How Free Is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow

Litwack, Leon F.

ISBN 10: 0674031520 / ISBN 13: 9780674031524

Published by Harvard University Press, 2009

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0674031520I4N00

Synopsis:

In 1985, a black veteran of the civil rights movement offered a bleak vision of a long and troubled struggle. For more than a century, black southerners learned to live with betrayed expectations, diminishing prospects, and devastated aspirations. Their odyssey includes some of the most appalling examples of terrorism, violence, and dehumanization in the history of this nation. But, as Leon Litwack graphically demonstrates, it is at the same time an odyssey of resilience and resistance defined by day-to-day acts of protest: the fight for justice poignantly recorded in the stories, songs, images, and movements of a people trying to be heard.

For black men and women, the question is: how free is free? Despite two major efforts to reconstruct race relations, injustices remain. From the height of Jim Crow to the early twenty-first century, struggles over racism persist despite court decisions and legislation. Few indignities were more pronounced than the World War II denial of basic rights and privileges to those responding to the call to make the world safe for democratic values―values that they themselves did not enjoy. And even the civil rights movement promise to redeem America was frustrated by change that was often more symbolic than real.

Although a painful history to confront, Litwack’s book inspires as it probes the enduring story of racial inequality and the ongoing fight for freedom in black America with power and grace.

About the Author: Leon F. Litwack is A. & M. Morrison Professor of American History, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received the Golden Apple Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2007. He is also winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the American Book Award and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Film Grant.

Bibliographic Details

Title: How Free Is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication Date: 2009
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket