olence was prompted in large part by the return
of African-American veterans from World War I.
Evidence of African-American patriotism and en-
trepreneurship, coupled with increasingly out-
spoken calls for racial justice, prompted many
whites to resent African-American success and po-
tential. In addition, the violence was prompted by
white workers who resented what they regarded as
black encroachment on their jobs. The Great Mi-
gration period, which resulted in thousands of
African Americans relocating from the South to
the North, intensified competition for jobs and
housing. Violent race riots ensued.
Cities such as Baltimore, CHICAGO, Houston,
Little Rock, New Orleans, NEWYORK, and WASH-
INGTON, D.C., all saw major rioting and civil dis-
obedience during the summer of 1919. Riots began
with individual acts of violence such as the stoning
of Eugene Williams in Chicago as he tried to swim
ashore at the 29th Street Beach. When police re-
fused to arrest the murderer, five days of rioting en-
sued. Some 38 people died, and nearly 300 were
wounded. In Elaine, Arkansas, African-American
sharecroppers were attacked by some 1,000 white
men and army soldiers after they protested unfair
compensation by plantation owners for their crops.
According to Grif Stockley, the African-American
death toll during the brutal massacre that historian
David Levering Lewis has characterized as an inci-
dent of “collective barbarism” may have been as
high as 856.
The Red Summer of 1919 was not the only
period of sustained and widespread violence during
the Harlem Renaissance period. Two years later,
the Tulsa Race Riot left between 300 and 3,000
African Americans dead and 7,800 homeless, and
more than 600 African-American businesses in
ruins. The cohesive and prosperous Tulsa commu-
nity known as Black Wall Street was ransacked,
bombed by air, and dynamited by whites.
Bibliography
Stockley, Grif. Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Mas-
sacres of 1919.Fayetteville: University of Arkansas,
2001.
Tuttle, William Jr. Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer
of 1919.Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
Williams, Lee, and Lee Williams, II. Anatomy of Four Race
Riots: Racial Conflict in Knoxville, Elaine (Arkansas),
Tulsa, and Chicago, 1919–1921.Hattiesburg: Univer-
sity and College Press of Mississippi, 1972.Reid, Ira De Augustine(1901–1968)
An eminent sociologist, educator, veteran, Quaker,
activist, and OPPORTUNITYeditor known for his
invaluable research on African-American life and
experience. Born in Clifton Forge, Virginia, Reid
was the son of Daniel Augustine, a Baptist minis-
ter, and his wife, Willie Roberta James Reid. He
married Gladys Russell Scott in the fall of 1925.
They adopted a daughter, Enid Harriet. In 1958,
two years after his wife Gladys passed away, Reid
married Anne Cooke. He died in Bryn Mawr,
Pennsylvania, of emphysema in the fall of 1968.
He spent most of his childhood in Harrisburg
and PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania. When his father
was transferred to Savannah, Georgia, during Reid’s
high school years, Reid attended Morehouse
Academy in ATLANTA, the only Georgia high school
available to African Americans. He returned to At-
lanta after his World War I military service. He at-
tended MOREHOUSECOLLEGEat the urging of its
president, JOHNHOPE, and graduated in 1922. He
hoped to pursue additional studies at the UNIVER-
SITY OFCHICAGObut attended only briefly before
returning home to his family, who by then were liv-
ing in West Virginia. He eventually resumed master’s
degree studies at the University of Pittsburgh and in
1925 received his degree in sociology. In 1939 he
earned his Ph.D. in sociology from COLUMBIAUNI-
VERSITY. That year, as a JULIUSROSENWALDFEL-
LOWSHIPwinner, he traveled to England and studied
at the London School of Economics.
Reid’s affiliation with the NATIONALURBAN
LEAGUEbegan in 1924 when he won a fellowship
from the Pittsburgh Urban League. He then joined
the staff of the New York Urban League as an indus-
trial secretary. In 1928 Reid, whose research had
been published in Opportunity,the official Urban
League publication, succeeded CHARLESS. JOHN-
SON, with whom he had worked closely as a re-
search assistant, as research director and
Opportunity editor. Reid held the position until
1934, when he joined the faculty at ATLANTAUNI-
VERSITY, where he later became head of the sociol-
ogy department and editor of the Atlanta
University–based scholarly journal Phylon: The At-
lanta University Review of Race and Culture.Reid, Ira De Augustine 445