Reviews

From a review by Wendy Smith, Los Angeles Times:
“McWhirter makes clear in his carefully researched, briskly narrated account of this difficult period in our national history, African Americans were increasingly disinclined to take advice from even well-meaning whites. The NAACP, founded in 1909 by a primarily white group of Northern liberals, was transformed by the events of 1919 into America’s premier civil rights organization, led by African Americans from the South.”

From a review by Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post:
“That it is one of the most shameful periods in our history is beyond question. Yet McWhirter is right to insist that during this same time, forgotten though it may be, ‘Black America awakened politically, socially, and artistically [as] never before.’ The first stirrings of what became the Harlem Renaissance were felt, and seeds were planted that bore fruit in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. As McWhirter says, if you explore the whole story of those troubled months, you are left not thinking of America’s bald and cruel failings, but of its astounding and elastic resilience. ‘The Red Summer’ is a story of destruction, but it is also a story of the beginning of a freedom movement.”

From a review by Ken Armstrong, The Seattle Times:
“In ‘Red Summer,’ Wall Street Journal reporter Cameron McWhirter skillfully reconstructs this bloody and unsettling period, a pivotal stretch from April to October that produced ripple effects extending to our time….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.”

From a review by Joseph Williams, The Minneapolis Star Tribune:
“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.”

From a review by Michael Taylor, The Richmond Times-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. His prose is carefully constructed and clear, and he avoids the temptation to embellish.”

From Booklist:
Starred review by Vanessa Bush. “From April to November 1919, a cataclysm of racial tension gripped America as black GIs returning from WWI bridled against increasing efforts to hold them in second-class status. Hundreds died, and millions of lives were disrupted as race riots broke out across the nation. McWhirter chronicles the lynchings and riots, the building tensions on both sides of the racial divide, in cities from Charleston, South Carolina, to Chicago and from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Washington, D.C., as the country came to grips with its troubled racial past and present….McWhirter recounts the roles of the NAACP in galvanizing racial justice campaigns and the black press in spreading the word about racial atrocities and efforts to resist. A riveting account of the summer that transformed American race relations.”

From Kirkus Reviews:
“Masterly examination of the widespread outbreak of racially motivated mob violence in the summer of 1919. In his debut, Wall Street Journal staff reporter 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.”

From Publishers Weekly:
“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.’ ”

From Library Journal:
“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.”

From a review in the Chicago Sun-Times:
“McWhirter makes a persuasive case that the summer of 1919 served as a turning point unlike any before or since….The book is fresh in its examination for three reasons: the depth of McWhirter’s research on one year; the theme that African Americans began to shake off their shackles in that year because of their proud but largely unacknowledged service to their country during World War I; and the lucid explanation about why the saga of American race relations makes sense to tell using 1919 as the centerpiece.”

From a review in the Chicago Tribune:
“McWhirter’s anatomy of the year’s violence and African-American responses to it make for poignant reading and the stories he tells are powerful ones that deserve to be remembered.”

Teresa Weaver, book editor of Atlanta Magazine:
“Absorbing history.”
The magazine picked Red Summer as one of its top five nonfiction works of 2011.

From a review in Chicago Life by Julie West Johnson:
“[E]xcellent new historical analysis….In every chapter, Red Summer reveals exhaustive research, with complete and precise documentation.”

From a review by Jim Cullen, The History News Network:
“McWhirter, a reporter who has worked around the globe and is now based at the Atlanta bureau of the Wall Street Journal, makes his case with deft prose and an exhaustive survey of the historical record.”

From a review by Steve Weinberg, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
“Writing a book abut black-white race relations across the United States is no big deal — thousands of authors have already been there. Writing a fresh, compelling book about race relations is a big deal. Cameron McWhirter, not a historian but a journalist, has written such a book.”

From Mike Feder, host of the Sirius XM radio show, The Feder Files:
“The book is, in my opinion, an essential history lesson for every American.”

From Milt Rosenberg, host of “Extension 720,” WGN, Chicago:
Red Summer “is very important, extemely interesting and very well wrought.”

From the lead item of the New York Post’s “Required Reading” column:
“The Red Summer had nothing to do with Communists. It was the blood of black Americans flowing in the streets of cities big and small that gave the terrible time its name.”

From a review by Rob Hardy in the Columbus, Miss., Dispatch:
“[T]here are plenty of eye-opening revelations in ‘Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America’ (Henry Holt) by Cameron McWhirter, the first narrative history of that epochal year….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.”

From a review by Scott McLemee in Barnes and Noble Review:
“Without ever sounding like an editorial, Red Summer has the feel of that moment just after the 2008 election: it is cast as a lesson in the sources of progress, a tale of how far we’ve come.”

From a review by Clay Risen in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas:
“Red Summer is a deeply researched, compelling entry in the growing body of literature on the so-called ‘long civil rights movement.’ This approach holds that, rather than seeing the legislative achievements of the 1960s as the discrete result of the work begun by Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s Deep South—what the activist Bayard Rustin called the ‘classical’ phase of the movement—scholars need to position those events within a longer, more varied, and more open-ended narrative.”

From a review by Peggy Carlson in the Fredericksburg, Va., Free Lance-Star:
“Cameron McWhirter, staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal and author of “Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America” 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.”

From an American Heritage review:
“Cameron McWhirter found that at least 25 major riots, in which more than 52 African Americans were lynched, hundreds of people killed, and tens of thousands forced to flee their homes. While the summary alone gives one pause, his particulars are utterly chilling.”

From a review by Ewuradjoa Dawson-Amoah for the “Youth Vote” section of The Progressive Reader:
“Although Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America can be ‘disagreeable,’ it is also extremely important. The accounts recorded in it should never again be forgotten.”

From a review by Sam Handler for The Daily:
“By carefully cataloging the riots, McWhirter dispenses with the myth that Northern industrial cities were unequivocally hospitable to blacks. In Northern and Southern states alike, labor strife, fears of radicalism and a still-strong racial prejudice brought both Northern and Southern whites to terrorize African-Americans during the Red Summer of 1919. McWhirter, though, rejects a story of simple victimization. Instead, he focuses on the black community’s unprecedented efforts to fight back.”

From David Levering Lewis, author of King: A Biography and W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919:
“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.”

From Richard Slotkin, author of Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality:
“A thoroughly researched and well-written study of a crucial and violent turn in the history of race relations in America.”

From a review by Donna Bowen McDaniel:
“McWhirter’s well-written and thoroughly researched work tells truths about the death or wounding of hundreds of African Americans and millions of dollars in damage to their property, another phenomenon on which history texts are silent. If we are to speak truth to power, McWhirter gives us vital truths to confront.”

From a review in the UK-based Historical Novel Review:
“One of the negative side effects of the decline in newspaper readership is that fewer people are exposed to the artistry displayed by the better journalists. Red Summer will, one hopes, enable a wide audience to experience the top grade writing of Cameron McWhirter, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The author presents the violent racial turmoil in 1919 America in a well-documented depiction of a nation seemingly on the verge of race war.”

From a review by Adam J. Hodges, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (January 2013):
“McWhirter’s book is thoroughly researched, listing an impressive thirty-four libraries and archives in the bibliography, and its author displays a keen knowledge of the literature on race produced during the Red Summer era and since…The book deserves wide readership.”