History; in the Service of Solidarity
Image: Successfully Escaping Slavery on Maryland’s Underground Railroad .
Deleso A. Alford & Daina Ramey Berry: Enslaved Women in America: An Encyclopedia .
Ana Lucia Araujo: Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past .
Anne C. Bailey: The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History .
Anne C. Bailey: African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade .
Edward E. Baptist: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism .
Alice L Baumgartner: South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War .
Sven Beckert: Empire of Cotton: A Global History .
Sven Beckert & Seth Rockman (editors): Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development .
Stephen Behrendt, A. J. H. Latham, & David Northrup: The Diary of Antera Duke, an Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader .
Herman L. Bennett: African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic .
Ira Berlin:
Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, & Steven F. Miller (editors): Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation .
Daina Ramey Berry: The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation .
Daina Ramey Berry & Leslie M. Harris (editors): Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas .
Barry Bienstock, Peter Onuf, &Annette Gordon-Reed (editors): Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis .
Alfred Blumrosen: Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution .
Patricia Bradley: Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution .
Alfred L. Brophy, James T. Campbell, & Leslie M. Harris: Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies .
Vincent Brown:
Stephanie M. H. Camp: Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South .
Judith Carney & Richard Nicholas Rosomoff: In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World .
Emma Christopher: Freedom in White and Black: A Lost Story of the Illegal Slave Trade and Its Global Legacy .
Matthew J. Clavin: The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community .
Matthew J. Clavin: Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers .
Herbert C. Covey: African American Slave Medicine: Herbal and non-Herbal Treatments .
Herbert C. Covey & Dwight Eisnach: How the Slaves Saw the Civil War: Recollections of the War through the WPA Slave Narratives .
Herbert C. Covey & Dwight Eisnach: What the Slaves Ate: Recollections of African American Foods and Foodways from the Slave Narratives .
David Brion Davis:
Erica Armstrong Dunbar: Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge .
David Eltis & David Richardson: Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade .
Sharla M. Fett:
Jeff Forret:
Jeff Forret & Christine E. Sears: New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison .
Marisa J. Fuentes: Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive .
Katharine Gerbner: Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World .
Annette Gordon-Reed:
Toby Green: A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution .
John Harris: The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage .
Leslie M. Harris: In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 .
Jean M. Hébrard & Rebecca J. Scott: Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation .
Aline Helg: Slave No More: Self-Liberation before Abolitionism in the Americas .
Woody Holton: Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia .
Gerald Horne: The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America .
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers: They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South .
Lisa A. Lindsay: Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa .
Edmund S. Morgan: American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia .
David Northrup: Africa’s Discovery of Europe .
Jesse Olsavsky: The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1861 .
Christian Pinnen: Complexion of Empire in Natchez: Race and Slavery in the Mississippi Borderlands .
Marcus Rediker: The Slave Ship: A Human History .
Joseph P. Reidy: Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery .
Leonard L. Richards: The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780—1860 .
Marc Howard Ross: Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory .
Joshua D. Rothman: The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America .
Calvin Schermerhorn: The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 .
Calvin Schermerhorn: Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery .
Manisha Sinha: The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina .
Manisha Sinha: The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition .
Gregory D. Smithers: Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History .
Randy J. Sparks: Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade .
Robert K. Sutton: Stark Mad Abolitionists: Lawrence, Kansas, and the Battle over Slavery in the Civil War Era .
Alan Taylor: The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 .
Amy Murrell Taylor: Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps .
John K. Thornton: A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 .
Andrew J. Torget: Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 .
Jonathan Daniel Wells: The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War .
Heather Andrea Williams: Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom .
Heather Andrea Williams: Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery .
Tom Zoellner: Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire .
Image: Bullet holes in Fred Hampton’s home, following his assassination by the Chicago Police Department .
Books
Simone Browne: Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness .
Clayborne Carson: Malcolm X: The FBI File .
Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall: Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement .
David J. Garrow: FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr: From “Solo” to Memphis .
Kenneth O’Reilly: Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 .
Videos & Podcasts
Black Geographies: Surveilling Blackness With Dr. Simone Browne .
Democracy Now! “The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther” .
Deb Ellis and Denis Meuller: The FBI’s War on Black America .
Independent Lens: Spies of Mississippi: A secret spy agency formed to preserve segregation investigated citizens and organizations in attempts to derail the civil rights movement .
NPR: COINTELPRO and the History of Domestic Spying .
Articles: Contemporary Repression
ACLU:
Brennan Center for Justice: The FBI Targets a New Generation of Black Activists .
Daniel Connolly: 8 things we learned at the Memphis police surveillance trial .
