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Author: Michael Pierce
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1610757750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta examines the history of labor relations and racial conflict in the Mississippi Valley from the Civil War into the late twentieth century. This essay collection grew out of a conference marking the hundredth anniversary of one of the nation’s deadliest labor conflicts—the 1919 Elaine Massacre, during which white mobs ruthlessly slaughtered over two hundred African Americans across Phillips County, Arkansas, in response to a meeting of unionized Black sharecroppers. The essays here demonstrate that the brutality that unfolded in Phillips County was characteristic of the culture of race- and labor-based violence that prevailed in the century after the Civil War. They detail how Delta landowners began seeking cheap labor as soon as the slave system ended—securing a workforce by inflicting racial terror, eroding the Reconstruction Amendments in the courts, and obstructing federal financial-relief efforts. The result was a system of peonage that continued to exploit Blacks and poor whites for their labor, sometimes fatally. In response, laborers devised their own methods for sustaining themselves and their communities: forming unions, calling strikes, relocating, and occasionally operating outside the law. By shedding light on the broader context of the Elaine Massacre, Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta reveals that the fight against white supremacy in the Delta was necessarily a fight for better working conditions, fair labor practices, and economic justice.
Author: Michael Pierce
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1610757750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Get Book Here
Book Description
Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta examines the history of labor relations and racial conflict in the Mississippi Valley from the Civil War into the late twentieth century. This essay collection grew out of a conference marking the hundredth anniversary of one of the nation’s deadliest labor conflicts—the 1919 Elaine Massacre, during which white mobs ruthlessly slaughtered over two hundred African Americans across Phillips County, Arkansas, in response to a meeting of unionized Black sharecroppers. The essays here demonstrate that the brutality that unfolded in Phillips County was characteristic of the culture of race- and labor-based violence that prevailed in the century after the Civil War. They detail how Delta landowners began seeking cheap labor as soon as the slave system ended—securing a workforce by inflicting racial terror, eroding the Reconstruction Amendments in the courts, and obstructing federal financial-relief efforts. The result was a system of peonage that continued to exploit Blacks and poor whites for their labor, sometimes fatally. In response, laborers devised their own methods for sustaining themselves and their communities: forming unions, calling strikes, relocating, and occasionally operating outside the law. By shedding light on the broader context of the Elaine Massacre, Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta reveals that the fight against white supremacy in the Delta was necessarily a fight for better working conditions, fair labor practices, and economic justice.
Author: Guy Lancaster
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739195484
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 167
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Book Description
Even before the end of Reconstruction in Arkansas, the state already possessed a long-standing reputation for violence, including lynchings, duels, and feuds. However, the years following Reconstruction witnessed the creation of new forms of mob violence. All across the state, gangs of whites sought to drive African Americans from their homes, their jobs, and their positions of authority, creating communities shamelessly advertised as “100% white.” This happened not only in the highland regions, the Ozarks and the Ouachitas, where the expulsion of African Americans created so-called “sundown towns,” but it also occurred in the low-lying Delta lands of eastern Arkansas, where cotton was king and where masked mobs of landless “whitecappers” and “nightriders” regularly dealt terror and murder to black sharecroppers. Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883–1924: Politics, Land, Labor, and Criminality by Guy Lancaster is the first book to examine the phenomenon of racial cleansing within the context of one particular state, illustrating how violence relates to geography and economic development. Lancaster analyzes the wholesale expulsion of African Americans and the emergence of “sundown towns” together with a survey of more limited deportations, including those with blatant political goals as well as vigilante violence. The book has broader implications not only for the study of Southern and American history but also for a deeper understanding of ethnic and racial conflict, local politics, and labor history
Author: Clyde Woods
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844675610
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
A new edition of a classic history of the Mississippi River Delta Development Arrested is a major reinterpretation of the 200-year-old conflict between African American workers and the planters of the Mississippi Delta. The book measures the impact of the plantation system on those who suffered its depredations firsthand, while tracing the decline and resurrection of plantation ideology in national public policy debate. Despite countless defeats under the planter regime, African Americans in the Delta continued to push forward their agenda for social and economic justice. Throughout this remarkably interdisciplinary book, ranging across fields as diverse as rural studies, musicology, development studies, and anthropology, Woods demonstrates the role of music—including jazz, rock and roll, soul, rap and, above all, the blues—in sustaining a radical vision of social change.
