This book examines African Americans'
strategies for resisting white racial violence from the Civil War until the
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 and up to the Clinton era.
Christopher Waldrep's semi-biographical approach to the pioneers in the
anti-lynching campaign portrays African Americans as active participants in the
effort to end racial violence rather than as passive victims. In telling this
more than 100-year-old story of violence and resistance, Waldrep describes how
white Americans legitimized racial violence after the Civil War, and how black
journalists campaigned against the violence by invoking the Constitution and the
law as a source of rights. He shows how, toward the end of the nineteenth
century and into the twentieth, anti-lynching crusaders Ida B. Wells and Monroe
Work adopted a more sociological approach, offering statistics and case studies
to thwart white claims that a black propensity for crime justified racial
violence. Waldrep describes how the NAACP, founded in 1909, represented an
organized, even bureaucratic approach to the fight against lynching. Despite
these efforts, racial violence continued after World War II, as racists changed
tactics, using dynamite more than the rope or the gun. Waldrep concludes by
showing how modern day hate crimes continue the lynching tradition, and how the
courts and grass-roots groups have continued the tradition of resistance to
racial violence. A rich selection of documents helps give the story a sense of
immediacy. Sources include nineteenth-century eyewitness accounts of lynching,
courtroom testimony of Ku Klux Klan victims, South Carolina senator Ben
Tillman's 1907 defense of lynching, and the text of the first federal hate
crimes law."
