Description

This hoodie traces a lineage of racial massacres that predate the founding of the United States and extend deep into the 20th century. The design’s center of gravity is the Red Summer of 1919, a season in which more than three dozen cities erupted in anti‑Black violence. East St. Louis (1917), Chicago (1919), Washington D.C. (1919), Knoxville (1919), Omaha (1919), and Elaine (1919) represent some of the most devastating episodes—mass killings, lynch mobs, and the destruction of entire neighborhoods. These events were not spontaneous riots; they were organized assaults, often aided or ignored by local authorities, designed to enforce racial hierarchy at a moment when Black veterans, workers, and families were asserting new claims to dignity and citizenship.

Tulsa 1921, placed prominently in the design, marks the destruction of Greenwood—one of the most prosperous Black communities in the nation. Its inclusion signals that violence did not end with Red Summer; it evolved, expanded, and adapted to new political conditions.—the hoodie collapses past and present, insisting that the technologies of racial terror have simply changed form. The garment becomes a wearable archive, a teaching tool, and a memorial to the thousands whose stories remain unacknowledged in mainstream narratives.