Author: Guy Lancaster
Publisher: Butler Center for Arkansas Studies
ISBN: 9781945624117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"Even a century later, the Elaine Massacre remains the subject of intense inquiry as historians seek explanations for why authorities in the Arkansas Delta used such overwhelming violence against a farmers' union, attempt to determine how many died in the massacre and document their names, and explore how the event has shaped the century that followed. However, we cannot fully understand what happened at Elaine without examining the one hundred years leading up to the massacre. The years from 1819, when Arkansas officially became an American territory, to 1919 provide the historical foundation for one of the bloodiest manifestations of racial violence in the United States. During the antebellum years, slaveholders grew paranoid about possible "insurrections," and after the Civil War and Emancipation, these lingering fears led to numerous atrocities long before the violence at Elaine. At the same time, African Americans were working to organize themselves in the fields and society to resist oppression, setting the stage for the farmers' union meeting that became the object of mob and military wrath during the Elaine Massacre." --p. [4] of cover.
Author: Cameron McWhirter
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1429972939
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
A narrative history of America's deadliest episode of race riots and lynchings After World War I, black Americans fervently hoped for a new epoch of peace, prosperity, and equality. Black soldiers believed their participation in the fight to make the world safe for democracy finally earned them rights they had been promised since the close of the Civil War. Instead, an unprecedented wave of anti-black riots and lynchings swept the country for eight months. From April to November of 1919, the racial unrest rolled across the South into the North and the Midwest, even to the nation's capital. Millions of lives were disrupted, and hundreds of lives were lost. Blacks responded by fighting back with an intensity and determination never seen before. Red Summer is the first narrative history written about this epic encounter. Focusing on the worst riots and lynchings—including those in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Charleston, Omaha and Knoxville—Cameron McWhirter chronicles the mayhem, while also exploring the first stirrings of a civil rights movement that would transform American society forty years later.
Author: Ellen B. Meacham
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 149681746X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
In April 1967, a year before his run for president, Senator Robert F. Kennedy knelt in a crumbling shack in Mississippi trying to coax a response from a listless child. The toddler sat picking at dried rice and beans spilled over the dirt floor as Kennedy, former US attorney general and brother to a president, touched the boy's distended stomach and stroked his face and hair. After several minutes with little response, the senator walked out the back door, wiping away tears. In Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi, Ellen B. Meacham tells the story of Kennedy's visit to the Delta, while also examining the forces of history, economics, and politics that shaped the lives of the children he met in Mississippi in 1967 and the decades that followed. The book includes thirty-seven powerful photographs, a dozen published here for the first time. Kennedy's visit to the Mississippi Delta as part of a Senate subcommittee investigation of poverty programs lasted only a few hours, but Kennedy, the people he encountered, Mississippi, and the nation felt the impact of that journey for much longer. His visit and its aftermath crystallized many of the domestic issues that later moved Kennedy toward his candidacy for the presidency. Upon his return to Washington, Kennedy immediately began seeking ways to help the children he met on his visit; however, his efforts were frustrated by institutional obstacles and blocked by powerful men who were indifferent and, at times, hostile to the plight of poor black children. Sadly, we know what happened to Kennedy, but this book also introduces us to three of the children he met on his visit, including the baby on the floor, and finishes their stories. Kennedy talked about what he had seen in Mississippi for the remaining fourteen months of his life. His vision for America was shaped by the plight of the hungry children he encountered there.
