The SS Espagne docked at Pier 57 in New York harbor early on the morning of July 15. One of the first passengers to disembark was William Monroe Trotter. And one of the first to recognize the now renowned African-American as he appeared at the top of the ship’s ramp was a man who had been waiting for Trotter all morning long. Like the others crowding the pier that day, this man had been standing for many hours in anticipation of a ship that was now a day late. Watching closely for the moment Trotter came ashore, he appeared, like the others, to be awaiting the arrival of a close friend or a relative. And although he knew as much about the object of his attention as a friend might know, he was neither friend nor relative.
As Trotter walked down the ramp, he scanned the clusters of people on the pier in anticipation of spotting a few familiar faces. His newspaper in Boston, The Guardian, had posted a notice informing its readers about his departure from France and asking them to pray for his journey to be safe and swift. But because the ship was a day late, he wasn’t expecting a welcoming committee. As he moved closer to the crowd, though, he recognized two ministers he knew from New York, a professor from his alma mater, Harvard, a colleague from The Guardian, and a journalist from the Chicago Defender. After the usual handshaking, hat tipping, and whispered greetings, these men escorted Trotter to a waiting taxi that whisked him away to a reception at 134th Street in Harlem, the home of the president of New York’s black Civic League. As the cab drove away from the pier, the man who had been waiting the longest for Trotter but whom Trotter did not notice entered a cab parked directly behind Trotter’s Harlem-bound cab. This man would never nod his head in approval or tip his hat at Trotter. In fact, Trotter would never make his acquaintance. For this man’s job was to stay in Trotter’s shadow and to send a full report of Trotter’s first days back from France to the Negro Subversion division of Military Intelligence.
Despite Trotter’s two months in Paris, Major Walter Loving never stopped gathering information about Trotter. Loving knew exactly what ship Trotter was on and when it had departed from Brest and when it would dock in New York. His agent followed Trotter to the address in Harlem and then waited outside until early evening, when the reception moved to a more public arena at the nearby A.M.E. Zion Church on West 137th Street. The next day, the agent sent a report to Loving, who then sent a memo to the director of military intelligence, Churchill, offering his boss an update on Trotter, who was now home. The memo began with news of the large reception and banquet held in Trotter’s honor, which did not break up until 1:30 A.M. The agent had informed Loving that Trotter spoke that night about his experiences as a cook in getting to France on the SS Yarmouth and his exploits after his arrival in Paris. “But he has reserved the full story,” the memo read, “until July 23rd [the lecture actually took place on the 27th] when he is to appear before a large public audience in New York. As the people know the method Mr. Trotter employed to get to France and have read the many cable reports in the daily press of his activities there, there is general anxiety to hear him speak and the meeting of July 23rd will no doubt be a monster affair. A full report of that meeting will be made.” Sent on the 16th, the memo would arrive on Churchill’s desk on the morning of July 19.
Trotter was a high-maintenance citizen from the government’s point of view, with a set-in-stone profile: Militant. Unstoppable. Dangerous. Like a spark to tinder, Trotter was an agitator who had the capability to inflame the masses. His recent articles and perhaps the attention he received in France had raised the level of surveillance planned for his return, though the government had been tailing him for a long while. Trotter was the one, after all, who had so aggressively protested segregation of federal offices in the District of Columbia at the beginning of Wilson’s first term; the one who could articulate the frustrations and angers of his race and who had the conduit to the public (his newspaper) to do so; and the one who had written in that newspaper, The Guardian: “Beyond a certain point the Negro will not show his back to his pursuers. He will turn and fight.” The Guardian had published in its July 19 issue an article covering a fiery lecture by Boston’s Rev. M. A. Shaw, who called attention to a recent lynching, in Laurel, Mississippi, in which a black woman was hanged, burned, and disemboweled for saying that if she could find the names of the men who had lynched her husband she would tell the sheriff. No black man or woman was safe anywhere in America, Shaw said, whether it was Boston Common or Mississippi. The headline read “Calls on Negroes to Kill Lynchers by Wholesale.” Now, considering what had happened at Charleston in May and at Longview in June, what Trotter had done in Paris in May, June, and July, and what his newspaper was publishing in July, to trail Trotter had become a government imperative.
