In American history, students are taught about the three branches of government. Most of the time is spent learning about the Executive and the Legislative bodies, but the Judicial branch has had a monumental effect on the course of American history, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of civil rights.

Race and National Power: A Sourcebook of Black Civil Rights from 1862 to 1954 gathers together a collection of primary documents on the history of law and civil rights, specifically in regard to race. The sources covered include key Supreme Court decisions, some opinions from other courts as well, and texts written by ordinary people ? the victims and perpetrators of racism and the lawmakers who wrote the statutes the courts must interpret.

With helpful headnotes and introductions, Race and National Power: A Sourcebook of Black Civil Rights from 1862 to 1954 is the perfect resource for anyone studying legal history or race in America.

In American history, students are taught about the three branches of government. Most of the time is spent learning about the Executive and the Legislative bodies, but the Judicial branch has had a monumental effect on the course of American history, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of civil rights. Race and National Power: A Sourcebook of Black Civil Rights from 1862 to 1954 gathers together a collection of primary documents on the history of law and civil rights, specifically in regard to race. The sources covered include key Supreme Court decisions, some opinions from other courts as well, and texts written by ordinary people - the victims and perpetrators of racism and the lawmakers who wrote the statutes the courts must interpret. With helpful headnotes and introductions, Race and National Power: A Sourcebook of Black Civil Rights from 1862 to 1954 is the perfect resource for anyone studying legal history or race in America.

In "Signposts," Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter have assembled seventeen essays, by both established and rising scholars, that showcase new directions in southern legal history across a wide range of topics, time periods, and locales. The essays will inspire today's scholars to dig even more deeply into the southern legal heritage, in much the same way that David Bodenhamer and James Ely's seminal 1984 work, "Ambivalent Legacy," inspired an earlier generation to take up the study of southern legal history.
Contributors to "Signposts" explore a wide range of subjects related to southern constitutional and legal thought, including real and personal property, civil rights, higher education, gender, secession, reapportionment, prohibition, lynching, legal institutions such as the grand jury, and conflicts between bench and bar. A number of the essayists are concerned with transatlantic connections to southern law and with marginalized groups such as women and native peoples. Taken together, the essays in "Signposts" show us that understanding how law changes over time is essential to understanding the history of the South.
Contributors: Alfred L. Brophy, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Laura F. Edwards, James W. Ely Jr., Tim Alan Garrison, Sally E. Hadden, Roman J. Hoyos, Thomas N. Ingersoll, Jessica K. Lowe, Patricia Hagler Minter, Cynthia Nicoletti, Susan Richbourg Parker, Christopher W. Schmidt, Jennifer M. Spear, Christopher R. Waldrep, Peter Wallenstein, Charles L. Zelden.

Much of the current reassessment of race, culture, and criminal justice in the nineteenth-century South has been based on intensive community studies. Drawing on previously untapped sources, the nine original papers collected here represent some of the best new work on how racial justice can be shaped by the particulars of time and place.

Although each essay is anchored in the local, several important larger themes emerge across the volume--such as the importance of personality and place, the movement of former slaves from the capriciousness of "plantation justice" to the (theoretically) more evenhanded processes of the courts, and the increased presence of government in daily aspects of American life.

"Local Matters" cites a wide range of examples to support these themes. One essay considers the case of a quasi-free slave in Natchez, Mississippi--himself a slaveowner--who was "reined in" by his master through the courts, while another shows how federal aims were subverted during trials held in the aftermath of the 1876 race riots in Ellenton, South Carolina. Other topics covered include the fear of black criminality as a motivation of Klan activity; the career of Thomas Ruffin, slaveowner and North Carolina Supreme Court Justice; blacks and the ballot in Washington County, Texas; the overturned murder conviction of a North Carolina slave who had killed a white man; the formation of a powerful white bloc in Vicksburg, Mississippi; agitation by black and white North Carolina women for greater protections from abusive white male elites; and slaves, crime, and the common law in New Orleans.

Together, these studies offer new insights into the nature of law and the fate of due process at different stages of a highly racialized society.

Much of the current reassessment of race, culture, and criminal justice in the nineteenth-century South has been based on intensive community studies. Drawing on previously untapped sources, the nine original papers collected here represent some of the best new work on how racial justice can be shaped by the particulars of time and place.