Malkia Cyril & Shanelle Matthews: We say black lives matter. The FBI says that makes us a security threat. The government is labeling activists as “black identity extremists.”
Megan Ming Francis: Black Surveillance Matters .
Mike German: The FBI has a history of targeting black activists. That’s still true today .
Ben Norton: FBI, Homeland Security sued for records on surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists: Human rights attorneys filed a lawsuit against the agencies for failing to release docs on monitoring of the M4BL .
Robyn C. Spencer: Black Identity Extremists: COINTELPRO 2017 .
Jeanne Theoharis: Comey Says FBI’s Surveillance of MLK Was “Shameful” — but Comey’s FBI Targeted Black Activists and Muslim Communities Anyway .
Articles: Historical Repression
Dan Berger:
Christopher Bonanos: The Civil Rights Movement Photographer Who Was Also an F.B.I. Informant .
Nana Afua Y. Brantuo: Targeted: Undocumented Black Immigrants Under Trump .
Charisse Burden-Stelly: ‘Stoolpigeons’ and the Treacherous Terrain of Freedom Fighting .
Lynn Burnett: Martin Luther King: The Assassination and the FBI .
James Campbell: James Baldwin and the FBI .
Joshua Clark Davis: The FBI’s War on Black-Owned Bookstores: At the height of the Black Power movement, the Bureau focused on the unlikeliest of public enemies: black independent booksellers .
Defending Rights & Dissent: Resisting HUAC – A Grassroots Success Story .
Martin Dobrow: How the FBI Tried to Block Martin Luther King’s Commencement Speech: The untold story of a government plot, a maverick college president, and the most important figure of the civil rights era.
Michel duCille: Black Moses, Red Scare .
Ashley D. Farmer:
Garrett Felber: Malcolm X assassination: 50 years on, mystery still clouds details of the case: Despite freedom of information act requests throughout the years, New York still will not release records to the public and claim files would endanger the safety of police off .
Nishani Frazier:
Beverly Gage: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals . (History of the “suicide letter” the FBI sent to King.)
Conor A. Gallagher & Aaron J. Leonard: Newly Obtained FBI Files Shed New Light on the Murder of Fred Hampton .
David Garrow: The FBI and Martin Luther King: Martin Luther King was never himself a Communist—far from it. But the FBI’s wiretapping of King was precipitated by his association with Stanley Levison, a man with reported ties to the Communist Party. Newly available documents reveal what the FBI actually knew—the vast extent of Levison’s Party activities.
Ashawnta Jackson: James Baldwin and the FBI: The author was monitored for his political activities, but also for being gay. The surveillance took a toll on him .
Andrew Lanham: When W. E. B. Du Bois Was Un-American .
Jared Leighton: “Character Assassins”: How the FBI Used the Issue of Homosexuality against the Black Freedom Struggle .
Denise Lynn:
Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar: The FBI’s War on Civil Rights Leaders: Steeped in its own racism, without any checks or balances, the FBI devoted more resources to harming the civil rights movement than any other task in its purview .
Kristine Phillips: In the latest JFK files: The FBI’s ugly analysis on Martin Luther King Jr., filled with falsehoods .
Phillip Luke Sinitiere: How W.E.B. Du Bois Resisted Government Repression .
Anthony C. Siracusa: State Surveillance of the Black Freedom Movement in Memphis .
During the civil rights movement, the use of explicitly racist language became publicly unacceptable. Politicians who relied on messages of racial fear and resentment adapted by using language that was not explicitly racist, but still succeeded at animating those fears and mobilizing their base. This was “dog-whistle politics”. Half a century later, dog-whistle politics has shifted and reinvented itself numerous time, and remains a winning political formula on the Right.
Ian Haney López is the essential person to follow on this subject. His book Dog Whistle Politics traces the history of this practice, while his book Merge Left explores how to defeat dog-whistle messaging using language that motivates interracial solidarity. To learn how to use the messaging that defeats dog-whistle politics yourself, visit the Race-Class Academy . See collections of López’s articles and talks here , and stay up to date on his work by following him on Twitter here .
BOOKS
Numan V. Bartley: The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950’s .
Rebecca Brückmann: Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation .
Dan T. Carter: The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics .
Joseph Crespino:
John Kyle Day: The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation .
Carolyn Renée Dupont: Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975 .
Glenn Feldman (editor): Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South .
Emma J. Folwell: The War on Poverty in Mississippi: From Massive Resistance to New Conservatism .
Matthew D. Lassiter & Andrew B. Lewis (editors): The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia .
George Lewis:
Angie Maxwell: The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness .
