Knoxville's Red Summer: The Riot of 1919

[Music] Knoxville had been growing really since 1870 after the Civil War freed slaves had come in from the countryside looking for a new life so had rural whites there's a post-war population explosion and Knoxville takes off briefly as a poster child for the new south and some of these whites coming in it's the first time they've ever worked beside a black person they're living some of them almost side-by-side and there's a lot of conflict going on even though the city leadership tries to turn a blind eye to it it's there and as a matter of fact there had been a study done by University of Tennessee graduate student in 1999 in which she predicted these conditions will lead to some sort of racial violence if something isn't done Knoxville was a stage city where race relations were were pretty good black people knew their place and stayed in it and I think we had a white paternalistic Society that left black people to their own devices as long as they didn't create a lot of trouble to me it was interesting how the local newspapers described the black community for example the corner of vine and central was a place where there were a number of black establishments well there were grocery stores a taxicab companies or shoeshine parlors that area was described as little Harlem and of course that that's kind of a compliment because Harlem was a very thriving place in New York City and to be compared to that I think had to be received as a compliment 19:19 was a a very volatile year all across the country it was certainly the just after the end of World War one and there were a number of black men coming back to this country having fought overseas and they were coming back into a racial situation that they just couldn't appreciate because they had had some measure of freedom and dignity overseas but had to come back to this country and suffer from racial indignities and consequently there were a number of race rights throughout the country my memory tells me that there were at least 25 of them across the United States and James Weldon Johnson who was head of the n-double a-c-p termed it the red summer because in many cases some of the streets were it literally ran with red with blood in addition to the racial and labor tensions that are going on nationwide there was a great deal of political tension the mayor Johnny McMillan is a was a pre-election one of the reasons that the mayor was controversial at that time was his progressive attitude towards race relations he had been elected largely with black votes he had made an address to the lack of business leaders denouncing the riots elsewhere denouncing he had denounced lynching and it said that he personally intended to make sure that nothing like that could ever happen in Knoxville there had been threats against black voters warning that black voters should stay home on Election Day threatening posters had been posted around town the mayor had a lot of black campaign workers one of them being Maurice Mays Maurice Mays had spent that entire day campaigning for the mayor handing out campaign flyers and poll tax receipts in those days Tennessee has a poll tax you have to pay the poll tax in order to vote but if someone pays the poll tax for you and you have a receipt that's perfectly fine and he had been handing out poll tax receipts all day to black voters would they understand that they would vote for Johnny Macmillan Maurice Mays was rumored to be the illegitimate son of the mayor Johnny Macmillan and according to members of McMillan's family it was acknowledged as true his mother had been a young maid who left Knoxville shortly after his birth he was about six months old when he was adopted by William and Frances Mayes Maurice Mayes was a black fella who was very handsome who liked white women and white women liked him and certainly 1919 was not two year the year to have this these kinds of relationships so there was a police officer in Knoxville who knew about mazes activities and had warned him about dating white women and threatened to put him in the penitentiary if he were ever to catch him and to do other terrible things to him if he caught him a white woman by the name of birdie Lindsay wound up murdered the 27 year old Bertie Lindsay was born Bertie Smith in Lee County Virginia in 1916 she married Daniel Peter Lindsay a carpenter from Dandridge Tennessee and worked at the standard knitting mill her bedroom assault and murder at sixteen twelve eighth Avenue in North Knoxville was witnessed by her younger cousin Laura Smith well the policeman who hated maize was investigating the case and he said I know exactly who that murderer was so they went to amaze his house and rousted him out of bed and took him to the scene of the crime put him under a dimly-lit street lamp and the woman identified him as the murderer this this woman had been sleeping in the bed with her cousin who was murdered who said that it was a black man who committed the crime and identified Bayes as the murderer and he said that couldn't be I've never been in this neighborhood before I don't know anybody here Mays was taken to the Knox County Jail and mayor McMillan had gotten him out of trouble early on when he was about 17 years old so people thought that McMillan would get him out of this he's already expressing fears to the sheriff it's not safe they're gonna try to lynch me there was apparently a brief mention in the morning paper the Knoxville Journal contribute to the effect that a white woman had been killed and a black man arrested it's not entirely clear what it was is apparently probably a one-page extra that has not survived word gets around very quickly Bertie Lindsay's body is being prepared at Roberts funeral home which is near Market Square Market Square is the traditional gathering place there are restaurants the Old Market House saloons by mid-morning people are already beginning to come to the funeral home passing through and staying at Market Square to congregate it's Saturday now in those days typically businesses worked half a day on Saturday so around noon everybody starts to get off work in slavery day weekend some people immediately start getting watered down for the weekend around the same time the afternoon paper the Knoxville Sentinel hits the street now we don't know exactly what that day's edition said because again no copies of that have survived at apparently there were some inflammatory statements in the articles that it was at least a picture of Bertie Lindsay and apparently some sort of a headline that was sensational again we don't know exactly what that was not too long after the paper hits the street the sheriff begins noticing that things are definitely starting to turn ugly and it's time to do something when word got out that he was the murderer of a white woman a mob forum now this was very unusual for Knoxville you mobs just didn't form in Knoxville the string anybody up in fact at all of my reading I have yet to find where somebody has been lynched in Knox County I mean the sheriff did a lot of legal lynchings but this never happened the sheriff knew the mob was coming and devised a plan to take