My initial question was how did the Republican party transition from the party of Lincoln to what it is today. This book answered the question partially. It introduced me to what another history student told me was sometimes termed “The Big Switch.” After the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Southern wing of the Democratic party left the Democrats and eventually, or immediately for some like Strom Thurmond, joined the Republican party. Nixon’s campaign welcomed the new voting block and even formalized the Southern Strategy to galvanize white voters for the Republican party by fomenting racial division.

My question was answered only in part because I remembered enough of the history that I was taught to recall that Blacks during Reconstruction voted Republican for the most part. I didn’t know the history of how the Black vote became predominantly Democratic. The motivation for Blacks to vote Democratic in the 60s seemed clear enough, but I didn’t know how we got there.

I learned in this book that the notion that the U.S. was led into civil rights reform by Democratic leaders in the 60s was false. I never really had that notion, but I was familiar with it. I also didn’t understand just how organized and lengthy the civil rights movement was. In this book, Schickler shows how unions, particularly the Congress of Industrial Organizations, began accepting Blacks into their ranks in the 30s. Most unions refused to do so, but not the CIO. Civil rights was not an important part of liberal politics when FDR was elected in 1932, but by the close of the decade it was because of the influence of the unions and ground level activism. Schickler argues that the movement for civil rights was fairly mature by the 40s and the main reason that the Democratic party did not act was in an attempt to maintain power by appeasing the demands of its Southern wing.

The story that I left with, whether right or wrong, was that the Republican party had lost interest in civil rights after Reconstruction, and that no political party had any large interest in civil rights from the end of Reconstruction until the rise of the unions by the end of the Depression. The Republican party had become aligned with the industrialists of the Northeast, and the Democrats with the workers and unions through FDR’s New Deal. Aligning with the workers and unions also aligned FDR, somewhat reluctantly, with civil rights because some of the powerful unions were integrated by the 40s.

Nothing happened for another 20+ years while the Democrats tried to keep the Southern wing in their political bloc. Finally the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s forced change; the Democratic leaders were shoved into action; and the Southern wing left for the Republican party. In short, the larger portion of the Black vote switched from voting for the Republican party during Reconstruction to the Democratic party during the 40s, after 60 years of being discarded by both parties because the Democrats wanted the votes of the workers, including the integrated unions.

I was somewhat aware that the soldiers returning from WWII offered a chance to advance civil rights, and also of Truman’s campaign and how he was expected to lose. What I didn’t remember was why he was expected to lose. As I understand it, it’s because his campaign included civil rights for Blacks. Truman wanted to do so because Blacks had served and died for the U.S. in WWII fighting against racial supremacy and fascism abroad only to return to it at home. Truman’s adoption of civil rights in the Democratic platform caused Strom Thurmond and other Southern Democrats to split from the Democratic party and form the Dixiecrats. Their platform was primarily about maintaining segregation. It is still available to read today.

I also investigated the Southern Strategy and read that two politicians who used it openly were Nixon and Strom Thurmond. Further, the campaign manager who was responsible for Thurmond’s race-baiting was Lee Atwater who went on to become Chairman of the Republican National Committee during the Reagan and Bush Sr. years.

I was also astonished to discover that none of the information that I had learned was controversial. No one denies it.

I got curious as to why my knowledge of history was so poor. It is my own fault. I am convinced that I was at least exposed to it. Regardless, this book levels deserved, heavy criticism at high school text books and history curricula. It also enticed me to do my own reading in U.S. history by shattering the notion that the U.S. always progressed with respect to civil rights, that is, it never got worse. It certainly did get worse after Reconstruction and continued declining for decades before finally beginning to recover in the late 30s.

Next I wanted to come to an understanding of the largest acts of Black history starting from before the Civil War until today, especially with regard to where Blacks lived. I have experienced segregation in my neighborhoods, schools, and jobs. After my surprise about the reversal of civil rights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I needed to know the history.

