Kerlin, Robert T.

Born in Newcastle, Missouri in 1866, the son of former slaveholders, Kerlin left to attend Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and Harvard, before earning his doctorate in English at Yale. He returned to Missouri to begin his career, teaching at Missouri Valley College from 1890-1894, before heading the doctrine of the call and becoming a Methodist Episcopal minister. His unpopular race advocacy platform caused him to be dismissed from his teaching position with the Virginia Military Institute. He became a race advocate working to end Jim Crow segregation laws.

Voice of the Negro (1919): The Classic African American Account of Riots and Lynching in America After the First World War

2014 0-7734-4356-8
A concise, journalistic overview of Red Summer and its background. This book also includes an introduction and reappraisal by Dr. Thomas Aiello of Robert T. Kerlin’s monumental book. Kerlin’s work, gathering the written articles from the ‘on-the-scene’ Black Journalists who witnessed the racial violence during the long hot summer following the Treaty of Versailles, continues to bring valuable insight to our understanding into the causes of these 1919 race riots..

An outstanding work by activist professor Thomas Kerlin which remains historically relevant and vital, but is a much overlooked work, The Voice of the Negro, Kerlin’s inspired response in the wake of the Red Summer’s racial violence, was moral, intellectual and practical, drawing his facts from the National Black press and its Journalists who were frontline witnesses to the stunning racial horrors of Red Summer.