May's to safety he borrows one of his wife's dresses they dress Maurice Mays up sneak him out take him by car down to Concord slip him aboard the train there and out of town meanwhile back at the jail the crowd keeps forming in an effort to get the crowd to disperse the chief deputy carol kate agrees to let a committee of men come through and inspect the jail will show you he's not here so they take them through take them all around they come out and they say well we can't find it well the crowds not satisfied so they put together another committee bring them through and then a third and then a fourth at which point some people in the crowd starts out we're just gonna follow a man and see for ourselves and then they slammed the doors in between the searches f Clayburn one of the ringleaders has made his way up to Market Square there's a bigger crowd forming up there some of these are people who have been to the funeral home some of the people just drinking getting ready for the weekend he starts addressing the crowd Carol Kate the chief deputy later estimated there's as many as four or five thousand people someone gives the command March boys it's a lot of these guys at World War one veteran's some are spanish-american veterans that are even accounts at the some of those some of the riders arrested whereas old is in their 70s some of them were Civil War veterans they marched down Market Street counting off a military-style until they just basically surrounded the jail they refused the final offer to search and at that point they tear down a telephone pole start using that as a battering ram the main doors hold but there's a side door that proves to be a little bit weaker and finally use dynamite to blast their way in once they're inside it's a free-for-all most the deputies basically give up stand back they know they're outnumbered they turn all the prisoners loose interestingly they leave the black prisoners untouched they tore up the jail to the tune of $50,000 and that was a lot of money in 1919 after sell for that kind of damage they drank up all look confiscated moonshine whiskey and other whiskeys that were there and got drunk and left the jailed vowing to kill every black person they saw in revenge the National Guard was summoned by the time the soldiers do arrive they're still outnumbered by the crowd the adjutant general addresses the crowd tries to reassure them that justice justice is going to be done you might as well go home that doesn't work there's an expectation in the black community that this this is going to be taken out on us they found maurice maze to blame but they're gonna blame all of us what the black community was aware of this and men who were in gun clubs and who were hunters decided to meet the mob he had owned so there were number men returning from World War one and they just said we're not going to take this anymore they perhaps before that time bit their tongues and put up with it swallowed deeply and put up with it counted to ten and put up with it but having fought in that war they decided we're just tired of this stuff and we just not gonna take it anymore and I think that was the difference when the rumor reaches the mob that black men are holding up white people at finance central which which was not true there's no evidence that that was happening mob surges up gay Street towards vine and the guard joins them they would have they later said they were restoring order basically they were just siding with the whites the mob starts breaking into stores all along Gay Street and the surrounding streets stealing guns knives baseball bats and any type of weapon that can get their hands on they surge out toward Vine Street the whites are basically amassed up here at fine and gay down at vine and central in the black community they have made siege preparations they've shot out the streetlights there are reports that there was furniture böck crates that sort of things stacked in the streets to create barricades and it becomes a standoff at that point National Guard has their machine guns they bring them in on the back of the truck and they set one up near vine and gay they set them up on each side of the street and I crossfire the guys Manning them are not experienced machine gunners a lot of most of the kids some of them as young as 15 16 years old most of them have not been in battle there was one lieutenant who tried to make his way down to the corner of vine and central to scout out what was going on he gets wounded by fire from the black side staggers out into the street someone in the mob screams let him have it and at that point one of the machine gunners panics and basically just starts spraying the street with bullets he's caught in the crossfire and almost literally sawed in half and it's takes several minutes for the officers to get the machine gun crew back under control the main fighting near Vine and central lasts for several hours at least up into the morning of the following day that was fighting all along Central Avenue which was essentially at the border of the black community people were fighting on the bridges there are accounts of the black men trying to literally charge the machine gun nests World War one over-the-top style and being moaned down at some point during the battle it starts to rain the general description from both sides was that Vine Avenue was a river of blood the real toll was probably never ever never going to be known the official count was first five then to one casualty being lieutenant pain the other being Joe etter a black Spanish American veteran storekeeper who was acknowledged as the one of the leaders on the black side how many more there are all kinds of accounts every time I hear the story somebody has added something to it and it gets so ridiculous for example I heard from somebody else that when they were building the city-county building that they unearthed this mass grave and somebody said it was from bodies from the soak from the race riot of 1919 I've heard that and I've heard so many stories about it that really just don't add up and so the more people hear about it 20th hand the more the story is embellished knoxville is under basically martial law for the next few days pretty much through the Labor Day weekend mayor authorizes special deputies dozens of people deputized issued guns and asked to basically patrol their communities there's some question as to how much order that special deputies actually kept and how much disorder they actually started there were rumors of in white communities of invasions by roaming bands of armed black men same thing happened in the black community accounts probing bands of white men running around the phone rang off the hook at the police department for the next few days with reports of all these things and majority of it was not true most of the guns taken during the break-ins on gay street never came back at the owners went so far as to run huge ads in the newspapers saying please return our guns and you won't be prosecuted no questions asked but they never got they never got it back there was a trial there was actually more than one trial there was a mass indictment there were 