This was a difficult book for me to read. Its structure includes many ideas in a passage without setting them off with headings. I should read it again someday so that I can understand more of it.

Reconstruction was not a failure. Where Blacks governed, their governments were not unusually corrupt or incompetent. Reconstruction was making progress at integrating the South socially and economically. Returning Civil War soldiers engaged in organized White violence, creating the first KKK organization. The violence was generally supported by White society during Reconstruction and for decades afterwards. White violence was countered by the presence of Northern troops. Blacks may have had numbers in some states like South Carolina, but they did not have the necessary arms or resources to defend themselves against the organizing White Civil War veterans.

This history to me made sense and made it clear how Blacks were elected to office early after the Civil War and then the color barrier descends after the North withdraws their troops in exchange for the Republican, Hayes, assuming the Presidency. After 10 years, Republican voters had tired of maintaining order in the South, and the nation abandoned Blacks to be terrorized by Whites for 60 years. This decision led to 60 years of additional slavery, 60 years of lynchings, 60 years of segregation and humiliating social inequality, 60 years of disenfranchisement; and 60 years of the Great Migration - all occurring after the Civil War ended and after slavery was nominally ended by the 13th amendment; second class citizenship was ended by the 14th amendment; and the ability to vote was guaranteed by the 15th amendment.

DuBois refers to this report in Black Reconstruction and cites it as evidence for describing the violent attitudes of Whites toward Blacks and how White society accepted the violent perpetrators. I was curious to read it myself, and Schurz does describe how he witnesses White men who have returned from the war being praised for their defense of the South, particularly the South’s women, from the depredations of the uncivilized Black man, and how such behavior won the White men positive attention from their fellows and from White women as well.

I was familiar with this book from my schooling. The copy that I had in fact came from my high school coursework. I had no recollection of what was in it anymore. I knew that the notion of the beneficent patriarch and the humble and happy slave was ridiculous and wrong, but I wanted to have Douglass’ narrative fresh in my mind.

Douglass’ narrative describes brutal and murderous acts of White violence against Blacks. Whites terrorized Blacks with physical torture and murder to intimidate them into slavery.

This is a collection of essays, opinions, autobiography, and fiction, from DuBois. The ones that have stuck with me most clearly were his descriptions of the conditions that sharecroppers experienced in his essays “Of the Black Belt” and “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece”. I highly recommend this book.

In the essay “Of the Black Belt” I learned of the first movement of Blacks after the Civil War: “The Black Belt was not, as many assumed, a movement toward fields of labor under more genial climatic conditions; it was primarily a huddling for self-protection,—a massing of the black population for mutual defense….”

This is also where I first learned of the antagonism between DuBois and Booker T. Washington. I did not know that Washington advocated for complicity with segregation and second class citizenship and that DuBois argued for resistance and demanded their rights.

This was the first book that I’ve read that was so brutal that I didn’t want to read it and felt goaded by DuBois to continue. He once wrote, “There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.” It opens with the lynching of Sam Hose, to which DuBois makes passing reference in The Souls of Black Folk.

I was prepared and desensitized to Whites beating and murdering Blacks, meaning that I was ready to ingest scholarly information regarding those acts. What I was not ready for and had no idea about was the delight that a large part of White society took in the cruelest and most grotesque acts. Lynchings were announced so that the local public could attend and participate. Burning the victims alive was a rapturous event for the audience and was often demanded. Parents would bring their children to witness the violence because they considered it educational. Afterwards, a mad scramble often ensued for macabre keepsakes like teeth, fingers, or genitals. Pictures were taken and turned into postcards for purchase and they actually sold. And lynchings didn’t occur only in the South. Many occurred in the Midwest and some occurred in every part of the country.

