For many blacks, however, the North was not the “promised land” they expected. Instead, they encountered bitter opposition from white migrants from the South competing for employment and scarce housing. As black and white veterans returned from the war, racial hostilities exploded. In 1919 race riots erupted in twenty-five cities throughout the country, including one in Washington, D.C., that left a deep impression on Ossian Sweet, who witnessed it firsthand.

The worst of these disturbances occurred in Chicago during what James Weldon Johnson, a poet and an NAACP official, called “Red Summer.” On a hot July day, a black youth swimming at a Lake Michigan beach inadvertently crossed over into an area of water customarily reserved for whites. In response, white bathers shouted at the swimmer to return to the black section of the beach. To make their point more forcefully, they hurled stones at him. The black swimmer drowned, and word of the incident quickly spread through white and black neighborhoods in Chicago. For thirteen days, mobs of blacks and whites attacked each other, ransacked businesses, and torched homes. Over the course of the riots, at least 15 whites and 23 blacks died, 178 whites and 342 blacks were injured, and more than a thousand black families were left homeless. Against this background, D. C. Stephenson’s Ku Klux Klan began to flourish in the North.