The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

With extensive photos and first-person accounts, this companion to the PBS series is “an illuminating, succinct history of racial discrimination in the US” (Publishers Weekly).

Between 1880 and 1954, African Americans dedicated their energies, and sometimes their lives, to defeating segregation. During these difficult decades, they acquired education and land and built businesses, churches, and communities, despite laws designed to isolate and disenfranchise them. White supremacy prevailed, but it did not destroy the spirit of the black community.

Incorporating first-person accounts and never-before-seen images and graphics, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow is the story of this long struggle for freedom after the Civil War. The book documents the work of such figures as the activist and separatist Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. It examines the emergence of the black middle class and intellectual elite, and the birth of the NAACP.

Above all, it tells the stories of ordinary heroes who accomplished extraordinary things: Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a teacher who founded the Palmer Memorial Institute, a private black high school in North Carolina; Ned Cobb, an Alabama tenant farmer who became a union organizer; Isaiah Montgomery, who founded Mound Bayou, an all-black town in Mississippi; Charles Evers, brother of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who fought for voter registration in 1940s Mississippi; and Barbara Johns, a sixteen-year-old who organized a student strike in 1951 Virginia. That strike led to a lawsuit that became one of the five cases the Supreme Court reviewed when it declared segregation in education illegal.

Rich in historical commentary and eyewitness testimony by blacks and whites who lived through the period, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow is a poignant record of a time when indignity and terror constantly faced off against courage and accomplishment.