I have a belief, and still do to this day, that there is no large difference between myself and the most incomprehensibly despicable people. If I was born and lived as they had, that I would think and act as they do. To know that being an audience member, an active participant, demanding and delighting in these atrocities, to know that that is within me and everyone… I was not prepared or desensitized to that. Further, I am not aware of these kinds of depredations being so socially acceptable at any other time in history. The open, public, and enthusiastically embraced terrorization of Blacks during the time between Reconstruction and WWII is the lowest point to which any society has ever sunk that I am aware of. These people were not forced into these acts by their leaders or by the military. This is something that they chose to do, repeatedly - something that they were thrilled by. This is nothing less than the worst human behavior I have knowledge of. This time is The Nadir - not merely the nadir of race relations in the U.S., but the nadir of human behavior for all time anywhere.

This is a data-driven book using Census data to find towns that had a precipitous drop in Black population to 0% and still to this day have very few or no Blacks in the town. The author then selects a few towns for which he could find corroborating evidence of a racial cleansing event, and presents his examples one per chapter.

Racial cleansing in America. It happened. Here’s the data. It happened more than this. These are just the examples with the best hard evidence.

This was another piece in how the segregation that I’ve experienced in America came to be. It explains in part how Blacks went from being ubiquitous field hands before the Civil War to being nearly absent now in many counties and small towns in the South and Midwest.

This book describes how towns all over the Midwest excluded Blacks from sundown to sunrise with violence. I wasn’t aware of how common these places were. More or less every town in the Midwest was a sundown town in the early part of the 20th century.

This was another piece of my understanding why my experience of America is segregated, and why the Midwest, the breadbasket of the U.S., has only a small Black population despite Black sharecroppers continuing into the middle of the 20th century.

This was a major piece in explaining why cities outside the South are segregated. It shatters the false notion that segregation is de facto, that is, that that’s just the way the races have chosen to live. Segregation was enforced by law in the North and West just as in the South.

This book also made me hunger to know more about the Great Migration. I was aware of it, but didn’t have any historical knowledge of it.

By this point I felt like I had a sketch of Black history in the U.S. from around the time of the Civil War to the present. There are still many important gaps. I didn’t feel like I had a good understanding of sharecropping and employment in the South for Blacks; I didn’t understand the history of prisons and Blacks; and I didn’t understand the Great Migration. I also didn’t have good historical knowledge of the Civil Rights movement of the 60s either. This book was my first effort toward that understanding. It is fantastic and highly recommended, if you can find a copy.

Before I read this book I believed that Rosa Parks didn’t want to move from her seat because she was tired and that civil rights activists rallied around her. The truth is that she was chosen for her background and her character to go through the legal ordeal that would follow her breaking the law. The organization and sophistication of the Civil Rights movement astonishes me. To deliberately and successfully change the opinions of the nation’s hostile or indifferent white people is an incredible undertaking, and one that I wish we could succeed at today as they did in the 60s.

This book describes how prison is a for-profit industry and that the U.S. economy continues to benefit from stripping freedom from Blacks. It’s pretty straightforward how it happens. Police patrol selectively within Black neighborhoods, largely ignoring white neighborhoods, and arrest Blacks for crimes that everyone commits like non-violent drug related crimes. Some of these “crimes” aren’t even crimes anymore in many states.

Locking up these individuals has a massive destructive impact on the financial well-being of many Black families. This combined with the legacy of red-lining (laws enforcing segregation in Northern and Western cities), Jim Crow, and unequal treatment before the law, have led to the denial of opportunity to generate wealth for Blacks through employment and real estate. When wealth was somehow created despite the obstacles, it was often stripped from them through unfair legal action.

This book brought the wealth gap to my attention, though I was already aware of it, and I now view the wealth gap as a primary metric for racial inequality in the U.S. The New Jim Crow works well with Chain Reaction to chronicle the loss of economic power for Blacks from the 60s until now. During the Reagan and Bush Sr. years, the GINI index for America increased substantially, signaling increasing income inequality, in large part due to the disastrous war on drugs, initiated by Reagan and continued by Bush Sr. To me it seems that if social inequality could no longer be enforced legally, then measures were taken to enforce it economically. Many Black families that would have joined the middle class did not because the war on drugs put their young men in jail, while white families enjoyed relative immunity from prosecution for their young fraternity brothers.

