A compelling, visually dramatic rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War, from the hopes of Reconstruction to the violent counter-revolution that overthrew it to the long shadow cast by Jim Crow that still haunts us today.
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 spans the Reconstruction Era.
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...