The Red Summer of 1919: A Reign of Terror.
(Colorado Springs): Press at Colorado College, 2019. 32mo. (8)ff. One of an unspecified number of copies, though certainly quite limited based on its lack of archival trace. Printed in deep black on sponged multi-tone red, Kennedy here recounts in what appears a typographic grief and outrage the frightening outbreak of racial violence in the "Red Summer" of 1919. The Great Migration, accelerated by World War I, compelled the movement of African Americans into cities previously predominantly white. Kennedy lists those cities, among them Charleston, Scranton, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Syracuse, and Omaha. Racial rioting by white mobs led to murders of Black residents; Kennedy is attuned to these events not as isolated occurrences by as manifestations of a racist system: "Violence is a tool of capitalism and it is used all the time. / Racism is a tool of capitalism. it is the essence of this nation." Kennedy's statements, paired with statistics and quotations from W. E. B. Du Bois, still resonate one hundred years later, in our age of Ferguson, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Black Lives Matter. Bound in self-wrappers. Fine. Item #32845
Price: $550.00