Detailing how Booker T. Washington rose from slavery to become one of the nations most prominent orators and educators at the turn of the 20th century, Up from Slavery chronciles the journey through Washingtons own words alongside documents that put the book into context.

Within decades of the American Revolution, the Northern states had either ended slavery or provided for its gradual abolition. Slavery, however, was entrenched in the South and remained integral to American politics and culture. Nationally, it was protected by the U.S. Constitution, federal laws, and Supreme Court decisions, and slaveowners dominated all three branches of the federal government. From the time of the Revolution until the Civil War (and beyond), Southern thinkers offered a variety of proslavery arguments. This body of thought—based on religion, politics and law, economics, history, philosophy, expediency, and science—offers invaluable insights into how slavery shaped American history and continues to affect American society. In this volume, Paul Finkelman presents a representative selection of proslavery thought and includes an introduction that explores the history of slavery and the debate over it. His headnotes supply a rich context for each reading. The volume also includes a chronology, a selected bibliography, and illustrations.

Southern Horrors (1892) is a pamphlet by Ida B. Wells. Published several months after a white mob destroyed the office of her prominent Memphis newspaper, the Free Speech, Southern Horrors is an impassioned work of investigative journalism and political criticism from a leading activist of the nineteenth century. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” After publishing these words in a May 1892 edition of the Memphis Free Speech, Ida B. Wells left for a brief vacation in New York—no doubt inspired by the numerous threats made against her life at the time. In her absence, a mob of white men destroyed the newspaper’s office, leaving no trace of her extensive research on the last half century of violence perpetrated against African Americans in the name of white supremacy. Undeterred, Wells published Southern Horrors just months later, combining personal reflections on the incident with daring investigative reporting on the widespread practice of lynching in the American South. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Ida B. Wells’ Southern Horrors is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

The civil rights movement’s most prominent leaders, Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) and Malcolm X (1925–1965), represent two wings of the revolt against racism: nonviolent resistance and revolution "by any means necessary." This volume presents the two leaders’ relationship to the civil rights movement beyond a simplified dualism. A rich selection of speeches, essays, and excerpts from Malcolm X’s autobiography and King’s sermons shows the breadth and range of each man’s philosophy, demonstrating their differences, similarities, and evolution over time. Organized into six topical groups, the documents allow students to compare the leaders’ views on subjects including integration, the American dream, means of struggle, and opposing racial philosophies. An interpretive introductory essay, chronology, selected bibliography, document headnotes, and questions for consideration provide further pedagogical support.

In 1897 the promising young sociologist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was given a temporary post as Assistant in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in order to conduct a systematic investigation of social conditions in the seventh ward of Philadelphia. The product of those studies was the first great empirical book on the Negro in American society. More than one hundred years after its original publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press, The Philadelphia Negro remains a classic work. It is the first, and perhaps still the finest, example of engaged sociological scholarship—the kind of work that, in contemplating social reality, helps to change it. In his introduction, Elijah Anderson examines how the neighborhood studied by Du Bois has changed over the years and compares the status of blacks today with their status when the book was initially published.

Reproduction of the original: Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Differentiated book- It has a historical context with research of the time-Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, also known as Ida B. Wells (Holly Springs, Mississippi, July 16, 1862-Chicago, Illinois, March 25, 1931), was an African-American woman co-founder of the National Association for the Progress of People of Color and dedicated to the defense of civil rights and women's rights in the United States, belonging to the suffrage movement. He documented hundreds of cases against racial lynchings, .Ida Wells-Barnett was born in Holly Springs, Mississipi (United States). Daughter of a carpenter's father, John Wells and Elizabeth Warrenton Wells, both slaves until their release after the Civil War. At the age of fourteen his parents and his nine-year-old brother died of yellow fever during an epidemic that ravaged the southern United States, after the funeral the friends decided to divide the remaining six brothers with different uncles and aunts. Wells did not think it was a good idea for the family to separate and for that he decided to go to the institute and find work as a teacher in a school for black people. Despite the difficulties, he was able to continue his education working at Rust College in Holly Springs.2In 1880 Wells moved to Memphis with his brothers, except for a fifteen year old. There he got a summer job and when possible he went to the summer sessions of Fisk University in Nashville.