Chapter XLVI
1. Whites riot against blacks in Washington DC in 1919.
2. The rampage by about 400 whites initially drew only scattered resistance in the black community, and the police were nowhere to be seen.
3. When the Metropolitan Police Department finally arrived in force, its white officers arrested more blacks than whites, sending a clear signal about their sympathies.
4. It was only the beginning.
5. The white mob - whose actions were triggered in large part by weeks of sensational newspaper accounts of alleged sex crimes by a "Negro fiend" - unleashed a wave of violence that swept over the city for four days.
6. Nine people were killed in brutal street fighting, and an estimated 30 more would die eventually from their wounds.
7. More than 150 men, women and children were clubbed, beaten and shot by mobs of both races.
8. Several Marine guards and six D.C. policemen were shot, two fatally.
9. The Washington riot was one of more than 20 that took place that summer.
10. With rioting in Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, Tenn., Charleston, S.C., and other cities, the bloody interval came to be known as "the Red Summer."
11. Unlike virtually all the disturbances that preceded it - in which white-on-black violence dominated - the Washington riot of 1919 was distinguished by strong, organized and armed black resistance, foreshadowing the civil rights struggles later in the century.
12. Perhaps the nations deadliest racial confrontation begin in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
13. The exact number of people killed in the riot, which destroyed a 30-square-block area of north Tulsa known as Greenwood, a primarily black neighborhood, was never determined.
14. Newspaper accounts at the time varied, with some reporting as many as 76 dead. But some historians, citing survivors' accounts, have put the figure as high as 300.
15. Blacks here have long maintained that whites used airplanes to bomb homes, churches and businesses in north Tulsa.
16. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that there were more than one thousand major incidents in which many were killed from this time to the beginning of the 21st Century, and hundreds of thousands of racially motivated attacks over the same period.