On the 19th when Churchill received Loving’s latest memo, stamped “confidential,” Loving was working on his last summary report to Churchill. This would be Loving’s magnum opus, the culmination of one year of spying on African-Americans whose speeches, articles, and ideas Loving and his colleagues believed to be radical and incendiary. Loving as well as his agents had attended meetings of black organizations, scrutinized their publications, analyzed speeches, and made lists of the most suspicious black men and women. And they had done this to determine how deeply the Bolsheviks had penetrated the soul of black America. What were the exact sources of the revolutionary propaganda? Which organizations and individuals were most troubling? How were blacks being manipulated in the plans of the Bolsheviks? Were the Bolsheviks behind the riot at Charleston? What about Longview?
Loving’s report would undoubtedly answer such questions but it appeared that his goal in writing it was a subtle yet very revealing variation on his assignment, perhaps reflecting the fact that he did not come up with the exact results the government had expected. The report, he noted in the preface, was not meant to describe the various organizations through which “radical sentiment has been diffused.” It was not a summary of the many reports he had sent to the MID director over the past year. Loving’s goal, he wrote, was to inform the government about “present conditions among the Negro population with regard to radical sentiment and propaganda.” Although he would discuss certain organizations, publications, and individuals, this would not be the point of his report. He would simply use such facts to “throw light upon the causes underlying [the recent] outbreaks and point the way to some remedial action to relieve the growing tension between the races.” He would show that there was in fact “radical sentiment among Negroes” and that it had intensified during the past four years. But his report would not confirm what the government suspected and perhaps even wanted to hear: that the causes for racial tensions were Bolshevists, socialists, and the Industrial Workers of the World.
In his report Loving did include commentary on Bolshevists, socialists, and the IWW and the fact that there were blacks involved with all three. And he would note the organizations that he believed encouraged radical notions among blacks: the League of Democracy, an organization of at least 150,000 black veterans of the recent war; the NAACP; Trotter’s National Equal Rights League; A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen’s National Association for the Promotion of Labor Unionism Among Negroes; and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association—all of which Loving discussed. He identified four “black and radical” publications: The Messenger, a monthly edited by two black socialists, Owen and Randolph, and also the organ of their League of Democracy; The Crusader, a New York monthly edited by a West Indian, Cyril V. Briggs; The Challenge, a monthly, also out of New York; and The Crisis. And he included a section called “Individual Agitators and Propagandists,” in which he devoted one full page to Trotter, calling him an “advanced radical” and noting that his influence had been “on the wane” until he figured out a clever way to get to France and then obtained endless publicity from the French press. But Loving made it clear that none of these groups or publications or individuals were the causes for the recent disturbances.
What “set the spark” that had released the pent up feelings of the masses, he wrote, was the awakened spirit of the black soldiers returning from France. After experiencing the free social intermingling in France, the discriminating restraints back home were “more galling” than ever before. While the soldiers were in France, Loving stressed, prejudice and discrimination were intensifying back in America to the extent that when the victorious soldiers went home, some of them, while wearing the uniform of their country, were burned and lynched. That the “bitter feeling of returning soldiers” would spread to the civilian black population was “but natural,” he wrote.
Expending few words on Bolshevism and socialism, Loving moved from the shock of returning soldiers to the economic reasons for blacks’ despair. He described the migrations of blacks coming up North from the South during the war to fill the jobs vacated by white enlisted men, how the white soldiers wanted their jobs back and resented black men making money, buying houses in white neighborhoods, and having good jobs. Misguided white workers had become so desperate and so angry and so filled with the prejudiced propaganda, Loving wrote, that they had thrown bombs into the homes that black men worked hard to purchase during the war. “The Negro has finally decided that he has endured all that he can endure. He has decided to strike back.”
