About the Book
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 four hundred years in the making. Millions of Americans took to the streets to protest both the murder and the centuries of systematic 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 systematic 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 protestors echoed generations of African Americans resisting the violence and oppression of white supremacy. Their opposition to violence soon spread to other aspects of systematic 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, eight million white Americans revolted against their country to try to safeguard the enslavement of four million African Americans. The volume has three interconnected sections that build on one another. The first section, "Violence," explores systematic 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 last 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 non-historians interested in showing the intertwined and longstanding connections between systematic 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 Author:
Hilary Green (Edited By) Hilary N. Green is James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies, Africana Studies Department, Davidson College. She is the author of
Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016), and numerous essays and articles. In addition, she is working on two book projects - a manuscript examining how everyday African Americans remembered and commemorated the Civil War and another exploring campus slavery, race, and memory at the University of Alabama.
Andrew L. Slap (Edited By) 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 University Press, 2006). 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 (Foreword By) Andre E. Johnson is an associate 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
The 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).