Silent Parade

The Negro Silent Protest Parade, commonly known as the Silent Parade, was a political protest in New York City on July 28, 1917. The purpose of the parade was to bring attention to discrimination and violence faced by African Americans, particularly the recent East St. Louis massacre, and lynchings in Waco and Memphis. Organizers of the parade included several African American groups, led by the recently formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Starting at 57th Street, the parade route proceeded down Fifth Avenue, ending at Madison Square. An estimated 8,000 to 15,000 African Americans marched in silence, accompanied by a muffled drum beat. The parade was widely publicized and drew attention to violence against African Americans. Parade organizers hoped the parade would prompt the federal government to enact anti-lynching legislation, but President Woodrow Wilson did not act on the demands of the African Americans. The federal government would not pass an anti-lynching law until 2022, when the Emmett Till Antilynching Act was passed.

Lynchings were widespread extrajudicial killings that began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and continued until 1981. Along with disenfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination, lynching was one of many forms of racism inflicted on African Americans. The frequency of lynchings steadily increased after the Civil War, peaking around 1892. They remained common into the early 1900s, experiencing a resurgence in 1915 following the founding of the Second Ku Klux Klan.

The Silent Parade took place at a time when lynchings were beginning to be widely publicized – particularly by the NAACP under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois. Two years before the Silent Parade, the NAACP's magazine The Crisis published an article titled "The Lynching Industry", which contained a year-by-year tabulation of 2,732 lynchings, spanning the years 1884 to 1914. During the year leading up to the parade, The Crisis published a series of articles documenting specific lynchings, including: a group lynching of six African Americans in Lee County, Georgia; the lynching of Jesse Washington, a mentally impaired 17-year-old African American, in Waco, Texas; and the lynching of Ell Persons in Memphis, Tennessee. These lynchings were precursors to the Silent Parade.

The specific events that precipitated the Silent Parade were a series of riots that took place in East St. Louis from May to July 1917. The rioting, by white residents, originated when the mostly white employees of the Aluminum Ore Company voted in Spring 1917 for a labor strike and the Company recruited hundreds of African Americans to replace them. Estimates of the number of African Americans killed by white mobs range from 39 to 200; hundreds were injured; and thousands were made homeless.

Du Bois and activist Martha Gruening visited the city after the massacre and spoke with witnesses and survivors. In September 1917, they published an article in The Crisis that described the riots in unusually explicit terms. After the riots, many African Americans were discouraged, and felt that it was unlikely that the United States would ever permit African Americans to enjoy full citizenship and equal rights. The brutality of the attacks by mobs of white people, coupled with the failure of police to protect the African American community, led to renewed calls for African American civil rights from leaders such as Du Bois, Hubert Harrison, and Marcus Garvey.

In April 1917, one month before the East St. Louis massacre, the United States declared war on the German Empire and joined the Allied Powers of World War I. The mobilization effort dominated the headlines in the United States, and served as a backdrop to the events leading up to the Silent Parade. African American soldiers of that era were treated as second-class citizens, and were segregated from white troops. African Americans had mixed feelings about the war: some recognized military service as an opportunity to demonstrate their worth; others viewed it as yet another situation where they would be exploited by their country. Some African American leaders, such as Du Bois, voiced pro-war sentiments, and encouraged African Americans to join the military.

James Weldon Johnson, the Field Secretary of the NAACP, worked with a group of influential community leaders from St. Philip's Church in New York to determine how best to protest the recent violence against African Americans. The concept of a silent protest was suggested by Oswald Garrison Villard during a 1916 NAACP Conference. Villard's mother, anti-war activist Fanny Garrison Villard, had organized a silent march in 1914 to protest the war. One month before the Silent Parade, African American women in New York participated in a silent march, alongside white women, to support the Red Cross. Unlike the anti-war parade of 1914, to which all persons were invited, organizers of the Silent Parade felt that it was important that only African American people participate, because they were the primary victims of the recent violence.

A week before the parade, an announcement in the African American newspaper The New York Age described it as a "mute but solemn protest against the atrocities and discrimination practiced against the race in various parts of the country." The official name of the parade was the Negro Silent Protest Parade, although some contemporary sources referred to it as the Negro Silent Parade. Men, women, and children alike were invited to take part. It was hoped that ten thousand people would participate, and that African Americans in other cities might hold their own parades. During the week before the parade, major newspapers in several states published articles announcing the march.

The parade was organized by the Harlem branch of the NAACP, with the help of several church and business leaders. Two prominent members of the New York clergy served as executives of the parade: the president was Hutchens Chews Bishop, rector of the city's oldest African American Episcopal parish; and the secretary was Charles Martin, founder of the Fourth Moravian Church. Frederick Asbury Cullen served as vice president. Parade marshals included J. Rosamond Johnson, A. B. Cosey, Christopher Payne, Everard W. Daniel, Allen Wood, James Weldon Johnson, and John E. Nail. Du Bois marched within the group of parade leaders.

The goal of the parade was to protest lynching in particular, and violence against African Americans in general. Organizer Charles Martin prepared a flyer which was distributed before the parade as an invitation, and during the parade to bystanders. The flyer had a section titled "Why We March" which read, in part:

The flyer was signed by Martin "Yours in righteous indignation."

