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In Remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional Stories and Media Responses to the Black Freedom Struggle
On August 28, 1955, fourteen-year-old Chicago native Emmett Till was brutally beaten to death for allegedly flirting with a white woman at a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were acquitted of murdering Till and dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River, and later that year, an all-white grand jury chose not to indict the men on kidnapping charges. A few months later, Bryant and Milam admitted to the crime in an interview with the national media. They were never convicted.
Although Till’s body was mutilated, his mother ordered that his casket remain open during ...Read More
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The Separate City: Black Communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968
A ground-breaking collaborative study merging perspectives from history, political science, and urban planning, The Separate City is a trenchant analysis of the development of the African-American community in the urban South. While similar in some respects to the racially defined ghettos of the North, the districts in which southern blacks lived from the pre-World War II era to the mid-1960s differed markedly from those of their northern counterparts. The African- American community in the South was (and to some extent still is) a physically expansive, distinct, and socially heterogeneous zone within the larger metropolis. It found itself functioning both politically ...Read More
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In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma
Bernard LaFayette Jr. (b. 1940) was a cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a leader in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins, a Freedom Rider, an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the national coordinator of the Poor People’s Campaign. At the young age of twenty-two, he assumed the directorship of the Alabama Voter Registration Project in Selma—a city that had previously been removed from the organization’s list due to the dangers of operating there.
In this electrifying memoir, written with Kathryn Lee Johnson, LaFayette shares the inspiring story of ...Read More
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Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860
This book explores the centrality of race in the development of Georgia, from its founding in 1733 until the eve of the Civil War. During that time, Georgia's racial order shifted from a more fluid conception of race prevalent in the colonial era to a more harsh understanding of racial difference in the antebellum era. This study argues that long-term structural and demographic changes accounted for this transformation. This book traces the rise of rice cultivation and the plantation complex in lowcountry Georgia in the mid-eighteenth century and charts the spread of slavery into the backcountry in the decades that ...Read More
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Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity
Between 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson defined affirmative action as a legitimate federal goal, and 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon named one of affirmative action's chief antagonists the head of the Department of Labor, government officials at all levels addressed racial economic inequality in earnest. Providing members of historically disadvantaged groups an equal chance at obtaining limited and competitive positions, affirmative action had the potential to alienate large numbers of white Americans, even those who had viewed school desegregation and voting rights in a positive light. Thus, affirmative action was — and continues to be — controversial. This ...Read More
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After the Dream: Black and White Southerners since 1965
Martin Luther King's 1965 address from Montgomery, Alabama, the center of much racial conflict at the time and the location of the well-publicized bus boycott a decade earlier, is often considered by historians to be the culmination of the civil rights era in American history. In his momentous speech, King declared that segregation was “on its deathbed” and that the movement had already achieved significant milestones. Although the civil rights movement had won many battles in the struggle for racial equality by the mid-1960s, including legislation to guarantee black voting rights and to desegregate public accommodations, the fight to implement ...Read More
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Toward Freedom Land: The Long Struggle for Racial Equality in America
The ongoing struggle for civil rights and social justice lies at the heart of America's evolving identity. The pursuit of equal rights is often met with social and political trepidation, forcing citizens and leaders to grapple with controversial issues of race, class, and gender. This book assembles writings on twentieth–century race relations, representing some of the finest race-related historical research on record. Spanning thirty–five years of research, the collection features an in-depth examination of the Great Depression and its effects on African Americans, the intriguing story of the labor movement and its relationship to African American workers, and a discussion ...Read More
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Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader
The history of civil rights in the United States is usually analyzed and interpreted through the lenses of modern conservatism and progressive liberalism. This book argues that the historical record does not conveniently fit into either of these categories and that knowledge of the American classical liberal tradition is required to gain a more accurate understanding of the past, present, and future of civil liberties in the nation. By assembling and contextualizing classic documents—from the Declaration of Independence to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning school assignment by race—the book demonstrates that ...Read More
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