Of all parts of his report, Loving was the most strident in his discussion of segregation, which he called “a menace to public safety.” This is the real danger, he wrote. When black and white families live in the same neighborhoods, Loving wrote, they know each other, become friendly, seek the same community benefits, fight for the same rights and privileges. But living in segregated communities, blacks and whites, through lack of knowledge, become suspicious of each other and fill in the blanks of the unknown with prejudice, fear, and then anger. The “black belts” in Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, he wrote, are “a dangerous condition” that just by definition alone become war zones. Innocent whites fear stepping over the borderlines into them and innocent blacks fear leaving them. These “cities within cities” will nurture violence. Thus segregation must be stopped.
In these last weeks of July, Loving pulled together his perceptions of the black problem in America, culling from hundreds of pages of spy reports over the past year and creating a fifteen-page, single-spaced document that was more a warning than a report. In it, he cautioned his readers, who would include the director of military intelligence, the chief of staff of the War Department, and, he hoped, the president, that the situation was so dire that “The slightest occurrence may now light the magazine which has been formed by economic, psychic and social forces.”
He concluded that it wasn’t Bolshevism or socialism that was causing the problem. It was the simple, natural, logical fact that “as a whole, Negroes have resolved never again to submit to the treatment which they received in the past and any attempt to deny them such privileges and rights as they are entitled to, in common with other men, will be promptly resented. The above is a true statement of existing conditions, verified by personal observation and contact with Negroes of all classes.”
Loving would complete his report by the first of August and submit it on August 6. Between the time he was writing it and the time his bosses read it, events moved swiftly onward.
As elsewhere in the nation, the month of July in Washington was the hottest on record. On July 19, it was 98 degrees. The heat was undoubtedly a factor in what happened that day—but hardly the cause. The reasons given would range from Bolshevik propaganda, always, to an insensitive Southern administration in the White House that had segregated federal office workers in 1913, to the impact of inflammatory headlines in newspapers sensationalizing a summer crime wave in the capital—in particular, stories of black men allegedly attempting to rape white women. On Saturday, July 19, the Washington Post ran a headline about one such case: “Negroes Attack Girl…White Men Vainly Pursue.” The “attack,” the story said, involved two black men who tried to seize the umbrella of a secretary walking home from work. When she resisted, they fled. In response, the chief of police issued the order that all men “found in isolated or suspicious parts of the city after nightfall” be held for questioning. Police brought in two suspects, but without evidence or witnesses, released them. The “attacked” girl turned out to be the wife of a man who worked in the aviation division of the Department of the Navy, and thus at least two hundred sailors and marines decided to find the two black men who had allegedly assaulted her, and to lynch them. They marched into the southwest section of town and stopped every black man—and woman—they met on the street, grabbing the victims’ arms, slapping their faces, and sometimes punching them in the stomach or face. As they walked, civilians along the way joined their crusade for justice. Thus the throng of thugs and bigots grew, spreading through the streets like molten lava. But on Saturday night when the mob tried to break into a house into which a black man and his wife had fled out of fear, the local and military police intervened, dispersed the mob, and arrested two white navy men and eight black men, who were “held for investigation.” Later that night police stopped three more black men in the neighborhood. One of them fired a gun, wounding a policeman.
On Sunday, the NAACP asked the secretary of the navy to restrain the white men who had started the attack. But he did not. And then that night what everyone from William Monroe Trotter in 1913 to Ray Stannard Baker in 1916 to W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, the Chicago Defender, The Crisis, the New York Age, and even Major Loving all foretold, began to happen—an unstoppable rush of events marking the start of an unprecedented wave of black resistance in America.
On Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the Capitol and the White House, a policeman arrested a young black man on a minor charge. A mob gathered while the police waited for the paddy wagon. They snatched the black man from the police, punched him, stoned him, and slashed him. When the police recovered him, they did not arrest a single white man. Minutes later down the street, white servicemen and black civilians attacked each other. Three black men were badly injured. By early Monday morning, scuffles seemed to be breaking out everywhere in the nation’s capital. But the worst was yet to come.
That morning the Washington Post published articles on the violence of the previous weekend and included this paragraph: “It was learned that a mobilization of every available service man stationed in or near Washington or on leave here has been ordered for tomorrow evening near the Knights of Columbus hut on Pennsylvania Avenue between Seventh and Eighth Streets. The hour of assembly is 9 o’clock and the purpose is a ‘clean up’ that will cause the events of the last two evenings to pale into insignificance.”
