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Race Riots and Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919. By Jan Voogd. African American Literature and Culture, No. 1 8. (New York and other cities: Peter Lang, c. 2008. Pp. [xii], 234. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-1-4331-0067-3; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-1-4331-0068-0.)
The year 1919 witnessed a wave of at least twenty-six race riots. Unlike the riots of the 1960s, in which black protesters ended up destroying their own communities, whites expressing "hysterical racism" initiated the violence of the so-called Red Summer (p. 3). World War I had bred extremes of patriotism, nativism, revolution, and moral ambiguity. Jan Voogd 's main thesis is that "[t]he major factor in this dynamic was the element of wartime hysteria injected into the longstanding racism, through many-faceted, gendered threats to white men's masculinity or honor" (p. 9).
After reviewing a broad range of social science literature, some of which seems only tangentially relevant, Voogd next gives fairly thorough descriptions of twenty-six riots divided into four categories. Her largest grouping consists of "hysterical reaction[s]" to breaches of racial caste boundaries. Five of twelve such riots occurred in the South, the best known being those in Longview, Texas, and...