The dramatic story of one of the most violent episodes of the civil rights movement and its role in the ongoing reckoning with racial injustice in the United States.
On Bloody Sunday, activist John Lewis led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and faced attacks by oncoming state troopers. Footage of the violence shocked the nation, galvanized the fight against racial injustice, and made it an iconic event in the nation's history. Yet the previous year an even more brutal incident dubbed Bloody Tuesday took place in Tuscaloosa.
On Tuesday, June 9, 1964, police attacked more than 600 Black men, women, and children inside First African Baptist Church, where Reverend Martin Luther King had launched the Tuscaloosa campaign for integration three months earlier. As the group gathered to march, they faced over seventy law enforcement officers and hundreds more deputized white citizens and Klansmen eager to end their protests for good. Police smashed the historic church's stained-glass windows with water hoses and fired rounds of tear gas inside. As demonstrators streamed from the church, many choking and soaked, they beat them with nightsticks, cattle prods, and axe handles, arrested nearly a hundred, and sent over thirty to the hospital. Here this event is recounted through the eyes of locals--a charismatic Black preacher trained by Rev. King, an aging police chief, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Black women who were the backbone of the protests. It was a pivotal moment in a southern city unwilling to shed its long history of racial control and Klan brutality until forced to do so by armed Black self-defense groups, a bus boycott, and the federal government.
In Bloody Tuesday, John Giggie powerfully recovers one of the last great untold stories of the civil rights movement and its role in the reckoning with America's ongoing struggle for racial justice.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
The historiography of the civil rights movement is still young. Even the seemingly well-known episodes turn out to be subject to major, irrevocable revision. Beyond the overlooked aspects in any particular story, we simply do not have enough solid local or episodic accounts of the movement to be able to make sound generalizations about the larger movement. This is but one reason for the critical importance of John Giggie's Bloody Tuesday, which fills an important gap in the story of the freedom movement in the South. The intimacy and insights of its detail paint a vivid picture of a Black community's long struggle for full citizenship. The historiographical questions it addresses are the important ones. Its literary qualities are notable. It promises to be a crucial and compelling contribution to our knowledge of the movement. * Timothy B. Tyson, Author of The Blood of Emmett Till * In attempts to racially desegregate Alabama cities such as Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, one is reminded of Malcom X's famous admonition, 'There is no such thing as a bloodless revolution.' John Giggie's Bloody Tuesday is an important fulcrum in the expanding civil rights history of the state, offering a compelling account of the horrifying brutality Tuscaloosa officials unleashed on its Black citizens in the face of their concerted effort to desegregate the city and the protracted efforts to belie the toll of state-sanctioned racial terrorism. * Derryn E. Moten, Alabama State University * A welcome resurrection of a forgotten episode in the sorrowful history of segregation. * Kirkus Reviews * Bloody Tuesday is a vivid and gracefully written account of a neglected but vitally important event in Alabama history. And this book reminds us how much of our history we have yet to learn. * BirminghamWatch *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 241 mm
Breite: 165 mm
Dicke: 29 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-19-776666-8 (9780197766668)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
John M. Giggie is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. He is creator of "History of Us," the first Black history class taught daily in a public school in Alabama. Giggie is also director of the Alabama Memory Project, which seeks to recapture and memorialize the over 650 lives lost to lynching in Alabama, and a founding member of the Tuscaloosa Civil Rights History and Reconciliation Foundation. He is the author of After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African America Religion in the Delta, 1875-1915 (OUP, 2007).
Autor*in
Associate Professor of History and Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the SouthAssociate Professor of History and Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South, University of Alabama
Acknowledgments
Prologue: "The Memory You Choose"
Introduction: "It Was Like Slavery from Another Era": Tuscaloosa, 1964
Chapter One: "The White Folks Are Going to Kill Him": The Arrival of Rev. T. Y. Rogers
Chapter Two: "God, Himself, was the Author of Segregation": The Rise of Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton
Chapter Three: "The Publicity is What Creates the Mayhem": The Making of Police Chief William Marable
Chapter Four: "No End to the Floggings and Murders": Protesting in Tuscaloosa
Chapter Five: "We Want Freedom Now": Bloody Tuesday and the Sacking of First African Baptist
Chapter Six: "You Can't Do Nothing but Kill Me": Fighting Back
Chapter Seven: "How Could There Be a God and Allow This to Happen?": Testing the Civil Rights Act
Chapter Eight: "Sit Where Anybody Wants To": Boycotting Druid City Transit
Chapter Nine: "The Voices of Dissent Must Be Heard": Legacies
Epilogue: "Just Give Us Fifty Years and We'll Take It All Back"
Note on the Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Index
