Red Summer

The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America

By: Cameron McWhirter

Narrated by: L.J. Ganser

A narrative history of America's deadliest episode of race riots and lynchings.

After World War I, black Americans fervently hoped for a new epoch of peace, prosperity, and equality. Black soldiers believed their participation in the fight to make the world safe for democracy finally earned them rights they had been promised since the close of the Civil War.

Instead, an unprecedented wave of anti-black riots and lynchings swept the country for eight months. From April to November of 1919, the racial unrest rolled across the South into the North and the Midwest, even to the nation's capital. Millions of lives were disrupted, and hundreds of lives were lost. Blacks responded by fighting back with an intensity and determination never seen before.

Red Summer is the first narrative history about this epic encounter. Focusing on the worst riots and lynchings - including those in Chicago, Washington, DC, Charleston, Omaha, and Knoxville - Cameron McWhirter chronicles the mayhem, while also exploring the first stirrings of a civil rights movement that would transform American society 40 years later.

©2011 Cameron McWhirter (P)2019 Tantor

Poignant

I learned many new things from listening to this book and gleaned greater historical context from others I already knew. Beyond the information conveyed, it leaves me with many questions about how we discuss educate ourselves around events in this country. At times, the accounts feel almost fictional because they are incredibly hard to stomach the reality. However, I would recommend anyone interested in learning about a treacherous time in our country’s history to listen to this book and reflect upon the generations of people and cultures that have been so devastated by the actions, policies, prejudice, and hatred through individual bigotry and systematic injustice.

How 1919 is like today

For the time traveled between 1919 to the present I am surprised by the similarities of racism. For examples, it was like watching all the comments on a social media post. But it was from 1919!

I also found the movement for seeking rights afforded to all citizens, equal treatment under the law, and the right to due process being fought for not just today or in 1964, but in 1919.

The retelling of what happened during the “red summer” documents the evil perpetrated against blacks by racist white mobs.

Rather than ending on a sad note this story touches on the sprouts of hope and new life.

True American History with brutality, ignorance and violence.

It really opened my eyes about American History and all children should no about it so it doesn’t repeat.

Mike

Quite informative. An exceptional and granular look at a horrible time period. I learned so

Excellent Account of a Pivotal Year

McWhirter does an excellent job bringing to life a pivotal year in American race relations. With more lynchings (in the south as well as in northern cities like Omaha) than any succeeding year in American history, and an intensely violent wave of white initiated race riots, it is a year generally understood in tragic terms. While fully acknowledging, in addition to carefully delineating this violence, despite often biased or incomplete accounts in the mainstream white press, the author makes an effective argument that 1919 also marked a turning point in African-American responses to it. African-Americans, many of them WW1 veterans, fought back against violent white attacks, meeting fire with fire, while also strengthening social and political organization through groups like the NAACP. The author mainly finds the shift in race-related attitudes and reforms after 1919 a positive one, linking it with (and ending with) the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The work being several years old, the audio book version produced in 2019, the events of 2020 may have provided another context in which to view 1919. What struck me was the way the press and politicians present events and protests, though it has changed, still often lack balance and accuracy and continue to represent themes now at least a century old. Any attack or criticism of the existing racial order is identified as associated with dangerous radicalism with appeals to law and order often used to crush out calls for reform. Despite perhaps demonstrating a tendency to assign revolutionary status to the black response to the Red Summer of 1919 rather than seeing it as an intensification and continuation of earlier trends and drawing overly positive conclusions, this is a worthy work deserving of attention. Reading it certainly provides additional context to the history of race in America. The narrator does a solid job, and it may be that critics listening to him at 1.25 speed, which I found to be the pre-set. At standard speed, the tone and inflection better match the material.