Entry · catalog no. 5414
whip it to the red
/ /ˌwɪp ɪt tə ðə ˈrɛd/ /WIP it tuh thuh RED
phrase · Harlem, New York · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
To club or pound someone about the head until the blood runs. In Hurston's Harlem the phrase most often named police violence specifically: a patrolman drawing his nightstick on a man he had decided to punish. The base form is to whip somebody's head; to the red is the intensifier, and the red is blood.
“He flashed that salute one time too many, and the officer whipped his head to the red.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem street speech of the 1930s and early 1940s, carried north by Southern Black migrants and collected on the avenue by Zora Neale Hurston working as a folklorist. It belongs to a cluster of Harlem terms about force and authority and describes a beating in the plainest words the neighborhood had. A gloss now circulating online — that the phrase means to go all out, at top speed — is wrong and appears nowhere in Hurston. Her own glossary reads that it means to beat a man's head until it is bloody, and her story uses it of a policeman's nightstick. Dan Burley wrote about head whipping in the Amsterdam Star-News the same year, which is independent confirmation that this was live speech and not a literary flourish.
1942
Hurston prints it in her Glossary of Harlem Slang and uses it in the story's dialogue
1942
Dan Burley discusses head whipping in the New York Amsterdam Star-News, 17 October
1995
Library of America reprints story and glossary in Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem, New York · 1940s
Spoken by
Harlem street and sporting men — hustlers, working people, mostly Southern-born
$WHIPITThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Dormant84 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
25/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1942
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston, "Story in Harlem Slang" with "Glossary of Harlem Slang," The American Mercury, July 1942
magazine
■
Dan Burley, New York Amsterdam Star-News, 17 October 1942, p. 10
newspaper
■
+ Cite a sourceZora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories, Library of America, 1995, pp. 1001–10
book
See also