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Books by Walter White
The Fire in the Flint (novel,1924)
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Flight
(novel,1926) /
Rope
and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929)
How far the Promised Land?
955) /
A
Man Called White (autobiography,1948).
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Books on
Lynching & Racial Violence
The Chronological
History of the Negro in America (1969) /
Strain of
Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (1975)
But There Was
No Peace: The
Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction
(1984) /
Lynch Law
( 1905) /
An American Dilemma
(1944)
The Crucible of Race:
Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation
(1984) /
Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
(1989)
Rope and Faggot
( 1929) /
The Tragedy of
Lynching (1933) /
Race Riot in East St,
Louis (1964) /
Urban Racial Violence
(1976)
Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
(1968) /
Violence
in America (1969) *
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Roosevelt Letter
The White House
Washington
March 19, 1936
My dear Mr. White:
Before I received
your letter today I had been in to the President, talking to him
about your letter enclosing that of the Attorney General. I told
him that it seemed rather terrible that one could get nothing
done and that I did not blame you in the least for feeling there
was no interest in this very serious question. I asked him if
there were any possibility of getting even one step taken, and
he said the difficulty is that it is unconstitutional apparently
for the Federal Government to step in in the lynching situation.
the Government has only been allowed to do anything about
kidnapping because of its interstate aspect, and even that has
not as yet been appealed so they are not sure that it will be
declared constitutional.
The president feels
that lynching is a question of education in the states, rallying
good citizens, and creating public opinion so that the
localities themselves will wipe it out. However, if it were done
by a Northerner, it will have an antagonistic effect. I will
talk to him again about the Van Nuys resolution and will try to
talk also to Senator Byrnes and get his point of view. I am
deeply troubled about the whole situation as it seems to be a
terrible thing to stand by and let it continue and feel that one
cannot speak out as to his feeling. I think your next step would
be to talk to the more prominent members of the Senate.
Very Sincerely yours,
Eleanor Roosevelt
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"With minor exceptions, until the civil
rights movement of the mid-1960s, the South was able to frustrate
any national effort to make a dent in America's apartheid. In this
climate, it was not even possible to pass so basic an expression
of a national commitment to justice as an antilynching bill.
"The NAACP fought for such a law. Walter
White was a confidant of Eleanor Roosevelt and, through her,
gained access to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1935, FDR tried to
explain to White why he had chosen to sacrifice the rights of
black Americans to the economic needs of the country as a whole:
'I've got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America.
The southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are
chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the senate and
House committees. If I come out for the antilynching bill now,
they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America
from collapsing.' By 1940, there had been almost 3,500 lynching in
the country, mostly in the small towns and rural areas of the
South. Between V-J day, the end of the war against Japan, and June
1947, less than two years later, there were twenty-six lynchings
of blacks" (16-17).
"Truman's civil rights programs later
became crucial for the advancement of black people and, indeed,
his committee on civil rights fashioned the agenda for the civil
rights developments of the next twenty years" (17).
Source: Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in
The Courts: How A Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil
Rights Revolution (1994)
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Note from Editor:
The several civil and voting
rights laws (1957, 1964, 1965, 1968) brought the federal
government into the protection of the rights of blacks, which
meant that the FBI was forced to protect blacks from any local
intimidation and thus investigations were required. Of course, the
laws in themselves did not stop blacks from being intimidated and
murdered by whites. But the whole system of legislation,
undermined the KKK and the white citizen councils, and then with
the election of blacks to office the whole tenor of white
terrorism was forced to change.
There are a couple of articles on ChickenBones
on lynchings that you might want to
check out: Lynching And Racial
Violence: Histories & Legacies and Lynching
By State and Race . In any event, I
think there was never an antilynching bill passed. It seemed that
the court cases won by the NAACP and the civil rights and voting
rights bills were sufficient to bring the Justice Department into matters
of white terrorism and intimidation. At least, in the punishment
stages. But as you know, with the Till case, the federal
government did nothing and the killers got away scot free. * * *
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Walter Francis White
(July 1, 1893, Atlanta, Georgia – March 21, 1955, New York, New York)
was an African American who became a spokesman for his community in the
United States for almost a quarter of a century, and served as executive
secretary (1931–1955) of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He
graduated from Atlanta University in 1916 (now
Clark Atlanta University). In 1918 he joined the small national
staff of the NAACP in New York at the invitation of
James Weldon Johnson. White acted as Johnson's assistant national
secretary. In 1931 he succeeded him at the helm of the NAACP.
White oversaw the plans and
organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. Under
his leadership, the NAACP set up the
Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to
segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among
these was the Supreme Court ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education, which determined that segregated
education was inherently unequal. He was the virtual author of President
Truman's presidential order desegregating the armed forces after the
Second World War. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly
500,000.In addition to his NAACP work, White was a journalist, novelist,
and essayist, and influential in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
Wikipedia.
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Bill
Moyers Interviews Douglass A. Blackmon
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html
Douglas A. Blackmon,
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the
Civil War to World War II (2008)
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Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 2 July
2008
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