Racism and Anti-Blackness: A Reading List

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Codename Greenkil The 1979 Greensboro Killings Elizabeth Wheaton

Summary On November 3, 1979, in a Greensboro, North Carolina, housing project, gunfire erupted when a group of Klansmen and Nazis responded to public challenges to "face the wrath of the people" at a Communist-sponsored anti-Klan demonstration.

Eighty-eight terror-filled seconds later, four demonstrators were dead, one was dying, and nine others were wounded. All of the dead were members of the Communist Workers Party (CWP).

University of Georgia Press 9780820331485 Pub Date: 9/21/2009 $30.95 Trade Paperback

In Codename Greenkil, Elizabeth Wheaton goes behind the scenes of the shootings to reveal the sixteen-year history of people and events that set the stage for the tragedy and its aftermath. In her new afterword, Wheaton looks at the legacy of the shootings, focusing in particular on the survivor-initiated Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose members were empaneled in June 2004 and issued their final report in May 2006.

354 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W | 0.8 in T | 1 lb Wt

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

The Fire in the Flint Walter White, R. Baxter Miller

Summary Written by a lifelong champion of civil rights, this is the story of Kenneth Harper, a young black physician who, after having studied in the North in the early part of the twentieth century and believing the days of oppression for blacks in the South were waning, returns to his hometown of Central City in South Georgia to practice medicine. Harper finds all too soon that the roots of intolerance grow deep. As he becomes increasingly aware of the ways in which the black community remains enslaved, Harper helps local sharecroppers organize a cooperative society to share in the economic freedom traditionally reserved for white landowners. The Ku Klux Klan is quickly rallied into action, and Harper finds himself in a violent and vengeful battle with the Klan. Amid the story's tragedy and violence, White reflects the complex nuances of humanity within white and black communities in conflict.

University of Georgia Press 9780820317427 Pub Date: 1/1/1996 $28.95 Trade Paperback 312 Pages 8 in H | 5.5 in W | 0.8 in T | 0.8 lb Wt

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

The Law of the White Circle A Novel Thornwell Jacobs, Paul Stephen Hudson, W. Fitzhugh...

Summary Long out of print, this is the only novel set during the infamous Atlanta race riot of 1906, in which dozens of African Americans were killed or injured. The "white circle" of the book's title delineates a realm of freedom, opportunity, and equality into which no black person could enter. The tensions that exploded into three days of deadly mob violence are explored through the intertwined stories of a white journalist, a black college professor, and the woman they both love—an artist of mixed race who chooses to pass as white.

University of Georgia Press 9780820328805 Pub Date: 9/1/2006 $23.95 Trade Paperback 164 Pages 8 in H | 5 in W | 0.4 in T | 0.4 lb Wt

Until the riot, Atlanta had been touted as a place where blacks and whites lived peacefully, yet separately. Thornwell Jacobs tries to make sense of what happened by weaving into his story threads of thought on such issues as media sensationalism, interracial love, social Darwinism, and class divisions within black and white communities.

This edition of The Law of the White Circle comes with additional writings that offer alternative perspectives on the Atlanta riot and put the novel and its real-world events in historical and sociological context. Included are a foreword by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a noted historian of the South whose scholarly interests include lynching and historical memory; an essay by historian Paul Stephen Hudson, the recognized authority on Thornwell Jacobs; an excerpt from A Man Called White, the autobiography of NAACP leader Walter White, whose family lived in Atlanta at the time of the riot; and the poem "A Litany of Atlanta," composed during the riot by the renowned African American scholar, writer, and civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

The Leo Frank Case

(2nd Edition)

Leonard Dinnerstein

Summary The events surrounding the 1913 murder of the young Atlanta factory worker Mary Phagan and the subsequent lynching of Leo Frank, the transplanted northern Jew who was her employer and accused killer, were so wide ranging and tumultuous that they prompted both the founding of B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. The Leo Frank Case was the first comprehensive account of not only Phagan’s murder and Frank’s trial and lynching but also the sensational newspaper coverage, popular hysteria, and legal demagoguery that surrounded these events.

University of Georgia Press 9780820331799 Pub Date: 9/15/2008 $28.95 Trade Paperback

Forty years after the book first appeared, and more than ninety years after the deaths of Phagan and Frank, it remains a gripping account of injustice. In his preface to the revised edition, Leonard Dinnerstein discusses the ongoing cultural impact of the Frank affair.

280 Pages 8.5 in H | 5.5 in W | 0.8 in T | 1.3 lb Wt

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Murder at Broad River Bridge The Slaying of Lemuel Penn by the Ku Klux Klan Bill Shipp, Renee C. Romano

Summary First published in 1981, Murder at the Broad River Bridge recounts the stunning details of the murder of Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn by the Ku Klux Klan on a back-country Georgia road in 1964, nine days after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Longtime Atlanta Constitution reporter Bill Shipp gives us, with shattering power, the true story of how a good, innocent, "uninvolved" man was killed during the Civil Rights turbulence of the mid-1960s. Penn was a decorated veteran of World War II, a United States Army Reserve officer, and an African American, killed by racist, white vigilantes as he was driving home to Washington, D.C. from Fort Benning, Georgia.

University of Georgia Press 9780820351612 Pub Date: 9/15/2017 $22.95 Trade Paperback

Shipp recounts the details of the blind and lawless force that took Penn’s life and the sorry mask of protective patriotism it hid behind. To read Murder at Broad River Bridge is to know with deep shock that it could be dated today, tonight, tomorrow. It is a vastly moving documentary drama.

112 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Remembering the Memphis Massacre An American Story Beverly Greene Bond, Susan Eva O'Donovan, Greg Dow...

Summary On May 1, 1866, a minor exchange between white Memphis city police and a group of black Union soldiers quickly escalated into murder and mayhem. Changes wrought by the Civil War and African American emancipation sent long-standing racial, economic, cultural, class, and gender tensions rocketing to new heights. For three days, a mob of white men roamed through South Memphis, leaving a trail of blood, rubble, and terror in their wake. By May 3, at least forty-six African American men, women, and children and two white men lay dead. An unknown number of black people had been driven out of the city. Every African American church and schoolhouse lay in ruins, homes and businesses burglarized and burned, and at least five women had been raped.

University of Georgia Press 9780820356518 Pub Date: 3/1/2020 $27.95 Trade Paperback 232 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W

As a federal military commander noted in the days following, “what [was] called the ‘riot’” was “in reality [a] massacre” of extended proportions. It was also a massacre whose effects spread far beyond Memphis, Tennessee. As the essays in this collection reveal, the massacre at Memphis changed the trajectory of the post–Civil War nation.

Led by recently freed slaves who refused to be cowed and federal officials who took their concerns seriously, the national response to the horror that ripped through the city in May 1866 helped to shape the nation we know today. Remembering the Memphis Massacre brings this pivotal moment and its players, long hidden from all but specialists in the field, to a public that continues to feel the effects of those three days and the history that made them possible.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Revolting New York How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising, and Revolution Shaped a City Neil Smith, Don Mitchell, Erin Siodmak, JenJoy Roy...

Summary

University of Georgia Press 9780820352824 Pub Date: 4/1/2018 $29.95 Trade Paperback 368 Pages 8.5 in H | 8.5 in W

Occupy Wall Street did not come from nowhere. It was part of a long history of riot, revolt, uprising, and sometimes even revolution that has shaped New York City. From the earliest European colonization to the present, New Yorkers have been revolting.

