Library of America #376

Introduction / by Tyina L. Steptoe -- 1876-1896 -- 1897-1909 -- 1909-1919 -- Chronology -- Note on the texts

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. A vital resource for the teaching of the history of race in America that traces the ascendancy 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: Part One, Reconstruction to the Red Summer brings together speeches, pamphlets, newspaper and magazine articles, public testimony and appeals, judicial opinions, letters, and poems and song lyrics from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the bloody "Red Summer" of 1919. These writings record and illuminate the ways Americans, Black and white, fought against white supremacy and envisioned a better America in the face of disenfranchisement, segregation, and widespread lynching, mob violence, and police brutality. The volume includes writing by both famous and lesser known individuals, including Ida B. Wells on the myths 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, Robert Smalls's protest against disenfranchisement in South Carolina, 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, and Jeanette Carter's tribute to the men and women who fought back white mobs in 1919. The volume also presents revealing examples of white supremacist advocacy by Nathaniel Shaler and Benjamin Tillman; testimony about the "Exoduster" migration to Kansas in the 1870s; celebrations of path-breaking Black musicians and stage performers; writing about the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, the founding of the NAACP, and Black soldiers in World War I; and contrasting editorials from the Black and white press on prizefighter Jack Johnson and the outlaw Robert Charles"-- Provided by publisher