The Long Red Summer on the Railroads: Labor, Race, and Exclusion in Appalachia

• Published in: The journal of the gilded age and progressive era 2024-08, p.1-24
• Main Author: O’Neal, Matthew C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1537-7814; 1943-3557
• DOI: 10.1017/S1537781424000203

This essay examines the relationship between race, work, and exclusion during the Long Red Summer of 1919. I focus on several “transportation towns” of railroad employees in Appalachia to argue for the combined importance of labor history and racial ideology in attempts to understand wartime violence. Academic and federal government investigations inform my analysis, as does the robust body of scholarship on railroad labor. After examining racism embedded in railroad work, unions, and community life, the essay then turns to the Wilson administration’s nationalization of the roads during the war. Wartime changes resulted in higher wages for Black workers and many perceived threats to the racialized labor hierarchy. What was once white railroaders’ effort to exclude African Americans from certain jobs became one to expel them from the industry entirely. In several transportation towns that experienced wartime migration, however, this impulse transformed into a campaign to remove Black people from their communities once and for all. I cite testimony from a grand jury trial of an expulsion, railroad union journals, and newspaper accounts of mob violence that made it clear that the transportation towns belonged to white labor at the end of the Long Red Summer.