Red Summer

After World War I, African American troops returned home with heightened expectations of the freedom and respect they'd received in Europe. France, in particular, welcomed these soldiers, believing they would bolster a French army besieged by battlefield casualties. Black- soldiers soon discovered that racial lines were not as strictly drawn as they were in the U.S.

On returning to American soil, they were disappointed to find themselves under the shadow of Jim Crow restrictions enforced by the Ku Klux Klan whose ranks would swell throughout the 1920s. It was an existential moment in the history of Black Americans. Those who fought for their country's freedom were denied just that. Tensions spiked. In the summer of 1919, race riots broke out in several major cities. The subsequent blood spilled in America's streets would prompt Black poet James Weldon Johnson to coin the phrase "red summer" to describe the violence raging throughout the heartland.

To many of its citizens, Knoxville, Tennessee, was the least likely place for such racial explosions. Knoxville's white folks were on good terms with the city's Black residents. However, when a white woman named Bertie Lindsey was murdered in August of 1919 by a killer alleged to be Black, a white Knoxville police officer, nursing a grudge, targeted a young and debonair Black man named Maurice Mays as the murderer. The subsequent riot and trial of Mays would capture national attention. The all-male, all-white jury's verdict would prove to be an act of injustice screaming for retribution. Nor would Mays's death by electrocution be the end of his story. Red Summer: A Novel is a work of historical fiction tapping into one of the most challenging times in America's blood-soaked history.