The 1917 massacre in East St. Louis, Illinois, in which at least forty blacks were murdered, was a prelude to the terrible years after the war. The summer of 1919 was known as the Red Summer, partly because of fears that communism was creeping into America as black citizens demanded equal rights, and partly because of the carnage in more than thirty towns and cities consumed by race riots that took hundreds of lives. Located primarily in the South and West, the rioters echoed the idea that black equality meant communism. As President Woodrow Wilson put it: “The American Negro returning from
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