Download or read book The Lynching of Cleo Wright written by Dominic J. CapeciJr. and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On January 20, 1942, black oil mill worker Cleo Wright assaulted a white woman in her home and nearly killed the first police officer who tried to arrest him. An angry mob then hauled Wright out of jail and dragged him through the streets of Sikeston, Missouri, before burning him alive. Wright's death was, unfortunately, not unique in American history, but what his death meant in the larger context of life in the United States in the twentieth-century is an important and compelling story. After the lynching, the U.S. Justice Department was forced to become involved in civil rights concerns for the first time, provoking a national reaction to violence on the home front at a time when the country was battling for democracy in Europe. Dominic Capeci unravels the tragic story of Wright's life on several stages, showing how these acts of violence were indicative not only of racial tension but the clash of the traditional and the modern brought about by the war. Capeci draws from a wide range of archival sources and personal interviews with the participants and spectators to draw vivid portraits of Wright, his victims, law-enforcement officials, and members of the lynch mob. He places Wright in the larger context of southern racial violence and shows the significance of his death in local, state, and national history during the most important crisis of the twentieth-century.
Download or read book Lynchings in Missouri 1803 1981 written by Harriet C. Frazier and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At least 227 mob lynchings are identified, confirmed, and documented. Topics include: lynchings of Native Americans and African Americans; law enforcement efforts to punish lynchers; horse/hog stealing, bank robbery, murder, sex crimes, and other offenses for which whites were lynched; a still-unsolved 1981 lynching; 50 falsely reported, doubtful, and/or foiled lynchings, 1857-1930"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book White Man s Heaven written by Kimberly Harper and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on court records, newspaper accounts, penitentiary records, letters, and diaries, White Man’s Heaven is a thorough investigation into the lynching and expulsion of African Americans in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kimberly Harper explores events in the towns of Monett, Pierce City, Joplin, and Springfield, Missouri, and Harrison, Arkansas, to show how post–Civil War vigilantism, an established tradition of extralegal violence, and the rapid political, economic, and social change of the New South era happened independently but were also part of a larger, interconnected regional experience. Even though some whites, especially in Joplin and Springfield, tried to stop the violence and bring the lynchers to justice, many African Americans fled the Ozarks, leaving only a resilient few behind and forever changing the racial composition of the region.
Download or read book Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States 1889 1918 written by National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Under Sentence of Death written by W. Fitzhugh Brundage and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the assembled work of fifteen leading scholars emerges a complex and provocative portrait of lynching in the American South. With subjects ranging in time from the late antebellum period to the early twentieth century, and in place from the border states to the Deep South, this collection of essays provides a rich comparative context in which to study the troubling history of lynching. Covering a broad spectrum of methodologies, these essays further expand the study of lynching by exploring such topics as same-race lynchings, black resistance to white violence, and the political motivations for lynching. In addressing both the history and the legacy of lynching, the book raises important questions about Southern history, race relations, and the nature of American violence. Though focused on events in the South, these essays speak to patterns of violence, injustice, and racism that have plagued the entire nation. The contributors are Bruce E. Baker, E. M. Beck, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Joan E. Cashin, Paula Clark, Thomas G. Dyer, Terence Finnegan, Larry J. Griffin, Nancy MacLean, William S. McFeely, Joanne C. Sandberg, Patricia A. Schechter, Roberta Senechal de la Roche, Stewart E. Tolnay, and George C. Wright.
Download or read book Southern Horrors Lynch Law in All Its Phases written by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original: Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Download or read book Hostile Heartland written by Brent M.S. Campney and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We forget that racist violence permeated the lower Midwest from the pre-Civil War period until the 1930s. From Kansas to Ohio, whites orchestrated extraordinary events like lynchings and riots while engaged in a spectrum of brutal acts made all the more horrific by being routine. Also forgotten is the fact African Americans forcefully responded to these assertions of white supremacy through armed resistance, the creation of press outlets and civil rights organizations, and courageous individual activism. Drawing on cutting-edge methodology and a wealth of documentary evidence, Brent M. S. Campney analyzes the institutionalized white efforts to assert and maintain dominance over African Americans. Though rooted in the past, white violence evolved into a fundamentally modern phenomenon, driven by technologies such as newspapers, photographs, automobiles, and telephones. Other surprising insights challenge our assumptions about sundown towns, who was targeted by whites, law enforcement's role in facilitating and perpetrating violence, and the details of African American resistance.
Download or read book The Broken Heart of America written by Walter Johnson and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing portrait of the racial dynamics that lie inescapably at the heart of our nation, told through the turbulent history of the city of St. Louis. From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America's most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War's first general emancipation, and the nation's first general strike—a legacy of resistance that endures. A blistering history of a city's rise and decline, The Broken Heart of America will forever change how we think about the United States.