It worked. I attended an expensive private school in the 80s. The reason given that few Blacks attended typically was that Blacks were poor and couldn’t afford it. Why didn’t any of us ask why Blacks were poor? In Spartanburg, SC, it’s an incomplete answer to say it was the war on drugs. I think it also had to be that the same opportunities for jobs and education weren’t available for Blacks due to the cultural legacy of segregation, that is, due to White racism.

This is the other incredibly brutal book in this list that was very difficult to read. It is an incredibly important missing piece to Black history in the U.S. from my perspective.

In the South after Reconstruction, it was common for Blacks to be arrested and charged falsely, tried without process, required to pay legal fees that were falsely generated, and when they could not, they were sold to Whites who could pay those fees. Ostensibly, the Blacks could then work off their debt to the Whites, but the common reality was that this was a re-enslavement of a significant portion of the Black race in the South. “In 1927, one out of nineteen black men over the age of twelve in Alabama was captured in some form of involuntary servitude.” When stories from this time period refer to the turpentine camps or the coal mines, they’re referring to involuntary servitude, that is, slavery, and a particularly brutal form of it.

Whites had little invested in the slaves obtained this way and could easily obtain more. The brutality of the treatment of the slaves is sheer horror.

The federal government refused to enforce the 13th amendment of the U.S. Constitution until WWII. What finally triggered the enforcement was Axis propaganda criticizing the U.S. as hypocrites. In other words, the Nazis refuted criticism for how they treated the Jews by pointing out how we treated the Blacks, and our government essentially agreed with them and finally decided to do something about it. That’s how bad it was, but even that doesn’t adequately describe the horror of this additional century of brutality and slavery.

Whites enslaved Blacks in the U.S. after the Civil War for another 80 years. How is this not widely known? How is this not history that we are all aware of like the Holocaust? How is it possibly conscionable that the U.S. continues to imprison the Black race? How is it acceptable that we lead all nations in prisoners per capita without significant protest from our citizens? How is profiting from these prisoners possibly acceptable?

I knew very little about the Great Migration prior to this book. I thought that it occurred at the beginning of the 20th century and that it involved the movement of millions of Blacks from the South to the cities of the North and West. I was unsure of how the movement took place, and mistakenly thought that some significant portion traveled by foot, I’m embarrassed to admit.

I have since learned that 6 million Blacks moved as part of the Great Migration starting from 1915 until 1970, and that trains and cars were the primary modes of travel. Only one reference was made to traveling by foot - the note for page 535 regarding Toni Morrison where the playwright August Wilson says that his mother walked most of the way from North Carolina to Pittsburgh, and he was probably writing more for literary effect than for the historical record.

I learned that there is a trend that, after controlling for race, the statistics for immigrants show that they tend to be more successful than the local population and that the farther they have traveled, the greater the difference. The motivation for this trend makes sense to me - the farther the journey the more determined the immigrant must be - but I am totally surprised and delighted to learn of this trend. It is completely at odds with how immigrants are portrayed in common political discourse and the media. It also strongly suggests that the only reason for the wealth gaps among the commonly defined races in America is racism. I would love to become more aware of the data supporting this trend.

From reading the first two of the three introductions, the thesis seems to be that bigotry is something that the ruling classes foment to keep labor split for easy exploitation. I'm very familiar with this idea from conversations with my father who was a history teacher and so I was surprised to see that the books were first published in the 90s as opposed to the 60s. However, I was surprised by the clarity of the example presented by the Virginia colony in the 17th century and can't wait to read more.

