"Novel set in the south during the Great Depression that takes an entirely fresh view on big American themes-- race, heredity, inequality, shame-- set in a time of financial crisis and racialized violence"-- Cotton County, Georgia, 1930. Two babies-- one light-skinned, the other dark-- are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight,...

The story of two Hairston families. One black that rose from slavery to success in mainstream America, the other white as it fell from wealth and power after the end of the Civil War.

"Originally published in 1884, T. Thomas Fortune's Black and White is an insightful and clear-eyed exploration of a post-Reconstruction America--one with issues that are still plaguing the United States to this day. As "the preeminent Black journalist of his age" (Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Church), and an early agitator for Civil Rights, Fortune astutely and compellingly analyses the relationship between capitalism and racism in...

¿Por qué es la tierra tan importante para la familia de Cassie? Los acontecimientos de un año agitado--el año de los hombres de la noche y de los incendios, el año en que una muchacha blanca humilló a Cassie en público porque era negra--sirvieron para que Cassie se diera cuenta de que tener un lugar propio constituye el alma de la familia Logan. El valor y el orgullo de los Logan se los da la tierra, porque sin importar cuánto los puedan subestimar,...

In 1959 a white writer darkened his skin and passed for a time as a "Negro" in the Deep South. John Howard Griffin was that writer, and his book Black Like Me swiftly became a national sensation. Few readers know of the extraordinary journey that led to Griffin's risky "experiment" - the culmination of a lifetime of risk, struggle, and achievement. A native of Texas, Griffin was a medical student who became involved in the rescue of Jews in occupied...

"The Reverend Robert W. Lee was a little-known pastor at a small church in North Carolina until the Charlottesville protests, when he went public with his denunciation of white supremacy in a captivating speech at the MTV Video Music Awards... In this riveting memoir, he narrates what it was like growing up as a Lee in the South, an experience that was colored by the world of the white Christian majority. He describes the widespread nostalgia for...

"This is a story about America during and after Reconstruction, one of history's most pivotal and misunderstood chapters. In a stirring account of emancipation, the struggle for citizenship and national reunion, and the advent of racial segregation, the renowned Harvard scholar delivers a book that is illuminating and timely. Real-life accounts drive the narrative, spanning the half century between the Civil War and Birth of a Nation. Here, you will...

"In the epic tradition of Eyes on the Prize and with the cultural significance of John Lewis's March trilogy, an ambitious and harrowing account of the devoted black educators who battled Southern school segregation and inequality"--

The civil rights movement was among the most important historical developments of the twentieth century and one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. In The Movement, Thomas C. Holt provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, re-centering the narrative around the mobilization of ordinary people.