Hard hitting, revealing, and insightful, Revolting New York tells the story of New York’s evolution through revolution, a story of near-continuous popular (and sometimes not-so-popular) uprising.

Richly illustrated with more than ninety historical and contemporary images, historical maps, and maps drawn especially for the book, Revolting New York provides the first comprehensive account of the historical geography of revolt in New York, from the earliest uprisings of the Munsee against the Dutch occupation of Manhattan in the seventeenth century to the Black Lives Matter movement and the unrest of the Trump era. Through this rich narrative, editors Neil Smith and Don Mitchell reveal a continuous, if varied and punctuated, history of rebellion in New York that is as vital as the more standard histories of formal politics, planning, economic growth, and restructuring that largely define our consciousness of New York’s story.

Contributors: Marnie Brady, Kathleen Dunn, Zultán Gluck, Rachel Goffe, Harmony Goldberg, Amanda Huron, Malav Kanuga, Esteban Kelly, Manissa McCleave Maharawal, Don Mitchell, Justin Sean Myers, Brendan P. O’Malley, Raymond Pettit, Miguelina Rodriguez, Jenjoy Roybal, McNair Scott, Erin Siodmak, Neil Smith, Peter Waldman, and Nicole Watson.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

The Hawk and the Sun A Novel Byron Herbert Reece, Hugh Ruppersburg

Summary Set in the small-town, pre-civil rights South, The Hawk and the Sun is the story of one day in the life of Dandelion, a physically impaired man who is the sole black resident in the town of Tilden.

Years before, the birth of a mixed-race child to a white prostitute had precipitated an outpouring of hatred against Tilden's black citizens, all of whom but Dandelion had been driven from town. In this atmosphere of smoldering self-righteousness, Dandelion survives on handouts and what little he can earn from odd jobs. Finally, the town turns against him as well.

University of Georgia Press 9780820316567 Pub Date: 8/1/1994 $24.95 Trade Paperback 200 Pages

Seen hurrying from the house of the neurotic Miss Ella as her screams fill the air of an August morning, Dandelion is apprehended and falsely accused of rape. Before the day's end, he is tortured and lynched. In his rendering of Dandelion, of those who murdered him, of those who looked the other way, and of the lone white man who stood futilely against the mob, Byron Herbert Reece brings his readers face to face with the horrifying spectacle of collective fear and racism.

8 in H | 5.5 in W | 0.6 in T | 0.6 lb Wt

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching Julie Buckner Armstrong

Summary Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching traces the reaction of activists, artists, writers, and local residents to the brutal lynching of a pregnant woman near Valdosta, Georgia. In 1918, the murder of a white farmer led to a week of mob violence that claimed the lives of at least eleven African Americans, including Hayes Turner. When his wife Mary vowed to press charges against the killers, she too fell victim to the mob.

University of Georgia Press 9780820337661 Pub Date: 8/1/2011 $29.95 Trade Paperback 264 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W | 0.6 in T | 1 lb Wt

Mary’s lynching was particularly brutal and involved the grisly death of her eightmonth-old fetus. It led to both an entrenched local silence and a widespread national response in newspaper and magazine accounts, visual art, film, literature, and public memorials. Turner’s story became a centerpiece of the Anti-Lynching Crusaders campaign for the 1922 Dyer Bill, which sought to make lynching a federal crime. Julie Buckner Armstrong explores the complex and contradictory ways this horrific event was remembered in works such as Walter White’s report in the NAACP’s newspaper the Crisis, the “Kabnis” section of Jean Toomer’s Cane, Angelina Weld Grimké’s short story “Goldie,” and Meta Fuller’s sculpture Mary Turner: A Silent Protest against Mob Violence.

Like those of Emmett Till and Leo Frank, Turner’s story continues to resonate on multiple levels. Armstrong’s work provides insight into the different roles black women played in the history of lynching: as victims, as loved ones left behind, and as those who fought back. The crime continues to defy conventional forms of representation, illustrating what can, and cannot, be said about lynching and revealing the difficulty and necessity of confronting this nation’s legacy of racial violence.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Trouble in July A Novel Erskine Caldwell, Bryant Simon

Summary Through the summer twilight in the Depression-era South, word begins to circulate of a black man accosting a white woman. In no time the awful forces of public opinion and political expediency goad the separate fears and frustrations of a small southern community into the single-mindedness of a mob.

Erskine Caldwell shows the lynching of Sonny Clark through many eyes. However, Caldwell reserves some of his most powerful passages for the few who truly held Clark's life in their hands but let it go: people like Sheriff Jeff McCurtain, who did nothing to disperse the mob; Harvey Glenn, who found Clark in hiding and turned him in; and Katy Barlow, who withdrew her false charge of rape only after Clark was dead.

University of Georgia Press 9780820321059 Pub Date: 3/1/1999 $20.95 Trade Paperback 272 Pages 8.5 in H | 5.5 in W | 0.6 in T | 0.7 lb Wt

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

What Virtue There Is in Fire Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose Edwin T. Arnold

Summary The 1899 lynching of Sam Hose in Newnan, Georgia, was one of the earliest and most gruesome events in a tragic chapter of U.S. history. Hose was a black laborer accused of killing Alfred Cranford, a white farmer, and raping his wife. The national media closely followed the manhunt and Hose’s capture. An armed mob intercepted Hose’s Atlanta-bound train and took the prisoner back to Newnan. There, in front of a large gathering on a Sunday afternoon, Hose was mutilated and set on fire. His body was dismembered and pieces of it were kept by souvenir hunters.

University of Georgia Press 9780820340647 Pub Date: 1/15/2012 $29.95 Trade Paperback 264 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W | 0.8 in T | 0.8 lb Wt

Born and raised twenty miles from Newnan, Edwin T. Arnold was troubled and fascinated by the fact that this horrific chain of events had been largely shut out of local public memory. In "What Virtue There Is in Fire," Arnold offers the first in-depth examination of the lynching of Sam Hose.

Arnold analyzes newspapers, letters, and speeches to understand reactions to this brutal incident, without trying to resolve the still-disputed facts of the crime.

Firsthand accounts were often contradictory, and portrayals of Hose differed starkly—from "black beast" to innocent martyr. Arnold traces how different groups interpreted and co-opted the story for their own purposes through the years.

Reflecting on recent efforts to remember the lynching of Sam Hose, Arnold offers the portrait of a place still trying to reconcile itself, a century later, to its painful past.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Beyond Katrina

(2nd Edition)

A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast Natasha Trethewey

Summary Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey’s very personal profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina.

University of Georgia Press 9780820349022 Pub Date: 8/1/2015 $19.95 Trade Paperback 144 Pages

Trethewey spent her childhood in Gulfport, where much of her mother’s extended family, including her younger brother, still lives. As she worked to understand the devastation that followed the hurricane, Trethewey found inspiration in Robert Penn Warren’s book Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, in which he spoke with southerners about race in the wake of the Brown decision, capturing an event of wide impact from multiple points of view. Weaving her own memories with the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors, Trethewey traces the erosion of local culture and the rising economic dependence on tourism and casinos. She chronicles decades of wetland development that exacerbated the destruction and portrays a Gulf Coast whose citizens—particularly African Americans—were on the margins of American life well before the storm hit. Most poignantly, Trethewey illustrates the destruction of the hurricane through the story of her brother’s efforts to recover what he lost and his subsequent incarceration.

