A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970 - Hardcover

Greta De Jong

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807827118 ISBN 13: 9780807827116

Publisher: University of North Carolina Press, 2002

Synopsis

From everyday resistance to mass protests; Examining African Americans' struggles for freedom and justice in rural Louisiana during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, Greta de Jong illuminates the connections between the informal strategies of resistance that black people pursued in the early twentieth century and the mass protests that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Using evidence drawn from oral histories and a wide range of other sources, she demonstrates that rural African Americans were politically aware and active long before civil rights organizers arrived in the region in the 1960s to encourage voter registration and demonstrations against segregation. De Jong explores the numerous, often-subtle methods African Americans used to resist oppression within the confines of the Jim Crow system. Such everyday forms of resistance included developing strategies for educating black children, creating strong community institutions, and fighting back against white violence. In the wake of the economic changes that swept the South during and after World War II, these activities became more open and organized, culminating in voter registration drives and other protests conducted in cooperation with civil rights workers. Deeply researched and accessibly written, A Different Day spotlights the ordinary heroes of the freedom struggle and offers a new perspective on black activism throughout the twentieth century.

About this title

Review:

Greta de Jong's well-written and well-researched book frames the freedom struggle in rural Louisiana as a long, painful, and not entirely successful movement. In rural areas, blacks relied less upon national civil rights organizations than upon their own ideas and armed self-defense. (Pete Daniel, author of "Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s")

About the Author:

Greta de Jong is assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0807827118
• ISBN 13: 9780807827116
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336