White violence and Black protests during the 1918 flu have a lesson for today
Adella Bond fired her revolver outside her window into the South Philadelphia air, hoping to attract police as a mob of Irish American people gathered around her home to tell her she wasn’t welcome.
Bond, a Black woman who was a municipal court probation officer, knew that racial conflicts unfolded in neighborhoods that had once belonged to only White people but were beginning to house Black people as they migrated from the South to the North during the Great Migration, said Kenneth Finkel, a professor in the department of history at Temple University in Philadelphia, and the author of “Insight Philadelphia: Historical Essays Illustrated.”
Violence toward Black people and protests for racial justice were rampant in Philadelphia during the 1918 flu pandemic, in much the same way they have been during the current coronavirus pandemic.