Although each essay is anchored in the local, several important larger themes emerge across the volume--such as the importance of personality and place, the movement of former slaves from the capriciousness of "plantation justice" to the (theoretically) more evenhanded processes of the courts, and the increased presence of government in daily aspects of American life.

"Local Matters" cites a wide range of examples to support these themes. One essay considers the case of a quasi-free slave in Natchez, Mississippi--himself a slaveowner--who was "reined in" by his master through the courts, while another shows how federal aims were subverted during trials held in the aftermath of the 1876 race riots in Ellenton, South Carolina. Other topics covered include the fear of black criminality as a motivation of Klan activity; the career of Thomas Ruffin, slaveowner and North Carolina Supreme Court Justice; blacks and the ballot in Washington County, Texas; the overturned murder conviction of a North Carolina slave who had killed a white man; the formation of a powerful white bloc in Vicksburg, Mississippi; agitation by black and white North Carolina women for greater protections from abusive white male elites; and slaves, crime, and the common law in New Orleans.

Together, these studies offer new insights into the nature of law and the fate of due process at different stages of a highly racialized society.

In 1906 a white lawyer named Dabney Marshall argued a case before the Mississippi Supreme Court demanding the racial integration of juries. He carried out a plan devised by Mississippi's foremost black lawyer of the time: Willis Mollison. Against staggering odds, and with the help of a friendly newspaper editor, he won. How Marshall and his allies were able to force the court to overturn state law and precedent, if only for a brief period, at the behest of the U.S. Supreme Court is the subject of "Jury Discrimination," a book that explores the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on America's civil rights history.
Christopher Waldrep traces the origins of Americans' ideas about trial by jury and provides the first detailed analysis of jury discrimination. Southerners' determination to keep their juries entirely white played a crucial role in segregation, emboldening lynchers and vigilantes like the Ku Klux Klan. As the postbellum Congress articulated ideals of national citizenship in civil rights legislation, most importantly the Fourteenth Amendment, factions within the U.S. Supreme Court battled over how to read the amendment: expansively, protecting a variety of rights against a host of enemies, or narrowly, guarding only against rare violations by state governments. The latter view prevailed, entombing the amendment in a narrow interpretation that persists to this day.
Although the high court clearly denounced the overt discrimination enacted by state legislatures, it set evidentiary rules that made discrimination by state officers and agents extremely difficult to prove. Had these rules been less onerous, Waldrep argues, countless black jurors could have been seated throughout the nation at precisely the moment when white legislators and jurists were making and enforcing segregation laws. Marshall and Mollison's success in breaking through Mississippi law to get blacks admitted to juries suggests that legal reasoning plausibly founded on constitutional principle, as articulated by the Supreme Court, could trump even the most stubbornly prejudiced public opinion.

"Christopher Waldrep's volume should quickly become one of a handful of standard reference works on the subject of lynching. His knowledge of the literature on lynching is masterful and far ranging. "Lynching in America" is an important book."
--Thomas H. Appleton, Jr., Eastern Kentucky University

aAn exemplar documentary history....While lynching might seem to be a tarnished relic of an unfortunate earlier part of history, Waldrepas sobering texts remind us of the timelessness of unrestrained power of community-based extra-legal violence.a
-- "Louisiana History""A distinct work."
--"Choice," recommended

"Christopher Waldrep has examined in depth a history we prefer to ignore-a not so distant time when Americans descended into vigilante justice and public displays of ritualistic murder, often targeting people of color. The testimony gathered for this collection is a sobering reminder that terrorism has deep roots in our own soil, that it is part of our history, part of our heritage."--Leon Litwack, author of "Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery"

"Christopher Waldrep's heart-wrenching but compelling documentary collection on American lynching traditions could not appear at a more fitting time. In Waldrep's carefully selected documents, we are forced to confront the grim record of American racial violence. The testimony given by blacks themselves in public hearings and in African-American newspapers proves to be especially dramatic and horrifying. "Lynching in America" should be read not just by historians, who so long neglected the topic. Rather, all those concerned to promote our better natures could benefit from pondering these past atrocities soskillfully laid before us."--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of "Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South"

""Lynching in America" is the best collection of documents and source material on the history of lynching ever compiled. The chronological coverage is superb, covering in detail earlier periods that are routinely left out of histories of lynching and the geographical coverage is exemplary including material on lynching throughout the United States."--William D. Carrigan, author of "The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916"

Whether conveyed through newspapers, photographs, or Billie Holliday's haunting song "Strange Fruit," lynching has immediate and graphic connotations for all who hear the word. Images of lynching are generally unambiguous: black victims hanging from trees, often surrounded by gawking white mobs. While this picture of lynching tells a distressingly familiar story about mob violence in America, it is not the full story. Lynching in America presents the most comprehensive portrait of lynching to date, demonstrating that while lynching has always been present in American society, it has been anything but one-dimensional.

