Book Signing Cameron McWhirter at Eagle Eye

Cameron McWhirter, is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, from Hamilton College, where he majored in history. He earned a masters from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and has worked for several news organizations including and . He has been awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for research in Eritrea and the Sudan, and a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, where he conceived this book. He lives in Decatur, Georgia, with his wife and two children. 

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.

is the first narrative history written about this epic encounter. Focusing on the worst riots and lynchings-including those in Chicago, Washington, D.C., 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 forty years later.