1919, The Year of Racial Violence

1919, The Year of Racial Violence
Author: David F. Krugler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2014-12-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316195007

1919, The Year of Racial Violence recounts African Americans' brave stand against a cascade of mob attacks in the United States after World War I. The emerging New Negro identity, which prized unflinching resistance to second-class citizenship, further inspired veterans and their fellow black citizens. In city after city - Washington, DC; Chicago; Charleston; and elsewhere - black men and women took up arms to repel mobs that used lynching, assaults, and other forms of violence to protect white supremacy; yet, authorities blamed blacks for the violence, leading to mass arrests and misleading news coverage. Refusing to yield, African Americans sought accuracy and fairness in the courts of public opinion and the law. This is the first account of this three-front fight - in the streets, in the press, and in the courts - against mob violence during one of the worst years of racial conflict in US history.

This Is Not Dixie

This Is Not Dixie
Author: Brent M.S. Campney
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2015-08-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252097610

Often defined as a mostly southern phenomenon, racist violence existed everywhere. Brent M. S. Campney explodes the notion of the Midwest as a so-called land of freedom with an in-depth study of assaults both active and threatened faced by African Americans in post–Civil War Kansas. Campney's capacious definition of white-on-black violence encompasses not only sensational demonstrations of white power like lynchings and race riots, but acts of threatened violence and the varied forms of pervasive routine violence--property damage, rape, forcible ejection from towns--used to intimidate African Americans. As he shows, such methods were a cornerstone of efforts to impose and maintain white supremacy. Yet Campney's broad consideration of racist violence also lends new insights into the ways people resisted threats. African Americans spontaneously hid fugitives and defused lynch mobs while also using newspapers and civil rights groups to lay the groundwork for forms of institutionalized opposition that could fight racist violence through the courts and via public opinion. Ambitious and provocative, This Is Not Dixie rewrites fundamental narratives on mob action, race relations, African American resistance, and racism's grim past in the heartland.

Charleston Syllabus

Charleston Syllabus
Author: Chad Williams
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2016-05-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0820349577

On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist entered Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and sat with some of its parishioners during a Wednesday night Bible study session. An hour later, he began expressing his hatred for African Americans, and soon after, he shot nine church members dead, the church’s pastor and South Carolina state senator, Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, among them. The ensuing manhunt for the shooter and investigation of his motives revealed his beliefs in white supremacy and reopened debates about racial conflict, southern identity,systemic racism, civil rights, and the African American church as an institution. In the aftermath of the massacre, Professors Chad Williams, Kidada Williams, and Keisha N. Blain sought a way to put the murder—and the subsequent debates about it in the media—in the context of America’s tumultuous history of race relations and racial violence on a global scale. They created the Charleston Syllabus on June 19, starting it as a hashtag on Twitter linking to scholarly works on the myriad of issues related to the murder. The syllabus’s popularity exploded and is already being used as a key resource in discussions of the event. Charleston Syllabus is a reader—a collection of new essays and columns published in the wake of the massacre, along with selected excerpts from key existing scholarly books and general-interest articles. The collection draws from a variety of disciplines—history, sociology, urban studies, law, critical race theory—and includes a selected and annotated bibliography for further reading, drawing from such texts as the Confederate constitution, South Carolina’s secession declaration, songs, poetry, slave narratives, and literacy texts. As timely as it is necessary, the book will be a valuable resource for understanding the roots of American systemic racism, white privilege, the uses and abuses of the Confederate flag and its ideals, the black church as a foundation for civil rights activity and state violence against such activity, and critical whiteness studies.

1919, The Year of Racial Violence

1919, The Year of Racial Violence
Author: David F. Krugler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2014-12-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107061792

Krugler recounts African Americans' brave stand against a cascade of mob attacks in the United States after World War I.

They Left Great Marks on Me

They Left Great Marks on Me
Author: Kidada E. Williams
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2012-03-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814795366

"Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans' bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress. Despite the trauma it could incur, many African Americans opted to publicize their experiences by testifying about the violence they endured and witnessed." "In this evocative and deeply moving history, Kidada Williams examines African Americans' testimonies about racial violence. By using both oral and print culture to testify about violence, victims and witnesses hoped they would be able to graphically disseminate enough knowledge about its occurrence that federal officials and the American people would be inspired bear witness to thier suffering and support their demands for justice. In the process of testifying, these people created a vernacular history of the violence they endured and witnessed, as well as the identities that grew from the experience of violence. This history fostered an oppositional consciousness to racial violence that inspired African Americans to form and support campaigns to end violence. The resulting crusades against racial violence became one of the political training grounds for the civil rights movement." -- Book Cover.

Racial Violence In Kentucky

Racial Violence In Kentucky
Author: George C. Wright
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 1996-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807153818

"Wright vividly portrays the clash between racist militants and blacks who would not submit to terror. The book makes clear the brutality concealed beneath the surface veneer of moderation." -- Journal of Southern History In this investigative look into Kentucky's race relations from the end of the Civil War to 1940, George C. Wright brings to light a consistent pattern of legally sanctioned and extralegal violence employed to ensure that blacks knew their "place" after the war. In the first study of its kind to target the racial patterns of a specific state, Wright demonstrates that despite Kentucky's proximity to the North, its black population was subjected to racial oppression every bit as severe and prolonged as that found farther south. His examination of the causes and extent of racial violence, and of the steps taken by blacks and concerned whites to end the brutality, has implications for race relations throughout the United States.

Racist Violence and the State

Racist Violence and the State
Author: Rob Witte
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2014-09-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317889193

Racist Violence and the State is the first serious study to apply a comparative research-based approach to the study of racist violence in Britain, France and The Netherlands since 1945. Setting racist violence within a historical background of the post-imperialist legacy, the author presents an accessible, fascinating and highly original analysis of the development of public and state attitudes to racist violence over the past 50 years.

Violent Racism

Violent Racism
Author: Benjamin Bowling
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 428
Release: 1999
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780198298786

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The Torture Letters

The Torture Letters
Author: Laurence Ralph
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2020-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022672980X

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.

A savage song

A savage song
Author: Margarita Aragon
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2021-07-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1526121697

This book examines key moments in which collective and state violence invigorated racialized social boundaries around Mexican and African Americans in the United States, and in which they violently contested them. Bringing anti-Mexican violence into a common analytical framework with anti-black violence, A savage song examines several focal points in this oft-ignored history, including the 1915 rebellion of ethnic Mexicans in South Texas, and its brutal repression by the Texas Rangers and the 1917 mutiny of black soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment in Houston, Texas, in response to police brutality. Aragon considers both the continuities and stark contrasts across these different moments: how were racialized constructions of masculinity differently employed? How did African and Mexican American men, including those in uniform, respond to the violence of racism? And how was their resistance, including their claims to manhood and nation, understood by law enforcement, politicians, and the press? Building on extensive archival research, the book examines how African and Mexican American men have been constructed as ‘racial problems’, investigating, in particular, their relationship with law enforcement and ideas about black and Mexican criminality.