Bøger i Carter G. Woodson Institute Series in Black Studies serien

Explores the lives and work of fifteen black labor historians and social scientists as seen through the prisms of gender, class, and time. This biography offers portraits of these seminal figures, following them through their educations, their often groundbreaking work in economic and labor studies, and their invaluable public advocacy.

This text describes the introduction, evolution, demise and final abolition of slavery in Delaware. The author uncovers why Delaware, a staunch Unionist state during the Civil War, failed to abolish slavery until 1901 and repeatedly denied its black citizens the right to vote.

Blending social, intellectual, legal, medical, gender, and cultural history, Segregation's Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia examines how eugenic theory and practice bolstered Virginia's various cultures of segregation--rich from poor, sick from well, able from disabled, male from female, and black from white and Native American. Famously articulated by Thomas Jefferson, ideas about biological inequalities among groups evolved throughout the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, proponents of eugenics--the "e;science"e; of racial improvement--melded evolutionary biology and incipient genetics with long-standing cultural racism. The resulting theories, taught to generations of Virginia high school, college, and medical students, became social policy as Virginia legislators passed eugenic marriage and sterilization statutes. The enforcement of these laws victimized men and women labeled "e;feebleminded,"e; African Americans, and Native Americans for over forty years.However, this is much more than the story of majority agents dominating minority subjects. Although white elites were the first to champion eugenics, by the 1910s African American Virginians were advancing their own hereditarian ideas, creating an effective counter-narrative to white scientific racism. Ultimately, segregation's science contained the seeds of biological determinism's undoing, realized through the civil, women's, Native American, and welfare rights movements. Of interest to historians, educators, biologists, physicians, and social workers, this study reminds readers that science is socially constructed; the syllogism "e;Science is objective; objective things are moral; therefore science is moral"e; remains as potentially dangerous and misleading today as it was in the past.

Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia's Criminal Justice System is the most comprehensive study of the criminal justice system of a slave state to date. McNair traces the evolution of Georgia's legal culture by examining its use of slave codes and slave patrols, as well as presenting data on crimes prosecuted, trial procedures and practices, conviction rates, the appellate process, and punishment. Based on more than four hundred capital cases, McNair's study deploys both narrative and quantitative analysis to get at both the theory and the reality of the criminal procedure for slaves in the century leading up to the Civil War. He shows how whites moved from the utopian innocence of the colony's original Trustees, who envisioned a society free of slavery and the depravity it inculcated in masters, to one where slaveholders became the enforcers of laws and informal rules, the severity of which was limited only by the increasing economic value of their slaves as property. The slaves themselves, regarded under the law both as moveable property and--for the purposes of punishment--as moral agents, had, inevitably, a radically different view of Georgia's slave criminal justice system. Although the rules and procedures were largely the same for both races, the state charged and convicted blacks more frequently and punished them more severely than whites for the same crimes. Courts were also more punitive in their judgment and punishment of black defendants when their victims were white, a pattern of disparate treatment based on race that persists to this day. Informal systems of control in urban households and on rural plantations and farms complemented the formal system and enhanced the power of slaveowners. Criminal Injustice shows how the prerogatives of slavery and white racial domination trumped any hope for legal justice for blacks.

This is a study of school desegregation in Virginia. It traces the evolution of the Richmond public schools from segregation to desegregation to resegregation in the decades following the ""Brown"" decision. It analyses the ""separate but equal"" system and its impact on life in the city.

So central was labour in the lives of African-American slaves that it has often been taken for granted, with little attention given to the type of work that slaves did. Cultivation and Culture explores when, where, and how slaves laboured in growing the New World's great staples and how this work shaped the institution of slavery and the lives of African-American slaves.

This controversial history explodes orthodoxies over why the South lost the Civil War. Robinson contends that the process of social change initiated during the birth of Confederate nationalism undermined the social and cultural foundations of the southern way of life built on slavery, ultimately sapped white southerners of the will to go on.

A significant number of 19th century Virginians, both black and white, migrated to extricate themselves from a slave society. This work argues that this migration intensified the national controversy over human bondage and helped shape American identity and the American definition of freedom.

This text examines public events in New York City from the end of the Civil War through World War I, demonstrating how ritualized elements of black processions, parades, riots and festivals made visible the inherent paradox of the ""separate but equal"" doctrine of the time.

Using primary documents, this work examines the characteristics of North Carolina's African-American population in order to explain the social and political factors that shaped economic opportunity for this group from the Civil War until 1915.

This study draws on a variety of sources, including the reports and correspondence of prison inspectors and letters from prisoners and their families, to explore the history of the African-American men and women whose labour made Alabama's prison system the most profitable in the country.