![]() His body was sold piecemeal to souvenir seekers an Atlanta meat market displayed his knuckles in its front window for a week. Wrongly accused of raping the man’s wife, Hose was mutilated, stabbed, and burned alive in front of 2,000 cheering whites. A chapter on lynching features the tale of Sam Hose, a black laborer who murdered his white boss in self-defense. Jim Crow’s more absurd contortions (the existence of separate courtroom Bibles for swearing in black and white witnesses a request for separate gallows for condemned prisoners) would seem pathetic but for the sadistic violence that backed them. Their testimony details white resistance to black progress in every conceivable endeavor, from social interaction to education, work, justice, even which games of chance blacks could play (craps was OK poker-“a white man’s game”-was not). Just how extensive, demeaning, and abhorrent was white repression is made painfully, abundantly clear by the testimony of the “common” blacks Litwack quotes. ![]() That’s because southern whites, through Jim Crow laws and violence, controlled every aspect of black life. The expansive sequel to Litwack’s Pulitzer-winning Been in the Storm So Long (1979) touches all the bases of southern African-American life during the period he calls -the nadir of black life.- Any recounting of the years between the dismantling of Reconstruction’s reforms in the 1870s and the migration to northern cities that commenced with WW I-is necessarily preoccupied with white power. ![]()
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