8.5 in H | 5.5 in W | 0.5 lb Wt

Renowned for writing about the idea of home, Trethewey’s attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

For Beyond Katrina, Trethewey has expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home.

A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Ely An Autobiography Lillian Smith, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Ely Green

Summary Ely Green was born in Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1893. His father was a member of the white gentry, the son of a former Confederate officer. His mother was a housemaid, the daughter of a former slave. In this small Episcopal community—home to the University of the South—Ely lived his early childhood oblivious to the implications of his illegitimacy and his parentage. He was nearly nine years old before he realized that being different from his white playmates was of any real significance.

University of Georgia Press 9780820323978 Pub Date: 1/5/2004 $29.95 Trade Paperback 280 Pages 8.3 in H | 5.5 in W | 0.7 in T | 0.8 lb Wt

An incident at a local drugstore marked the beginning of what would be a painful rite of passage from an idyllic childhood through a tormented adolescence as Ely struggled to understand why he could not wholly belong to either his father's world or his mother's. "I was having a struggle within," he writes, ". . . learning to hate white people after I had been taught that they were all God's children and we are to love everybody." At age eighteen, still warring to reconcile one part of himself with the other, he fled the mountains of Tennessee—and a brewing lynch mob—for the plains of Texas and a new beginning.

Straightforwardly recounting his early life, rising above bitterness and pain, Ely Green gives his readers an astoundingly honest and poignant portrait of a young man trying to come to terms with race relations in the early twentieth-century South.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Exit to Freedom Calvin C. Johnson Jr., Greg Hampikian, Barry Schec...

Summary "With God as my witness, I have been falsely accused of these crimes. I did not commit them. I'm an innocent man." In 1983 Calvin C. Johnson Jr. spoke these words to a judge who later handed down a life sentence for rape and related crimes.

Johnson spent sixteen years behind bars before he was freed in 1999 after DNA testing conclusively ruled out the possibility of his guilt.

University of Georgia Press 9780820327846 Pub Date: 9/12/2005 $24.95 Trade Paperback 320 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W | 0.9 in T | 1 lb Wt

Exit to Freedom is the unforgettable story of Johnson's unrelenting quest for justice against incredible odds and under circumstances that threatened to shred his dignity and hope. As Johnson recalls his trial and long journey toward freedom through five Georgia prisons, he also speaks candidly about everything from his middle-class childhood in Atlanta to the reasons he came to be a rape suspect to the steadfast support of his family. This is also a story of faith: how Johnson found it in prison and how, he believes, it played a role in his release.

At the point in his prison term when Johnson thought that he had exhausted all avenues of appeal, DNA-based forensics began to make headlines. Eventually his case was taken up by the Innocence Project, the nonprofit legal clinic renowned for overturning convictions through DNA testing of evidence. Years of delay followed, but Johnson eventually became the sixty-first convict to be exonerated with the Innocence Project's help. His is the only first-person account of a wrongful conviction overturned through DNA testing.

However disturbed readers may become by this portrait of a justice system undermined by its own cynicism, Johnson himself feels no bitterness toward his accusers. In a book that offers many lessons about freedom, that may be the most important one of all.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

He Included Me The Autobiography of Sarah Rice Sarah Rice, Louise H. Westling

Summary A rare first-person account of life in the twentieth-century South, He Included Me weaves together the story of a black family—eight children reared in rural Alabama, their mother a schoolteacher, their father a minister—and the emerging self-portrait of a woman determined, like her parents, to look ahead.

Sarah Rice recalls her mother's hymn of thanks—"He Included Me"—when God showed her a way to feed her family, and hears again her mother's quiet words, "It's no disgrace to work. It's an honor to make an honest dollar," spoken when her children were embarrassed that she took in white people's laundry. Rice speaks, finally, of the determination, faith, and pride that carried her through life.

University of Georgia Press 9780820349787 Pub Date: 2/1/2016 $19.95 Trade Paperback

In a document that spans more than three-quarters of the twentieth century, He Included Me presents the voice of a single woman whose life was rich in complexity, deep in suffering and joy; yet it also speaks for the many black women who have worked and struggled in the rural South and always looked ahead.

200 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W | 0.7 lb Wt

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

A Man Called White The Autobiography of Walter White Walter White

Summary First published in 1948, A Man Called White is the autobiography of the famous civil rights activist Walter White during his first thirty years of service to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. White joined the NAACP in 1918 and served as its executive secretary from 1931 until his death in 1955. His recollections tell not only of his personal life, but amount to an insider's history of the association's first decades.

University of Georgia Press 9780820316987 Pub Date: 2/1/1995 $28.95 Trade Paperback 392 Pages 8.5 in H | 5.5 in W | 1 in T | 1.1 lb Wt

Although an African American, White was fair-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed.

His ability to pass as a white man allowed him—at great personal risk—to gather important information regarding lynchings, disfranchisement, and discrimination. Much of A Man Called White recounts his infiltration of the country's white-racist power structure and the numerous legal battles fought by the NAACP that were aided by his daring efforts.

Penetrating and detailed, this autobiography provides an important account of crucial events in the development of race relations before 1950—from the trial of the "Scottsboro Boys" to an investigation of the treatment of African American servicemen in World War II, from the struggle against the all-white primaries in the South to court decisions—at all levels—on equal education.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Willie Mae Elizabeth Kytle

Summary First published in 1958 and selected by the New York Times as one of the best books of the year, Willie Mae is a first-person account of a black woman's life and her experiences as a domestic worker in a succession of southern households in the first half of the century.

Powerful and poignant, sometimes funny and always honest, Willie Mae is a testament to the courage and strength of a generation of women who struggled to survive with dignity and humanity in the years before the civil rights movement.

University of Georgia Press 9780820323763 Pub Date: 1/5/2004 $29.95 Trade Paperback 272 Pages 8 in H | 5.5 in W | 0.7 in T | 0.8 lb Wt

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Baptized in Blood The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 Charles Reagan Wilson

Summary Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity by blending Christian rhetoric and symbols with the rhetoric and imagery of Confederate tradition. Out of defeat emerged a civil religion that embodied the Lost Cause. As Charles Reagan Wilson writes in his new preface, "The Lost Cause version of the regional civil religion was a powerful expression, and recent scholarship affirms its continuing power in the minds of many white southerners."

University of Georgia Press 9780820334257 Pub Date: 10/1/2009 $27.95 Trade Paperback 264 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W | 1.3 lb Wt

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

The Black Panther Party in a City near You Judson L. Jeffries, Curtis Austin, Charles Jones, ...

Summary This is the third volume in Judson L. Jeffries’s long-range effort to paint a more complete portrait of the most widely known organization to emerge from the 1960s Black Power Movement. Like its predecessors (Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party [2007] and On the Ground: The Black Panther Party in Communities across America [2010]), this volume looks at Black Panther Party (BPP) activity in sites outside Oakland, the most studied BPP locale and the one long associated with oversimplified and underdeveloped narratives about, and distorted images of, the organization.

