NATION'S CAPITAL HELD AT MERCY OF THE MOB

THE YEAR WAS 1919. THE MOB WAS WHITE. AND THE RESULTING RIOT, A PAINFUL CHAPTER IN WASHINGTON'S HISTORY, FORESHADOWED THE GREAT CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLES TO COME

NO ONE KNOWS PRECISELY HOW IT STARTED, BUT ON A STEAMY Saturday night in July, 70 years ago this week, the word began to spread among the pool halls and saloons of downtown Washington. A black suspect, questioned in an attempted sexual assault on a white woman, had been released by the police. The woman was the wife of a military man. So the message was passed among hundreds of white soldiers and sailors -- many on weekend liberty from nearby military installations in Maryland and Virginia -- to meet at the Knights of Columbus hut at Pennsylvania Avenue and Eighth Street NW. A predominantly white neighborhood called "Murder Bay," known for its bars and brothels, provided additional recruits. The crowd planned to march into the city's "black belt" in Southwest to catch -- and punish -- the perpetrator of the alleged assault.

The mob crossed the tree-covered Mall, picking up clubs, lead pipes and pieces of lumber as it moved. Near Ninth and D streets SW, it came across a surprised Charles Linton Ralls, who was out for a walk with his wife, Mary. Ralls was chased and beaten severely with clubs.

The mob then fell upon a second black man, George Montgomery, 55, who was returning home with groceries. He was also severely beaten and his skull fractured, prompting resistance by a handful of black residents. Initially, D.C. police were nowhere to be seen. When they finally did act, they arrested eight blacks and two whites, sending a clear signal about their sympathies.

The mob of white men -- whose actions that Saturday, July 19, 1919, were triggered in part by sensational newspaper accounts of alleged sex crimes by a "negro fiend" -- unleashed a tide of violence that swept over the nation's capital for four days. Nine people were killed in brutal street fighting, and many more would die later from their wounds. The final death toll approached 40, roughly three times that of the city's other major race riot in 1968, according to Constance McLaughlin Green, author of several Washington histories. An estimated 150 men, women and children were clubbed, beaten and shot by mobs of both races. Several Marines and six policemen were shot, at least two fatally.

The 1919 riot is a painful chapter of the city's past; but like much of black history, it is a largely hidden one. Washington's 1968 riot, triggered by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., is fresher in historical memory, part of an outpouring of black rage that swept the nation 21 years ago. In that case, black anger was aimed primarily at white businesses. Most of the 13 people killed were blacks trapped accidentally in burning buildings. The riot of 1919 was more like an actual race war, part of a wave of post-World War I violence that the eminent historian John Hope Franklin calls "the greatest period of interracial strife the nation ever witnessed."

Breaking out in more than 20 cities including Chicago, Charleston, S.C., Knoxville, Tenn., and Omaha, the bloody rioting of July-August 1919 came to be known as "The Red Summer." But unlike virtually all the race riots that preceded it -- in which white-on-black violence dominated -- the Washington riot of 1919 would be distinguished by strong, organized and armed black resistance, foreshadowing the great civil rights struggles later in the 20th century. Indeed, the Washington riot would mark what Franklin calls "the emergence of a new kind of Negro." THE YEAR 1919 WAS A TURBULENT and hate-filled period in America: The nation had just worked itself into a frenzy of German-hating, and suspicion of foreigners extended to all those who were considered possible Bolsheviks, not "100 percent American." There was particularly deep unrest in crowded, racially divided cities like Washington (then 75 percent white), where housing was in short supply and jobs so scarce that ex-doughboys in uniform panhandled along Pennsylvania Avenue. Unemployed whites bitterly envied the relatively few blacks who had been fortunate enough to procure such low-level federal government jobs as messengers and clerks. Many whites also resented the black "invasion" of previously segregated neighborhoods around Capitol Hill, Foggy Bottom and the old downtown.

