Anatomy of Four Race Riots by Lee E. Williams II is a concise historical study of four outbreaks of racial violence in the post–World War I United States—Knoxville, Elaine, Tulsa, and Chicago—showing how different spark events unfolded within strikingly similar climates of fear, resentment, and contested Black advancement. Rather than treating each riot as isolated, it compares the local conditions, the roles of rumor and policing, and the aftermath of devastation and injustice, aiming to explain patterns of racial conflict from 1919 to 1921 without turning the narrative into a single-case whodunit.
