Steeped in the Blood of Racism

Steeped in the Blood of Racism
Author: Nancy K. Bristow
Publisher:
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2020
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0190215372

On May 15, 1970, white police opened fire on students in front of a women's dormitory at Jackson State College, a historically black institution in Mississippi, killing two young people and injuring twelve. Frequently linked to the shootings at Kent State University ten days earlier, the violence at Jackson State was routinely misunderstood and largely forgotten by all but the local African American community. This book provides a full account of these shootings and their aftermath, as well as historical amnesia about the incident.

Steeped in the Blood of Racism

Steeped in the Blood of Racism
Author: Professor Nancy K. Bristow
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0190092106

Minutes after midnight on May 15, 1970, white members of the Jackson city police and the Mississippi Highway Patrol opened fire on young people in front of a women's dormitory at Jackson State College, a historically black college in Jackson, Mississippi, discharging "buckshot, rifle slugs, a submachine gun, carbines with military ammunition, and two 30.06 rifles loaded with armor-piercing bullets." Twenty-eight seconds later two young people lay dead, another 12 injured. Taking place just ten days after the killings at Kent State, the attack at Jackson State never garnered the same level of national attention and was chronically misunderstood as similar in cause. This book reclaims this story and situates it in the broader history of the struggle for African American freedom in the civil rights and black power eras. The book explores the essential role of white supremacy in causing the shootings and shaping the aftermath. By 1970, even historically conservative campuses such as Jackson State, where an all-white Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning had long exercised its power to control student behavior, were beginning to feel the impact of the movements for African American freedom. Though most of the students at Jackson State remained focused not on activism but their educations, racial consciousness was taking hold. It was this campus police attacked. Acting on racial animus and with impunity, the shootings reflected both traditional patterns of repression and the new logic and rhetoric of "law and order," with its thinly veiled racial coding. In the aftermath, the victims and their survivors struggled unsuccessfully to find justice. Despite multiple investigative commissions, two grand juries and a civil suit brought by students and the families of the dead, the law and order narrative proved too powerful. No officers were charged, no restitution was paid, and no apologies were offered. The shootings were soon largely forgotten except among the local African American community, the injured victimized once more by historical amnesia born of the unwillingness to acknowledge the essential role of race in causing the violence.

Blood in the Soil

Blood in the Soil
Author: Carole Townsend
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2016-04-12
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1634507525

Blood in the Soil is the first book about the investigation into the shooting of Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and his country attorney in Gwinnett County, Georgia, in 1978. But this book is not primarily about Larry Flynt, or even his shooter (the serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin), though both men are of course important characters in the story. This true account is told alternately from the perspective of Detective J. Michael Cowart and by following Franklin’s life from childhood through his execution. The monster that was Joseph Paul Franklin was the result of a perfect storm of circumstances, which included poverty, cruel abuse as a child, the detestation and mistrust between blacks and whites, integration, and the hate groups that operated and recruited openly. Detective Cowart tells the story of his first introduction to Franklin, and the cat-and-mouse game that ensued. A self-proclaimed truth-seeker, the detective had to appear to befriend Franklin to get him to provide enough information to prosecute him in the Flynt shooting. In the course of developing this rapport, Cowart gains astonishing insight into many of Franklin’s other cold-blooded killings and crimes, and his twisted justification for them. This book tells of a very real struggle between right and wrong. It details with stark honesty the terrible truths that characterized the South during the volatility of the sixties and seventies, and of the ugly reality that lies just beneath the veneer of a beautiful region known for its warm hospitality. Along the way, it examines some hard lessons about life, trust, and compromise.

Blood Done Sign My Name

Blood Done Sign My Name
Author: Timothy B. Tyson
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307419932

The “riveting”* true story of the fiery summer of 1970, which would forever transform the town of Oxford, North Carolina—a classic portrait of the fight for civil rights in the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird *Chicago Tribune On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased and beat Marrow, then killed him in public as he pleaded for his life. Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets. While lawyers battled in the courthouse, the Klan raged in the shadows and black Vietnam veterans torched the town’s tobacco warehouses. Tyson’s father, the pastor of Oxford’s all-white Methodist church, urged the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away. Tim Tyson’s gripping narrative brings gritty blues truth and soaring gospel vision to a shocking episode of our history. FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD “If you want to read only one book to understand the uniquely American struggle for racial equality and the swirls of emotion around it, this is it.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Blood Done Sign My Name is a most important book and one of the most powerful meditations on race in America that I have ever read.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “Pulses with vital paradox . . . It’s a detached dissertation, a damning dark-night-of-the-white-soul, and a ripping yarn, all united by Tyson’s powerful voice, a brainy, booming Bubba profundo.”—Entertainment Weekly “Engaging and frequently stunning.”—San Diego Union-Tribune

American Pandemic

American Pandemic
Author: Nancy K. Bristow
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190238550

In 1918-1919 influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history. Focusing on those closest to the crisis--patients, families, communities, public health officials, nurses and doctors--this book explores the epidemic in the United States.