Washington's black community was then the largest and most prosperous in the country, with a small but impressive upper class of teachers, ministers, lawyers and businessmen concentrated in the LeDroit Park neighborhood near Howard University. Many in the community were mulattoes whose lighter skin and mixed racial background made them somewhat more palatable to the white establishment. But their status, like that of all blacks, was eroding, and black Washingtonians were increasingly resentful of the growing dominance of the Jim Crow system that had been imported from the Deep South. The 1896 Supreme Court ruling Plessy v. Ferguson had legalized segregation, and the mostly unwritten rules of race essentially barred blacks from setting foot in the restaurants, hotels, barbershops, theaters, neighborhoods and schools of white Washington.

The racial makeup of Washington neighborhoods in 1919 was far different than today: Most blacks lived in old Southwest -- much of which was razed in 1960s urban renewal -- and in sections of Georgetown and Foggy Bottom. But through much of the area east of Rock Creek, Washington was an archetypal southern town, with whites living in close proximity to black domestic workers. There were good race relations in some neighborhoods, where even the local youth gangs were integrated -- but it also meant that potential adversaries were close at hand.

By that summer, racial resentment was particularly intense among Washington's several thousand returning black war veterans. They had proudly served their country in such units as the District's 1st Separate Battalion, part of the segregated Army forces that fought on the battlefields of France. These black Americans had had to fight for the right to serve, because the U.S. Army at first refused to draft blacks for any role other than laborer. They returned home hopeful that their military service would finally allow them fair treatment. Blacks who stayed in the United States also supported the war effort, purchasing Liberty bonds, giving to the Red Cross, saving food and expecting that perhaps they too had earned full partnership in American society.

Instead, they saw mounting evidence that race relations were worsening under an administration dominated by conservative southern whites brought here by Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian. Wilson's promise of a "New Freedom" had won him more black votes than any Democrat before him had received. But his administration was a cruel disappointment. Previously integrated departments such as the Post Office and the Treasury had now set up "Jim Crow corners" with separate washrooms and lunchrooms for "colored only." Wilson did nothing to stop the racism.

Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan was being revived in Maryland and Virginia. But perhaps the most vivid evidence of the rise of racial hatred by 1919 was the resurgence of lynching around the country. No fewer than 28 public lynchings of black men and women had been reported in the national media in the first six months of 1919 alone, including those of seven black veterans killed while still wearing their Army uniforms. A national crusade against lynching -- and a long, futile effort to get Wilson and other leaders to speak out and actively support a federal anti-lynching law -- became the major thrust of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, then in its first decade. WITH RACIAL TENSION ON THE RISE, WASHINGTON'S NEWS-papers made the situation worse. The 1919 riot began in part because of an unrelenting series of racially inflammatory news stories concerning alleged sexual assaults by an unknown black perpetrator upon white women. The headlines dominated the city's four daily papers -- The Post, the Times, the Herald and the Evening Star -- for more than a month. A small sampling of these July "crime wave" headlines illustrates the lynch-mob mentality that was building in the city: "13 SUSPECTS ARRESTED IN NEGRO HUNT"; "POSSES KEEP UP HUNT FOR NEGRO"; "HUNT COLORED ASSAILANT"; "NEGRO FIEND SOUGHT ANEW."

Washington's newly formed chapter of the NAACP was so concerned by the news coverage that on July 9 -- ten days before the bloodshed began -- it sent a prophetic letter to the four daily papers saying they were "sowing the seeds of a race riot by their inflammatory headlines."

Actually, according to police records, the "crime wave" of June-July 1919, up until the alleged assault that started the riot, consisted of one rape in suburban Chevy Chase, another attempted assault in Takoma Park and three or four other incidents over a period of several weeks -- including a purse-snatching and a case in which a white woman became hysterical when she encountered a black man while walking through Rock Creek Park. Police later determined that the man had been minding his own business.

