American Congo / / Nan Elizabeth WOODRUFF.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter HUP eBook Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: WOODRUFF, Nan Elizabeth,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2021]; ©2003
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (288 p.)

This is the story of how rural black people struggled against the oppressive sharecropping system of the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. Delta planters, aided by local law enforcement, engaged in peonage, murder, theft, and disfranchisement. As individuals and through collective struggle, black men and women fought back, demanding a just return for their crops and laying claim to a democratic vision of citizenship. Nan Woodruff shows how the freedom fighters of the 1960s would draw on this half-century tradition of protest, thus expanding our standard notions of the civil rights movement and illuminating a neglected but significant slice of the American black experience.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1 The Forging of the Alluvial Empire -- 2 Tensions of Empire -- 3 The Killing Fields -- 4 The Black People's Burden -- 5 Revolt against Mean Things -- 6 A War within a War -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index