African Americans confront lynching

by Christopher Waldrep

"This book examines African Americans' strategies for resisting white racial violence from the Civil War until the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. Christopher Waldrep's semi-biographical approach to the pioneers in the antilynching campaign portrays African Americans as active participants in the effort to end racial violence rather than as passive victims." "In telling this more-than 100-year-old story of violence and resistance, Waldrep describes how white Americans legitimized racial violence after the Civil War, and how black journalists campaigned against the violence by invoking the Constitution and the law as a source of rights. He shows how, toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, anti-lynching crusaders Ida B. Wells and Monroe Work adopted a more sociological approach, offering statistics and case studies to thwart white claims that a black propensity for crime justified racial violence. Waldrep describes how the NAACP, founded in 1909, represe