In the past year, film-maker Bayeté Ross Smith has traveled across the country, trying to find the exact locations where Black people were brutally attacked and killed a century ago. He wanted to make films that showed his viewers that they are living on top of a history of racial violence that was rarely taught or discussed.
He started by studying pictures of white mobs climbing buildings, destroying neighborhoods and killing Black people – all part of a white backlash to the progress Black Americans made after the first world war. Incidents of racial terror were so numerous in the summer of 1919 that it was given a name: Red Summer.
The images look like they’re from another era. But when Smith saw pictures of the Capitol insurrection in January 2021, he couldn’t help but notice the parallels between those images and the ones he was studying.
“The juxtaposition was almost uncanny,” he said. “To see that happen in this day and age is just a reminder of how we’re not that far from the violence and the motivations for the violence that happened 100 years ago.”
Over the past year, Smith has collaborated with the Guardian to create 360 immersive videos that overlay photos from the race massacres on top of modern day footage. Smith traveled to seven cities that experienced racial violence a century ago: Tulsa, Oklahoma; Elaine, Arkansas; Omaha, Nebraska; East St Louis, Illinois; Houston, Texas; Washington DC; and Chicago, Illinois.
As he concludes the project, we asked him about his experience retracing the steps of this oft forgotten history and what he learned.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Read the full story at The Guardian | US News.