Download or read book Death and the American South written by Craig Thompson Friend and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death and the American South is an edited collection of twelve never-before-published essays, featuring leading senior scholars as well as influential up-and-coming historians. The contributors use a variety of methodological approaches for their research and explore different parts of the South and varying themes in history.
Download or read book The New Negro written by Alain Locke and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Swift to Wrath written by William D. Carrigan and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2013-05-24 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholarship on lynching has typically been confined to the extralegal execution of African Americans in the American South. The nine essays collected here look at lynching in the context of world history, encouraging a complete rethinking of the history of collective violence. Employing a diverse range of case studies, the volume’s contributors work to refute the notion that the various acts of group homicide called "lynching" in American history are unique or exceptional. Some essays consider the practice of lynching in a global context, confounding the popular perception that Americans were alone in their behavior and suggesting a wide range of approaches to studying extralegal collective violence. Others reveal the degree to which the practice of lynching has influenced foreigners’ perceptions of the United States and asking questions such as, Why have people adopted the term lynching—or avoided it? How has the meaning of the word been transformed over time in society? What contextual factors explain such transformations? Ultimately, the essays illuminate, opening windows on ordinary people’s thinking on such critical issues as the role of law in their society and their attitudes toward their own government.
Download or read book Journalism and Jim Crow written by Kathy Roberts Forde and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the American Historical Association’s 2022 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize. White publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacy across the South in the decades after the Civil War. At the same time, a vibrant Black press fought to disrupt these efforts and force the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. Journalism and Jim Crow centers the press as a crucial political actor shaping the rise of the Jim Crow South. The contributors explore the leading role of the white press in constructing an anti-democratic society by promoting and supporting not only lynching and convict labor but also coordinated campaigns of violence and fraud that disenfranchised Black voters. They also examine the Black press’s parallel fight for a multiracial democracy of equality, justice, and opportunity for all—a losing battle with tragic consequences for the American experiment. Original and revelatory, Journalism and Jim Crow opens up new ways of thinking about the complicated relationship between journalism and power in American democracy. Contributors: Sid Bedingfield, Bryan Bowman, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Kathy Roberts Forde, Robert Greene II, Kristin L. Gustafson, D'Weston Haywood, Blair LM Kelley, and Razvan Sibii
Download or read book Gateway to Equality written by Keona K. Ervin and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like most of the nation during the 1930s, St. Louis, Missouri, was caught in the stifling grip of the Great Depression. For the next thirty years, the "Gateway City" continued to experience significant urban decline as its population swelled and the area's industries stagnated. Over these decades, many African American citizens in the region found themselves struggling financially and fighting for access to profitable jobs and suitable working conditions. To combat ingrained racism, crippling levels of poverty, and sub-standard living conditions, black women worked together to form a community-based culture of resistance—fighting for employment, a living wage, dignity, representation, and political leadership. Gateway to Equality investigates black working-class women's struggle for economic justice from the rise of New Deal liberalism in the 1930s to the social upheavals of the 1960s. Author Keona K. Ervin explains that the conditions in twentieth-century St. Louis were uniquely conducive to the rise of this movement since the city's economy was based on light industries that employed women, such as textiles and food processing. As part of the Great Migration, black women migrated to the city at a higher rate than their male counterparts, and labor and black freedom movements relied less on a charismatic, male leadership model. This made it possible for women to emerge as visible and influential leaders in both formal and informal capacities. In this impressive study, Ervin presents a stunning account of the ways in which black working-class women creatively fused racial and economic justice. By illustrating that their politics played an important role in defining urban political agendas, her work sheds light on an unexplored aspect of community activism and illuminates the complexities of the overlapping civil rights and labor movements during the first half of the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Lynching of Cleo Wright written by Dominic J. CapeciJr. and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On January 20, 1942, black oil mill worker Cleo Wright assaulted a white woman in her home and nearly killed the first police officer who tried to arrest him. An angry mob then hauled Wright out of jail and dragged him through the streets of Sikeston, Missouri, before burning him alive. Wright's death was, unfortunately, not unique in American history, but what his death meant in the larger context of life in the United States in the twentieth-century is an important and compelling story. After the lynching, the U.S. Justice Department was forced to become involved in civil rights concerns for the first time, provoking a national reaction to violence on the home front at a time when the country was battling for democracy in Europe. Dominic Capeci unravels the tragic story of Wright's life on several stages, showing how these acts of violence were indicative not only of racial tension but the clash of the traditional and the modern brought about by the war. Capeci draws from a wide range of archival sources and personal interviews with the participants and spectators to draw vivid portraits of Wright, his victims, law-enforcement officials, and members of the lynch mob. He places Wright in the larger context of southern racial violence and shows the significance of his death in local, state, and national history during the most important crisis of the twentieth-century.
