A vivid firsthand record of the stain of white supremacy and the outspoken resistance of Black and white Americans who envisioned a better, more just nationW.E.B. Du Bois famously identified “the problem of the color-line” as the defining issue in American life in the twentieth century. The powerful writings gathered here reveal the many ways Americans, Black and white, fought against white supremacist efforts to police the color line, envisioning a better America in the face of disenfranchisement, segregation, and widespread lynching, mob violence, and police brutality.
Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle brings together speeches, pamphlets, newspaper and magazine articles, public testimony and appeals, judicial opinions, and poems and song lyrics from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 to the Boston busing crisis of 1974–76.
This volume includes writing by both famous and lesser known individuals, including
- Frederick Douglass on the importance of voting rights
- Ida B. Wells on the scourge of lynching
- Richard T. Greener’s scathing critique of America’s “White Problem”
- Booker T. Washington’s historic Atlanta address
- John Marshall Harlan’s eloquent and prophetic dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson
- William Monroe Trotter’s dramatic White House confrontation with Woodrow Wilson
- Alain Locke’s tribute to “the New Negro”
- Thurgood Marshall on police brutality in wartime Detroit
- Rosa Parks’s appeal for justice for Recy Taylor
- Earl Warren’s landmark opinion in Brown
- Fannie Lou Hamer’s eloquent challenge to disenfranchisement in Mississippi
- and James Baldwin on the myths and meaning of the American Dream
As the teaching of our nation’s history, especially the history of race in America, becomes increasingly contested, this book will serve as a vital resource, a crucial reminder of where we’ve been, how far we’ve come, and how long the road ahead remains.
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