From Slavery To Civil Rights

African American Childhoods seeks to fill a vacuum in the study of African American children. Recovering the voices or experiences of these children, we observe nuances in their lives based on their legal status, class standing, and social development.

The history of Louisiana from slavery until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 shows that unique influences within the state were responsible for a distinctive political and social culture. In New Orleans, the most populous city in the state, this was reflected in the conflict that arose on segregated streetcars that ran throughout the crescent city. This study chronologically surveys segregation on the streetcars from the antebellum period in which black stereotypes and justification for segregation were formed. It follows the political and social motivation for segregation through reconstruction to the integration of the streetcars and the white resistance in the 1950s while examining the changing political and social climate that evolved over the segregation era. It considers the shifting nature of white supremacy that took hold in New Orleans after the Civil War and how this came to be played out daily, in public, on the streetcars. The paternalistic nature of white supremacy is considered and how this was gradually replaced with an unassailable white supremacist atmosphere that often restricted the actions of whites, as well as blacks, and the effect that this had on urban transport. Streetcars became the 'theatres' for black resistance throughout the era and this survey considers the symbolic part they played in civil rights up to the present day.

With the text of the biblical Beatitudes as an undercurrent, the story of the civil rights movement is told in lyrical text and stirring illustrations.

2013 Book Award Winner from the International Research Society in Children's Literature 2012 Outstanding Book Award Winner from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education 2012 Winner of the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize presented by the New England American Studies Association 2012 Runner-Up, John Hope Franklin Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association 2012 Honorable Mention, Distinguished Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series Beginning in the mid nineteenth century in America, childhood became synonymous with innocence—a reversal of the previously-dominant Calvinist belief that children were depraved, sinful creatures. As the idea of childhood innocence took hold, it became racialized: popular culture constructed white children as innocent and vulnerable while excluding black youth from these qualities. Actors, writers, and visual artists then began pairing white children with African American adults and children, thus transferring the quality of innocence to a variety of racial-political projects—a dynamic that Robin Bernstein calls “racial innocence.” This phenomenon informed racial formation from the mid nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Racial Innocence takes up a rich archive including books, toys, theatrical props, and domestic knickknacks which Bernstein analyzes as “scriptive things” that invite or prompt historically-located practices while allowing for resistance and social improvisation. Integrating performance studies with literary and visual analysis, Bernstein offers singular readings of theatrical productions from blackface minstrelsy to Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; literary works by Joel Chandler Harris, Harriet Wilson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett; material culture including Topsy pincushions, Uncle Tom and Little Eva handkerchiefs, and Raggedy Ann dolls; and visual texts ranging from fine portraiture to advertisements for lard substitute. Throughout, Bernstein shows how “innocence” gradually became the exclusive province of white children—until the Civil Rights Movement succeeded not only in legally desegregating public spaces, but in culturally desegregating the concept of childhood itself. Check out the author's blog for the book here.

Slavery came to North America via Virginia in the early 1600s. It would be two hundred and sixty-five years before the practice would finally come to an end. It would take another one hundred years before the basic civil rights of those former slaves and their descendants were fully established in law. During that time and thereafter, it would be a matter of attitude and acceptance by the white race. Of the years, there were a number of pivotal events that shaped the issues and the responses to slavery and civil rights. The Atlas presents a number of these events in an attempt to tell part of the history of the march for equality in America. It also includes brief biographical sketches of the lives of many of the leading figures that led the fight. This work deals with black Americans or blacks, a term that has become synonymous with the Negro race itself; their struggle out of slavery; and their quest for acceptance and equal rights under the law. The effects of slavery were all pervasive. Without an understanding of and an appreciation for slavery, segregation, and the struggle for equal rights, it is difficult if not impossible to understand the America of our history and to reach beyond where we are today to arrive at where we need to be.

Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize Winner of the 2022 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War. The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states’ insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement’s ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement. Kate Masur’s magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois “black laws” helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.

The author begins with the birth of civil rights - the circumstances, acts and legacy of the 39th Congress, constitutional origins, passage and structure of the Act, moves through the Fourteenth Amendment and into restrictive interpretations and quiescent years, and finishes with a chapter on discerning the future from the past and the contemporary significance of the Act.

The issue of race has indelibly shaped the history of the United States. Nowhere has the drama of race relations been more powerfully staged than in the American South. This book charts the turbulent course of southern race relations from the colonial origins of the plantation system to the maturation of slavery in the nineteenth century, through the rise of a new racial order during the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the civil rights revolution of the twentieth century.While the history of race in the southern states has been shaped by a basic struggle between black and white, the authors show how other forces such as class and gender have complicated the colour line. They distinguish clearly between ideas about race, mostly written and disseminated by intellectuals and politicians, and their reception by ordinary southerners, both black and white. As a result, readers are presented with a broad, over-arching view of race in the American South throughout its chequered history.Key Features:*racial issues are the key area of interest for those who study the American South*race is the driving engine of Southern history*unique in its focus on race*broad coverage - origins of the plantation system to the situation in the South today