The end of Reconstruction in the former Confederacy signaled a painful and protracted new phase in the struggle for racial equality in the United States. An oppressive regime of laws and behavioral codes based on disenfranchisement and segregation, racial terror, and relentless calumny against Black Americans spread across the South and transformed the nation as a whole, shaping the life of every American in ways still felt today. Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle captures firsthand what it was like to live during this period while showing how courageous individuals, Black and white, resisted efforts to enforce white supremacy.

Bringing together speeches, pamphlets, journalism, legal opinions, congressional testimony, and poems by writers both famous and less well known, this first of two volumes opens with Frederick Douglass’s impassioned 1876 call to preserve voting rights for freedmen and culminates with W. A. Domingo’s defiant annunciation of “the New Negro” during the violent “Red Summer” of 1919. Along the way readers encounter Ida B. Wells exposing the horrors of lynching and the lies used to justify it; Mary Church Terrell denouncing the cruelty of the convict labor system;
and William Monroe Trotter dramatically confronting Woodrow Wilson in the White House over segregation in the federal workforce.

Here too are disturbing expressions of white supremacy by Harvard paleontologist Nathaniel S. Shaler and South Carolina politician Benjamin Tillman, as well as incendiary newspaper articles that sparked a violent coup by white mobs in Wilmington, North Carolina, in November 1898. Editorials from the Black and white press offer contrasting perspectives on two Black figures whose acts of defiance became flashpoints: the notorious Robert Charles, who killed four white police officers in New Orleans before being himself shot to death after a citywide manhunt in 1900, and heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, who defeated James Jeffries, “the Great White Hope,” in 1910.

As the nation continues to reckon with its history of racial injustice, this powerful and illuminating collection offers crucial insights into an inescapable part of the American experience.

See the table of contents (PDF)

Tyina L. Steptoe, editor, is associate professor of history at the University of Arizona and the author of Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City (2015). Her writing has appeared in Time, American Quarterly, Journal of African American History, and Oxford American, and she is the host of Soul Stories, a weekly radio program on KXCI Tucson that explores “the roots and branches” of rhythm and blues music.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle is kept in print by gifts to the Guardians of American Letters Fund from The Berkley Family Foundation Foundation and from Elizabeth W. Smith. They also provided project support for the volume.