That year, much of the country was already engulfed in sporadic, deadly racial violence against blacks that led black author and activist James Weldon Johnson to call it the “Red Summer.” With the hint of revolution in the air around the world, postwar Chicago was dealing with labor strife and an influx of southern black families who doubled its population in two years, shrinking housing options and leading to tensions with neighboring white residents. World War I soldiers, black and white, returned home with different ideas about equal treatment and were competing for jobs, most notably at the stockyards in Back of the Yards.