"Focusing on the years of the Reconstruction, this volume examines the actions of the Ku Klux Klan between the years of 1865 and 1899. It explores how the organization sponsored and promoted violence against former slaves, and how that violence eventually led to the formation of armed defensive units, which in some instances engaged in retaliatory action"--Provided by publisher.

The Confederacy lost the Civil War but quickly began to win the peace when a mysterious organization arose called the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux, as it was then called, sought to restore white supremacy by terrorizing the formerly enslaved to prevent them from voting or owning firearms. To support Black resistance to the KKK’s campaign of murder and mayhem, President Ulysses S. Grant suspended the writ of habeas corpus in large portions of South Carolina and sent the famed 7th Cavalry to make mass arrests. Grant’s new attorney general, the first former Confederate to serve in a presidential Cabinet and an ardent advocate for Black equality, Amos T. Akerman, aggressively prosecuted the Ku Klux in a series of sensational trials that shocked the nation and forced a reckoning regarding just how much the Civil War and the recently enacted Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution had changed America and its notions of citizenship. Highlighting forgotten Black and white civil rights pioneers and weaving in the story of the author’s own great-grandfather’s crimes as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Freedom on Trial tells a gripping story of a moment pregnant with promise when race relations in the United States might have taken a dramatically different turn. It is a story that also offers a sober lesson for those engaged in the ongoing work of fulfilling the American promise of equality for all.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Where were the first African American churches founded? When did Frederick Douglass deliver his first anti-slavery speech? Who de-segregated Major League Baseball? The turbulent history of African Americans unfolds in historical waves, through rights and injustices, migration, inventions and art, protests, legislation, and accomplishments. From the first recorded arrival of Africans in the New World to the death of Rosa Parks, a chronology of events ties history together for the reader, giving a greater sense of the struggle, alienation, and triumph of blacks in America. The African American Chronology introduces the student researcher to the most impactful events in African American history, drawing from such categories as: Abolitionism, civil rights, economics, marriage, religion, media, literature, science, crime and war. Organized by date and including entries through 2005, the Chronology is one of the most accessible and current of its kind. The fascinating historical record is illuminated through primary source sidebars, illustrations, a glossary, print and online bibliography, and index.

The first comprehensive examination of the nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan since the 1970s, Ku-Klux pinpoints the group's rise with startling acuity. Historians have traced the origins of the Klan to Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, but the details behind the group's emergence have long remained shadowy. By parsing the earliest descriptions of the Klan, Elaine Frantz Parsons reveals that it was only as reports of the Tennessee Klan's mysterious and menacing activities began circulating in northern newspapers that whites enthusiastically formed their own Klan groups throughout the South. The spread of the Klan was thus intimately connected with the politics and mass media of the North. Shedding new light on the ideas that motivated the Klan, Parsons explores Klansmen's appropriation of images and language from northern urban forms such as minstrelsy, burlesque, and business culture. While the Klan sought to retain the prewar racial order, the figure of the Ku-Klux became a joint creation of northern popular cultural entrepreneurs and southern whites seeking, perversely and violently, to modernize the South. Innovative and packed with fresh insight, Parsons' book offers the definitive account of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.

This book examines African Americans' strategies for resisting white racial violence from the Civil War until the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 and up to the Clinton era. Christopher Waldrep's semi-biographical approach to the pioneers in the anti-lynching campaign portrays African Americans as active participants in the effort to end racial violence rather than as passive victims. In telling this more than 100-year-old story of violence and resistance, Waldrep describes how white Americans legitimized racial violence after the Civil War, and how black journalists campaigned against the violence by invoking the Constitution and the law as a source of rights. He shows how, toward the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, anti-lynching crusaders Ida B. Wells and Monroe Work adopted a more sociological approach, offering statistics and case studies to thwart white claims that a black propensity for crime justified racial violence. Waldrep describes how the NAACP, founded in 1909, represented an organized, even bureaucratic approach to the fight against lynching. Despite these efforts, racial violence continued after World War II, as racists changed tactics, using dynamite more than the rope or the gun. Waldrep concludes by showing how modern day hate crimes continue the lynching tradition, and how the courts and grass-roots groups have continued the tradition of resistance to racial violence. A rich selection of documents helps give the story a sense of immediacy. Sources include nineteenth-century eyewitness accounts of lynching, courtroom testimony of Ku Klux Klan victims, South Carolina senator Ben Tillman's 1907 defense of lynching, and the text of the first federal hate crimes law.

"Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans' bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress. Despite the trauma it could incur, many African Americans opted to publicize their experiences by testifying about the violence they endured and witnessed." "In this evocative and deeply moving history, Kidada Williams examines African Americans' testimonies about racial violence. By using both oral and print culture to testify about violence, victims and witnesses hoped they would be able to graphically disseminate enough knowledge about its occurrence that federal officials and the American people would be inspired bear witness to thier suffering and support their demands for justice. In the process of testifying, these people created a vernacular history of the violence they endured and witnessed, as well as the identities that grew from the experience of violence. This history fostered an oppositional consciousness to racial violence that inspired African Americans to form and support campaigns to end violence. The resulting crusades against racial violence became one of the political training grounds for the civil rights movement." -- Book Cover.

At the close of the Civil War, it was clear that the military conflict that began in South Carolina and was fought largely east of the Mississippi River had changed the politics, policy, and daily life of the entire nation. In an expansive reimagining of post–Civil War America, the essays in this volume explore these profound changes not only in the South but also in the Southwest, in the Great Plains, and abroad. Resisting the tendency to use Reconstruction as a catchall, the contributors instead present diverse histories of a postwar nation that stubbornly refused to adopt a unified ideology and remained violently in flux. Portraying the social and political landscape of postbellum America writ large, this volume demonstrates that by breaking the boundaries of region and race and moving past existing critical frameworks, we can appreciate more fully the competing and often contradictory ideas about freedom and equality that continued to define the United States and its place in the nineteenth-century world. Contributors include Amanda Claybaugh, Laura F. Edwards, Crystal N. Feimster, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Steven Hahn, Luke E. Harlow, Stephen Kantrowitz, Barbara Krauthamer, K. Stephen Prince, Stacey L. Smith, Amy Dru Stanley, Kidada E. Williams, and Andrew Zimmerman.

This second edition of Gloria Browne-Marshall’s seminal work , tracing the history of racial discrimination in American law from colonial times to the present, is now available with major revisions. Throughout, she advocates for freedom and equality at the center, moving from their struggle for physical freedom in the slavery era to more recent battles for equal rights and economic equality. From the colonial period to the present, this book examines education, property ownership, voting rights, criminal justice, and the military as well as internationalism and civil liberties by analyzing the key court cases that established America’s racial system and demonstrating the impact of these court cases on American society. This edition also includes more on Asians, Native Americans, and Latinos. Race, Law, and American Society is highly accessible and thorough in its depiction of the role race has played, with the sanction of the U.S. Supreme Court, in shaping virtually every major American social institution.