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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.
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.
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.
"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." 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 "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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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