Ranging from personal correspondence to courtroom transcripts to journalistic accounts, Christopher Waldrep has extensively mined an enormous quantity of documents about lynching, which he arranges chronologically with concise introductions. He reveals that lynching has been part of American history since the Revolution, but its victims, perpetrators, causes, and environments have changed over time. From the American Revolution to the expansion of the western frontier, Waldrep shows howcommunities defended lynching as a way to maintain law and order. Slavery, the Civil War, and especially Reconstruction marked the ascendancy of racialized lynching in the nineteenth century, which has continued to the present day, with the murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's contention that he was lynched by Congress at his confirmation hearings.

Since its founding, lynching has permeated American social, political, and cultural life, and no other book documents American lynching with historical texts offering firsthand accounts of lynchings, explanations, excuses, and criticism.

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."

During the hottest days of the summer of 1863, while the nation's attention was focused on a small town in Pennsylvania known as Gettysburg, another momentous battle was being fought along the banks of the Mississippi. In the longest single campaign of the war, the siege of Vicksburg left 19,000 dead and wounded on both sides, gave the Union Army control of the Mississippi, and left the Confederacy cut in half. In this highly-anticipated new work, Christopher Waldrep takes a fresh look at how the Vicksburg campaign was fought and remembered. He begins with a gripping account of the battle, deftly recounting the experiences of African-American troops fighting for the Union. Waldrep shows how as the scars of battle faded, the memory of the war was shaped both by the Northerners who controlled the battlefield and by the legacies of race and slavery that played out over the decades that followed.

Violence forms a constant backdrop to American history, from the revolutionary overthrow of British rule, to the struggle for civil rights, to the present-day debates over the death penalty. It has served to challenge authority, defend privilege, advance causes, and throttle hopes.
In the first anthology of its kind to appear in over thirty years, Documenting American Violence brings together excerpts from a wide range of sources about incidents of violence in the United States. Each document is set into context, allowing readers to see the event through the viewpoint of contemporary participants and witnesses and to understand how these deeds have been excused, condemned, or vilified by society. Organized topically, this volume looks at such diverse topics as famous crimes, vigilantism, industrial violence, domestic abuse, and state-sanctioned violence. Among the events these primary sources describe are:
--Benjamin Franklin's account of the Conestoga massacre, when an entire village of American Indians was killed by the Paxton Boys, a group of frontier settlers
--militant abolitionist John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry
--Ida B. Wells' condemnation of lynchings in the South
--the massacre of General Custer's 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn, as witnessed by Cheyenne war chief Two Moon
--Nat Turner's confession about the slave revolt he led in Southampton County, Virginia
--Oliver Wendell Holmes' diaries and letters as a young infantry officer in the Civil War
--a police officer's account of the Haymarket Trials
--Harry Thaw's murder of the Gilded Age's most prominent architect, Stanford White, through his own published version of the events
--thepost-trial, public confessions of Ray Bryant and J.W. Milam for the murder of Emmett Till
--the Los Angeles Police Department's investigation into the causes of the 1992 riot
Taken as a whole, this anthology opens a new window on American history, revealing how violence has shaped America's past in every era.

An examination of the historical experience of African Americans as a case study of America's legacy of racial violence. In this comprehensive overview of how the law has been used to combat racism, author Christopher Waldrep points out that the U.S. government has often promoted discrimination. A veritable history of civil rights, the story is told primarily through a discussion of key legal cases. Racial Violence on Trial also presents 11 key documents gathered together for the first time, from the Supreme court's opinion in Brown v. Mississippi to a 1941 newspaper account entitled The South Kills Another Negro, to a 1947 New Yorker piece, Opera in Greenville, about a crowd of taxi drivers who killed a black man. Also included are a listing of key people, laws, and concepts; a chronology; a table of cases; and an annotated bibliography. Four narrative chapters examine the history of black-white relations since America was founded A-Z entries cover important people, laws, events, and concepts and a special documents section includes court decisions, magazine stories, and personal accounts