On July 9, a most remarkable headline appeared on the front page of the Washington Herald: "$2,500 PRICE PUT ON HEAD OF D.C. FIEND." The Herald reported that enraged white citizens' groups, primarily from upper Northwest and Chevy Chase, were offering this reward -- enough by 1919 standards to nearly triple the annual salary of the average white city worker. Heavily armed bands of white vigilantes, including "a group of white-hooded figures," were patrolling the neighborhoods at night, stopping and questioning blacks, according to the Herald. A second headline beneath the announcement of the reward said: "D.C. POLICE FEAR RACE RIOTS WILL BREAK OUT." PRECISE DETAILS ABOUT MUCH OF THE WASHINGTON RIOT of 1919 are lost to history. The daily newspapers carried often-contradictory accounts in which the names, ages and reported activities of the participants differ markedly. What follows is based on the four daily papers -- and the only major black paper in the city at the time, the weekly Washington Bee -- as well as magazine articles, historical papers, personal journals and interviews with several native Washingtonians now in their eighties or nineties.

SATURDAY: The riot began a day after Elsie Stephnick, 22, the wife of a Navy aviation department employee, told police that two black men had tried to grab her as she approached her home at Ninth and D streets SW. Stephnick said she fought the men with her umbrella and drove them off by screaming for help. "SCREAMS SAVE GIRL FROM 2 NEGRO THUGS" read the Washington Times headline on Saturday. "NEGROES ATTACK GIRL, WHITE MEN VAINLY PURSUE" was the headline in The Washington Post.

News quickly spread that a black suspect questioned in the case had been released, and the white crowd gathered to seek revenge. Its immediate target was a man who lived near the Stephnicks; whether he was found is unclear, but the question quickly became academic as the crowd marched into Southwest and began attacking blacks on the street. The "mobbists," as the newspapers called them, were apparently encouraged by the minimal resistance from police and from the black community.

SUNDAY: The violence on the second night apparently began when a young black man was arrested on a minor charge by police, then was seized and beaten by a white mob. The crowd, including Army and Navy men, then began chasing and beating blacks along Pennsylvania Avenue between the Treasury and Seventh Street, where the giant Center Market was a major gathering spot. On G Street NW, a young black was pulled from a streetcar and beaten severely. In front of Riggs Bank, a black man was beaten with clubs and stones wrapped in handkerchiefs and was left bleeding on the street for more than 20 minutes before being taken to the Freedmen's Hospital near Howard University, where most blacks were treated.

One of black Washington's leading citizens, the late Carter G. Woodson -- Howard University professor, Harvard graduate and founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History -- was walking home that night along Pennsylvania Avenue. He recalled being startled to hear "a Negro yelling for mercy" while being pursued by a white mob. Frightened, Woodson ducked into a storefront entryway and crouched with his back to the mob before slipping away. But then he encountered a second mob: "They had caught a Negro and deliberately held him as one would a beef for slaughter, and when they had conveniently adjusted him for lynching, they shot him. I heard him groaning in his struggle as I hurried away as fast as I could without running, expecting every moment to be lynched myself."

"Sensing the failure of the police," wrote historian Lloyd Abernethy in 1963, "the mob became even more contemptuous of authority -- two Negroes were attacked and beaten directly in front of the White House." Police headquarters received riot calls that second night: more fighting near Center Market; a mob pulling blacks off streetcars at New York Avenue and Ninth Street NW; and violence up at American League Park, where the Washington Senators played, in the heart of the black community around Seventh and T streets NW.

But Sunday also saw an increase in black resistance. When a white mob reached Seventh and Florida Avenue NW, for instance, it was met by a force of more than a hundred blacks who exchanged blows with the whites and dispersed the mob.

Scores of blacks were badly injured throughout the city, but surprisingly, there were no deaths in the first two nights, largely because only a few of the rioters used guns. Even more than today, guns were readily available in Washington. Most hardware stores sold second-hand pistols along with knives, no questions asked.

