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After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875-1915

John M. Giggie

This book explores religious transformation in the lives of ex-slaves and their descendants living in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great ... More

This book explores religious transformation in the lives of ex-slaves and their descendants living in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great Migration. It argues that Delta blacks, who were overwhelmingly rural sharecroppers and tenant farmers, developed a rich and complex sacred culture during this era. They forged a new religious culture by integrating their spiritual life with many of the defining features of the post‐Reconstruction South, including the rise of segregation and racial violence, the emergence of new forms of technology like train travel, the growth of black fraternal orders, and the rapid expansion of the consumer market. Experimenting with new symbols of freedom and racial respectability, forms of organizational culture, regional networks of communication, and popular notions of commodification and consumption enabled them to survive, make progress, and at times resist white supremacy. The book then evaluates the social consequences of these changes and shows in particular how the Holiness‐Pentecostal developed in large part as a rejection of them. It ends by probing how this new religious world influenced the Great Migration and black spiritual life in the 1920s and 1930s.Less

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression

Robin D. G. Kelley

This book studies the history of the “long Civil Rights movement,” and tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 1940s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for ... More

This book studies the history of the “long Civil Rights movement,” and tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 1940s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. This book reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, the book reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.Less

The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer

Chris Myers Asch

This study of race, politics, and economics in Mississippi tells the story of two extraordinary personalities—Fannie Lou Hamer and James O. Eastland—who represented deeply opposed sides of the civil ... More

This study of race, politics, and economics in Mississippi tells the story of two extraordinary personalities—Fannie Lou Hamer and James O. Eastland—who represented deeply opposed sides of the civil rights movement. Both were from Sunflower County: Eastland was a wealthy white planter and one of the most powerful segregationists in the U.S. Senate, while Hamer, a sharecropper who grew up desperately poor just a few miles from the Eastland plantation, rose to become the spiritual leader of the Mississippi freedom struggle. The author uses Hamer's and Eastland's entwined histories, set against the backdrop of Sunflower County's rise and fall as a center of cotton agriculture, to explore the county's changing social landscape during the mid-twentieth century and its persistence today as a land separate and unequal. The author, who spent nearly a decade in Mississippi as an educator, looks at the South's troubled ties to the cotton industry, the long struggle for civil rights, and unrelenting social and economic injustice through the eyes of two of the era's most important and intriguing figures.Less

In the Lion's Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886-1900

Omar H. Ali

Following the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877, African Americans organized a movement—distinct from the white Populist movement—in the South and parts of the Midwest for economic and political ... More

Following the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877, African Americans organized a movement—distinct from the white Populist movement—in the South and parts of the Midwest for economic and political reform: Black Populism. Between 1886 and 1898, tens of thousands of black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers created their own organizations and tactics primarily under black leadership. As Black Populism grew as a regional force, it met fierce resistance from the Southern Democrats and constituent white planters and local merchants. African Americans carried out a wide range of activities in this hostile environment. They established farming exchanges and cooperatives; raised money for schools; published newspapers; lobbied for better agrarian legislation; mounted boycotts against agricultural trusts and business monopolies; carried out strikes for better wages; protested the convict lease system, segregated coach boxes, and lynching; demanded black jurors in cases involving black defendants; promoted local political reforms and federal supervision of elections; and ran independent and fusion campaigns. Growing out of the networks established by black churches and fraternal organizations, Black Populism found further expression in the Colored Agricultural Wheels, the southern branch of the Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, the Farmers Union, and the Colored Farmers Alliance. In the early 1890s, African Americans, together with their white counterparts, launched the People’s Party and ran fusion campaigns with the Republican Party. By the turn of the century, Black Populism had been crushed by relentless attack, hostile propaganda, and targeted assassinations.Less

Builders of a New South: Merchants, Capital, and the Remaking of Natchez, 1865-1914

Aaron D. Anderson

This book describes how, between 1865 and 1914, ten Natchez mercantile families emerged as leading purveyors in the wholesale plantation supply and cotton handling business, and soon became a ... More

This book describes how, between 1865 and 1914, ten Natchez mercantile families emerged as leading purveyors in the wholesale plantation supply and cotton handling business, and soon became a dominant force in the social and economic Reconstruction of the Natchez District. They were able to take advantage of postwar conditions in Natchez to gain mercantile prominence by supplying planters and black sharecroppers in the plantation supply and cotton buying business. They parlayed this initial success into cotton plantation ownership and became important local businessmen in Natchez, participating in many civic improvements and politics that shaped the district into the twentieth century. This book digs deep in countless records (including census, tax, property, and probate, as well as thousands of chattel mortgage contracts) to explore how these traders functioned as entrepreneurs in the aftermath of the Civil War, examining closely their role as furnishing merchants and land speculators, as well as their relations with the area’s planters and freed black population. Their use of favorable laws protecting them as creditors, along with a solid community base that was civic-minded and culturally intact, greatly assisted them in their success. These families prospered partly because of their good business practices, and partly because local whites and blacks embraced them as useful agents in the emerging new marketplace. The situation created by the aftermath of the war and emancipation provided an ideal circumstance for the merchant families.Less

A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle: The Life of Harry Haywood

Harry Haywood

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (ed.)

Mustering out of the U.S. army in 1919, Harry Haywood stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of his life. Within months, he found himself in the middle of one of the bloodiest race riots in ... More

Mustering out of the U.S. army in 1919, Harry Haywood stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of his life. Within months, he found himself in the middle of one of the bloodiest race riots in U.S. history and realized that he’d been fighting the wrong war—the real enemy was right here at home. This book is an eloquent account of coming of age as a black man in twentieth-century America and of his political awakening in the Communist Party. For all its cultural and historical interest, this story is also noteworthy for its considerable narrative drama. The son of parents born into slavery, the text tells of how Haywood grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, found his first job as a shoeshine boy in Minneapolis, then went on to work as a waiter on trains and in restaurants in Chicago. After fighting in France during the war, he studied how to make revolutions in Moscow during the 1920s, led the Communist Party’s move into the Deep South in 1931, helped to organize the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, worked with the Sharecroppers Union, supported protests in Chicago against Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, fought with the International Brigades in Spain, served in the Merchant Marines during World War II, and continued to fight for the right of self-determination for the Afro-American nation in the United States until his death in 1985.Less