Author: Harriet Pollack
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082034432X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Faced with Eudora Welty's preference for the oblique in literary performances, some have assumed that Welty was not concerned with issues of race, or even that she was perhaps ambivalent toward racism. This collection counters those assumptions as it examines Welty's handling of race, the color line, and Jim Crow segregation and sheds new light on her views about the patterns, insensitivities, blindness, and atrocities of whiteness. Contributors to this volume show that Welty addressed whiteness and race in her earliest stories, her photography, and her first novel, Delta Wedding. In subsequent work, including The Golden Apples, The Optimist's Daughter, and her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, she made the color line and white privilege visible, revealing the gaping distances between lives lived in shared space but separated by social hierarchy and segregation. Even when black characters hover in the margins of her fiction, they point readers toward complex lives, and the black body is itself full of meaning in her work. Several essays suggest that Welty represented race, like gender and power, as a performance scripted by whiteness. Her black characters in particular recognize whiteface and blackface as performances, especially comical when white characters are unaware of their role play. Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race also makes clear that Welty recognized white material advantage and black economic deprivation as part of a cycle of race and poverty in America and that she connected this history to lives on either side of the color line, to relationships across it, and to an uneasy hierarchy of white classes within the presumed monolith of whiteness. Contributors: Mae Miller Claxton, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, Sarah Ford, Jean C. Griffith, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Harriet Pollack, Keri Watson, Patricia Yaeger.
Author: Guy Lancaster
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1439676747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
The Line between Lawmen and Lawless On December 26, 1910, Oscar Chitwood lay lifeless on the courthouse lawn in Hot Springs, his wrists shackled together, and his body torn by bullets. The deputies on the scene claimed that masked men had lynched their prisoner and that the lawmen were innocent bystanders to the carnage. Newspapers everywhere proclaimed this killing another example of vigilantism run rampant. Within days, however, the official story fell apart, and these deputies were charged with cold-blooded murder. Authors Guy Lancaster and Christopher Thrasher tell the little-known story of accused outlaw Oscar Chitwood, the authorities he dared defy, and the mysterious resort town of Hot Springs, a place where the Wild West met the epitome of civilization, and where the boundaries between lawman and outlaw were never all that clear.
Author: Thomas Aiello
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000852687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 552
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Book Description
This handbook offers a comprehensive historical overview and analysis of police brutality in US history and the variety of ways it has manifested itself. Police brutality has been a defining controversy of the modern age, brought into focus most readily by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the mass protests that occurred as a result in 2020. However, the problem of police brutality has been consistent throughout American history. This volume traces its history back to Antebellum slavery, through the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the two world wars and the twentieth century, to the present day. This handbook is designed to create a generally holistic picture of the phenomenon of police brutality in the United States in all of its major lived forms and confronts a wide range of topics including: Race Ethnicity Gender Police reactions to protest movements (particularly as they relate to the counterculture and opposition to the Vietnam War) Legal and legislative outgrowths against police brutality The representations of police brutality in popular culture forms like film and music The role of technology in publicizing such abuses, and the protest movements mounted against it The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America will provide a vital reference work for students and scholars of American history, African American history, criminal justice, sociology, anthropology, and Africana studies.
Author: John A. Kirk
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1610755480
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas brings together the work of leading experts to cast a powerful light on the rich and diverse history of Arkansas’s racial and ethic relations. The essays span from slavery to the civil rights era and cover a diverse range of topics including the frontier experience of slavery; the African American experience of emancipation and after; African American migration patterns; the rise of sundown towns; white violence and its continuing legacy; women’s activism and home demon¬stration agents; African American religious figures from the better know Elias Camp (E. C.) Morris to the lesser-known Richard Nathaniel Hogan; the Mexican-American Bracero program; Latina/o and Asian American refugee experiences; and contemporary views of Latina/o immigration in Arkansas. Informing debates about race and ethnicity in Arkansas, the South, and the nation, the book provides both a primer to the history of race and ethnicity in Arkansas and a prospective map for better understanding racial and ethnic relations in the United States.
