Red Summer: Wave of Anti-Black Race Massacres Across America

During the summer and fall of 1919, white mobs attacked Black communities in more than three dozen American cities including Chicago, Washington D.C., Elaine Arkansas, and Knoxville Tennessee. Hundreds of Black people were killed. Coined 'Red Summer' by writer James Weldon Johnson, the violence also catalyzed unprecedented Black armed self-defense and political organizing, including early NAACP anti-lynching campaigns.