Cover image for Redemption : the last battle of the Civil War
Redemption : the last battle of the Civil War
Title:
Redemption : the last battle of the Civil War
ISBN:
9780374248550
Edition:
1st ed.
Publication Information:
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Physical Description:
xi, 257 p. ; 24 cm.
Contents:
Adelbert and Blanche -- Vicksburg troubles -- The Peace Conference -- Revolution -- The Mississippi plan.
Personal Subject:
Summary:
A century after Appomattox, the civil rights movement won full citizenship for black Americans in the South. It should not have been necessary: by 1870 those rights were set in the Constitution. This is the story of the terrorist campaign that took them away. Nicholas Lemann opens his extraordinary new book with a riveting account of the horrific events of Easter 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where a white militia of Confederate veterans-turned-vigilantes attacked the black community there and massacred hundreds of people in a gruesome killing spree. This was the start of an insurgency that changed the course of American history: for the next few years white Southern Democrats waged a campaign of political terrorism aiming to overturn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and challenge President Grant ssupport for the emergent structures of black political power. The remorseless strategy of well-financed “White Line” organizations was to create chaos and keep blacks from voting out of fear for their lives and livelihoods. Redemption is the first book to describe in uncompromising detail this organized racial violence, which reached its apogee in Mississippi in 1875--Publisher.
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