Steeped In The Blood Of Racism

Download or read book Steeped in the Blood of Racism written by Professor Nancy K. Bristow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minutes after midnight on May 15, 1970, white members of the Jackson city police and the Mississippi Highway Patrol opened fire on young people in front of a women's dormitory at Jackson State College, a historically black college in Jackson, Mississippi, discharging "buckshot, rifle slugs, a submachine gun, carbines with military ammunition, and two 30.06 rifles loaded with armor-piercing bullets." Twenty-eight seconds later two young people lay dead, another 12 injured. Taking place just ten days after the killings at Kent State, the attack at Jackson State never garnered the same level of national attention and was chronically misunderstood as similar in cause. This book reclaims this story and situates it in the broader history of the struggle for African American freedom in the civil rights and black power eras. The book explores the essential role of white supremacy in causing the shootings and shaping the aftermath. By 1970, even historically conservative campuses such as Jackson State, where an all-white Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning had long exercised its power to control student behavior, were beginning to feel the impact of the movements for African American freedom. Though most of the students at Jackson State remained focused not on activism but their educations, racial consciousness was taking hold. It was this campus police attacked. Acting on racial animus and with impunity, the shootings reflected both traditional patterns of repression and the new logic and rhetoric of "law and order," with its thinly veiled racial coding. In the aftermath, the victims and their survivors struggled unsuccessfully to find justice. Despite multiple investigative commissions, two grand juries and a civil suit brought by students and the families of the dead, the law and order narrative proved too powerful. No officers were charged, no restitution was paid, and no apologies were offered. The shootings were soon largely forgotten except among the local African American community, the injured victimized once more by historical amnesia born of the unwillingness to acknowledge the essential role of race in causing the violence.

Download or read book Blood Done Sign My Name written by Timothy B. Tyson and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “riveting”* true story of the fiery summer of 1970, which would forever transform the town of Oxford, North Carolina—a classic portrait of the fight for civil rights in the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird *Chicago Tribune On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased and beat Marrow, then killed him in public as he pleaded for his life. Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets. While lawyers battled in the courthouse, the Klan raged in the shadows and black Vietnam veterans torched the town’s tobacco warehouses. Tyson’s father, the pastor of Oxford’s all-white Methodist church, urged the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away. Tim Tyson’s gripping narrative brings gritty blues truth and soaring gospel vision to a shocking episode of our history. FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD “If you want to read only one book to understand the uniquely American struggle for racial equality and the swirls of emotion around it, this is it.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Blood Done Sign My Name is a most important book and one of the most powerful meditations on race in America that I have ever read.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “Pulses with vital paradox . . . It’s a detached dissertation, a damning dark-night-of-the-white-soul, and a ripping yarn, all united by Tyson’s powerful voice, a brainy, booming Bubba profundo.”—Entertainment Weekly “Engaging and frequently stunning.”—San Diego Union-Tribune

Download or read book American Pandemic written by Nancy K. Bristow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1918-1919 influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history. Focusing on those closest to the crisis--patients, families, communities, public health officials, nurses and doctors--this book explores the epidemic in the United States.

Download or read book Dreamland Burning written by Jennifer Latham and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling dual-narrated tale from Jennifer Latham that questions how far we've come with race relations. Some bodies won't stay buried. Some stories need to be told. When seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase finds a skeleton on her family's property, she has no idea that investigating the brutal century-old murder will lead to a summer of painful discoveries about the present and the past. Nearly one hundred years earlier, a misguided violent encounter propels seventeen-year-old Will Tillman into a racial firestorm. In a country rife with violence against blacks and a hometown segregated by Jim Crow, Will must make hard choices on a painful journey towards self discovery and face his inner demons in order to do what's right the night Tulsa burns. Through intricately interwoven alternating perspectives, Jennifer Latham's lightning-paced page-turner brings the Tulsa race riot of 1921 to blazing life and raises important questions about the complex state of US race relations--both yesterday and today.

Download or read book The Snake in the Garden written by Deborah Hand-Cutler and published by Black Horse Press. This book was released on 2021-05-10 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Snake in the Garden is an explosive depiction of racism in twentieth-century Arkansas, seen through the lens of interracial relationships over four generations. Starting in 1926, and paying homage to Kate Chopin's "Desiree's Baby," the story moves to the turbulent night of the Kennedy assassination in 1963, the Hollywood music scene of the 1970s and '80s, and the still-troubled racial attitudes of 1993. Written by two women, one Black, one white, the novel depicts racism from the point of view of both Blacks and whites - racists, non-racists and victims, alike. The setting is the fictional town of Jefferson Springs, Arkansas, during the Jim Crow era. Lucille Day, a Black woman, worked as a domestic for the family of judge Reuben Whittier in the 1950s and early '60s. Her children, Regina and Clarence, were forbidden to be friends with the judge's daughter, Karen. In 1963, when Regina, Clarence and Karen were teenagers, bigotry prevailed, and it was illegal for Blacks and whites to have relationships or marry. The night President Kennedy was assassinated, three days after a stopover in town, all hell broke loose in Jefferson Springs, with tragic results, including a lynching. Clarence was jailed, and Regina was exiled to California to live with her Aunt Violet. There, she won a singing contest and became a pop star. Karen, meanwhile, was forced to stay home under the cruel thumb of her father. She longed for a true father-daughter bond, but in his eyes, she could do no right. She consoled herself in her boring and barren life with chocolate and English romance novels. Regina had vowed never to return to Arkansas. But when her mother died, she knew she had to attend the funeral. She dreaded going back where she had felt nothing but humiliation, anger and fear. Can the two women now unite to uncover the truth about their families, and finally make things right for Clarence? The Snake in the Garden is a powerful story of transcendence over scars of the past, and the healing that can come when the truth is finally faced.

Download or read book Playing the Race Card written by Linda Williams and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2002-09-23 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Island on Fire written by Tom Zoellner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a New York Times bestselling author, a gripping account of the slave rebellion that led to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. For five horrific weeks after Christmas in 1831, Jamaica was convulsed by an uprising of its enslaved people. What started as a peaceful labor strike quickly turned into a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. By the time British troops had put down the rebels, more than a thousand Jamaicans lay dead from summary executions and extrajudicial murder. While the rebels lost their military gamble, their sacrifice accelerated the larger struggle for freedom in the British Atlantic. The daring and suffering of the Jamaicans galvanized public opinion throughout the empire, triggering a decisive turn against slavery. For centuries bondage had fed Britain’s appetite for sugar. Within two years of the Christmas rebellion, slavery was formally abolished. Island on Fire is a dramatic day-by-day account of this transformative uprising. A skillful storyteller, Tom Zoellner goes back to the primary sources to tell the intimate story of the men and women who rose up and tasted liberty for a few brief weeks. He provides the first full portrait of the rebellion's enigmatic leader, Samuel Sharpe, and gives us a poignant glimpse of the struggles and dreams of the many Jamaicans who died for liberty.