On Monday afternoon, in Congress, a Florida legislator argued that the cause of the “riots,” as they were now termed, was that police had not been aggressive enough that summer in arresting black assailants of white women. He called for a congressional probe into the D.C. police passivity. At the same time, a New York congressman demanded that all servicemen in the region be restrained from joining the mobs. The secretary of war and the army chief of staff met to discuss a plan for using troops, if necessary, to quell what they expected would be more rioting. And blacks in Washington who read the “mobilization” story in the Post began to arm themselves. That night the rioting resumed and was far worse than the previous nights: four men killed, eleven seriously wounded. Of those fifteen, six were white policemen, one a white marine, three white civilians, and five black civilians.
On Tuesday, President Wilson met with the secretary of war, who then ordered the Washington police chief to request additional troops from Camp Meade, marines from Quantico, and sailors from two ships currently docked on the Potomac to help secure the nation’s capital. For every D.C. cop there would now be two armed military men. By Tuesday night Wilson had authorized the mobilization of about two thousand federal troops. And the wartime volunteers in Washington, who called themselves the Home Defense League, were called to action.
The black community—as Loving and all well-informed blacks and whites well knew—would not passively stand by. On Tuesday, black leaders called for protection for black prisoners, whom they learned had been beaten upon arrest, some severely. They also visited city officials, asking why blacks carrying weapons had been arrested but the whites from whom they were trying to protect themselves had not been. And they demanded a congressional investigation of police “antagonism to Negroes.” Black ministers sent out a call to all blacks to stay off the streets after dusk. And on Tuesday, at sunset, poolrooms and theaters and all gathering places were closed in black neighborhoods.
By Tuesday night, federal troops, including cavalry on horseback, and driving rain stopped the mobs from forming, though there were isolated incidents of violence in which one white member of the Home Defense League was killed and one black man fleeing from approaching officers was shot. The sound of the cavalry’s galloping horses answering urgent calls and the sight of troops on street corners continued through Wednesday night. By Thursday the danger seemed to have passed, at least in Washington. The total casualties: six dead and at least one hundred wounded.
Then came an onslaught of meetings, strategies, and demands to prevent future mob violence in the nation’s capital. The white solution was uniformly more security. If black insubordination was the cause, which many people believed, then suppression was the solution and fear of suppression through the presence of high-level security was an effective strategy. Local and federal law enforcement stressed the need for ongoing battalions of troops to police the city. It was imperative in a town that was also the nation’s capital and thus a gathering place for international dignitaries and a hub of high-level meetings of worldwide significance to prevent “small causes” from throwing the city “into a state of lawlessness.” The D.C. police chief and commissioner asked Congress for money to increase the number of policemen in the District and to raise their pay. Newspapers nationwide echoed their plea. As the New York Globe wrote on July 23, “There is nothing to be done but to quiet the rioters by force. We make no pretense nowadays of settling the race question; we simply keep it in abeyance.”
From the white point of view, the riots were certainly a reason to maintain segregation in all cities in America. The overly confident, uppity black man who in Washington might now own his home and collect a high wage must be kept in his place and kept separate from his white counterpart. Only segregation would prevent such uprisings. The Brooklyn Eagle ran the headline “Race War in Washington Shows Black and White Equality Not Practical.” Even the New York Times reported “the negroes, before the great war, were well behaved…even submissive” and nostalgically looked back on the prewar state of the nation’s capital. “Bolshevist agitation has been extended among the Negroes,” wrote the Times, “and it is bearing its natural and inevitable fruit.”
Black leaders saw it differently, from whites and from each other. Some, such as Emmett Scott of Howard University in Washington, blamed the white mobs. And although they conceded that the black retaliation was abhorrent, in their opinion, it was natural, to be expected. It was necessary for survival. To stop it before it escalated and spread to other cities, interracial groups must be formed to create a riot-prevention strategy based on “mutual sharing of the rewards of American life, rather than on Negro subordination.”