University of Georgia Press 9780820351971 Pub Date: 2/1/2018 $32.95 Trade Paperback 218 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W

The cities covered in this volume are Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, and Washington, D.C. The contributors examine official BPP branches and chapters as well as offices of the National Committee to Combat Fascism that evolved into full-fledged BPP chapters and branches. They have mined BPP archives and interviewed members to convey the daily ups-and-downs related to BPP’s social-justice activities and to reveal the diversity of rank-and-file BPP members’ personal backgrounds and the legal, political, and social skills, or baggage, that they brought to the BPP. The BPP reportedly had a presence in some forty places across the country. During this time, no other Black Power Movement organization fed as many children, provided healthcare to as many residents, educated as many adults, assisted as many senior citizens, and clothed as many people. In point of fact, no other organization of the Black Power era had as great an impact on American lives as did the BPP. Nonetheless, when Jeffries undertook this project, chapter-level scholarly investigations of the BPP were few and far between. This third book, The Black Panther Party in a City Near You, raises the number of BPP branches that Jeffries and his contributors have examined to seventeen.

Contributors: Curtis Austin, Judson L. Jeffries, Charles E. Jones, Ava Kinsey, Duncan MacLaury, Sarah Nicklas, John Preusser.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

The Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity James C. Cobb

Summary The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling was a watershed event in the fight against racial segregation in the United States. The recent fiftieth anniversary of Brown prompted a surge of tributes: books, television and radio specials, conferences, and speeches. At the same time, says James C. Cobb, it revealed a growing trend of dismissiveness and negativity toward Brown and other accomplishments of the civil rights movement. Writing as both a lauded historian and a white southerner from the last generation to grow up under southern apartheid, Cobb responds to what he sees as distortions of Brown’s legacy and their implied disservice to those whom it inspired and empowered.

University of Georgia Press 9780820357034 Pub Date: 8/1/2019 $24.95 Trade Paperback 102 Pages 8.5 in H | 5.5 in W

Cobb begins by looking at how our historical understanding of segregation has evolved since the Brown decision. In particular, he targets the tenacious misconception that racial discrimination was at odds with economic modernization—and so would have faded out, on its own, under market pressures. He then looks at the argument that Brown energized white resistance more than it fomented civil rights progress. This position overstates the pace and extent of racial change in the South prior to Brown, Cobb says, while it understates Brown’s role in catalyzing and legitimizing subsequent black protest.

Finally, Cobb suggests that the Brown decree and the civil rights movement accomplished not only more than certain critics have acknowledged but also more than the hard statistics of black progress can reveal. The destruction of Jim Crow, with its “denial of belonging,” allowed African Americans to embrace their identity as southerners in ways that freed them to explore links between their southernness and their blackness. This is an important and timely reminder of “what the Brown court and the activists who took the spirit of its ruling into the streets were up against, both historically and contemporaneously.”

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Charleston Syllabus Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence Chad Williams, Kidada E. Williams, Keisha N. Blain

Summary 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 a 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.

University of Georgia Press 9780820349572 Pub Date: 5/15/2016 $29.95 Trade Paperback 368 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W

In the aftermath of the massacre, Professors Chad Williams, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain sought a way to put the murder—and the subsequent debates 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 discussion questions and 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.

This book is dedicated to Cynthia Hurd Susie Jackson Ethel Lance DePayne Middleton-Doctor Clementa Pinckney Tywanza Sanders Daniel Simmons Sr. Sharonda Singleton Myra Thompson

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Development Drowned and Reborn The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans Clyde Woods, Laura Pulido, Jordan T. Camp

Summary Development Drowned and Reborn is a “Blues geography� of New Orleans, one that compels readers to return to the history of the Black freedom struggle there to reckon with its unfinished business. Reading contemporary policies of abandonment against the grain, Clyde Woods explores how Hurricane Katrina brought long-standing structures of domination into view. In so doing, Woods delineates the roots of neoliberalism in the region and a history of resistance.

University of Georgia Press 9780820350929 Pub Date: 7/1/2017 $34.95 Trade Paperback 396 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W

Written in dialogue with social movements, this book offers tools for comprehending the racist dynamics of U.S. culture and economy. Following his landmark study, Development Arrested, Woods turns to organic intellectuals, Blues musicians, and poor and working people to instruct readers in this future-oriented history of struggle.

Through this unique optic, Woods delineates a history, methodology, and epistemology to grasp alternative visions of development.

Woods contributes to debates about the history and geography of neoliberalism. The book suggests that the prevailing focus on neoliberalism at national and global scales has led to a neglect of the regional scale. Specifically, it observes that theories of neoliberalism have tended to overlook New Orleans as an epicenter where racial, class, gender, and regional hierarchies have persisted for centuries. Through this Blues geography, Woods excavates the struggle for a new society.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Fight against Fear Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights Clive Webb

Summary In the uneasily shared history of Jews and blacks in America, the struggle for civil rights in the South may be the least understood episode. Fight against Fear is the first book to focus on Jews and African Americans in that remarkable place and time.

Mindful of both communities' precarious and contradictory standings in the South, Clive Webb tells a complex story of resistance and complicity, conviction and apathy.

University of Georgia Press 9780820325552 Pub Date: 9/1/2003 $30.95 Trade Paperback 328 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W | 0.7 in T | 1 lb Wt

Webb begins by ranging over the experiences of southern Jews up to the eve of the civil rights movement—from antebellum slaveowners to refugees who fled Hitler's Europe only to arrive in the Jim Crow South. He then shows how the historical burden of ambivalence between Jews and blacks weighed on such issues as school desegregation, the white massive resistance movement, and business boycotts and sit-ins.

As many Jews grappled as never before with the ways they had become—and yet never could become—southerners, their empathy with African Americans translated into scattered, individual actions rather than any large-scale, organized alliance between the two groups. The reasons for this are clear, Webb says, once we get past the notion that the choices of the much larger, less conservative, and urban-centered Jewish populations of the North define those of all American Jews. To understand Jews in the South we must look at their particular circumstances: their small numbers and wide distribution, denominational rifts, and well-founded anxiety over defying racial and class customs set by the region's white Protestant majority.

For better or worse, we continue to define the history of Jews and blacks in America by its flash points. By setting aside emotions and shallow perceptions, Fight against Fear takes a substantial step toward giving these two communities the more open and evenhanded consideration their shared experiences demand.

Racism and Anti-Blackness: A Reading List - June 2020

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871–1872 Lou Falkner Williams

Summary It is remarkable that the most serious intervention by the federal government to protect the rights of its new African American citizens during Reconstruction (and well beyond) has not, until now, received systematic scholarly study.

In The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, Lou Falkner Williams presents a comprehensive account of the events following the Klan uprising in the South Carolina piedmont in the Reconstruction era. It is a gripping story—one that helps us better understand the limits of constitutional change in post-Civil War America and the failure of Reconstruction.

University of Georgia Press 9780820326597 Pub Date: 9/27/2004 $25.95 Trade Paperback 224 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W | 0.6 in T | 0.8 lb Wt

The South Carolina Klan trials represent the culmination of the federal government's most substantial effort during Reconstruction to stop white violence and provide personal security for African Americans. Federal interventions, suspension of habeas corpus in nine counties, widespread undercover investigations, and highly publicized trials resulting in the conviction of several Klansmen are all detailed in Williams's study.

When the trials began, the Supreme Court had yet to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment and the Enforcement Acts. Thus the fourth federal circuit court became a forum for constitutional experimentation as the prosecution and defense squared off to present their opposing views. The fate of the individual Klansmen was almost incidental to the larger constitutional issues in these celebrated trials. It was the federal judge's devotion to state-centered federalism—not a lack of concern for the Klan's victims—that kept them from embracing constitutional doctrine that would have fundamentally altered the nature of the Union.

