Remembering Red Summer -- Which Textbooks Seem Eager to Forget

Zinn Education Project - Teaching People's History

Remembering Red Summer ---- Which Textbooks Seem Eager to Forget

The racist riots of 1919 happened 100 years ago this summer. Confronting a national epidemic of white mob violence, 1919 was a time when African Americans defended themselves, fought back, and demanded full citizenship in thousands of acts of courage and daring, small and large, individual and collective.

Teen Vogue featured a Zinn Education Project article by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca , on Red Summer as part of their OG History series that unearths history not told through a white, cisheteropatriarchal lens.

See our If We Knew Our History series for a longer version of this article.

Additional Resources on Red Summer

NEW BOOK

1919 ---- Poetic Reflections on the Chicago Race Riots

By Eve L. Ewing

In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 ---- which lasted eight days and resulted in 38 deaths and almost 500 injuries. Ewing's speculative and Afrofuturist poetry recounts the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city.

1919, The Year of Racial Violence

By David F. Krugler

Krugler's book details the wave of racist violence that swept the United States in 1919 through the lens of Black armed resistance and freedom struggle. His scholarship reminds readers of the limitations of mainstream civil rights curriculum, which too often leaves out the tradition of armed self-defense in the long Black freedom struggle.

COORDINATED BY:

PO BOX 73038, WASHINGTON, D.C. 20056

202-588-7205 | zinnedproject.org

STAY CONNECTED: