Social History of the American Negro

Immediately after the war legislation enacted in the South made severe provision with reference to vagrancy. Negroes were arrested on the slightest pretexts and their labor as that of convicts leased to landowners or other business men. When, a few years later, Negroes, dissatisfied with the returns from their labor on the farms, began a movement to the cities, there arose a tendency to make the vagrancy legislation still more harsh, so that at last a man could not stop work without technically committing a crime. Thus in all its hideousness developed the convict lease system. -from "The Negro in the New South" This 1921 volume offers a new examination of the history of black people in America in light of the new flowering of cultural interest-on the part of whites as well as blacks-in the post-World War I period. A highly readable and tremendously informative foundational overview of the grand and terrible story of Africans in the New World, this work explores: . the role of the Negro in the Spanish exploration of America . the development of the slave trade . the difficult social positions of the Indian, the mulatto, and the free Negro . early slave insurrections . the Negro in the American Revolution . first steps toward abolition . Negroes in the West . the impact of Nat Turner and the Amistad case . Sojourner Truth and the influence of the women's suffrage movement . the Civil War and Emancipation . the problems of enfranchisement . Mob violence and election troubles at the turn of the 20th century . Negro migration around America . the place of the Negro in American life . and much more. African-American author and educator BENJAMIN GRIFFITH BRAWLEY (1882-1939) wrote extensively on black culture, including Women of Achievement (1919).