The race riot started on Saturday July 19, 1919 when a group of white veterans sparked a rumor regarding the arrest, questioning, and release of a black man suspected by the Metropolitan Police Department of sexually assaulting a white woman. The victim was also the wife of a Navy man. white military men became livid. Hundreds white servicemen gathered near the Liberty YMCA and started on a rampage. The mob tried to lynch a black man, but he escaped after being severely beaten. During the night, group of white service men attacked blacks, pulling from streetcars and assaulting them on sidewalks. Shots were fired.

On Sunday, July 20, the violence continued to grow, in part because the seven-hundred-member Metropolitan Police Department failed to intervene. African Americans continued to face brutal beatings in the streets of Washington, at the Center Market on Seventh Street NW, and even in front of the White House.

By the late hours of Sunday night, July 20, the African American community began to fight back. They armed themselves and attacked whites who entered their neighborhoods. Both black and white men fired bullets at each other from moving vehicles. At the end of the night, ten whites and five blacks were either killed or severely wounded. In the end several men were killed and many people left with injuries.