Post-'Waco Horror' race riot May 1916

After the horrific lynch-burning in Waco of 17-yr-old mentally retarded black teenager Jesse Washington in May 1916, for the alleged murder of his employer's wife Lucy Fryer, jubilant members of the lynch-mob tied his charred corpse to a wagon and dragged the body thru the nearby black community of Robinson, as a supposed warning to other blacks of what would happen if they didn't stay in their 'place'. AFAIK, there was some sentiment among local blacks, outraged at the brutal torture, murder and desecration of 1 of their own, to arm and take revenge against the bigoted local whites, but in the end cooler heads prevailed and no racial clashes occurred.

But WI the rage and sorrow felt by Robinson's blacks reached a breaking-point, esp with the knowledge of picture postcards of the atrocity having been sold and distributed, and these local African-Americans did decide to avenge Jesse's horrific fate by taking up whatever arms they could and converging on Waco to try to find and punish the perpetrators themselves ? A race riot would undoubtedly have ensued, and would such a disturbance have been of a similar scale to, and have had a similar effect as, East St Louis the following yr ? Could there have resulted a racial massacre of pogrom proportions as the outgunned and outnumbered blacks found themselves gradually surrounded and gradually outfought by local whites supported by local sheriffs and the National Guard ? Also, would the 24th Inf Regt, stationed in New Mexico at the time, have been deployed to try to restore law and order, and if not, could some members of the regt have tried to make their way to the vicinity of Waco and Robinson in order to support their fellow blacks in this struggle against the oppressor and to avenge the victims of mob violence ? How much worse would American race relations have been on the eve of US entry into WWI ?

It would end like every other race riot in the teens and 20's, the NG would come in and eventually put it down.

Not to offend anybody but I thing that in that period black comunity wasn't as willing to start making troubles/standing up for themselves as it was later.

Yeah, aktarian, generally that's true pre-WWI, since it was only after the war and large nos. of black veterans returned home that the black community as a whole became more assertive in defending themselves and their homes against white racism, as evidenced during the Red Summer race riots of 1919 in Chicago and Washington, D.C., where a fair few white rioters were killed by blacks who'd armed for self-protection, and similarly by 1921 in Elaine, Arkansas and Tulsa, where respectively black ex-servicemen led fellow sharecroppers in defending themselves against violent intimidation from their white employers, and the local black community armed to protect a local black man, who was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman (it was actually only an unintended brush-past in a lift), from lynching. Alot of the previous race riots, such as in Atlanta, Springfield, Illinois and Memphis (?), involved blacks largely as victims unable to properly defend themselves from racist aggression.

Then again, at East St Louis, local blacks, in response to armed incursions by local white toughs, had shot at a car full of police officers who cruised into their neighbourhood, and which contributed to triggering the full extent of racial violence. Of course, as per my previous thread, there were also incidents of armed resistance against white racism and violence leading up to WWI, which involved black soldiers wishing to avenge themselves against local racial injustice in the South- Brownsville (1906) and Houston (1917).

There was also another prominent instance of open black resentment at Jim Crow, during the period of American troops being trained in the South before deployment to the Western Front, involving members of the 369th Inf Regt (ex-15th NY NG, later the 'Harlem Hellfighters' under French command on the WF), who faced intense racial discrimination while stationed at Spartanburg, South Carolina, which came to a head where 1 of the unit's black officers IIRC, Capt Noble Sissle, was subject to racist abuse by a local hotel proprietor who knocked off his hat and refused to let him buy a newspaper- in response, a crowd of enraged 369th soldiers gathered outside, joined by white Northern soldiers (also New Yorkers, AFAIK) who were similarly incensed at such blatant racial discrimination, and who wanted to bust the place up, but who were calmed down by their officers. WI this incident had flared up to a similar extent as at Houston ? What would've been the effects suffered by black soldiers training stateside and on their way to France ?