As
soldiers, they had been taught to stand up and fight like men. In
Europe, they had been treated more like men than ever before.
The attitude of submissiveness which had been stamped on the
Afro-American community by its slave mentality and which had
been reinforced by the philosophy of Booker T. Washington was
undermined by this new sense of manhood. When a wave of two
dozen riots swept America in the summer of 1919, Negroes fought
back as they had not done in East St. Louis. Riots occurred in
places as diverse as Longview, Texas, Washington, D.C., Omaha,
Nebraska, and Chicago, Illinois.
The worst riot of that bloody summer occurred in Chicago. It
began when a young Negro boy, swimming in Lake Michigan,
crossed into a section of the water which had been traditionally
reserved for whites. White youths began throwing stones at him,
and he drowned. A later investigation showed that he had not
been hit by any of these rocks. Nevertheless, this incident
triggered the tense racial situation in Chicago into an
explosion. Fighting broke out all over the city. Whites pulled
Negroes from streetcars and beat them openly.
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