Others, such as Trotter, claimed that the only way to prevent riots was to end “the mobocratic lyncherized system” of segregation, discrimination, and prejudice in America. There would be violence until that was accomplished. The Wilson administration was in large part to blame for segregating federal workers, placing black workers under the supervision of white Southern bosses, sidestepping the urgent need for federal legislation against lynching, and not addressing Washington’s postwar employment issues. For example, during the war the federal government added jobs that were filled largely with whites who abandoned private jobs to take them. Many of those private sector jobs were filled by blacks who had left federal jobs because of discrimination or had come up from the South because of job opportunities. The black skilled laborers in the private sector ended up making more money than the white government workers. Witnessing a rise in prosperity among blacks in Washington angered whites who had shifted from private to public work or had just returned from the war. Jealous and resentful, they wanted to put blacks in their place at a time when the black community was feeling more deserving of better treatment than ever before.
The NAACP favored an end to segregation and championed a federal law to criminalize the act of lynching, but in the aftermath of the Washington riot, it zeroed in on two issues: racial prejudice among the police, and irresponsibility on the part of the media. Du Bois was quoted in several newspapers as saying that it was clear that the Washington police did not try to stop the rioting until whites began to get hurt. James Weldon Johnson, of the NAACP staff and New York Age columnist, said that the riot would have ended on Saturday night, after the first outbreak, if the Washington police officers had had “the courage to enforce the law against the white man as well as against the colored.” If black men felt unprotected by the law, then they would of course prepare to protect themselves, wrote Johnson.
On July 25, John R. Shillady, the NAACP’s executive secretary, wrote a letter to A. Mitchell Palmer asking if the Justice Department was planning to take action against the Washington Post for publishing the “mobilization notice.” Shillady, who was white—and whose work against racism would soon, in late August, result in a beating at the hands of a white mob in Texas—believed that that seemingly simple paragraph in the Saturday, July 19, Post had facilitated the mobilization of a white mob and had caused such fear and such anger among blacks already angry and afraid that it alone had incited the riot. Numerous black leaders agreed. Palmer said no.
On July 26, the Reverend J. G. Robinson of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, sent a letter to President Wilson, published the next day in the Sunday New York Times, in which he reminded the president of his and other black Americans’ loyalty during the recent war; pleaded for the president to support federal legislation to outlaw lynchings and to allow black men to serve on juries; and warned that before his people would submit themselves again to the injustices of white mobs, “the white men will have to kill more of them than the combined number of soldiers that were slain in the Great World War.”
That Sunday was the day of Trotter’s “monster affair” at the Palace Casino in New York City, which attracted an audience of more than three thousand men and women, mostly black. A long list of black speakers, including two ministers, two professors, one lawyer, and one doctor, preceded the guest of honor. Their master of ceremonies introduced them all by saying that they would, in their presentations, “assail every form of hypocrisy and injustice arrayed against the Race.” So enthusiastic was the audience that they frequently cried out their endorsements of the sentiments of the speakers, and at times they rose up from their seats cheering the campaign to claim their rights and liberties as full-fledged Americans. Some screamed at the white reporters with words and phrases they wanted to see in the next day’s papers. Write about the black man’s gratitude toward France for its fair treatment of black soldiers! they shouted. Write about the shock of returning home to a lawless land! “Fiery Orators Condemn Unjust Treatment, Predicting a New Era,” read the headline in the Chicago Defender.
Trotter’s speech, which made it into Loving’s final report—as Trotter’s shadow loyally attended the lecture—began: “In the same week of my arrival home my heart is made to swell within me because the new spirit in my own race refused to be shot down in the capital of Lincoln [Washington, D.C.]. Unless the white American behaves, he will find that in teaching our boys to fight for him he was starting something that he will not be able to stop.”
Trotter shared his story of finding his way to Paris as a cook’s assistant and of getting his petition to the peace conference published in sixty-two daily newspapers worldwide. Although President Wilson would not meet with him, he told them, he did visit Wilson’s Parisian residence and he left a missive for the president “representing the voice of 12 million colored people.” The MID agent shadowing him reported: “Mr. Trotter was most enthusiastically applauded and $234.00 was collected to help him carry on his work.”