We Are Living in a Red Spring
A rash of racist violence against African Americans has hit the United States. Across the land, African Americans and left organizations attempt to organize, or even fight back. Meanwhile, a pandemic ravages the country and the world. International crises further threaten to tear the nation apart.
This was the state of things in the summer of 1919.
The United States reeled from the “Red Summer” riots, where hundreds of African Americans were slain in cities and small towns alike. Many of the “riots” were little more than anti-black pogroms, waged in response to growing demands for civil rights, labor rights, and adequate housing. This all came as the nation struggled to return to a peacetime economy amid international uncertainty, and the influenza pandemic — popularly known as the “Spanish Flu” — pummeled the country. Ultimately, 675,000 Americans would die from influenza, part of over 50 million deaths worldwide.
Historians tend to say that history doesn’t repeat itself. But, in this case, it does feel like it rhymes.
When I began working on this piece last week, people across the nation were outraged at the latest on-camera murder of an African American. Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed in the South Georgia city of Brunswick earlier this year while out for a run. His killers told the authorities that they feared Arbery fit the description of a local burglar and argued they were simply defending themselves under Georgia law — an argument supported by the local district attorney, who refused to pursue the case. (Police later arrested two men, charging them with murder and aggravated assault.)
Since then, in a radically short amount of time, additional killings of African Americans — men and women — at the hands of police have pushed a long-running debate about racism and policing to a possible breaking point. On Thursday, protesters in Minneapolis torched a police station following the on-camera killing of a forty-six-year-old black man, George Floyd, and seven people were shot in Louisville during protests following the murder of a twenty-six-year-old black woman, Breonna Taylor, by plainclothes police. On Friday and Saturday, demonstrations exploded across the country as the conflagration continued in Minneapolis.