A vital resource for the teaching of the history of race in America that traces the ascendency of white supremacy after Reconstruction--and the outspoken resistance to it led by Black Americans and their allies

W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified "the problem of the color-line" as the defining issue in American life. The powerful writings gathered here reveal the many ways Americans, Black and white, fought against white supremacist efforts to police the color line, envisioning a better America in the face of disenfranchisement, segregation, and widespread lynching, mob violence, and police brutality.

Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle, Part One brings together speeches, pamphlets, newspaper and magazine articles, public testimony, judicial opinions, letters, and poems and song lyrics--more than eighty essential texts in all--from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 to the bloody "Red Summer" of 1919.

The volume includes writing by both famous and lesser known individuals, including:

• Ida B. Wells on the scourge of lynching
• Richard T. Greener's scathing critique of America's "White Problem"
• Charles Chesnutt on the nullification of the Fifteenth Amendment
• Booker T. Washington's historic Atlanta address
• John Marshall Harlan's eloquent and prophetic dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson;
• Mary Church Terrell on segregation in the nation's capital and the convict lease system
• William Monroe Trotter's dramatic White House confrontation with Woodrow Wilson
• Jeanette Carter's tribute to the men and women who fought back against white mobs in 1919