It’s not an easy thing to reckon with one’s past. It’s even harder to look back and see how the decisions of others have molded your present in invisible ways. And it can be downright terrifying to stand in full recognition of the villainy that presides over the social order of today and know how that mendacity is a through-line of the web of history, ensnaring and damning us all.
Red Summer is the latest LP from Chicago’s experimental gospel anti-music vanguard Ono. It is the fourth LP from the group since their reconstitution in 2012 following a 26-year hiatus. Lead by multi-instrumentalist sound-miser P Michael Grego and evocative siren travis, their latest album examines the legacy of the “Red Summer” in Chicago, a period in 1919 when white, mostly Irish mobs, roamed the south side of the city beating, murdering, and terrorizing black citizens. Their victims had moved to Chicago for work and to escape the campaigns of the revived Klan in the deep southern United States. Now they were faced with conditions as bad as those they had fled. The race riot was set off by the murder of Eugene Williams at a segregated beach. Williams had swum too close to the whites-only area, was struck by a stone and drown. Police refused to arrest the white man who had killed Williams and the resulting protests by the black community were met by violent suppression by white mobs. This aggressive response escalated into the now infamous riots that claimed the lives of 38 lives, injured countless others, and resulted in tremendous damage to the property and livelihood for Southside blacks. After the riots were suppressed by the National Guard in August, no prosecutions were brought for the murder of black citizens who were victims of racist violence.
While the riot ended 100 years ago, the Red Summer has not. Ono’s latest album connects the threads of the first sale of black people as property in what would become the United States, to the violence of the Red Summer, through the butchery of the Tuskegee experiments, through wars waged by the rich and fought by the poor, and finally to the degraded state of affairs today, and asks: Why has the world changed so much, and yet, remained dishearteningly the same? This question is especially relevant to Chicago, which remains onerously divided along racial lines, and where the death and execution of its black citizens, by poverty, by cop, and now plague, remains criminally under-addressed.
On Red Summer, Ono remains committed to their mission of illuminating our discordant reality through mutilated jazz, harsh piercing tones, and an antagonistic gospel revue. As we head into the summer months, it is imperative to remember that the past, for better or for worse (mostly worse), is alive in all of us. Only in examining the wounds left by the sabers of injustice can we attempt to break these blades and ensure that they are never again in the hands who would use them to do harm. It is possible to bring the Red Summer to an end, but if only we are willing to recognize where it began.
Grab a copy of Red Summer via American Dream Records, here.
