Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle Part One (LOA #376)

About Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle Part One (LOA #376)

This collection of 80 dramatic firsthand writings by Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and others brings to life the struggle for racial justice from the Civil War to World War I

A vital resource for the teaching of the history of race in America that traces the ascendency of white supremacy after Reconstruction—and the outspoken resistance to it led by Black Americans and their allies

W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified “the problem of the color-line” as the defining issue in American life. 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, Part One brings together speeches, pamphlets, newspaper and magazine articles, public testimony, judicial opinions, letters, and poems and song lyrics—more than eighty essential texts in all—from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 to the bloody “Red Summer” of 1919.

The volume includes writing by both famous and lesser known individuals, including:

• Ida B. Wells on the scourge of lynching
• Richard T. Greener’s scathing critique of America’s “White Problem”
• Charles Chesnutt on the nullification of the Fifteenth Amendment
• Booker T. Washington’s historic Atlanta address
• John Marshall Harlan’s eloquent and prophetic dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson;
• Mary Church Terrell on segregation in the nation’s capital and the convict lease system
• William Monroe Trotter’s dramatic White House confrontation with Woodrow Wilson
• Jeanette Carter’s tribute to the men and women who fought back against white mobs in 1919