Synopsis
Investigates how Americans have remembered violence and resistance since the Civil War, including Confederate monuments, historical markers, college classrooms, and history books.
George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020 sparked a national reckoning for the United States that had been 400 years in the making. Millions of Americans took to the streets to protest both the murder and the centuries of systemic racism that already existed among European colonists but transformed with the arrival of the first enslaved African Americans in 1619. The violence needed to enforce that systemic racism for all those years, from the slave driver’s whip to state-sponsored police brutality, attracted the immediate attention of the protesters. The resistance of the protesters echoed generations of African Americans’ resisting the violence and oppression of white supremacy. Their opposition to violence soon spread to other aspects of systemic racism, including a cultural hegemony built on and reinforcing white supremacy. At the heart of this white supremacist culture is the memory of the Civil War era, when in 1861 8 million white Americans revolted against their country to try to safeguard the enslavement of 4 million African Americans.
The volume has three interconnected sections that build on one another. The first section, “Violence,” explores systemic racism in the Civil War era and now with essays on slavery, policing, and slave patrols. The second section, titled “Resistance,” shows how African Americans resisted violence for the past two centuries, with essays discussing matters including self-emancipation and African American soldiers. The final section, “Memory,” investigates how Americans have remembered this violence and resistance since the Civil War, including Confederate monuments and historical markers.
This volume is intended for nonhistorians interested in showing the intertwined and longstanding connections between systemic racism, violence, resistance, and the memory of the Civil War era in the United States that finally exploded in the summer of 2020.
About the Authors
Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. A distinguished scholar, her research explores the intersections of race, memory, and education in the post–Civil War American South. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890, co-author of the NPS-OAH Historic Resource Study of African American Schools in the South, 1865–1900, and co-editor of The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 (Fordham).
Andrew L. Slap is a Professor of history at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (Fordham). He is also the editor or co-editor of three volumes on the Civil War era. His current book project is “African American Communities during Slavery, War, and Peace: Memphis in the Nineteenth Century.”
Andre E. Johnson is a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Memphis. He is the author of three national award-winning books, The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (2012), The Struggle Over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter (with Amanda Nell Edgar, Ph.D., 2018), and No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (2020). He is also the editor of the forthcoming Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit (2023) and Preaching During a Pandemic: The Rhetoric of the Black Preaching Tradition (with Kimberly P. Johnson, Ph.D., and Wallis C. Baxter IV, Ph.D., 2023).
John Bardes is an assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University. His work explores policing and incarceration in the context of slavery and emancipation. He is the author of The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024). His scholarship has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of African American History, American Quarterly, and Journal of Southern History.
Karen Cook Bell, an associate professor of history at Bowie State University, received her Ph.D. in history from Howard University. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of African American History, Georgia Historical Quarterly, Passport; U.S. West-Africa: Interaction and Relations (2008), Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era Politicians (2012), Converging Identities: Blackness in the Contemporary Diaspora (2013), and Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (2014). She has published Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth Century Georgia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018), which won the Georgia Board of Regents Excellence in Research Award. Her current book, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.
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