Placing the Klan trials in the context of postemancipation race relations, Williams shows that the Klan's campaign of terror in the upcountry reflected white determination to preserve prewar racial and social standards. Her analysis of Klan violence against women breaks new ground, revealing that white women were attacked to preserve traditional southern sexual mores, while crimes against black women were designed primarily to demonstrate white male supremacy.

Well-written, cogently argued, and clearly presented, this comprehensive account of the Klan uprising in the South Carolina piedmont in the late 1860s and early 1870s makes a significant contribution to the history of Reconstruction and race relations in the United States.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Medical Bondage Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology Deirdre Cooper Owens

Summary The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women.

Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation.

University of Georgia Press 9780820354750 Pub Date: 7/15/2018 $26.95 Trade Paperback 182 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W

In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.

Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.

Racism and Anti-Blackness: A Reading List - June 2020

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Rabble Rousers The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era Clive Webb

Summary The decade following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision saw white southerners mobilize in massive resistance to racial integration. Most segregationists conceded that ultimately they could only postpone the demise of Jim Crow. Some militant whites, however, believed it possible to win the civil rights struggle. Histories of the black freedom struggle, when they mention these racist zealots at all, confine them to the margin of the story.

University of Georgia Press 9780820335773 Pub Date: 5/15/2010 $29.95 Trade Paperback 304 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W | 0.7 in T | 1 lb Wt

These extremist whites are caricatured as ineffectual members of the lunatic fringe.

Civil rights activists, however, saw them for what they really were: calculating, dangerous opponents prepared to use terrorism in their stand against reform. To dismiss white militants is to underestimate the challenge they posed to the movement and, in turn, the magnitude of civil rights activists’ accomplishments. The extremists helped turn massive resistance into a powerful political phenomenon. While white southern elites struggled to mobilize mass opposition to racial reform, the militants led entire communities in revolt.

Rabble Rousers turns traditional top-down models of massive resistance on their head by telling the story of five far-right activists—Bryant Bowles, John Kasper, Rear Admiral John Crommelin, Major General Edwin Walker, and J. B. Stoner—who led grassroots rebellions. It casts new light on such contentious issues as the role of white churches in defending segregation, the influence of anti-Semitism in southern racial politics, and the divisive impact of class on white unity. The flame of the far right burned brilliantly but briefly. In the final analysis, violent extremism weakened the cause of white southerners. Tactical and ideological tensions among massive resisters, as well as the strength and unity of civil rights activists, accelerated the destruction of Jim Crow.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Race Science and Politics Ruth Benedict, Judith Schachter

Summary In science, race can be a useful concept—for specific, limited purposes. When race, as a way of classifying people, is drafted into the service of politics, religion, or any belief system, then danger follows. That is the focus of this classic repudiation of racism, which is as readable and timely now as when it first appeared.

University of Georgia Press 9780820356785 Pub Date: 10/15/2019 $29.95 Trade Paperback 240 Pages 7.8 in H | 5.1 in W

Race: Science and Politics was first published in 1940, in response to the global rise of fascism and its pseudoscientific rationales for marginalizing and even exterminating “inferior” people. Writing for a general audience, Ruth Benedict ranges across the history of Western thought and research on race to illuminate rifts between the facts of race and the claims of racism. Rather than take issue only with the Nazis and their allies, Benedict set out to show that all racist beliefs are objectively groundless—and that is the key to the book’s ongoing relevance.

The book’s bonus content includes The Races of Mankind, a pamphlet-length distillation of the book with its own controversial role in dismantling racist theory. This edition also includes a new foreword by Judith Schachter. An anthropologist, historian, and Benedict biographer, Schachter discusses the book’s importance for current readers. Also included is a foreword by anthropologist Margaret Mead from 1958, a time when colonial ties around the world were unravelling and civil rights unrest was a daily occurrence in the United States.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics How the Harassment of Black Elected Officials Shaped Post-Civil Rights America George Derek Musgrove

Summary Historians have exhaustively documented how African Americans gained access to electoral politics in the mid-1960s, but few have scrutinized what happened next, and the small body of work that does consider the aftermath of the civil rights movement is almost entirely limited to the Black Power era. In Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics, George Derek Musgrove pushes much further, examining black elected officials’ allegations of state and news media repression—what they called “harassment”—to gain new insight into the role of race in U.S. politics between 1965 and 1995.

University of Georgia Press 9780820341217 Pub Date: 2/1/2012 $26.95 Trade Paperback 312 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W | 0.9 in T | 1.1 lb Wt

Drawing from untapped sources, including interviews he conducted with twenty-five sitting and former black members of Congress, Musgrove tells new stories and reinterprets familiar events. His cast of characters includes Julian Bond, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Alcee Hastings, Ronald Dellums, Richard Arrington, and Marion Barry, as well as white political figures like Newt Gingrich and Jefferson Sessions. Throughout, Musgrove connects patterns of surveillance, counterintelligence, and disproportionate investigation of black elected officials to the broader political culture. In so doing, he reveals new aspects of the surveillance state of the late 1960s, the rise of adversary journalism and good government reforms in the wake of Watergate, the official corruption crackdown of the 1980s, and the allure of conspiracy theory to African Americans seeking to understand the harassment of their elected leadership.

Moving past the old debate about whether there was a conscious conspiracy against black officials, Musgrove explores how the perception of harassment shaped black political thought in the post–civil rights era. The result is a field-defining work by a major new intellectual voice.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

States' Laws on Race and Color Pauli Murray, Davison M. Douglas

Summary This remarkable, hard-to-find resource is an exhaustive compilation of state laws and local ordinances in effect in 1950 that mandated racial segregation and of pre-Brown-era civil rights legislation.

The volume cites legislation from forty-eight states and the District of Columbia, and ordinances of twenty-four major cities across the country. The complete text of each law or ordinance is included, along with occasional notes about its history and the extent to which it was enforced.

Other relevant information found in the volume ranges widely: the texts of various Supreme Court rulings; international documents; federal government executive orders, departmental rules, regulations, and directives; legislation related to aliens and Native Americans; and more.

University of Georgia Press 9780820350639 Pub Date: 6/2/2016 $44.95 Trade Paperback

In his introduction Davison M. Douglas comments on the legislation compiled in the book and its relevance to scholars today and also provides biographical background on Pauli Murray, the attorney who was the volume's original editor.

776 Pages 9.3 in H | 6.1 in W

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Confederate Statues and Memorialization Catherine Clinton, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Karen L. ...

Summary Nine killed in Charleston church shooting. White supremacists demonstrate in Charlottesville. Monuments decommissioned in New Orleans and Chapel Hill. The headlines keep coming, and the debate rolls on. How should we contend with our troubled history as a nation? What is the best way forward?

University of Georgia Press 9780820355573 Pub Date: 4/1/2019 $19.95 Trade Paperback 192 Pages 7 in H | 5 in W

This first book in UGA Press’s History in the Headlines series offers a rich discussion between four leading scholars who have studied the history of Confederate memory and memorialization. Through this dialogue, we see how historians explore contentious topics and provide historical context for students and the broader public.

Confederate Statues and Memorialization artfully engages the past and its influence on present racial and social tensions in an accessible format for students and interested general readers.

