Red Summer

"In Red Summer . . . Cameron McWhirter skillfully reconstructs this bloody and unsettling period, a pivotal stretch from April to October that produced ripple effects extending to our time . . . There's a social consciousness to McWhirter's approach that is enormously appealing. It's as if he's walking through a neglected graveyard, etching names into gravestones that we have allowed to fade for fear of the stories that go with all those deaths . . . McWhirter's insistence on attaching names—to the dead and, when possible, to those responsible for the violence—provides the book with a cumulative power and a sense of historical accountability."—Ken Armstrong, Seattle Times

"Cameron McWhirter, not a historian but a journalist, has written [a fresh, compelling book about race relations]."—Steve Weinberg, Atlanta Journal Constitution

"McWhirter weaves an understated, powerful narrative . . . In unflinching, just-the-facts style bolstered with copious footnotes, McWhirter describes how the entrenched white power structure—small-town police, elected officials, businessmen and even newspapers—were bent on preserving the social order in uncertain economic times. But African-Americans, some of whom had fought with valor in World War I, were chafing under Jim Crow rule and discrimination in the open marketplace."—Joseph Williams, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"The old boast is that everything is bigger and better in America. Cameron McWhirter's comprehensive history of the terrible Red Summer of 1919 reminds us that, because our failures at democracy are also very big, we have to be even better at understanding why."—David Levering Lewis, author of King: A Biography and W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919

"This visual chronicle is enhanced with pictures and the anecdotes of heroes such as Thurgood Marshall, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E. B. Du Bois. I'd characterize this selection as a Black historian's dream work. I tread through the pages spellbound with feelings of sadness, pain, and hope."—Rosetta Codling, Atlanta Examiner

"There are plenty of eye-opening revelations in Red Summer. . . the first narrative history of that epochal year. McWhirter is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and much of the obviously extensive research he has done involves the way the newspapers covered the violence at the time. Not only does he give narratives of the causes and details of the riots in Chicago, Washington, Omaha and other cities, he gives a broader picture of the reasons 1919 should have been a particular year for racial violence, and the changes the violence wrought."—Rob Hardy, The Columbus Dispatch

"It has taken nearly a century for a narrative history of this tragic episode in American history to be written, and Wall Street Journal reporter Cameron McWhirter has done a superb job in Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. The book is well-researched, and McWhirter's journalistic skills serve him well in writing about such a sensitive subject."—Michael Taylor, Richmond Times Dispatch

"Cameron McWhirter . . . has done a top-notch job of shining a light on a particularly horrific chapter in a long line of appalling treatment of African-Americans."—Peggy Carlson, Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star

"Weaving the great economic and political tides of the post-World War I era together with deeply personal stories, researched and written with an artist's eye for detail and a novelist's sense of pacing, Cameron McWhirter recounts an eight-month ‘spasm of brutality' in which white mobs attached more than two dozen African-American communities."—Hamilton College Magazine

"Masterful examination of the widespread outbreak of racially motivated mob violence in the summer of 1919 . . . McWhirter describes in gripping detail a wave of incidents of mob violence that erupted across America in the summer following the end of World War I. . . . Throughout the book, the author writes with professional detachment, permitting his subjects' words and deeds to speak eloquently for themselves, amplified by liberal quotation from the vibrant black press of the period. An unsettling reminder of the cruelty and hatred that can lie beneath the surface of a nation formally committed to equal justice for all, but also a monument to the suffering and perseverance of a people at last determined to demand rights promised but too long denied."—Kirkus Reviews

"A riveting account of the summer that transformed American race relations."—Vanessa Bush, Booklist (starred review)

"McWhirter's narrative style will engage general readers unfamiliar with events during America's early 20th-century civil rights struggle. Professional historians will appreciate the extensive, well-sourced newspaper and archival research."—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library Journal

"The author brings a journalist's diligent digging and skillful storytelling to this historical account; behind the names of towns, he takes the reader into the lives of victims who suffered, perpetrators who destroyed, enablers who dawdled, and politicians who profited, as well as those who fought back . . . McWhirter's valuable study, in chronologically examining the outbreaks of violence, may well qualify as ‘the first narrative history of America's deadliest episode of race riots and lynchings.'"—Publishers Weekly