1919 ★^767Violence was not confined to the North. In the year after the war ended,
seventy- six persons were lynched in the South, including several returning
black veterans wearing their uniforms. In Phillips County, Arkansas, attacks on
striking black sharecroppers by armed white vigilantes left as many as 200 per-
sons dead and required the intervention of the army to restore order. The worst
race riot in American history occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, when more
than 300 blacks were killed and over 10,000 left homeless after a white mob,
including police and National Guardsmen, burned an all- black section of the
city to the ground. The Tulsa riot erupted after a group of black veterans tried
to prevent the lynching of a youth who had accidentally tripped and fallen on a
white female elevator operator, causing rumors of rape to sweep the city.
The Rise of Garveyism
World War I kindled a new spirit of militancy. The East St. Louis riot of 1917
inspired a widely publicized Silent Protest Parade on New York’s Fifth Ave-
nue in which 10,000 blacks silently carried placards reading, “Mr. President,
Why Not Make America Safe for Democracy?” In the new densely populated
black ghettos of the North, widespread support emerged for the Universal
Negro Improvement Association, a movement for African independence
and black self- reliance launched by Marcus Garvey, a recent immigrant
from Jamaica. Freedom for Garveyites meant national self- determination.
Blacks, they insisted, should enjoy the same internationally recognized iden-
tity enjoyed by other peoples in the aftermath of the war. “Everywhere we
hear the cry of freedom,” Garvey proclaimed in 1921. “We desire a freedom
that will lift us to the common standard of all men,... freedom that will give
us a chance and opportunity to rise to the fullest of our ambition and that we
cannot get in countries where other men rule and dominate.” Du Bois and
other established black leaders viewed Garvey as little more than a demagogue.
They applauded when the government deported him after a conviction for
mail fraud. But the massive following his movement achieved testified to the
sense of betrayal that had been kindled in black communities during and after
the war.
1919
A Worldwide Upsurge
The combination of militant hopes for social change and disappointment with
the war’s outcome was evident far beyond the black community. In the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics (or Soviet Union), as Russia had been renamed
Why was 1919 such a watershed year for the United States and the world?