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.
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How Free Is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow
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.
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.
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.
Table of Contents
Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Chapter 1. High Water Everywhere Chapter 2. Never Turn Back Chapter 3. Fight the Power Notes Acknowledgments Index
What People are Saying About This
How Free Is Free is a powerful addition to Leon Litwack's now multi-volume epic on African-American travails in slavery and freedom. In concise, though immensely evocative ways, he shows us the new world of possibilities that the Second World War opened as well as the contradictory and unsettling legacies of the ensuing struggles for civil rights.
William S. McFeely
With How Free is Free?, a master historian elegantly buries Jim Crow only to find his evil twin, Poverty, still haunts the graveyard. — William S. McFeely, author of Frederick Douglass and Sapelo's People: A Long Walk Into Freedom
Steven Hahn
How Free Is Free is a powerful addition to Leon Litwack's now multi-volume epic on African-American travails in slavery and freedom. In concise, though immensely evocative ways, he shows us the new world of possibilities that the Second World War opened as well as the contradictory and unsettling legacies of the ensuing struggles for civil rights. — Steven Hahn, author of A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration and The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom
