August 1919

In the aftermath of the 1919 Chicago Race Riot, Governor Frank Lowden appointed a biracial Chicago Commission on Race Relations that spent two years investigating the causes. Its 1922 report, 'The Negro in Chicago,' documented in exhaustive detail the discrimination in employment, housing, schools, and the criminal justice system that created the conditions for the riot. It was one of the first government documents to treat systemic racism as a policy problem requiring systemic solutions — though its recommendations were almost entirely ignored.

John Shillady, the white executive secretary of the NAACP, traveled to Austin, Texas to protest official attempts to shut down the Texas NAACP chapter. He was seized on the street by a mob that included a county judge and a constable, and severely beaten. Texas authorities refused to prosecute. The federal government took no action. Shillady wrote: 'I am less confident than heretofore of the speedy success of the NAACP's full program and of the probability of overcoming, within a reasonable period, the forces opposed to Negro equality.' He resigned as executive secretary shortly after.

During the Red Summer of 1919, white mobs attacked Black residents of Knoxville, Tennessee over two days following the arrest of a Black man accused of killing a white woman. Two people were killed and the National Guard deployed. White soldiers and civilians ransacked Black businesses and homes in the Vine Hill neighborhood. The riot fit the pattern of Red Summer violence: war veterans, racial anxieties, labor competition, and inflammatory newspaper coverage combining to produce mass anti-Black violence.