Journalist Cameron McWhirter is the first to attempt a chronological narrative of the Red Summer, the nation's bloodiest period of race rioting, which stretched from April to November in 1919. This era has long been subsumed in the drama of the post-World War I Red Scare. Conflict between whites and blacks in 1919 has only recently begun to take center stage, joining the nativism and anti-communism that have long captivated scholars. In books published in 1998 and 2003, Theodore Kornweibel Jr. and Barbara Foley provided the links between black rebellion and government repression during the Red Scare.Footnote ¹ Kornweibel called the Red Scare “the most militant period of African-American history prior to the modern civil rights era” and asserted that federal power had a central role in crushing this uprising.Footnote ² No author has yet attempted to combine an examination of the rioting with one of organized black militancy. Just making sense of the rioting and building a basic framework around it is an enormous challenge. Harvard librarian Jan Voogd attempted in 2008 to divide twenty-six riots during the Red Summer into four categories: “hysterical reaction to racial caste rupture,” “arising out of labor conflicts,” “involving the military,” and “arising out of local politics.”Footnote ³ Many of the individually described riots really should sit astride multiple categories, and nearly half end up in the first section. The book, ultimately, is indispensible as a reference and bewildering as a synthesis.

McWhirter came up with roughly the same number of major race riots, but he and Voogd each include some riots that the other did not. Even the basic process of defining a significant Red Summer race riot and collecting a comprehensive list seems to be still in progress. Rather than use a thematic framework like Voogd's, McWhirter started in Jenkins County, Georgia in April 1919. The violence began here, and the author identified seven riots in Georgia, making it by far the most violent state. His list of riots also reveals the violence as, in many ways, a southern story: two-thirds of the clashes took place in the former Confederate states. This contradicts Voogd's measure, in which over half took place outside the South. 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. Strangely, however, the author did not mention Voogd's book, and their differing choices remain unreconciled.

McWhirter intersperses chapters on select riots in specific locales with chapters on the context of black activism during the period, mainly the rapidly growing and increasingly assertive National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). That organization serves as glue for the disparate narrative pieces on local riots as the Red Summer grinds grimly on. In Kornweibel's book, the NAACP was just one facet of black militancy in the period, and he spent just as much time on major African American newspapers, the Garvey movement, and blacks in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). McWhirter presents the Red Summer in a framework that shows a much more direct continuity with the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. The swirl of revolutionary ardor and its repression, typically so central to analysis of 1919, plays little role here. McWhirter offers an inversion of earlier work, privileging the battles of the left. There is as little on anti-capitalist radicalism in McWhirter's Red Summer as there is on the race riots in Robert K. Murray's foundational 1955 Red Scare.Footnote ⁴ McWhirter consistently referred to the IWW as the “International Workers of the World,”Footnote ⁵ making clear how little revolutionaries and their opponents mattered to his research.

Jumping from one locale to another, the author weaves together a story that refuses to simplify causality. Using a journalist's clipped sentences and dividing the chapters into short sections, McWhirter packed in as much human drama as possible to vividly explicate the tangled web of economic, political, and cultural factors at work in the conflagration. As with scholars of the period who focus on public hysteria over the reds, McWhirter is not quite sure why the wave of rioting diminishes. However, he does argue for the era's positive importance, though it is replete with tragedy: “It was the start of a process—a great dismantling of institutional prejudice and inequity that marred American society. In military terms, the Red Summer was more akin to Lexington and Concord than to Yorktown” (252). McWhirter recounts Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial at the bottom of that page. It is the other side of the coin of Kornweibel's continuity, the dogged persistence of government repression of black militancy down through the decades.

McWhirter makes the case that the Red Summer heightened and transformed black political and legal activism and that even though Garvey's movement was larger, the NAACP was more relevant and had the lasting vision focused on equality, not separatism. It is also no surprise that William M. Tuttle Jr., the author of the first major work on the Red Summer, a 1970 history of the Chicago riot, lent his advice and his files to McWhirter (273–74).Footnote ⁶ Tuttle was determined to bring everyday people into the history of 1919, and McWhirter continues that valuable enterprise. He is at his best when describing the human impact of the outbreaks of local violence and evoking the terror of its victims. The book deserves wide readership. Subsequent attempts to synthesize the Red Summer and perhaps finally integrate it with the Red Scare now have a foundational chronology upon which to build.