At dusk on August 27, 1949, in a meadow called Lakeland Acres just outside Peekskill, New York, black radical singer, actor, and intellectual Paul Robeson was set to headline a concert. Pete Seeger and his fellow People’s Artists would open the show.

This performance would be Robeson’s third appearance in northern Westchester County in as many years. The “red summer belt” in northern Westchester County had become a kind of Borscht Belt for New York’s working-class radicals. The colonies and socialist summer camps also attracted black radicals and many fellow-traveling liberals.

Each resort had a different political pedigree: Mohegan Colony (once an old-line anarchist camp had, by 1949, become home to an eclectic mix of leftists and liberals), Camp Unity (closely affiliated with the Communist Party), Camp Followers of the Trail (an enclave of hardcore working-class communists), Camp Three Arrows (a Socialist Party retreat), and Shrub Oak Park (a “progressive” camp for left-wing New Dealers, unionists, “labor” Zionists, a handful of communists, and even some religious Jews).