Fri 2/24-Sun 3/5
Red Summer, opening at Karamu this week, addresses a fraught and under-examined time in U.S. history: the surge of racist violence in 1919.
World War I (1914-18) was a dividing line between old and new, when everything in society changed, from technology to morals to fashion. In two years women would win the right to vote. And during the war African-Americans grew tired of their treatment in south where Jim Crow, installed at the end of the previous century, did not change. So the Great Migration from the south to northern cities to take factory jobs vacated by servicemen grew, creating tension; and Black veterans returned home to find they had defended their own exclusion from jobs and rights.
Growing up in Chicago, I learned about Fort Dearborn and the 1893 Columbia exposition, about 1903 Iroquois Theater fire (I sat in the back row of movie theaters throughout my childhood) and the 1915 Eastland pleasure boat disaster. But I didn’t learn about the Black boy stoned to death while swimming in Lake Michigan for crossing an invisible boundary between Black and white beaches which sparked a week-long Black/white clash that left 28 dead, hundreds injured and thousands of people, mostly Black, homeless. (There was always a rumor that the powerful machine mayor and well-known racist, Richard J. Daley, who ruled Chicago from 1955-76, had been involved. He was known to have been a member of an Irish gang that took part. He was 17 at the time.)
Similar events were happening in dozens of cities and towns across the country, from Washington D.C. to Philadelphia to New York City, to Indianapolis and Omaha and Baltimore, and of course, across the deep south.
Red Summer, conceived by Karamu’s president/CEO Tony Sias , written by noted local actress/director/playwright Nina Domingue, and co-directed by the two, is a pastiche of music, dance, poetry and art that will tell some of the stories of that summer that aren’t widely known and explore their impact.
It runs through Sunday March 5 in Karamu’s Jeliffe Theatre.
Get tickets here.