Following the conversation, the book includes a “Top Ten” set of essays and articles that everyone should read to flesh out their understanding of this contentious, sometimes violent topic. The book closes with an extended list of recommended reading, offering readers specific suggestions for pursuing other voices and points of view.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Born to Rebel An Autobiography Benjamin E. Mays, Orville Vernon Burton

Summary Born the son of a sharecropper in 1894 near Ninety Six, South Carolina, Benjamin E. Mays went on to serve as president of Morehouse College for twenty-seven years and as the first president of the Atlanta School Board. His earliest memory, of a lynching party storming through his county, taunting but not killing his father, became for Mays an enduring image of black-white relations in the South. Born to Rebel is the moving chronicle of his life, a story that interlaces achievement with the rebuke he continually confronted.

University of Georgia Press 9780820325231 Pub Date: 4/14/2003 $30.95 Trade Paperback 464 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W | 1.2 in T | 1.6 lb Wt

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Black Judas William Hannibal Thomas and "The American Negro" John David Smith

Summary William Hannibal Thomas (1843–1935) served with distinction in the U.S. Colored Troops in the Civil War (in which he lost an arm) and was a preacher, teacher, lawyer, state legislator, and journalist following Appomattox. In many publications up through the 1890s, Thomas espoused a critical though optimistic black nationalist ideology.

After his mid-twenties, however, Thomas began exhibiting a self-destructive personality, one that kept him in constant trouble with authorities and always on the run. His book The American Negro (1901) was his final self-destructive act.

University of Georgia Press 9780820356266 Pub Date: 11/15/2019 $29.95 Trade Paperback 436 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W

Attacking African Americans in gross and insulting language in this utterly pessimistic book, Thomas blamed them for the contemporary “Negro problem” and argued that the race required radical redemption based on improved “character,” not changed “color.” Vague in his recommendations, Thomas implied that blacks should model themselves after certain mulattoes, most notably William Hannibal Thomas.

Black Judas is a biography of Thomas, a publishing history of The American Negro, and an analysis of that book’s significance to American racial thought. The book is based on fifteen years of research, including research in postamputation trauma and psychoanalytic theory on selfhatred, to assess Thomas’s metamorphosis from a constructive race critic to a black Negrophobe. John David Smith argues that his radical shift resulted from key emotional and physical traumas that mirrored Thomas’s life history of exposure to white racism and intense physical pain.

Racism and Anti-Blackness: A Reading List - June 2020

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Breaking Ground My Life in Medicine Louis W. Sullivan, David Chanoff, Andrew Young

Summary In Breaking Ground, Louis W. Sullivan, M.D. recounts his extraordinary life including his childhood in Jim Crow south Georgia and continuing through his trailblazing endeavors training to become a physician in an almost entirely white environment in the Northeast. He was the founding dean and president of Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, and served as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in President George H. W. Bush’s administration. Throughout his extraordinary life Sullivan has passionately championed improved access to health care for all Americans and greater diversity among the nation’s health professionals.

University of Georgia Press 9780820349381 Pub Date: 2/1/2016 $24.95 Trade Paperback

Sullivan’s life—from Morehouse to the White House and his ongoing work with medical students in South Africa—is the embodiment of the hopes and progress that the civil rights movement fought to achieve. His story should inspire future generations—of all backgrounds—to aspire to great things.

288 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W | 1 lb Wt

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Eugene Bullard, Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris Craig Lloyd

Summary Although he was the first African American fighter pilot, Eugene J. Bullard is still a relative stranger in his homeland. An accomplished professional boxer, musician, club manager, and impresario of Parisian nightlife between the world wars, Bullard found in Europe a degree of respect and freedom unknown to blacks in America. There, for twenty-five years, he helped define the expatriate experience for countless other African American artists, writers, performers, and athletes.

University of Georgia Press 9780820328188 Pub Date: 3/1/2006 $26.95 Trade Paperback 240 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W | 0.7 in T | 0.8 lb Wt

This is the first biography of Bullard in thirty years and the most complete ever. It follows Bullard's lifelong search for respect from his poor boyhood in Jim-Crow Georgia to his attainment of notoriety in Jazz-Age Paris and his exploits fighting for his adopted country, for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Drawing on a vast amount of archival material in the United States, Great Britain, and France, Craig Lloyd unfolds the vibrant story of an African American who sought freedom overseas.

Lloyd provides a new look at the black expatriate community in Paris, taking readers into the cabarets where Bullard rubbed elbows with Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, and even the Prince of Wales. Lloyd also uses Bullard's life as a lens through which to view the racism that continued to dog him even in Europe in his encounters with traveling Americans.

When Hitler conquered France, Bullard was wounded in action and then escaped to America. There, his European successes counted for little: he spent his last years in obscurity and hardship but continued to work for racial justice. Eugene Bullard, Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris offers a fascinating look at an extraordinary man who lived on his own terms and adds a new facet to our understanding of the black diaspora.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

John Oliver Killens A Life of Black Literary Activism Keith Gilyard

Summary John Oliver Killens’s politically charged novels And Then We Heard the Thunder and The Cotillion; or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd, were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His works of fiction and nonfiction, the most famous of which is his novel Youngblood, have been translated into more than a dozen languages. An influential novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and teacher, he was the founding chair of the Harlem Writers Guild and mentored a generation of black writers at Fisk, Howard, Columbia, and elsewhere. Killens is recognized as the spiritual father of the Black Arts Movement. In this first major biography of Killens, Keith Gilyard examines the life and career of the man who was perhaps the premier African American writer-activist from the 1950s to the 1980s.

University of Georgia Press 9780820340319 Pub Date: 11/1/2011 $31.95 Trade Paperback 456 Pages

Gilyard extends his focus to the broad boundaries of Killens’s times and literary achievement—from the Old Left to the Black Arts Movement and beyond. Figuring prominently in these pages are the many important African American artists and political figures connected to the author from the 1930s to the 1980s—W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, and Maya Angelou, among others.

9 in H | 6 in W | 1 in T | 1.6 lb Wt

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Justice Leah Ward Sears Seizing Serendipity Rebecca Shriver Davis

Summary This is the first full biography of Justice Leah Ward Sears. In 1992 Sears became the first woman and youngest justice to sit on the Supreme Court of Georgia. In 2005 she became the first African American woman to serve as chief justice of any state supreme court in the country. This book explores her childhood in a career military family; her education; her early work as an attorney; her rise through Georgia’s city, county, and state court systems; and her various pursuits after leaving the supreme court in 2009, when she transitioned into a life that was no less active or public.

University of Georgia Press 9780820356822 Pub Date: 2/1/2020 $24.95 Trade Paperback 184 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W

As the biography recounts Sears’s life and career, it is filled with instances of how Sears made her own luck by demonstrating a sharpness of mind and sagacious insight, a capacity for grueling hard work, and a relentless drive to succeed. Sears also maintained a strict devotion to judicial independence and the rule of law, which led to decisions that would surprise conservatives and liberals alike, earned the friendship of figures as diverse as Ambassador Andrew Young and Justice Clarence Thomas, and solidified a reputation that would land her on the short list of replacements for two retiring U.S. Supreme Court justices.

As a woman, an African American, a lawyer, and a judge, Sears has known successes as well as setbacks. Justice Leah Ward Sears shows that despite political targeting, the death of her beloved father, a painful divorce, and a brother’s suicide, she has persevered and prevailed.

