Red Summer is a portfolio of photographic collages created as a response to the locations in the U.S. landscape where a series of racial conflicts occurred between 1917 and 1923. The selected locations are not meant to be comprehensive, however, they are offered as examples of these post World War I conflicts.  A few of the categories of particular concern for this work includes (but are not limited to); growing African American resistance to decades of lynching; labor conflicts stemming from the mass immigration of European labor; the disenfranchisement of WWI Black veterans that returned home to second class status in a segregated society; and ongoing violence directed at African American communities.

The prints incorporate landscape images of the communities where many of the significant events occurred with fragments of contemporaneous newspaper accounts of the era. “Red Summer” was a term used by James Weldon Johnson to describe the concentration of racial conflicts (at least 25) that took place across the U.S. during 1919.

Red Summer Discussion with Arlene Keiser, Oct 2020

Click thumbnail images below to view full versions. Prints are available for exhibition.