MONDAY: After a weekend of violence, the all-white political establishment realized that the 700-member police department, which had not seen a disturbance like this since the Civil War, had been unable or unwilling to stop the bloodshed. Louis Brownlow, the chairman of the District Commissioners, issued an appeal to citizens: "The actions of the men who attacked innocent Negroes cannot be too strongly condemned, and it is the duty of every citizen to express his support of law and order by refraining from any inciting conversation or the repcontinued on page 36 RIOTS continued from page 21 etition of inciting rumor and tales." But a crucial event had already occurred that morning that would overwhelm Brownlow's good intention. The Washington Post published a Page One account of the riot under the headline "SCORES ARE INJURED IN MORE RACE RIOTS." The contents of this article would be singled out by the NAACP, and later by historians, as a principal cause of the riot's escalation. The Post, then the city's fourth-largest paper, was owned by the McLeans, a fabulously wealthy publishing family whose scion, Edward "Neddy" McLean, was the owner of the legendary Hope diamond. McLean had a bad drinking habit and was a rabid opponent of the city's 1917 Prohibition law, using his newspaper to crusade against the police department for enforcing it. Critics later contended that The Post had been exaggerating the "crime wave" as part of its anti-police crusade.

For whatever reason, the Monday Post went far beyond the bounds of conventional journalism. The article reported the Sunday night violence, adding that the uniformed rioters "were outspoken in their threats against the negro popula- tion of the capital {and} were loud in proclaiming their intention for the near future." Then the story lapsed into what Chalmers Roberts, a Post reporter, would describe in a history of the paper as a "highly provocative and shamefully irresponsible role."

Under the bold-faced heading, "Mobilization for Tonight.," the Monday morning story continued:

It was learned that the 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.

It was never clear how or why this fictional "mobilization" call was issued, but the "clean-up" became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Essentially, The Post had issued a call to arms for white rioters to gather, complete with the specific time and place. It was also a call to arms -- literally -- for the black community, which was beginning to equip itself with weapons.

The Parents League, a very active black middle-class citizens' group that had been formed primarily to improve the "colored schools," printed up about 50,000 copies of a "Notice to the Colored Citizens," a handbill that advised "our people, in the interest of law and order and to avoid the loss of life and injury, to go home before dark and to remain quietly and to protect themselves."

"The older people were very frightened," recalls Louise Brown, 84, a former beautician who lives in a senior citizens' home in Northwest. "I lived at 26th and I Northwest, where the streetcars came up Pennsylvania Avenue and turned . . . and I remember that day. The streetcars just stopped, and the conductors got off" because of the danger downtown. "And then this fellow from Georgetown drove through in his Cadillac and said all the women and children should get off the streets . . . We didn't know what a riot was."

Many blacks had lost confidence in the ability or willingness of the white establishment to protect them. It was later estimated that more than 500 guns were sold in the District that Monday alone, many of them to blacks who paid up to $50 apiece. Pawnshops and other gun dealers were swamped, some blacks purchased guns in Baltimore, and black veterans got out the weapons they'd brought back from France.

As a result, according to a 1963 account of the riot by Abernethy in Maryland Historical Magazine, the tide of the fighting clearly began to turn by Monday night. Four blacks in a speeding car were reported to be driving around the city firing guns at whites. The New York Age, a black newspaper, reported that machine guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and hand grenades had been placed in "high-powered cars" by several black raiding parties that shot whites. A white Marine was shot and stabbed by a black near the White House. At Fourth and N streets NW, blacks turned the tables by attacking whites on the streetcars. At Seventh and F streets NW, a black man fired into a crowd from the rear of a truck; he was killed when a detective returned fire. Another black rioter emptied his revolver into a crowded streetcar at Seventh and G, wounding two whites before taking five bullets himself in the return fire from a policeman. Ten whites and five blacks were killed or mortally wounded Monday night.

In one of the most dramatic incidents of the riot, police surrounded a home near 12th and G streets NW where there had been repeated gunfire. When police rushed the house, a teenage black girl -- who had been barricaded inside and was hiding under a bed -- shot and killed Metropolitan Police Detective Harry Wilson and seriously wounded a second detective. The girl, Carrie Minor Johnson, 17, claimed self-defense and was called a "little heroine" on the pages of the black press. But she was convicted and sent to jail for the killing.

