The complex interactions of class, race, and racism are addressed in this study of the historic anti-black riot in 1908 in Springfield. The author explores the causes and course of the late summer outbreak, concluding that there were two worlds of white racism in Springfield, with class serving as the dividing line between them. -- Book jacket.
Race riots are the most glaring and contemporary displays of the racial strife running through America's history. Mostly urban, mostly outside the South, and mostly white-instigated, the number and violence of race riots increased as blacks migrated out of the rural South and into the North and West's industrialized cities during the early part of the twentieth-century. Though white / black violence has been the most common form of racial violence, riots involving Asians and Hispanics are also included and examined. Race riots are the most glaring and contemporary displays of the racial strife running through America's history. Mostly urban, mostly outside the South, and mostly white-instigated, the number and violence of race riots increased as blacks migrated out of the rural South and into the North and West's industrialized cities during the early part of the twentieth-century. While most riots have occurred within the past century, the encyclopedia reaches back to colonial history, giving the encyclopedia an unprecedented historical depth. Though white on black violence has been the most common form of racial violence, riots involving other racial and ethnic groups, such as Asians and Hispanics, are also included and examined. Organized A-Z, topics include: notorious riots like the Tulsa Riots of 1921, the Los Angeles Riots of 1965 and 1992; the African-American community's preparedness and responses to this odious form of mass violence; federal responses to rioting; an examination of the underlying causes of rioting; the reactions of prominent figures such as H. Rap Brown and Martin Luther King, Jr to rioting; and much more. Many of the entries describe and analyze particular riots and violent racial incidents, including the following: Belleville, Illinois, Riot of 1903 Harlem, New York, Riot of 1943 Howard Beach Incident, 1986 Jackson State University Incident, 1970 Los Angeles, California, Riot of 1992 Memphis, Tennessee, Riot of 1866 Red Summer Race Riots of 1919 Southwest Missouri Riots 1894-1906 Texas Southern University Riot of 1967 Entries covering the victims and opponents of race violence, include the following: Black Soldiers, Lynching of Black Women, Lynching of Diallo, Amadou Hawkins, Yusef King, Rodney Randolph, A. Philip Roosevelt, Eleanor Till, Emmett, Lynching of Turner, Mary, Lynching of Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Many entries also cover legislation that has addressed racial violence and inequality, as well as groups and organizations that have either fought or promoted racial violence, including the following: Anti-Lynching League Civil Rights Act of 1957 Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 Ku Klux Klan National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Nation of Islam Vigilante Organizations White League Other entries focus on relevant concepts, trends, themes, and publications. Besides almost 300 cross-referenced entries, most of which conclude with lists of additional readings, the encyclopedia also offers a timeline of racial violence in the United States, an extensive bibliography of print and electronic resources, a selection of important primary documents, numerous illustrations, and a detailed subject index.
Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in the United States! Winner of the Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award! This detailed case study of the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, which began only a few blocks from Abraham Lincoln’s family home, explores the social origins of rioting by whites against the city’s African American community after a white woman alleged that a black man had raped her. Over two days rioters wrecked black-owned businesses, burned neighborhoods to the ground, killed two black men, and injured many others. Author Roberta Senechal de la Roche draws from a wide range of sources to describe the riot, identify the rioters and their victims, and challenge previous interpretations that attribute rioting to interracial competition for jobs, housing, or political influence. Written in a direct and clear style, In Lincoln’s Shadow documents a violent explosion of racial hatred that shocked the nation and reveals the complexity of white racial attitudes in the early twentieth century.
In a world of increasingly heterogeneous societies, matters of identity politics and the links between collective identities and national, racial, or ethnic intolerance have assumed dramatic significance - and have stimulated an enormous body of research and literature which rarely transcends the limitations of a national perspective, however, and thus reproduces the limitations of its own topic. Comparative attempts are rare, if not altogether absent. Identity and Intolerance attempts to shift the focus toward comparison in order to show how German and American societies have historically confronted matters of national, racial, and ethnic inclusion and exclusion. This perspective sheds light on the specific links between the cultural construction of nationhood and otherness, the political modes of integration and exclusion, and the social conditions of tolerance and intolerance. The contributors also attempt to integrate the approaches offered by the history of ideas and ideologies, social history, and discourse theory.
This new perspective on interracial and black female global activism helps redefine the often covert systemic violence necessary to maintain systems of social and economic hierarchy, moving peace and war discourse away from its narrow focus on European and European American issues."
