|
The Free Negro in North Carolina , 1790-1860 (1943)
From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (1947)
The Militant South, 1800-1860 (1956)
Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961)
The Emancipation Proclamation (1963)
Land of the Free with John W. Caughey and Ernest R. May (1965)
Illustrated History of Black Americans with the editors of Time-Life Books (1970 and 1973)
A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Ante-bellum North (1976)
Racial Equality in America (1976)
George Washington Williams: A Biography (1985)
Race and History: Selected Essays 1938-1988 (1990)
The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-first Century (1993)
From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans with Alfred A. Moss Jr. (2000)
Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (2006)
(Ed.) With John Whittington Franklin, My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin (1997)
(Ed.) The Civil War Diary of James T. Ayers (1947)
(Ed.) Albion Tourgee's A Fool's Errand (1961)
(Ed.) T.W. Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment (1962)
(Ed.) Three Negro Classics (1965)
(Ed.) The Negro in the Twentieth Century with Isadore Starr (1967)
(Ed.) Color and Race (1968)
(Ed.) W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1969)
(Ed.) Reminiscences of an Active Life: The Autobiography of John R. Lynch (1970)
No Crystal Stair
Living in a world restricted by laws defining race, as well as creating obstacles, disadvantages, and even superstitions regarding race, challenged my capacities for survival. For ninety years I have witnessed countless men and women likewise meet this challenge. Some bested it; some did not; many had to settle for any accommodation they could. I became a student and eventually a scholar. And it was armed with the tools of scholarship that I strove to dismantle those laws, level those obstacles and disadvantages, and replace superstitions with humane dignity. Along with much else, the habits of scholarship granted me something many of my similarly striving contemporaries did not have. I knew, or should say know, what we are up against.
Slavery was a principal centerpiece of the New World Order that set standards of conduct including complicated patterns of relationships. These lasted not merely until emancipations but after Reconstruction and on into the twentieth century. Many of them were still very much in place when beginning in the late 1950s, the sit-ins, marches, and the black revolution began a successful onslaught on some of the antediluvian practices that had become a part of the very fabric of society in the New World and American society in particular.
<<Previous - Continued>>
|
