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Penguin Books

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

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Title: Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
Author: Henry Louis Gates
ISBN: 9780525559559
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2020
Binding: Book
Language: English
Condition: New
New from the publisher

History 1434063

Publisher Description:
"Stony the Road presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white nationalism. . . . In our current politics we recognize African-American history--the spot under our country's rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. Stony the Road lifts the rug. --Nell Irvin Painter, New York Times Book Review

A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, by the bestselling author of The Black Church.

The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked a new birth of freedom in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the nadir of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance.

Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. Bringing a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a New Negro to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to America as it hurtled toward the modern age.

The story Gates tells begins with great hope, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Union victory, and the liberation of nearly 4 million enslaved African-Americans. Until 1877, the federal