Overview

Shares wrenching accounts of the everyday violence experienced by emancipated African Americans Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans’ bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress. In this evocative and deeply moving history Kidada Williams examines African Americans’ testimonies about racial violence. By using both oral and print culture to testify about violence, victims and witnesses hoped they would be able to graphically disseminate enough knowledge about its occurrence and inspire Americans to take action to end it. In the process of testifying, these people created a vernacular history of the violence they endured and witnessed, as well as the identities that grew from the experience of violence. This history fostered an oppositional consciousness to racial violence that inspired African Americans to form and support campaigns to end violence. The resulting crusades against racial violence became one of the political training grounds for the civil rights movement.

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9780814795361

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Reviews

Budreau offers an insightful perspective on how the US dealt with the aftermath of the Great War as officials sought to commemorate those who died in faraway places... For those with interests in the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, or military, ethnic, and gender history, this book is a must... Summing Up: Essential. -CHOICE,

An impressive and important contribution to our understanding of African American life after the Civil War... While lifting up the transformative power of public testimony, Ms. Williams also helps re-centre the discussion of white-on- black violence in the late nineteenth century, which all too often focuses on the most spectacular form of violence during that period, lynching, to the detriment of the more common and arguably more important day-to-day violence suffered by African Americans... An important work. William D. Carrigan, Rowan University, author of The Making of a Lynching Culture

Author Information

Kidada E. Williams is Assistant Professor of African American history at Wayne State University

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