The Syracuse Riot of 1919: Red Summer in Upstate New York

The Syracuse Riot of 1919 was a violent racial attack that occurred when the management of the Globe Malleable Iron Works pitted striking white unionized workers against black strikebreakers on July 31, 1919.

After the First World War white unionized workers across America were facing difficult working conditions and striking for better conditions and pay. At the same time, as part of the Great Migration, black Americans were moving from the South to urban manufacturing towns in the Northeast and Midwest.

Most unions were not integrated and arriving black Americans found themselves excluded from higher paying union jobs. During strikes, companies used these black laborers as a source of cheaper labor to avoid giving their white workers more money and weaken the labor movement.

Some 40,000 black workers were hired at low wages as strikebreakers to keep the factories running during strikes. The result was a series of attacks by white workers on black strikebreakers throughout the US in 1919, including in Chicago’s stockyards, in the iron works at Syracuse, and the New York race riots of 1919.

The Globe Malleable Iron Works depended on Polish and Italian iron molders, who went on strike in the summer of 1919. To break the strike, the plant owners brought in black replacement workers.

In response, strikers violently clashed with the strikebreakers using clubs, stones, and guns. The violence ended once the city officials activated the entire police force.

Almost nothing has been written about the Syracuse Riot of 1919. A similar riot against strikebreakers happened about two weeks earlier in Utica.

Red Summer & Resistance

The Syracuse Riot was part of the Red Summer of 1919, which primarily consisted of terrorist attacks on black communities and white oppression in nearly 40 U.S. cities and counties.

In most cases, white mobs attacked African American neighborhoods. In some cases, black community groups resisted the attacks, especially in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Most deaths occurred in rural areas during events like the Elaine Race Riot in Arkansas, where an estimated 100 to 240 black people and five white people were killed.

During the Chicago race riot and Washington D.C. race riot, 38 and 39 people were killed, respectively, with many more non-fatal injuries and millions of dollars in property damage.

In part as a result of the Red Summer the pan-African nationalist newspaper The Crusader increasingly drew parallels between black workers in the U.S. and African independence movements and argued for common action by workers of all races against their capitalist oppressors.

Cyril Briggs immigrated to Harlem in the summer of 1905 from the island of Nevis and was hired as a journalist for the black community’s leading newspaper, New York Amsterdam News.

Inspired by the ongoing violence and rhetoric of “national self-determination” espoused by President Woodrow Wilson, Briggs wrote essays for the The Crusader promoting the idea of “repatriation” of blacks to a decolonized Africa, in the way some later Zionist European Jews sought to “return” to Palestine.

The Crusader increasingly advocated armed self-defense and in September of 1919 announced the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB), to serve as a self-defense organization for blacks threatened by race riots and lynchings. This was accompanied by the re-publishing of Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die”:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

The ABB was established on the model of the secret society (similar to the Irish Republican Brotherhood or Fenians). The group’s socialist orientation caught the attention of the fledgling American communist movement and the ABB joined forces with the Communist Party of America during the First Red Scare.

Some historians demarcate the Red Summer era beginning with the deaths of more than two dozen African Americans in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917 and extending through the Rosewood Massacre of 1923, when a black town in Florida was destroyed. More than 1,100 Americans were killed in racial violence over those six years.

The NAACP gained about 100,000 members in 1919 and at its height in the 1920s The Crusader reached 36,000 people, mostly in Harlem. Historian Jan Voogd argues that these responses to the riots marked an early stage of the Civil Rights Movement.

For more information on this or other Red Summer race riots see Voogd’s Race Riots and Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919 (Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2008).

Illustrations, from above: News coverage for the Syracuse race riot in 1919; white rioters stone and bludgeon a black victim under the corner of house during the Red Summer riot in Chicago in 1919 (Chicago History Museum);  and an advertisement for the African Blood Brotherhood in The Crusader, Aug 1921, following the Tulsa Race Riot.