Download or read book Frank Little and the IWW written by Jane Little Botkin and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2017-05-25 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franklin Henry Little (1878–1917), an organizer for the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), fought in some of the early twentieth century’s most contentious labor and free-speech struggles. Following his lynching in Butte, Montana, his life and legacy became shrouded in tragedy and family secrets. In Frank Little and the IWW, author Jane Little Botkin chronicles her great-granduncle’s fascinating life and reveals its connections to the history of American labor and the first Red Scare. Beginning with Little’s childhood in Missouri and territorial Oklahoma, Botkin recounts his evolution as a renowned organizer and agitator on behalf of workers in corporate agriculture, oil, logging, and mining. Frank Little traveled the West and Midwest to gather workers beneath the banner of the Wobblies (as IWW members were known), making soapbox speeches on city street corners, organizing strikes, and writing polemics against unfair labor practices. His brother and sister-in-law also joined the fight for labor, but it was Frank who led the charge—and who was regularly threatened, incarcerated, and assaulted for his efforts. In his final battles in Arizona and Montana, Botkin shows, Little and the IWW leadership faced their strongest opponent yet as powerful copper magnates countered union efforts with deep-laid networks of spies and gunmen, an antilabor press, and local vigilantes. For a time, Frank Little’s murder became a rallying cry for the IWW. But after the United States entered the Great War and Congress passed the Sedition Act (1918) to ensure support for the war effort, many politicians and corporations used the act to target labor “radicals,” squelch dissent, and inspire vigilantism. Like other wage-working families smeared with the traitor label, the Little family endured raids, arrests, and indictments in IWW trials. Having scoured the West for firsthand sources in family, library, and museum collections, Botkin melds the personal narrative of an American family with the story of the labor movements that once shook the nation to its core. In doing so, she throws into sharp relief the lingering consequences of political repression.
Download or read book O N Pruitt s Possum Town written by Berkley Hudson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Photographer O. N. Pruitt (1891–1967) was for some forty years the de facto documentarian of Lowndes County, Mississippi, and its county seat, Columbus--known to locals as "Possum Town." His body of work recalls many FSA photographers, but Pruitt was not an outsider with an agenda; he was a community member with intimate knowledge of the town and its residents. He photographed his fellow white citizens and Black ones as well, in circumstances ranging from the mundane to the horrific: family picnics, parades, river baptisms, carnivals, fires, funerals, two of Mississippi's last public and legal executions by hanging, and a lynching. From formal portraits to candid images of events in the moment, Pruitt's documentary of a specific yet representative southern town offers viewers today an invitation to meditate on the interrelations of photography, community, race, and historical memory. Columbus native Berkley Hudson was photographed by Pruitt, and for more than three decades he has considered and curated Pruitt's expansive archive, both as a scholar of media and visual journalism and as a community member. This stunning book presents Pruitt's photography as never before, combining more than 190 images with a biographical introduction and Hudson's short essays and reflective captions on subjects such as religion, ethnic identity, the ordinary graces of everyday life, and the exercise of brutal power.
Download or read book American Lynching written by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of lynching in America over the course of three centuries, from colonial Virginia to twentieth-century Texas. After observing the varying reactions to the 1998 death of James Byrd Jr. in Texas, called a lynching by some, denied by others, Ashraf Rushdy determined that to comprehend this event he needed to understand the long history of lynching in the United States. In this meticulously researched and accessibly written interpretive history, Rushdy shows how lynching in America has endured, evolved, and changed in meaning over the course of three centuries, from its origins in early Virginia to the present day. “A work of uncommon breadth, written with equally uncommon concision. Excellent.” —N. D. B. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University “Provocative but careful, opinionated but persuasive . . . Beyond synthesizing current scholarship, he offers a cogent discussion of the evolving definition of lynching, the place of lynchers in civil society, and the slow-in-coming end of lynching. This book should be the point of entry for anyone interested in the tragic and sordid history of American lynching.” —W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 “A sophisticated and thought-provoking examination of the historical relationship between the American culture of lynching and the nation’s political traditions. This engaging and wide-ranging meditation on the connection between democracy, lynching, freedom, and slavery will be of interest to those in and outside of the academy.” —William Carrigan, Rowan University “In this sobering account, Rushdy makes clear that the cultural values that authorize racial violence are woven into the very essence of what it means to be American. This book helps us make sense of our past as well as our present.” —Jonathan Holloway, Yale University
