Friday, January 07, 2011

Review: A People’s History of the United States

From “A People’s History of the United States” concerning the so-called Progressive period in American history:

In this early part of the twentieth century, labeled by generations of white scholars as “the Progressive period,” lynchings were reported every week; it was the low point for Negroes, North and South, “the nadir” as Rayford Logan, a black historian, put it.  In 1910 there were 10 million Negros in the United States, and 9 million of them were in the South.

The government of the United States (between 1901 and 1921, the Presidents were Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson) – whether Republican or Democrat – watched Negroes being lynched, observed murderous riots against blacks in Statesboro, Georgia, Brownsville, Texas and Atlanta, Georgia – and did nothing.

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