1919 is the title of Eve L. Ewing’s collection of poems and the year of the Chicago Race Riots. Most of the poems begin with an excerpt from The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot, a report prepared in 1922 by a committee appointed by the Governor of Illinois. Then a poem follows, inspired by or elaborating on the passage excerpted. The poems are good, and have some knock-out lines, but my main takeaway was the humanity of people involved in and affected by the riots. One may debate how much racism has changed over the last 100 years, but the perpetrators and victims in the 1919 riots, and the respective white and black narrators describing those events, seemed to me, as people, no different than people of today. Here’s what New York Journal of Books says:
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/1919-poems
