Over the past two years, artist and photographer Bayeté Ross Smith has revisited the sites of Red Summer and the violence following the war, capturing present-day images through 360 VR (virtual reality) footage and pairing those with interviews of descendants, historians and activists to bring greater consciousness to a little understood and discussed historical period of the United States that is still relevant today.
In addition to Tulsa, Smith visited Washington DC, where white men in military uniform laid siege to Black neighbourhoods forcing President Woodrow Wilson to call in the national guard; Omaha where 10,000 whites attacked a county courthouse where they captured and burned alive a Black man accused of rape; and Chicago, where an estimated 50 people were killed, over 500 injured and more than 1,000 Black families left homeless in the greatest violence in the Red Summer. And he also visited East St Louis, Illinois, where whites fearful of losing political power attacked Black voters and their white allies two years before the Red Summer.