In the midst of a record heat wave in New York City on Saturday, July 28, an estimated 8,000 to 15,000 African Americans marched in silent protest. The march began at 57th Street, and proceeded down Fifth Avenue, ending at Madison Square. Mounted police escorted the parade.

Eight hundred children led the parade, followed by women dressed in white, then men dressed in black. Their attire was formal and uniform, and they marched in rows. Academic Soyica Colbert analyzed the performative aspects of the parade: "...the deliberate refinement of the clothing reinforced the relationship between rights and respectability. The protestors presented themselves as citizens while affirming the look of citizenship."

People of all races looked on from both sides of Fifth Avenue, including an estimated 15,000 African Americans, according to The New York Age. African American boy scouts handed out flyers describing why they were marching. During the parade, white people stopped to listen to marchers explain the reasons for the march, and other white bystanders expressed support. Many spectators were moved by the spectacle; in his autobiography, organizer James Johnson wrote “the streets of New York have witnessed many strange sites, but I judge, never one stranger than this; among the watchers were those with tears in their eyes.”

Although the marchers were silent, many of them carried signs and banners that described contributions of African Americans to American society, or gave reasons for the protest. Many of the placards contained slogans highlighting military service by African Americans, reflecting the fact that the country had just entered World War I. Some signs appealed directly to President Woodrow Wilson. One notable banner displayed an African American family in the ruins of East St. Louis, pleading with Wilson to bring democracy to the U.S. before he brought it to Europe (World War I was in progress at the time). Police deemed the banner in "poor taste", so parade organizers withdrew the banner before the parade began.

The New York Times described the parade in an article published the following day:

The parade was the first large, exclusively African American protest in New York; and was the second instance of African Americans publicly demonstrating for civil rights. Media coverage of the march helped to counter the dehumanization of African Americans in the United States. The parade and its coverage depicted the NAACP as well-organized and respectable, and helped increase the visibility of the NAACP both among white and black people alike.

Marchers hoped to persuade President Wilson to implement anti-lynching legislation and support African American civil rights. Four days after the Silent Parade, a group of NAACP leaders traveled to Washington D.C. for a prearranged appointment with Wilson. Upon arrival at the White House, the group was told that Wilson was unable to meet with them due to another appointment. They left a petition they had prepared for Wilson, which reminded him of African Americans serving in World War I and asked him to take steps to prevent lynchings in the future. In July 1918, Wilson issued a written statement discouraging mob violence, but it fell short of the anti-lynching legislation the marchers hoped for. Discrimination against African Americans significantly increased during the Wilson presidency (1913 – 1921) as a result of Wilson's policy of segregating the federal government workforce.

As World War I drew to an end, there was considerable social tension as returning veterans of all races tried to find work, and black veterans struggled to gain better treatment after their war service. During the summer of 1919, later called the Red Summer, racial riots of whites against blacks broke out in numerous industrial cities during these tensions and economic strife. In contrast to the East St. Louis massacre, the 1919 events were characterized by many instances of black people fighting back against their attackers. In October 1919, African American sociologist George Edmund Haynes, an employee of the federal government, published a detailed report outlining the white-on-black violence of the summer, and noted that states were unwilling to intervene. The report urged the U.S. Congress to take action and identified 38 separate racial riots against blacks in widely scattered cities, in which whites attacked black people. In addition, Haynes reported that between January 1 and September 14, 1919, white mobs lynched at least 43 African Americans, with 16 hanged, some shot, and eight burned at the stake.

The Silent Parade failed to reduce the number of lynchings of African Americans; in fact, the number of lynchings per year increased after the parade. It was not until 1923 that the number of lynchings fell below the 1917 quantity. Lynchings continued into the 1960s.

After the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was introduced in Congress in 1918, two silent marches were organized by African Americans to show support: on June 14, 1922 in Washington, D.C., about 5,000 people marched in front of the White House and Congress holding signs supporting the anti lynching legislation. In the same month, women members of the NAACP in Newark, New Jersey organized a similar silent parade. The Dyer bill was not passed by Congress, nor were any of the nearly 200 anti-lynching bills that were introduced between the end of the Civil War and the civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 created new federal crimes for violent acts based on the race of the victim. In 2022, Congress passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which extended existing federal hate crime laws to encompass any members of a mob who conspired to injure a victim.

Several events commemorated the one-hundredth anniversary of the parade, July 28, 2017. On that day, Google commemorated the Silent Parade with a Google Doodle. The Google Doodle was responsible for many people learning about the Silent Parade. In East St. Louis, a week-long commemoration of the riots and Silent Parade was held in July 2017, on the 100th anniversary of the riots. Around 300 people marched from the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Higher Learning Center to the Eads Bridge. Everyone marched in silence, with many women in white and men wearing black suits. A group of artists, along with the NAACP, reenacted the silent march in New York on the evening of July 28, 2017. The event, with around 100 people and many participants wearing white, was not able to march down Fifth Avenue because the city would not grant access due to Trump Tower's location on that street. The commemoration took place on Sixth Avenue instead, and the group held up portraits of contemporary victims of violence by both police and vigilantes in the United States.

• "New York - Silent Protest Parade". Yale University Library - Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Retrieved 15 April 2025. Collection of photos of the Silent Parade.