Racism and Anti-Blackness: A Reading List - June 2020

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

The Pussycat of Prizefighting Tiger Flowers and the Politics of Black Celebrity Andrew M. Kaye

Summary In 1926 Theodore “Tiger” Flowers became the first African American boxer to win the world middleweight title. The next year he was dead, the victim of surgery gone wrong. His funeral in Atlanta drew tens of thousands of mourners, black and white.

Atlantans would not grieve again in comparable numbers until Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968.

Flowers, whose career was sandwiched between those of the better-known black boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, was not America’s first successful black athlete.

He was, however, the first to generate widespread goodwill among whites, especially in the South, where he became known as “the whitest black man in the ring.”

University of Georgia Press 9780820329109 Pub Date: 4/1/2007 $26.95 Trade Paperback 232 Pages 8.7 in H | 5.8 in W | 0.6 in T | 0.7 lb Wt

The Pussycat of Prizefighting is more than an account of Flowers’s remarkable achievements—it is a penetrating analysis of the cultural and historical currents that defined the terms of Flowers’s success as both a man and an athlete. As we discover the sources of Flowers’s immense popularity, Andrew Kaye also helps us to understand more deeply the pressures and dilemmas facing African Americans in the public eye.

We read, for instance, how boxing reinforced fans’ notions of masculinity and ethnic pride; how whites rationalized the physical superiority of a black sportsman; and how blacks debated the value of athletes as racial role models. Kaye shows how Flowers, mindful that the ring was a testing ground for much more than his punching ability, carefully negotiated the mass media and celebrity culture. He crafted an uncontroversial public persona—that of a religious man who prayed before each match, was deferential to whites, and exuded an aura of middleclass respectability.

Through the prism of prizefighting, this book reveals the personal cost African Americans faced as they attempted to earn black respect while escaping white hostility. Andrew Kaye gives us much to ponder regarding our own hopes and prejudices—-and how we often burden our athletes and celebrities with them.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Ralph Ellison Emergence of Genius Lawrence Jackson

Summary Author, intellectual, and social critic, Ralph Ellison (1914-94) was a pivotal figure in American literature and history and arguably the father of African American modernism. Universally acclaimed for his first novel, Invisible Man, a masterpiece of modern fiction, Ellison was recognized with a stunning succession of honors, including the 1953 National Book Award. Despite his literary accomplishments and political activism, however, Ellison has received surprisingly sparse treatment from biographers. Lawrence Jackson’s biography of Ellison, the first when it was published in 2002, focuses on the author’s early life.

University of Georgia Press 9780820329932 Pub Date: 9/1/2007 $30.95 Trade Paperback 520 Pages 9.3 in H | 6.1 in W | 1.2 in T | 1.6 lb Wt

Powerfully enhanced by rare photographs, this work draws from archives, literary correspondence, and interviews with Ellison’s relatives, friends, and associates.

Tracing the writer’s path from poverty in dust bowl Oklahoma to his rise among the literary elite, Jackson explores Ellison’s important relationships with other stars, particularly Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and examines his previously undocumented involvement in the Socialist Left of the 1930s and 1940s, the black radical rights movement of the same period, and the League of American Writers. The result is a fascinating portrait of a fraternal cadre of important black writers and critics—and the singularly complex and intriguing man at its center.

Racism and Anti-Blackness: A Reading List - June 2020

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Rosa Parks In Her Own Words Susan Reyburn, Carla D. Hayden

Summary

University of Georgia Press 9780820356921 Pub Date: 12/15/2019 $16.95 Paperback 96 Pages 8 in H | 8 in W

Until recently, Rosa Parks’s personal papers were unavailable to the public. In this compelling new book from the Library of Congress, where the Parks Collection is housed, the civil rights icon is revealed for the first time in print through her private manuscripts and handwritten notes. Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words illumines her inner thoughts, her ongoing struggles, and how she came to be the person who stood up by sitting down.

At the height of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as Parks was both pilloried and celebrated, she found a catharsis in her writing. Her precise descriptions of her arrest, the segregated South, and her recollections of childhood resistance to white supremacy document a lifetime of battling inequality. Parks expressed her thoughts on paper using whatever was available—meeting agendas, event programs, drugstore bags. The book features one hundred color and black-and-white photographs from the Parks collection, many appearing in print for the first time, along with ephemera from the long life of a private person in the public eye.

Racism and Anti-Blackness: A Reading List - June 2020

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Visible Man The Life of Henry Dumas Jeffrey B. Leak

Summary Henry Dumas (1934–1968) was a writer who did not live to see most of his fiction and poetry in print. A son of Sweet Home, Arkansas, and Harlem, he devoted himself to the creation of a black literary cosmos, one in which black literature and culture were windows into the human condition. While he certainly should be understood in the context of the cultural and political movements of the 1960s—Black Arts, Black Power, and Civil Rights—his writing, and ultimately his life, were filled with ambiguities and contradictions.

University of Georgia Press 9780820351469 Pub Date: 2/15/2017 $24.95 Trade Paperback 212 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W

Dumas was shot and killed in 1968 in Harlem months before his thirty-fourth birthday by a white transit policeman under circumstances never fully explained. After his death he became a kind of literary legend, but one whose full story was unknown. A devoted cadre of friends and later admirers from the 1970s to the present pushed for the publication of his work. Toni Morrison championed him as “an absolute genius.”

Amiri Baraka, a writer not quick to praise others, claimed that Dumas produced “actual art, real, man, and stunning.” Eugene Redmond and Quincy Troupe heralded Dumas’s poetry, short stories, and work as an editor of “little” magazines.

With Visible Man, Jeffrey B. Leak offers a full examination of both Dumas’s life and his creative development. Given unprecedented access to the Dumas archival materials and numerous interviews with family, friends, and writers who knew him in various contexts, Leak opens the door to Dumas’s rich and at times frustrating life, giving us a layered portrait of an African American writer and his coming of age during one of the most volatile and transformative decades in American history.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Black Woman Reformer Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism Sarah L. Silkey

Summary During the early 1890s, a series of shocking lynchings brought unprecedented international attention to American mob violence. This interest created an opportunity for Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist and civil rights activist from Memphis, to travel to England to cultivate British moral indignation against American lynching.

Wells adapted race and gender roles established by African American abolitionists in Britain to legitimate her activism as a “black lady reformer”—a role American society denied her—and assert her right to defend her race from abroad. Based on extensive archival research conducted in the United States and Britain, Black Woman Reformer

by Sarah Silkey explores Wells’s 1893–94 antilynching campaigns within the broader contexts of nineteenth-century transatlantic reform networks and debates about the role of extralegal violence in American society.

University of Georgia Press 9780820353784 Pub Date: 3/15/2018 $29.95 Trade Paperback 224 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W

Through her speaking engagements, newspaper interviews, and the efforts of her British allies, Wells altered the framework of public debates on lynching in both Britain and the United States. No longer content to view lynching as a benign form of frontier justice, Britons accepted Wells’s assertion that lynching was a racially motivated act of brutality designed to enforce white supremacy. As British criticism of lynching mounted, southern political leaders desperate to maintain positive relations with potential foreign investors were forced to choose whether to publicly defend or decry lynching. Although British moral pressure and media attention did not end lynching, the international scrutiny generated by Wells’s campaigns transformed our understanding of racial violence and made American communities increasingly reluctant to embrace lynching.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

A Better Life for Their Children Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools That Changed America Andrew Feiler, John Lewis, Jeanne Cyriaque, Brent ...

