27 and August 3, fifteen white people and 23 black people died in Chicago alone. Then-Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley was also a gang leader. The gang was called the Hamburg Athletic Club. They played sports but were definitely a gang. Members of the Hamburg Athletic Club were the ones who started the race riots that week. Of course, since Mayor Daley was the leader of the club, he wouldn't stop the riots. In just one week, it is estimated that more than a thousand families were left homeless, more than five hundred people were injured, and more than fifty people were killed.After that, there were housing shortages and even more labor disputes and post-war unemployment. In Washington, D.C., on July 19, 1919, a black man was accused of sexually assaulting a woman who was the wife of a Navy man. When the news reached the white men who were sailors, marines, and soldiers hanging around downtown Washington, DC, they were not happy. Many white men began beating African Americans at random. They took them out of the trams at random and off the sidewalks to beat them. Late at night, a crowd of white men descended on the southwest Washington, DC area. They took their lead pipes, clubs and pieces of wood into a predominantly black neighborhood to beat them. Eventually, they not only began to go to their neighborhoods, but they also beat them in the central market and in front of the White House. The local police did nothing. The next night, African Americans began to fight back. At the end of the fighting, fifty-five people died or were seriously injured. Elaine, Arkansas, has also been very violent in another part of the country. Elaine's African American sharecroppers were very unhappy with the low wages they received for doing their work. They met in a small church on September 30, 1919 with a lawyer who had come from Little Rock. They were trying to organize a union so they could express their worries and concerns to the planters. That night, white men discovered him and shot up the church at eleven o'clock in the evening. There were about three or four hundred white men shooting. The sharecroppers knew they were at risk when they encountered each other and were prepared to fight back. This lasted until the next day. More than two hundred people died. They then shared their proposal with the planters. The planters opposed their organization. These three examples represent only a small part of everything that happened during the summer of 1919. There were over twenty-five major riots and even more smaller, less recognizable riots. Many homes of black families were burned. Throughout the summer, of all those who died, more than 60% were black. After all the major riots were over, whites wanted to pass official segregation laws. Woodrow Wilson blamed white people for all this, but he didn't do anything about it either. In Chicago, however, residents organized the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. The organization consisted of six white men and six black men. These twelve men spoke on many different topics and filed a complaint brief. Many different issues, including African Americans "denied the right to vote in the South, trapped in a sharecropping system that prevented economic mobility, excluded from countless workplaces, denigrated as biologically and culturally inferior, subject harassment and violence, and relegated to segregated institutions that were visibly inferior to their white counterparts” – were all part of the bill. The NAACP is still functioning today. They work on many cases with African Americans because everyone is still not equal. During that summer, the police either participated in the killing of black people or they saw what was happening and did nothing to try to stop it. Today in the news there can be a lot of police brutality because it targets African Americans rather than looking at everyone the same. The police are not the only ones to do this. Take Stephon Clark, for example. He was in his grandmother's garden when he was shot by.