A Different Day

by De Jong, Greta

• ISBN13: 9780807827116
• ISBN10: 0807827118
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

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 Dayspotlights the ordinary heroes of the freedom struggle and offers a new perspective on black activism throughout the twentieth century.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Abbreviations	xv
Introduction	1	(9)
And Did Not Pay Them a Cent: Reconstruction and the Roots of the Twentieth-Century Freedom Struggle	10	(9)
Our Plight Here Is Bad: The Limits of Protest in a New South Plantation Economy	19	(22)
They Will Not Fight in the Open: Strategies of Resistance in the Jim Crow Era	41	(23)
We Feel You All Aut to Help Us: Struggles for Citizenship, 1914-1929	64	(21)
With the Aid of God and the F.S.A.: The Louisiana Farmers' Union and the Freedom Struggle in the New Deal Era	85	(31)
I Am an American Born Negro: Black Empowerment and White Responses during World War II	116	(28)
The Social Order Have Changed: The Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1960	144	(31)
To Provide Leadership and an Example: The Congress of Racial Equality and Local People in the 1960s	175	(32)
Epilogue	207	(8)
Notes	215	(62)
Bibliography	277	(22)
Index	299