African American poetry invoking Red Summer addresses trauma, mob violence, racial hostility, and collective vulnerability while also recognising Black resistance and political awakening. The term represents a crucial historical moment exposing the fragility of postwar democratic promises. In poetry, it often functions as historical witness, communal memory, and indictment of racial injustice embedded within American public life.

Red Summer refers to the period of approximately April through November 1919, when anti-Black riots erupted in at least twenty-five cities across the United States, including Chicago, Washington D.C., and Elaine, Arkansas. The name is attributed to NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson. In poetry, Red Summer has become a touchstone for understanding the organised, systematic nature of racial violence in America and its continuity with both earlier and later periods of terror. Students should connect Red Summer to the broader context of post-World War I racial tensions and to the African American soldiers returning from France who had experienced more equal treatment. Related terms include anti-lynching poetry, Black Wall Street, dispossession, countermemory, and protest poetry.