55 men and women all of them white ultimately arrested and charged with some role in the riot all but five were acquitted charges against three were dropped before it ever got to the jury the jury deadlocked on two men neither served more than a year's jail time Maurice Mayes is brought back to Knoxville he was given a fairly sizable defense team of court-appointed lawyers chief counsel was Ruben Cates there was William Yardley assisting he also had two other lawyers but Cates was the chief counsel prosecution was handled by the local district attorney Rufus miner within about a month or so of the riot the jury deliberated about 18 minutes before finding him guilty of murder the defense at the first trial made the effort to introduce testimony from some white women who were willing to testify that they had been assaulted in the same fashion as Bertie Lindsay Nora Smith after Maurice maces arrest the judge refused to allow that that number would increase in later years the attacks on women continued long after his arrest Maurice Mayes could handle the English language very well and in fact when he was in prison he wrote a number of letters to people across the country asking for support he will torch me there were people like James G back in Knoxville prominent black person who asked for help from the National in double-a-c-p to help them raise funds to help Mayes with his defense the n-double-a-cp had problems all across the country because there were at least 25 cities in turmoil with these race riots and of course there were other problems at the n-double a-c-p was concerned with there were many many lynchings in the United States that they were concerned with so they just didn't have the money to share even though there were a number of peel of appeals from Knoxville to help the situation but what intrigues be more than that is that there were prominent black men and not Shaw who had money who could have contributed to the cause but they did not and I don't know whether they were intimidated whether they thought there would be repercussions if they contributed to the cause and the pastor at Mount Zion Baptist Church who was heading up the fundraiser said he didn't understand it either he said there are these people of means but they are as silent as clams he's tried once he's convicted the judge gives the verdict his hearty approval and sentences Maurice Mayes to death by the second trial in 1921 the number of women who are willing to testify that they've been attacked in the same manner after mazes arrest has increased to 15 and that includes one woman who says that the man stuck a gun in her face and said lay still or I'll kill you like I did that Lindsey woman again the judge refuses to allow that testimony again he's convicted again the defense appeals this time they're turned down the case goes before the governor now governor Taylor won't you please come out to the prison to see me I am eager and very anxious to explain to you personally some valuable information that you should have certainly know please allow me to urgently beg for your presence humbly yours Maurice Mays death chamber he appealed to the governor and everybody else the newly formed Knoxville n-double-a-cp got involved in the case and they attempted to raise money for his defense but none of that did any good so Mays was eventually sent to the electric chair in March of 1922 and I always say that he really wasn't electrocuted for murdering the white woman because I never saw any evidence of that in any of the court transcripts that I read but he went to the electric chair for dealing with white women which was a real boo in in 1919 so he paid with his life for that indiscretion rather than being convicted of the murder for which he was accused there was a funeral in Knoxville but there were people in Knoxville who didn't want the funeral here because they didn't want to stir up trouble finally the pastor at Logan temple AME Zion where his parents were members agreed to conduct the funeral when he got up to do the eulogy he said you've all read the obituary you know the story of the decedent Undertaker take charge and that was basically the sermon at the funeral now thousands of people attended they walked past the casket both blacks and whites what's happening in the first two decades of the 20th century to make it such a fertile moment for racial violence mob violence of all kinds the violence of the 20th of the early 20th century seems to become almost predictable and I think part of that is the way in which the justification for lynching becomes elevated to the point where it's incorporated too into American popular music into American popular film like Birth of a Nation the DW Griffith's epic movie which is really a call for white supremacy what was being elevated was the idea that african-american men were primitive brutal violent and prone to transgress against whites but especially white women so that notion of the black rapist got elevated in the early 20th century and we can only imagine the effect of incorporating that image into a movie that was so unprecedented and it's cultural impact it's there's no way we can come up with a contemporary analogy Birth of a Nation provided an incredibly visceral film rendition of the black threat and that's four years before Knoxville four years before the red summer in from drinks riot to sit-in Arthur I wass Kao categorized in Knoxville's red summer with Omaha Nebraska's unrest as a particular form of violence the jailhouse riot the two jailhouse riots of 1919 had a number of peculiar features both were connected with local political rivalries and the control of underworld activities both originated in anger at a black man accused of rape both were stopped before the initial incident could turn into a full-scale riot between the races and both events were a combination of an insurrection against state authority and a pogrom against the black community in Omaha Nebraska the accused William Brown was successfully kidnapped by the mob shot lynched burned and left on display at a major intersection certainly and without any uniqueness Knoxville Tennessee was well on its way to a similarly shameful exhibition if events were left to run its intended course I don't think here in Knoxville it really rose to a race riot as it did in some other cities but there certainly were clashes in this city that would lead one to think that Knoxville had a race right it shattered the belief and feeling that Knoxville had great race relations and things like that that happened elsewhere couldn't happen here we've never had a lynching in Knox County we just didn't have those atrocities that happened in other places what I think and what we've been trying to do for a number of years is to have the governor of Tennessee to clear Mays his name because it's obvious to all who read the case and who understand it know that the man was not guilty of that crime and we worked with I think three governor's now attempting to get that done but we've been very unsuccessful [Music] [Music] Knoxville's red summer was made possible by support from the open society foundation and from viewers like you thank you