Dreamland Burning

Dreamland Burning
Author: Jennifer Latham
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2016-01-26
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0316384941

A compelling dual-narrated tale from Jennifer Latham that questions how far we've come with race relations. Some bodies won't stay buried. Some stories need to be told. When seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase finds a skeleton on her family's property, she has no idea that investigating the brutal century-old murder will lead to a summer of painful discoveries about the present and the past. Nearly one hundred years earlier, a misguided violent encounter propels seventeen-year-old Will Tillman into a racial firestorm. In a country rife with violence against blacks and a hometown segregated by Jim Crow, Will must make hard choices on a painful journey towards self discovery and face his inner demons in order to do what's right the night Tulsa burns. Through intricately interwoven alternating perspectives, Jennifer Latham's lightning-paced page-turner brings the Tulsa race riot of 1921 to blazing life and raises important questions about the complex state of US race relations--both yesterday and today.

The Snake in the Garden

The Snake in the Garden
Author: Deborah Hand-Cutler
Publisher: Black Horse Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2021-05-10
Genre:
ISBN: 9781736516515

The Snake in the Garden is an explosive depiction of racism in twentieth-century Arkansas, seen through the lens of interracial relationships over four generations. Starting in 1926, and paying homage to Kate Chopin's "Desiree's Baby," the story moves to the turbulent night of the Kennedy assassination in 1963, the Hollywood music scene of the 1970s and '80s, and the still-troubled racial attitudes of 1993. Written by two women, one Black, one white, the novel depicts racism from the point of view of both Blacks and whites - racists, non-racists and victims, alike. The setting is the fictional town of Jefferson Springs, Arkansas, during the Jim Crow era. Lucille Day, a Black woman, worked as a domestic for the family of judge Reuben Whittier in the 1950s and early '60s. Her children, Regina and Clarence, were forbidden to be friends with the judge's daughter, Karen. In 1963, when Regina, Clarence and Karen were teenagers, bigotry prevailed, and it was illegal for Blacks and whites to have relationships or marry. The night President Kennedy was assassinated, three days after a stopover in town, all hell broke loose in Jefferson Springs, with tragic results, including a lynching. Clarence was jailed, and Regina was exiled to California to live with her Aunt Violet. There, she won a singing contest and became a pop star. Karen, meanwhile, was forced to stay home under the cruel thumb of her father. She longed for a true father-daughter bond, but in his eyes, she could do no right. She consoled herself in her boring and barren life with chocolate and English romance novels. Regina had vowed never to return to Arkansas. But when her mother died, she knew she had to attend the funeral. She dreaded going back where she had felt nothing but humiliation, anger and fear. Can the two women now unite to uncover the truth about their families, and finally make things right for Clarence? The Snake in the Garden is a powerful story of transcendence over scars of the past, and the healing that can come when the truth is finally faced.

Playing the Race Card

Playing the Race Card
Author: Linda Williams
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2002-09-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 069110283X

Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization."--BOOK JACKET.

What Comes Naturally

What Comes Naturally
Author: Peggy Pascoe
Publisher:
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2009
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0195094638

A long-awaited history that promises to dramatically change our understanding of race in America, What Comes Naturally traces the origins, spread, and demise of miscegenation laws in the United States--laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, most often between whites and members of other races. Peggy Pascoe demonstrates how these laws were enacted and applied not just in the South but throughout most of the country, in the West, the North, and the Midwest. Beginning in the Reconstruction era, when the term miscegenation first was coined, she traces the creation of a racial hierarchy that bolstered white supremacy and banned the marriage of Whites to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as the marriage of Whites to Blacks. She ends not simply with the landmark 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws throughout the country, but looks at the implications of ideas of colorblindness that replaced them. What Comes Naturally is both accessible to the general reader and informative to the specialist, a rare feat for an original work of history based on archival research.

Island on Fire

Island on Fire
Author: Tom Zoellner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2020-05-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674984307

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award “Impeccably researched and seductively readable...tells the story of Sam Sharpe’s revolution manqué, and the subsequent abolition of slavery in Jamaica, in a way that’s acutely relevant to the racial unrest of our own time.” —Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising The final uprising of enslaved people in Jamaica started as a peaceful labor strike a few days shy of Christmas in 1831. A harsh crackdown by white militias quickly sparked a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. The rebels lost their daring bid for freedom, but their headline-grabbing defiance triggered a decisive turn against slavery. Island on Fire is a dramatic day-by-day account of these transformative events. A skillful storyteller, Tom Zoellner uses diaries, letters, and colonial records to tell the intimate story of the men and women who rose up and briefly tasted liberty. He brings to life the rebellion’s enigmatic leader, the preacher Samuel Sharpe, and shows how his fiery resistance turned the tide of opinion in London and hastened the end of slavery in the British Empire. “Zoellner’s vigorous, fast-paced account brings to life a varied gallery of participants...The revolt failed to improve conditions for the enslaved in Jamaica, but it crucially wounded the institution of slavery itself.” —Fergus M. Bordewich, Wall Street Journal “It’s high time that we had a book like the splendid one Tom Zoellner has written: a highly readable but carefully documented account of the greatest of all British slave rebellions, the miseries that led to it, and the momentous changes it wrought.” —Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains