2 chapters across the catalog
The "Red Summer" of 1919 is analyzed as a period where racial riots and the "Red Scare" intersected. In Chicago, the Black population doubled due to the Great Migration, leading to housing and job competition with European immigrants. The government feared that "serious" Black people were being radicalized by Bolsheviks, leading to the monitoring of Black newspapers by J. Edgar Hoover and the labeling of civil rights groups as communist fronts.
Author Isabel Wilkerson describes the "Great Migration," where millions of Black Americans fled the Jim Crow South for Northern industrial cities like New York and Chicago. This exodus was driven by the need for labor during World War I and the mechanization of cotton picking in 1927, which displaced agricultural workers. The hosts discuss the "Red Summer" of 1919 and the subsequent creation of "urban" identity, noting that Black migrants were often used as a wedge to drive down wages for white workers.
