San Antonio College Library

"This book is about the variegated and convoluted reform phenomenon known as "progressivism." Southern reform's scope was broad; change was rich and multidirectional. Reformers sought many goals desired elsewhere in the United States and frequently joined in national movements for better government, improved economic opportunity, and sundry "moral" reforms. However, in several senses, southern reform was different: the race issue was intimately involved...

Most of these essays, now rev.and extended, originally appeared in a supplement to the April 1965 issue of Harper's magazine.

The author's own assessment of his project and its usefulness could hardly be improved upon: ""Readers of all faiths and persuasions are invited. The segregationist reader may choose to look upon the book as a compilation of evidence that he does indeed have some very resourceful people on his side, working diligently to keep the Negro 'in his place'; the integrationist reader may find it valuable as a sort of intelligence report on The Enemy; and...

"This brief volume introduces readers to the prominent reformer and journalist Ida B. Wells and her late-nineteenth-century crusade to abolish lynching. Built around three crucial documents - Well's pamphlet Southern horrors (1892), her essay A red record (1895), and her case study Mob rule in New Orleans (1900) - the volume shows how Wells defined lynching for an international audience as an issue deserving public concern and action. The editor's...

In August 1955, the mutilated body of Emmett Till -- a fourteen-year-old black Chicago youth -- was pulled from Mississippi's Tallahatchie River. Abducted, severely beaten, and finally thrown into the river with a weight fastened around his neck with barbed wire, Till, an eighth-grader, was killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The nation was horrified by Till's death. When the all-white, all-male jury hastily acquitted the two white defendants,...

Born and raised in the heart of old Dixie, D'aron Davenport finds himself in unfamiliar territory his freshman year at UC Berkeley. Two thousand miles and a world away from his childhood, he is a small-town fish floundering in the depths of a large, hyper-liberal pond. Caught between the prosaic values of his rural hometown and the intellectualized multicultural cosmopolitanism of Berzerkeley, the nineteen-year-old white kid is uncertain about his...

Wright tells the story of three centuries of religious conversion, enslavement, epidemic disease, and murder at the hands of Spanish, French, and English settlers, long before the Indians of the south were forced into Andrew Jackson's "Trail of Tears."