A global pandemic has begun to ease off leaving many thousands dead and the economy in tatters — and civil unrest with racist underpinnings breaks out across the country.
It was 1919. They called it the “red summer.”
The parallels between the summer of 1919 and the summer of 2020 are, according to Connecticut State Historian Walt Woodward, “One of the situations where there is a real resonance between the past and the present.”
The current coronavirus pandemic has been often compared to the influenza outbreak of 1918 and 1919, though there are some important distinctions. The death toll from the so-called Spanish Flu, for example, far outpaces the likely track of COVID-19.
Likewise, there are some important distinctions but also many parallels between the post-pandemic “race riots” (as they were called) of 1919 and the current ongoing protests against police brutality.
There had been a series of white-led raids of Black communities — including a month of fighting in Connecticut — when, in late July of 1919, a Black teenager was stoned to death while swimming in an area of Lake Michigan designated white-only, as The New York Times reported back then.
Police refused to charge the attackers, and the violent clashes lasted for two weeks.
Between Jan. 1, 1919, and October of the same year, The Times tracked “38 race riots and clashes in cities and other communities in various parts of the country.”
The flu pandemic, the so-called “red summer” race riots of 1919 and World War I are integrally connected, as historian and author Kenneth C. Davis said.
“I think absolutely the Spanish Flu had something to do with the red summer,” said Davis, author of “More Deadly Than War: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War.” “I don't want to overstate that it was the pandemic, but I don't think you can disassociate or disconnect anything about the period from 1918 to 1919, 1920, from the flu and the war, because they're completely interconnected.”
Soldiers return with disease
The Spanish Flu spread so easily, Davis said, because the priority had been on winning the war. Soldiers contracted the flu, and brought it back to military bases back home.
“In 1918 scientists and doctors were ignored. Sometimes the advice they were giving to politicians was ignored at great peril to the public health,” he said. “In 1917, 1918, the priority was winning the war. And that meant, keep pushing soldiers into the training camps, even though they were the breeding grounds for the disease. Keep pushing those soldiers onto the troop ships to go overseas. Even though the doctors said you have to slow this down.”
That’s why the first cases of Spanish Flu in Connecticut were identified in New London.
“New London in 1918 was a major hub of military activity,” said Woodward. “There were a tremendous number of military personnel on duty in New London.”
The first case in Connecticut of Spanish Flu was identified at the Naval base in New London in September 1918. By the end of the month there were hundreds of identified cases and, from there, the virus spread west through the state.
“It certainly was the epicenter in the way that New York City or Rockland County was at the beginning of the coronavirus,” Woodward said, noting that New London was also “one of the early places where these riots broke out.
The virus had begun to abate in May 1919 when clashes between Black and white sailors spilled onto the streets of New London.
“Black seamen reported that white sailors attacked them, while white navy men accused the black sailors of lying in wait for them after dark as they made their way across the Long Cove Bridge,” said Jan Voogt, author of “Race Riots and Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919.”
When police arrested two white sailors, others raided a hotel where Black sailors were known to hang out.
“The white sailors threw a group of hotel patrons into the street and beat them severely,” Voogt said in an email. “A fierce battle ensued on Bank Street that the town’s entire police force and fire department could not stop, so the authorities called in the Marines.”
Concurrent with the war and the flu, the United States was going through some cultural growth. The “great migration” brought as many as 450,000 Black families from the south to work in urban centers up north.
White soldiers returning from war found their jobs held by African Americans.
“White people, especially working-class people and military men facing demobilization, they're the ones most threatened by this,” Woodward said.
At the same time, Black soldiers who fought overseas were not prepared for the racism waiting for them back home.
“They had found a new sense of freedom over there,” according to Woodward. “A lot of those soldiers came back and they weren't ready to accept second-class citizenship again.”
Davis referred to a well-known quote from W.E.B. DuBois: “We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why,” DuBoise wrote in May 1919.
“We forget how really, really racist America was in 1919 and 1920 and going forward,” Davis said. “You can't separate the sense of fear and anxiety that people felt between the war and the flu striking together at this moment in history, and when people are afraid and anxious, they strike out in fear.”
Xenophobia and the ‘red scare’
The summer of 1919 was called the “red summer” because of the blood but also because of the threat of Communism.
Though white people largely instigated the 1919 race riots, they were blamed on Communists and anarchists, who were supposedly inciting the Black community to violence according to Cameron McWhirter.
McWhirter, author of “Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America,” said he sees parallels to today.
Propaganda at the time suggested that “Clearly the anarchists are circulating among the African American community and starting trouble. It set up that whole situation throughout the 20th century,” McWhirter said. “When people started accusing antifa of causing all this violence I definitely saw parallels.”
At the same time, there had been growing xenophobia and racism during and prior to the flu pandemic, according to Davis.
“You have a tremendous rise of the Ku Klux Klan,” he said. “You have, in this period, the most restrictive anti immigration laws ever passed in American history or passed shortly afterwards. So you have a tremendously conservative mood in the country, looking inwards, keeping out the other, keeping out the strange, keeping out all the things that bring diseases.”
In fact, Davis said Black people were blamed for the flu, in the early days of the pandemic.
Then, as now, Black communities were hit harder by the pandemic, though that wasn’t the case in the first wave of influenza. “The black population (which were expected to have higher influenza morbidity and mortality) had lower morbidity and mortality than the white population during the autumn of 1918,” according to a 2019 report published by the National Institutes of Health.
That changed as the disease continued to spread, with Black communities suffering more from the Spanish Flu in later waves than their white neighbors.
“When you look, for instance, at Chicago, where the red summer was very bad, public health officials early on had blamed the great influx of African Americans into Chicago, the northern migration,” Davis said. “They blamed this for the spread of many diseases. They said that these Negroes coming into Chicago were bringing disease with them.”
Responses to stress
While there may be similarities between the summers of 1919 and 2020 in both racial tensions and disease, one must be careful to draw too many parallels, McWhirter said.
“There are parallels to how humans react to crisis,” he said. “This is a flash point because people are frustrated, stressed out, this becomes yet another pressure point.”
Woodward said the two crises — the war and the pandemic — had a significant psychological effect on the nation.
“More Connecticut residents died in the pandemic of 1918 than in any war they had ever fought,” he said. “At the moment of victory, there is a second event.”
Davis, too, linked the psychological effects of the war, the changing economy, the pandemic and the red summer, though he said it comes down to looking for a way to place blame.
“I think what happens, between the flu and the war, is America had this tremendous feeling of wanting to isolate and wanting to keep out the things that were dangerous, that were coming from somewhere else,” he said. “We always have, even today, we have a knack for blaming somebody for disease. Viruses, of course, know no race, no color, no creed, no nationality, they don't have passports.”