W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified the problem of the color-line as the defining issue in American life in the twentieth century. 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 brings together speeches, pamphlets, newspaper and magazine articles, public testimony and appeals, judicial opinions, and poems and song lyrics from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 to the Boston busing crisis of 1974–76.

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

Frederick Douglass on the importance of voting rights

Ida B. Wells on the scourge of lynching

Richard T. Greener’s scathing critique of America’s “White Problem

Booker T. Washington’s historic Atlanta address

John Marshall Harlan’s eloquent and prophetic dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson

William Monroe Trotter’s dramatic White House confrontation with Woodrow Wilson

Alain Locke’s tribute to “the New Negro”

Thurgood Marshall on police brutality in wartime Detroit

Rosa Parks’s appeal for justice for Recy Taylor

Earl Warren’s landmark opinion in Brown

Fannie Lou Hamer’s eloquent challenge to disenfranchisement in Mississippi

James Baldwin on the myths and meaning of the American Dream

See the table of contents for volume 1 (PDF)

See the table of contents for volume 2 (PDF)

As the teaching of our nation’s history, especially the history of race in America, becomes increasingly contested, this book will serve as a vital resource, a crucial reminder of where we’ve been, how far we’ve come, and how long the road ahead remains.

Tyina L. Steptoe, editor, is associate professor of history at the University of Arizona and the author of Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City (2015). Her writing has appeared in Time, American Quarterly, Journal of African American History, and Oxford American, and she is the host of Soul Stories, a weekly radio program on KXCI Tucson that explores “the roots and branches” of rhythm and blues music.