Lillian Smith Book Awards - Featured 2016 Nominee

Anti-Black Violence in Twentieth-Century Texas

 Edited by Bruce A. Glasrud
 
Anti-Black Violence in Twentieth-Century Texas provides an arresting look at the history of violence against African Americans in Texas.

From a lynching in Paris at the turn of the century to the 1998 murder of Jasper resident James Byrd Jr., who was dragged to death behind a truck, this volume uncovers the violent side of race relations in the Lone Star State.

Historian Bruce A. Glasrud has curated an essential contribution to Texas history and historiography that will also bring attention to a chapter in the state’s history that, for many, is still very much a part of the present.

BRUCE A. GLASRUD is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay, and retired dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Sul Ross State University. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of more than two dozen books, including Southern Black Women in the Modern Civil Rights Movement, winner of the Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the
History of Women.

What Readers Are Saying:

“Bruce A. Glasrud’s impressive collection of carefully researched essays is an important contribution in the field of racial violence. This timely collection also deepens our understanding of the modern civil rights movement and the resistance to a racially just society. The twelve contributors demonstrate, sadly, the persistence of racial violence across time and into the twenty-first century. Anti-Black Violence reveals a broad spectrum of white violence and numerous forms of racial control, and it illustrates, too, the creative range of responses that black Texans used to cope with white violence, ranging from organized activism and out-migration to racial accommodation. These powerful narratives reveal finally that the Lone Star State was every bit as brutal and vicious toward African Americans as Mississippi and Georgia in its quest to assert white supremacy and maintain a subservient and inferior status for African Americans.”—Albert S. Broussard, author of Expectations of Equality: A History of Black Westerners

“Bruce A. Glasrud has brought together in one volume a striking collection of essays on Texas racism, past and present, which should dash unexamined notions of benign race relations in a state often considered more Western than Southern. It deserves high priority for every reader who wishes to understand the full nature of one of the most politically important states in the nation.”—Garna Christian, author of Black Soldiers in Jim Crow, Texas, 1899–1917

“Anti-Black Violence in Twentieth-Century Texas is a welcome and long overdue addition to the literature on African American history in the Lone Star State. This landmark study is more than a historical analysis. By providing a rich description and analysis of important events, it becomes an insightful discussion of collective violence meted to African Americans. In a word, it fills a serious gap in the history of racial violence in this country, especially Texas.”—Merline Pitre, Professor of History, Texas Southern University and coauthor of Southern Black Women in the Modern Civil Rights Movement.