Summary

University of Georgia Press 9780820358413 Pub Date: 2/1/2021 $34.95 Hardcover with dust jacket

Born to Jewish immigrants, Julius Rosenwald rose to lead Sears, Roebuck & Company and turn it into the world’s largest retailer. Born into slavery, Booker T. Washington became the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute. In 1912 the two men launched an ambitious program to partner with black communities across the segregated South to build public schools for African American children. This watershed moment in the history of philanthropy—one of the earliest collaborations between Jews and African Americans—drove dramatic improvement in African American educational attainment and fostered the generation who became the leaders and foot soldiers of the civil rights movement.

136 Pages 11 in H | 9 in W

Of the original 4,978 Rosenwald schools built between 1917 and 1937 across fifteen southern and border states, only about 500 survive. While some have been repurposed and a handful remain active schools, many remain unrestored and at risk of collapse. To tell this story visually, Andrew Feiler drove more than twenty-five thousand miles, photographed 105 schools, and interviewed dozens of former students, teachers, preservationists, and community leaders in all fifteen of the program states.

A Better Life for their Children includes eighty-five duotone images that capture interiors and exteriors, schools restored and yet-to-be restored, and portraits of people with unique, compelling connections to these schools. Brief narratives written

by Feiler accompany each photograph, telling the stories of Rosenwald schools’ connections to the Trail of Tears, the Great Migration, the Tuskegee Airmen, Brown v.

Board of Education, embezzlement, murder, and more.

Beyond the photographic documentation, A Better Life for Their Children includes essays from three prominent voices. Congressman John Lewis, who attended a Rosenwald school in Alabama, provides an introduction; preservationist Jeanne Cyriaque has penned a history of the Rosenwald program; and Brent Leggs, director of African American Cultural Heritage at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has written a plea for preservation that serves as an afterword.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Genus Americanus Hitting the Road in Search of America’s Identity Loren Ghiglione, Alyssa Karas, Dan Tham

Summary A seventy-year-old Northwestern journalism professor, Loren Ghiglione, and two twenty-something Northwestern journalism students, Alyssa Karas and Dan Tham, climbed into a minivan and embarked on a three-month, twenty-eight state, 14,063-mile road trip in search of America’s identity. After interviewing 150 Americans about contemporary identity issues, they wrote this book, which is part oral history, part shoe-leather reporting, part search for America’s future, part memoir, and part travel journal.

University of Georgia Press 9780820358000 Pub Date: 10/15/2020 $32.95 Hardcover with dust jacket 360 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W

On their journey they retraced Mark Twain’s travels across America—from Hannibal, Missouri, to Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle. They hoped Twain’s insights into the late nineteenth-century soul of America would help them understand the America of today and the ways that our cultural fabric has shifted.

Their interviews focused on issues of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status. The timely trip occurred as the United States was poised to replace president Barack Obama, an icon of multiculturalism and inclusion, with Donald Trump, whose white-identity agenda promoted exclusion and division. What they learned along the way paints an engaging portrait of the country during this crucial moment of ideological and political upheaval.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Remaking Radicalism A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973–2001 Dan Berger, Emily K. Hobson, Lumumba Akinwole-Band...

Summary This book brings together documents from multiple radical movements in the recent United States from 1973 through 2001. These years are typically viewed as an era of neoliberalism, dominated by conservative retrenchment, the intensified programs of privatization and incarceration, dramatic cuts to social welfare, and the undermining of labor, antiracist, and feminist advances. Yet activists from the period proved tenacious in the face of upheaval, resourceful in creating new tactics, and dedicated to learning from one another. Persistent and resolute, activists did more than just keep radical legacies alive. They remade radicalism—bridging differences of identity and ideology often assumed to cleave movements, grappling with the eradication of liberal promises, and turning to movement cultures as the source of a just future.

University of Georgia Press 9780820357256 Pub Date: 8/15/2020 $39.95 Trade Paperback 528 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W

Remaking Radicalism is the first anthology of U.S. radicalisms that reveals the depth, diversity, and staying power of social movements after the close of the long 1960s.

Editors Dan Berger and Emily Hobson track the history of popular struggles during a time that spans the presidencies of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush and bring to readers the political upheavals that shaped the end of the century and that continue to define the present.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Selling Hate Marketing the Ku Klux Klan Dale W. Laackman

Summary Selling Hate is a fascinating and powerful story about the power of a southern PR firm to further the Ku Klux Klan’s agenda. Dale W. Laackman’s uncovered never-beforepublished archival material, census records, and obscure books and letters to tell the story of an emerging communications industry—an industry filled with potential and fraught with peril.

University of Georgia Press 9780820358093 Pub Date: 9/1/2020 $26.95 Trade Paperback 264 Pages 9 in H | 6 in W

The brilliant, amoral, and spectacularly bold Bessie Tyler and Edward Young Clarke —together, the Southern Publicity Association—met the fervent William Joseph Simmons (founder of the second KKK), saw an opportunity, and played on his many weaknesses. It was the volatile, precarious terrain of post–World War I America. Tyler and Clarke took Simmons's dying and broke KKK, with its two thousand to three thousand associates in Georgia and Alabama, and in a few short years swelled its membership to nearly five million. Chapters were established in every state of the union, and the Klan began influencing American political and social life. Between one-third and one-half of the eligible men in the country belonged to the organization.

Even to modern sensibilities, the extent of Tyler and Clarke’s scheme is shocking: the limitlessness of their audacity; the full-scale and ongoing con of Simmons; the size of the personal fortunes they earned, amassed, and stole in the process; and just how easily and expertly they exploited the particular fears and prejudices of every corner of America. You will recognize in this pair a very American sense of showmanship and an accepted, even celebrated, brash entrepreneurial hustle. And as their story winds down, you will recognize the tainted and ultimately ineffectual congressional hearings into the Klan's monumental growth.

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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections Jim Downs, Stacey Abrams, Carol Anderson, Kevin M....

Summary Historians have long been engaged in telling the story of the struggle for the vote. In the wake of recent contested elections, the suppression of the vote has returned to the headlines, as awareness of the deep structural barriers to the ballot, particularly for poor, black, and Latino voters, has called attention to the historical roots of issues related to voting access.

Perhaps most notably, former state legislator Stacey Abrams’s campaign for Georgia's gubernatorial race drew national attention after she narrowly lost to then-secretary of state Brian Kemp, who had removed hundreds of thousands of voters from the official rolls. After her loss, Abrams created Fair Fight, a multimillion-dollar initiative to combat voter suppression in twenty states.

University of Georgia Press 9780820357744 Pub Date: 7/1/2020 $19.95 Trade Paperback 176 Pages 7 in H | 5 in W

At an annual conference of the Organization of American Historians, leading scholars Carol Anderson, Kevin M. Kruse, Heather Cox Richardson, and Heather Anne Thompson had a conversation with Abrams about the long history of voter suppression at the Library Company of Philadelphia. This book is a transcript of that extraordinary conversation, edited by Jim Downs.

Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections offers an enlightening, history-informed conversation about voter disenfranchisement in the United States. By gathering scholars and activists whose work has provided sharp analyses of this issue, we see how historians in general explore contentious topics and provide historical context for students and the broader public.

The book also includes a “top ten” selection of essays and articles by such writers as journalist Ari Berman, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Blight, and civil rights icon John Lewis.

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