There are nearly 20,000 general-purpose municipal governments—cities—in the United States, employing more people than the federal government. About twenty of those cities received charters of incorporation well before ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and several others were established urban centers more than a century before the American Revolution. Yet despite their estimable size and prevalence in the United States, city government and politics has been a woefully neglected topic within the recent study of American political development. The volume brings together some of the best of both the most established and the newest urban scholars in political science, sociology, and history, each of whom makes a new argument for rethinking the relationship between cities and the larger project of state-building. Each chapter shows explicitly how the American city demonstrates durable shifts in governing authority throughout the nation’s history. By filling an important gap in scholarship the book will thus become an indispensable part of the American political development canon, a crucial component of graduate and undergraduate courses in APD, urban politics, urban sociology, and urban history, and a key guide for future scholarship.
Now in paperback, The Rural Face of White Supremacy presents a detailed study of the daily experiences of ordinary people in rural Hancock County, Georgia. Drawing on his own interviews with over two hundred black and white residents, Mark Schultz argues that the residents acted on the basis of personal rather than institutional relationships. As a result, Hancock County residents experienced more intimate face-to-face interactions, which made possible more black agency than their urban counterparts were allowed. While they were still firmly entrenched within an exploitive white supremacist culture, this relative freedom did create a space for a range of interracial relationships that included mixed housing, midwifery, church services, meals, and even common-law marriages.
This three-volume work traces the history of revolts and rebellions from the colonial era to the 20th century. America has a long history of rebellions extending back before 1776. Revolts have taken place because of economic hard times, the denial of civil rights, racism, sexism, and classism. Studying the reasons for and results of these uprisings provides a window into the life of the American body politic—and what moves the American people to action. Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia details the history of popular actions from the colonial era to the 20th century. Each event in the three-volume encyclopedia is covered by an overview entry that details who was involved, why the revolt took place, what happened, and what the aftereffects were. Shorter subentries provide further detail on the important people, places, events, and ideas that were a part of the action. By presenting both the broad themes and the specifics, the encyclopedia enables readers to gain a general knowledge of the event or drill down to acquire a greater understanding.
A modern-day civil rights champion tells the stirring story of how he helped start a movement to bridge America’s racial divide. Over the summer of 2013, the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II led more than a hundred thousand people at rallies across North Carolina to protest restrictions to voting access and an extreme makeover of state government. These protests—the largest state government–focused civil disobedience campaign in American history—came to be known as Moral Mondays and have since blossomed in states as diverse as Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New York. At a time when divide-and-conquer politics are exacerbating racial strife and economic inequality, Rev. Barber offers an impassioned, historically grounded argument that Moral Mondays are hard evidence of an embryonic Third Reconstruction in America. The first Reconstruction briefly flourished after Emancipation, and the second Reconstruction ushered in meaningful progress in the civil rights era. But both were met by ferocious reactionary measures that severely curtailed, and in many cases rolled back, racial and economic progress. This Third Reconstruction is a profoundly moral awakening of justice-loving people united in a fusion coalition powerful enough to reclaim the possibility of democracy—even in the face of corporate-financed extremism. In this memoir of how Rev. Barber and allies as diverse as progressive Christians, union members, and immigration-rights activists came together to build a coalition, he offers a trenchant analysis of race-based inequality and a hopeful message for a nation grappling with persistent racial and economic injustice. Rev. Barber writes movingly—and pragmatically—about how he laid the groundwork for a state-by-state movement that unites black, white, and brown, rich and poor, employed and unemployed, gay and straight, documented and undocumented, religious and secular. Only such a diverse fusion movement, Rev. Barber argues, can heal our nation’s wounds and produce public policy that is morally defensible, constitutionally consistent, and economically sane. The Third Reconstruction is both a blueprint for movement building and an inspiring call to action from the twenty-first century’s most effective grassroots organizer.
Black and white Americans have occupied separate spaces since the days of "the big house" and "the quarters." But the segregation and racialization of American society was not a natural phenomenon that "just happened." The decisions, enacted into laws, that kept the races apart and restricted blacks to less desirable places sprang from legal reasoning which argued that segregated spaces were right, reasonable, and preferable to other arrangements. In this book, David Delaney explores the historical intersections of race, place, and the law. Drawing on court cases spanning more than a century, he examines the moves and countermoves of attorneys and judges who participated in the geopolitics of slavery and emancipation; in the development of Jim Crow segregation, which effectively created apartheid laws in many cities; and in debates over the "doctrine of changed conditions," which challenged the legality of restrictive covenants and private contracts designed to exclude people of color from white neighborhoods. This historical investigation yields new insights into the patterns of segregation that persist in American society today.