There were largely unsung instances of courage. When the black community was besieged by rumors of an impending mob attack, a young teacher at Howard, William Stuart Nelson, who was light-skinned enough to pass for white, donned a military uniform and went downtown to scout out the movements of white mobs. As the story was later told, according to Montague Cobb, then a lad of 15, now a retired Howard professor: "Nelson heard these conspirators talking and heard of a plan to march up Seventh and T and put a machine gun in Koss's pharmacy and spray gunfire on everybody." Columns of white rioters were headed into the heart of the black community, but when blacks got word from Nelson, black snipers and mobs confronted them and prevented larger-scale bloodshed.

Henry Robinson, a historian at Morgan State University who grew up in Washington, recalls hearing family tales of the riot, including an account of how the upper-class blacks of the fashionable LeDroit Park neighborhood owed a debt to the "very rough-type blacks from old Southwest" who helped save them. The Southwest blacks had guns, and they stationed themselves around Seventh and T streets NW, Robinson was told, "and they rid the area of the lower-element whites . . . and the people of LeDroit Park owed their safety" to the low-income people who knew how to fight.

TUESDAY: As the rioting escalated, city leaders and members of Congress realized that stronger action was needed. On Tuesday President Wilson ordered the mobilization of about 2,000 troops to stop the riot -- cavalry from Fort Myer, Marines from Quantico, Army troops from Camp Meade and sailors from ships in the Potomac. City officials and businessmen closed the saloons, movie houses and billiard rooms in the neighborhoods where rioting had occurred.

Despite the warnings of community leaders and the arrival of federal troops, sporadic violence continued Tuesday night. At Ninth and M streets NW, two white volunteers in the Home Defense League confronted a black man who drew a gun and shot them, killing one and fatally wounding the other. In downtown, a large mob of whites gathered and headed toward a black neighborhood, but they were dispersed by mounted troops and by a heavy downpour. The strong summer rain persisted through the night, a fortunate happenstance that played a not-insignificant role in ending the rioting. THE AFTERMATH OF THE RIOT WAS played out in the courts, in the newspapers and in the consciousness of those who lived through it. Hundreds of peo- ple -- most of them black -- faced criminal charges. The NAACP vigorously protested the alleged beating of black prisoners and what it called the unfair nature of court proceedings. In D.C. Police Court, 46 blacks faced up to a year in prison on charges of carrying concealed weapons -- compared with only six whites. The NAACP was successful in getting many of the charges reduced, and it then tried to bring pressure in Congress for a full-scale investigation of the riot and of the city's justice system. But the move was defeated in congressional committees controlled by southerners, and no investigation was ever conducted, which caused the riot to quickly drop out of the news.

In the riot's wake, many called for stronger police protection. Others wanted to improve race relations. But white institutions, including the newspapers, were slow to change, except perhaps in becoming more fearful of stirring up racial trouble. Chalmers Roberts and Ben W. Gilbert, a former Post editor who also studied the riot, both concluded that the violence led The Post and other white-run newspapers to downplay or ignore stories with racial angles. Gilbert quoted the late night city editor John J. Riseling, who had worked on the 1919 riot story. "We were blamed for one riot, and I don't want to be blamed for another one," Riseling would explain as he cut or spiked a story dealing with the black community.

Historian Green concluded that the long-term consequence of the riot in Washington was that it "reinforced white prejudices, deepened the obliviousness of much of white Washington to the needs of a biracial city, and for nearly two decades, defeated the attempts of an enlightened minority to seek closer cooperation with the Negro citizens."

But within the black community, the reaction to the riot had another dimension, according to Arthur Waskow, a sociologist who interviewed riot survivors during the 1960s: "According to some who lived through the riots, there was a new self-respect among Negroes, a readiness to face white society as equals . . . The Washington riot demonstrated that neither the silent mass of 'alley Negroes' nor the articulate leaders of the Negro community could be counted on to knuckle under . . . One permanent change in the American intellectual climate can be traced directly to the 1919 riots: There were few Americans, of whatever race or whatever persuasion as to racial policy, who could doubt that Negroes would from 1919 on, be prepared to fight back against attack." Peter Perl, an assistant Maryland editor of The Post, is completing a historical novel on the riot of 1919.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.