At the East Side Freedom Library we want to promote a conversation between the past and the present. This can be more challenging than it sounds, as important chapters in our past have been covered up, swept under the rug, and erased. Whether we have been aware of them or not, their outcomes have helped to shape the world in which we live. Becoming aware of these chapters of our history is a step towards understanding the hand that history has dealt us. Such understanding is a necessary step towards – to remain with the metaphor – choosing how we play the hand that we have been dealt. And so we can become conscious agents in the history that we will make. This has been particularly so in the history of racism in the United States. ESFL has great resources for such exploration, and, later this month, we will provide two opportunities to explore this history and its consequences.
When most of us pay attention to U.S. history, it is often through the celebration of anniversaries. Only weeks ago, for instance, ESFL marked the 85th anniversary of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters’ strike. But now, in late August, we turn our attention to a much more vexed anniversary – the centennial of “The Red Summer” of 1919. Despite the Russian Revolution of 1917-1918, the “red” did not refer to communism. Rather, it was a reference to bloodshed, particularly that occasioned by race riots. No fewer than 25 cities, north and south, east and west, and Midwest, were swept by racialized violence. All were precipitated by white mobs who attacked African American neighborhoods, institutions, homes, and families.
This chapter in our country’s history profoundly impacted African Americans, immigrants, and the “white” descendants of earlier immigrants, and the relationships between and among them, but it was not part of the “American history” most of us were taught in school. But we can still learn this history and explore its consequences through the resources and programs provided at ESFL. Activist scholars have undertaken research and written about the experiences of specific cities, often connecting that history to the challenges of their own era. In 1970, William Tuttle published one of the first such studies, RACE RIOT: CHICAGO IN THE RED SUMMER OF 1919, a book which has been reprinted several times. Just months ago, almost half a century later, the University of North Carolina Press published a new study, OCCUPIED TERRITORY: POLICING BLACK CHICAGO FROM RED SUMMER TO BLACK POWER, by Simon Balto, a young History professor at Ball State University in Indiana. Balto, who had been a student of ESFL’s close friend Will Jones, explicitly connects the racialized violence of the past to that of the present. While such studies detail the violence directed at African Americans, some seek to illuminate the ways that the “victims” also resisted. Five years ago, in his book, 1919, THE YEAR OF RACIAL VIOLENCE: HOW AFRICAN AMERICANS FOUGHT BACK, David Krugler, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, tied African American activism in the Red Summer to the emergence of the “New Negro” and “Harlem Renaissance” cultural movements of the 1920s-1930s. These are just some of the books we have on our shelves.
You can also learn more about these events and discuss their consequences by attending the August 22 presentation by veteran African American journalist Joseph Hill, and our screening of the powerful dramatic film, “The Killing Floor,” on August 22. Together, we can unearth more of our complex past and place it in conversation with our present.
Peter Rachleff