In The House I Live In, award-winning historian Robert J. Norrell offers a truly masterful chronicle of American race relations over the last one hundred and fifty years. This scrupulously fair and insightful narrative-the most ambitious and wide-ranging history of its kind-sheds new light on the ideologies, from white supremacy to black nationalism, that have shaped race relations since the Civil War. Norrell argues that it is these ideologies, more than politics or economics, that have sculpted the landscape of race in America. Beginning with Reconstruction, he shows how the democratic values of liberty and equality were infused with new meaning by Abraham Lincoln, only to become meaningless for generations of African Americans as the white supremacy movement took shape. The heart of the book paints a vivid portrait of the long, often dangerous struggle of the Civil Rights movement to overcome decades of accepted inequality. Norrell offers fresh appraisals of key Civil Rights figures and dissects the ideas of racists. He offers striking new insights into black-white history, observing for instance that the Civil Rights movement really began as early as the 1930s, and that contrary to much recent writing, the Cold War was a setback rather than a boost to the quest for racial justice. He also breaks new ground on the role of popular culture and mass media in first promoting, but later helping defeat, notions of white supremacy. Though the struggle for equality is far from over, Norrell writes that today we are closer than ever to fulfilling the promise of our democratic values. The House I Live In gives readers the first full understanding of how far we have come.

First published in 1970, The New South Creed has lost none of its usefulness to anyone examining the dream of a new South -- prosperous, powerful, racially harmonious -- that developed in the three decades after the Civil War, and the transformation of that dream into widely accepted myths, shielding and perpetuating a conservative, racist society. Many young moderates of the period created a philosophy designed to enrich the region -- attempting to both restore the power and prestige and to lay the race question to rest. In spite of these men and their efforts, their dream of a "New South" joined the Antebellum illusion as a genuine social myth, with a controlling power over the way in which their followers, in both North and South, perceived reality.

In this classic and compelling account, Robert Norrell traces the course of the civil rights movement in Tuskegee, Alabama, capturing both the unique aspects of this key Southern town's experience and the elements that it shared with other communities during this period. Home to Booker T. Washington's famed Tuskegee Institute, the town of Tuskegee boasted an unusually large professional class of African Americans, whose economic security and level of education provided a base for challenging the authority of white conservative officials. Offering sensitive portrayals of both black and white figures, Norrell takes the reader from the founding of the Institute in 1881 and early attempts to create a harmonious society based on the separation of the races to the successes and disappointments delivered by the civil rights movement in the 1960s. First published in 1985, Reaping the Whirlwind has been updated for this edition. In a newly expanded final chapter, Norrell brings the story up to the present, examining the long-term performance of black officials, the evolution of voting rights policies, the changing economy, and the continuing struggle for school integration in Tuskegee in the 1980s and 1990s. |A narrative history of the civil rights movement in Tuskegee, Alabama, home to an unusually large professional class of African Americans capable of challenging the authority of white conservatives.

Since the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., has personified black leadership with his use of direct action protests against white authority. A century ago, in the era of Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington pursued a different strategy to lift his people. In this compelling biography, Norrell reveals how conditions in the segregated South led Washington to call for a less contentious path to freedom and equality. He urged black people to acquire economic independence and to develop the moral character that would ultimately gain them full citizenship. Although widely accepted as the most realistic way to integrate blacks into American life during his time, Washington s strategy has been disparaged since the 1960s.

The first full-length biography of Booker T. in a generation, "Up from History" recreates the broad contexts in which Washington worked: He struggled against white bigots who hated his economic ambitions for blacks, African-American intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois who resented his huge influence, and such inconstant allies as Theodore Roosevelt. Norrell details the positive power of Washington s vision, one that invoked hope and optimism to overcome past exploitation and present discrimination. Indeed, his ideas have since inspired peoples across the Third World that there are many ways to struggle for equality and justice. "Up from History" reinstates this extraordinary historical figure to the pantheon of black leaders, illuminating not only his mission and achievement but also, poignantly, the man himself.