My father was a teacher and we traveled during the summer, often to sites on Indian reservations. For example, when I was 10 or so, we visited Old Oraibi in Arizona. Like a typical tourist, I had a camera around my neck. As we walked up to the fenced gate across the road, we read that cars and cameras were not allowed inside. So, we went back and put the camera in the truck. A kind elderly couple saw us do that and invited us in for apricots just to say thanks for accepting the rules. All of this is to say that my father also studied history, much more so than I do in fact, and he studied the history of the indigenous peoples of the U.S. Indirectly, I received some of what he knew. This was also true of his study of Black U.S. history, but my understanding of that subject was also mixed with what I learned from my society in South Carolina in the 70s and 80s. Regardless, I wanted a fresh overview of Indigenous U.S. History and this book seemed like a good start.

This was a brutally difficult book to read. It establishes the genocidal nature of the U.S. toward the indigenous peoples. Policy and historical acts repeatedly act to unsuccessfully eradicate the people who lived here before Europeans, Africans, and Asians arrived. I learned in this book that the genocide of the Indians in the U.S. was unsuccessful. They survive.

I also learned for the first time in this book about a different way of modifying the land to support human settlement. Many indigenous peoples cleared the land of underbrush without clearing the trees using fire to make it easy to hunt and supported the game populations so that a ready supply of meat would be at hand. The “pristine” land that was so easy to move through and easy to farm wasn’t pristine. It only looked that way to the ignorant colonists. It had been groomed by the peoples who lived there to support their civilizations.

This was a great book told by a white man about many of the military massacres and horrors perpetrated upon the Indians by the U.S. government. It is eye-opening and detailed. This was the first place I learned of the massacre of the Cheyenne people at Sand Creek. I also learned of the flight of the Nez Perce and how the Modocs were cornered in the California lava beds where a few dozen Modocs held off thousands of U.S. soldiers.

This is simply a great biography of Crazy Horse. It’s engaging and not romanticized. Highly recommended. I first read it in my father’s history class, and again now as an adult.

I was surprised to learn how casual violence seemed to be among Crazy Horse’s tribe when during a raid on the Cheyenne as a boy, Crazy Horse shoots and kills an unarmed girl tending her village’s fields.

The book is written in simple English. Sandoz explains “… I have used the simplest words possible, hoping by idiom and figures and the underlying rhythm pattern to say some of the things of the Indian for which there are no white-man words, suggest something of his inner nature, something of his relationship to the earth and the sky and all that is in between.” A brave choice and one which has made it easy for me to read this book multiple times.

I received this as a gift. It is a study of Tecumseh as written by a white veteran of the U.S. military. Nevertheless, it seems even-handed to me.

The thing that I was most surprised to learn was just how bumbling and idiotic the U.S. military leadership was. Those are my judgments, not Cozzens’. He merely describes the actions they take and their motivations when they are known.

I was aware of Tecumseh’s attempt to create a pan-Indian alliance, and was excited to read a detailed history of those events.

I have large holes in my knowledge of Indian history, including what it’s like to be an Indian today. In an attempt to know at least one perspective of today’s Indians’ lives, I picked up this book. It doesn’t disappoint.

Treuer is an Ojibwe and Professor of Literature at the University of Southern California. In each chapter he presents a brief biography of some of the Ojibwe he has known and the events that shaped their lives and their relationship to each other, their reservation, and the U.S.

I learned about allotment in this book and how it damaged the cohesion and self-governance of many reservations. I also learned about the abhorrent use of boarding schools that furthered the genocidal aims of the U.S. by removing children from their parents and refusing to allow the children to speak or write their language.

The book Rez Life referenced this book and recommended it. It is unusual in that it presents the history in the form of letters written by the children held in the boarding schools and the letters from their parents.

I learned that these schools sometimes killed the children through poverty, hard labor, and disease, though that was not their aim. The purpose was to replace their Indian language and culture with English and White U.S. culture. This was a direct attempt to extinguish their Indian identity. I was surprised and dismayed to learn that conditions on the reservations were so bad that some parents preferred that their child be taken off the reservation to the boarding school, despite knowing what was occurring there.