Channel: Black in Appalachia

Views: 233,707

Rating: 4.880022 out of 5

Keywords: black in Appalachia, African american history, black history, east tennessee pbs, etpbs, 1919, red summer, knoxville, riot, race riot, Maurice Mayes, Bertie Lindsey, Robert Booker, Matt Lakin, Fitzhugh Bundridge, UNC Chapel Hill, East Tennessee, Appalachia

Id: 8qI2cUkhGEY

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/JohnCarcinogen]

Remind me tomorrow

[u/MeLikeYou]

Ugh. I just learned about this and am related to the victim and her cousin. She lived not far from where I live now and I’m still processing this. I’m also new to this city.

I have been absorbed in learning about this and the responses here are a bit tone deaf. The city was not the powder keg here. The red summer was a national problem. The release of so much propaganda against black Americans like Birth of a Nation, the return from WW1, etc was fuel that ignited in several towns across the country.

Mays was murdered for the crime of being intelligent, handsome, successful, and not bigoted in who he loved. He was the victim of targeted condemnation by a racist police officer.

The federal govt intervention sent during the riot resulted in two people sawed literally in two by machine gun fire and had troops participating in the targeting of the black community.

It is a mirror of our own times. I think saying things like our city just has a bad history are incorrect and lose the opportunity to learn from this event. It’s too relevant today to be so easily dismissed.

[u/ObviousAnimator]

In the aftermath of this race riot, none of the lynch mob members were prosecuted, while a Knoxville court convicted and executed an innocent black man, which is just so typical for this city. A request to formally clear Mays' name (the black man executed) was brought forward in 2011, but Bill Haslam flat out refused it.

Some history this place has

[u/[deleted]]

I learned about this recently myself. It’s such a tragic part of history here.

[u/ozillator]

Interesting how Knox News Sentinel "lost" the original sensational newspaper article that sparked this all in the first place, huh?

[u/illimitable1]

I'm so glad to know that MLK Jr. back in the 1960s went up to the Lincoln Memorial, told all the mean white people to stop being so mean, and thus ended all racism. I think he also snapped his fingers four times in a z-formation. It was like magic.

And that's why we're all so equal now.

(sarcasm)