‘A reminder of what human beings can be capable of’: a journey to the sites of America’s forgotten race massacres

Bayete Ross Smith's project on the Red Summer of 1919 reveals uncanny' likeness to today's political violence

In the past year, film-maker Bayete Ross Smith has traveled across the country, trying to find the exact locations where Black people were brutally attacked and killed a century ago. He wanted to make films that showed his viewers that they are living on top of a history of racial violence that was rarely taught or discussed.

He started by studying pictures of white mobs climbing buildings, destroying neighborhoods and killing Black people - all part of a white backlash to the progress Black Americans made after the first world war. Incidents of racial terror were so numerous in the summer of 1919 that it was given a name: Red Summer.