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae: Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy .
Jason Sokol: There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 .
Jason Morgan Ward: Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965 .
Clive Webb: Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era .
Clive Webb (editor): Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction .
ARTICLES
Sarah Carr: In Southern Towns, ‘Segregation Academies’ Are Still Going Strong: In the 1960s and ’70s, towns across the South created inexpensive private schools to keep white students from having to mix with black. Many remain open, the communities around them as divided as ever .
Dan T. Carter: Legacy of Rage: George Wallace and the Transformation of American Politics .
Patricia Cohen: Interpreting Some Overlooked Stories From the South .
Justin Driver: Supremacies and the Southern Manifesto .
The Equal Justice Initiative:
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae:
Milestone Documents in American History: The Southern Manifesto .
Jason Sokol:
The Southern Manifesto: Transcript .
Rebecca Stoner: ‘Segregation’s Constant Gardeners’: How White Women Kept Jim Crow Alive. Elizabeth McRae’s recent book introduces us to good white mothers, PTA members, and newspaper columnists who were also committed white supremacists .
Wikipedia:
DOCUMENTARIES
CNN: Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street .
The History Channel: Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre .
PBS: Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten .
PODCASTS
Code Switch: Tulsa, 100 Years Later .
New York Public Radio: Blindspot: Tulsa Burning .
Soul of a Nation: Tulsa’s Buried Truth .
BOOKS
Qurash Ali-Lansana & Najah Amatullah-Hylton: Opal’s Greenwood Oasis
Floyd Cooper & Carol Boston Weatherford: Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre
Scott Ellsworth: The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice
Greenwood Art Project: An Impulse to Keep
Karlos K. Hill: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History .
Randy Krehbiel: Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre
Carlos Moreno: The Victory of Greenwood
Jewell Parker Rhodes: Magic City
ARTICLES
Keisha Blain: Tulsa Race Massacre survivors are fighting for reparations, 100 years later .
Gillian Brockell: Tulsa isn’t the only race massacre you were never taught in school. Here are others .
DeNeen L. Brown:
James Howard Hill, Jr.: Watchmen, Haunting, and the Religious Imagination .
Fay Horwitt, Lanessa Owens-Chaplin, & Trevor Smith: Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood wasn’t America’s only Black Wall Street .
Tracy Jan: The ‘whitewashing’ of Black Wall Street: A century after the Tulsa massacre, Black entrepreneurs in the city’s Greenwood district feel threatened with erasure yet again, amid demands for reparations .
Hannibal B. Johnson: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: Healing Historical Racial Trauma .
Robin D.G. Kelley: The Tulsa Race Massacre Went Way Beyond “Black Wall Street” .
NPR:
New York Times:
Suzanne E. Smith: Black Wall Street, Collective Memory, and Reparations .
Thomas J. Sugrue: Terror in the Streets .
FURTHER RESOURCES
Tulsa Historical Society and Museum: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
“A town in Connecticut posted this sign at its city limits, probably around 1950. It is more polite than most sundown town signs, which featured the “N-word,” followed by “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On You In _____.” (From James Loewen).James W. Loewen is the leading expert on this subject: here is his resource page on sundown towns , including this interactive map , tips on how to discover if your city/town was a sundown town, and much more. See his book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism . You can read the first chapter here .
Note: the following resources focus on sundown towns, as well as how Black Americans navigated them: thus the section includes resources on Black travel guides, such as the Green Book.
Evan Andrews: The Green Book: The Black Travelers’ Guide to Jim Crow America: For nearly 30 years, a guide called the “Negro Motorist Green Book” provided African Americans with advice on safe places to eat and sleep when they traveled through the Jim Crow-era United States .
DeNeen L. Brown: ‘Life or death for black travelers’: How fear led to ‘The Negro Motorist Green-Book’
Hannah Buehler: Sundowners signs taken down in North Tonawanda
Logan Jaffe and ProPublica Illinois: Life in One of the Whitest Towns in America: Anna, Illinois, has a long history of excluding black people. Where does that leave it today?
New York Public Library: Green Book
New York Public Library: Hackley & Harrison’s hotel and apartment guide for colored travelers . (Primary source.)
Heather A. O’Connel: Historical Shadows: The Links between Sundown Towns and Contemporary Black–White Inequality .
Candacy Taylor: The Roots of Route 66: America’s favorite highway usually evokes kitschy nostalgia. But for black Americans, the Mother Road’s lonely expanses were rife with danger .
Candacy Taylor: Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America .
Teaching Tolerance: Does My Town Have a Racist Past? How students can convert the shameful history of sundown towns in America into a rich opportunity for setting the record straight .
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