Back Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle 1876-1976 (boxed set)

Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle 1876-1976 (boxed set)

A vivid firsthand record of the personal courage and enduring vision of Americans who fought to create a better, more just nation

Edited by Tyina L. Steptoe

Sets are expected to arrive in the LOA warehouse in late April. Order your copy today, and it will be shipped to you as soon as they arrive from the printer—ahead of the publication date.
In bookstores May 27, 2025.

Overview

Overview
W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified “the problem of the color-line” as the defining issue in American life in the twentieth century. The powerful writings gathered here reveal the many ways Americans, Black and white, fought against white supremacist efforts to police the color line, envisioning a better America in the face of disenfranchisement, segregation, and widespread lynching, mob violence, and police brutality.

Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle brings together speeches, pamphlets, newspaper and magazine articles, public testimony and appeals, judicial opinions, and poems and song lyrics from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 to the Boston busing crisis of 1974–76.

This volume includes writing by both famous and lesser known individuals, including:
- Frederick Douglass on the importance of voting rights
- Ida B. Wells on the scourge of lynching
- Richard T. Greener’s scathing critique of America’s “White Problem”
- Booker T. Washington’s historic Atlanta address
- John Marshall Harlan’s eloquent and prophetic dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson
- William Monroe Trotter’s dramatic White House confrontation with Woodrow Wilson
- Alain Locke’s tribute to “the New Negro”
- Thurgood Marshall on police brutality in wartime Detroit
- Rosa Parks’s appeal for justice for Recy Taylor
- Earl Warren’s landmark opinion in Brown
- Fannie Lou Hamer’s eloquent challenge to disenfranchisement in Mississippi
- James Baldwin on the myths and meaning of the American Dream
See the table of contents for volume 1 (PDF)
See the table of contents for volume 2 (PDF)

As the teaching of our nation’s history, especially the history of race in America, becomes increasingly contested, this book will serve as a vital resource, a crucial reminder of where we’ve been, how far we’ve come, and how long the road ahead remains.

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.

Library of America series editions are printed on acid-free paper and feature Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle (Part One: 1876-1919) 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.

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-814-4 1655 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

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Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle 1876-1976 (boxed set)

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