During the hottest days of the summer of 1863, while the nation's attention was focused on a small town in Pennsylvania known as Gettysburg, another momentous battle was being fought along the banks of the Mississippi. In the longest single campaign of the war, the siege of Vicksburg left 19,000 dead and wounded on both sides, gave the Union Army control of the Mississippi, and left the Confederacy cut in half. In this highly-anticipated new work, Christopher Waldrep takes a fresh look at how the Vicksburg campaign was fought and remembered. He begins with a gripping account of the battle, deftly recounting the experiences of African-American troops fighting for the Union. Waldrep shows how as the scars of battle faded, the memory of the war was shaped both by the Northerners who controlled the battlefield and by the legacies of race and slavery that played out over the decades that followed.

Vicksburg's Long Shadow: The Civil War Legacy of Race and Remembrance (The American Crisis Series: Books on the Civil War Era)

History

Waldrep author of Jury Discrimination, Christopher

Americas

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

This book examines African Americans' strategies for resisting white racial violence from the Civil War until the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 and up to the Clinton era. Christopher Waldrep's semi-biographical approach to the pioneers in the antilynching campaign portrays African Americans as active participants in the effort to end racial violence rather than as passive victims. In telling this more-than 100-year-old story of violence and resistance, Waldrep describes how white Americans legitimized racial violence after the Civil War, and how black journalists campaigned against the violence by invoking the Constitution and the law as a source of rights. He shows how, toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, anti-lynching crusaders Ida B. Wells and Monroe Work adopted a more sociological approach, offering statistics and case studies to thwart white claims that a black propensity for crime justified racial violence. Waldrep describes how the NAACP, founded in 1909, represented an organized, even bureaucratic approach to the fight against lynching. Despite these efforts, racial violence continued after World War II, as racists changed tactics, using dynamite more than the rope or the gun. Waldrep concludes by showing how modern day hate crimes continue the lynching tradition, and how the courts and grass-roots groups have continued the tradition of resistance to racial violence. A rich selection of documents helps give the story a sense of immediacy. Sources include nineteenth-century eyewitness accounts of lynching, courtroom testimony of Ku Klux Klan victims, South Carolina senator Ben Tillman's 1907 defense of lynching, and the text of the first federal hate crimes law.

African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (The African American Experience Series)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Waldrep author of Jury Discrimination, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Waldrep author of Jury Discrimination, Christopher

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Waldrep author of Jury Discrimination, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Vicksburg's Long Shadow: The Civil War Legacy of Race and Remembrance (The American Crisis Series: Books on the Civil War Era)

African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (The African American Experience Series)