Johnson, who had served as U.S. consul to Nicaragua and Venezuela in the Roosevelt administration, traveled to the capital to talk with public officials and the media about how to solve the problems underpinning the violence. He wrote the following report on his trip for the September 1919 issue of The Crisis, the NAACP magazine.
I reached Washington early in the evening of July 22. As the train neared the capital I could feel the tenseness of the situation grow. It showed itself in the air of the passengers as they read the newspapers, with their glaring headlines telling of the awful night before and intimating that the worst was yet to come. As I passed through the cars on my way to the diner and back, men and women glanced up at me with what seemed to be a look of mild surprise; with a glance which seemed to say, “This man must indeed have very important business in Washington.”
The porters and waiters plainly showed the strain under which they were doing their work—the strain of suppressed excitement with, perhaps, an added sense of dread of going into something, they knew not what. They moved about quietly, in fact, grimly and entirely without their customary good humor and gaiety. One of the porters who knew who I was questioned the wisdom of my going through with the trip. I may have felt that his question was not absolutely without reason, but I did not admit it. When I left the car he said to me, “Take good care of yourself.” I assured him that I would spare no effort to do so.
I had made many trips to Washington—some as a mere visitor, some as a member of the government’s Foreign Service, some for the purpose of placing for the NAACP matters affecting the race before men high in authority and position; and so I had experienced varied emotions on making the trip to the nation’s capital, but none like the emotions experienced on this trip. I knew it to be true, but it was almost an impossibility for me to realize as a truth that men and women of my race were being mobbed, chased, dragged from street cars, beaten, and killed within the shadow of the dome of the Capitol, at the very front door of the White House. It was almost an impossibility for me to realize that, perhaps, my own life would not be safe on the public streets.