Jim Crow: Primary Sources

Written by David Pilgrim, founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Understanding Jim Crow introduces readers to the museum, a collection of more than 10,000 contemptible collectibles that are used to engage visitors in intense and intelligent discussions about race, race relations, and racism. The items in the Jim Crow Museum served to dehumanize Blacks and legitimized patterns of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation.

This collection offers an overview of events and personalities that were involved in such historical milestones as: the Dred Scott decision of 1857; Lincoln's candidacy for the presidency and his 1860 election; the printed announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863; and the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. Chronological coverage begins with an illustrated report of the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1851. Each year following is covered in separate chapters that begin with an introduction and overview written by a historian. In all, 1200 articles are reproduced.

Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the primary purpose of this documentary project was to record and preserve the living memory of African American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s. The tapes and selected transcripts of the 1,260 interviews in this collection capture the vivid personalities, poignant personal stories, and behind-the-scenes decision-making that bring to life the African American experience in the South during the late-19th to mid-20th century. It is the largest single collection of Jim Crow oral histories in the world.

This unique book provides readers with a wealth of primary source materials from 1828 to 1980 that reveal how the Jim Crow era affects how historians practice their craft. The book is chronologically organized into five sections, each of which focuses on a different historical period in the story of Jim Crow: inventing, building, living, resisting, and dismantling. Many of the fifty-six documents and eighteen images and cartoons, many of which have not been published before, reveal something significant about this subject or offer an unconventional or unexpected perspective on this era.

A teacher's guide and several primary source documents are included in this resource from the Library of Congress.

Using first-person narratives collected through oral history interviews, this groundbreaking book collects black women's memories of their public and private lives during the period of legal segregation in the American South.

Ripples of Hope brings together the most influential and important civil rights speeches from the entire range of American history-from the colonial period to the present. Gathered from the great speeches of the civil rights movement of African Americans, Asian Americans, gays, Hispanic Americans, and women, Ripples of Hope includes voices as diverse as Sister Souljah, Spark Matsui, and Harvey Milk, which, taken as a whole, constitute a unique chronicle of the modern civil rights movement.Featuring a foreword by President Bill Clinton and an afterword by Mary Frances Berry, this collection represents not just a historical first but also an indispensable resource for readers searching for an alternative history of American rhetoric.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow is the story of the African American struggle for freedom following the end of the Civil War. A companion volume to the four-part PBS television series, which took seven years to write, research, and edit, the book documents the work of such figures as the activist and separatist Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. It examines the emergence of the black middle class and intellectual elite, and the birth of the NAACP.