A long dark night
Subtitle: race in America from Jim Crow to World War II
By: J. Michael Martinez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 423
ISBN-13: 9781442259942
Copyright date: 2016
Subjects: Race relations; African Americans; Racism; History
Other titles: Race in America from Jim Crow to World War II
Description: For a brief time following the end of the US Civil War, American political leaders had an opportunity--slim, to be sure, but not beyond the realm of possibility--to remake society so that black Americans and other persons of color could enjoy equal opportunity in civil and political life. It was not to be. With each passing year after the war--and especially after Reconstruction ended during the 1870s--American society witnessed the evolution of a new white republic as national leaders abandoned the promise of Reconstruction and justified their racial biases based on political, economic, social, and religious values that supplanted the old North-South/slavery-abolitionist schism of the antebellum era. This book provides a sweeping history of this too often overlooked period of African American history that followed the collapse of Reconstruction--from the beginnings of legal segregation through the end of World War II. Author J. Michael Martinez argues that the 1880s ushered in the dark night of the American Negro--a night so dark and so long that the better part of a century would elapse before sunlight broke through. Combining both a "top-down" perspective on crucial political issues and public policy decisions as well as a "bottom-up" discussion of the lives of black and white Americans between the 1880s and the 1940s, A Long Dark Night will be of interest to all readers seeking to better understand this crucial era that continues to resonate throughout American life today.--Adapted from dust jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 359-397) and index.
Table of contents: title: Prologue: Race in America: "There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America"; title: Part I. A child of misery. The legacy of Reconstruction ; Jumpin' Jim Crow and legal segregation ; Racial violence and the plight of the freedmen; title: Part II. I'm sometimes up and sometimes down. The rise of the populist movement ; Southern populism ; Washington versus Du Bois; title: Part III. He's gone on high to prepare a place. The Great Migration ; A nadir of race relations ; The rise of a new Black culture ; Southern justice, a depression, and a war; title: Epilogue: The postwar American landscape: "White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually 'cause' each other".