Anti-Black Violence in Twentieth-Century Texas

“Bruce A. Glasrud’s impressive collection of carefully researched essays is an important contribution in the field of racial violence. This timely collection also deepens our understanding of the modern civil rights movement and the resistance to a racially just society. The twelve contributors demonstrate, sadly, the persistence of racial violence across time and into the twenty-first century. Anti-Black Violence reveals a broad spectrum of white violence and numerous forms of racial control, and it illustrates, too, the creative range of responses that black Texans used to cope with white violence, ranging from organized activism and out-migration to racial accommodation. These powerful narratives reveal finally that the Lone Star State was every bit as brutal and vicious toward African Americans as Mississippi and Georgia in its quest to assert white supremacy and maintain a subservient and inferior status for African Americans.”—Albert S. Broussard, author of Expectations of Equality: A History of Black Westerners

“Bruce A. Glasrud has brought together in one volume a striking collection of essays on Texas racism, past and present, which should dash unexamined notions of benign race relations in a state often considered more Western than Southern. It deserves high priority for every reader who wishes to understand the full nature of one of the most politically important states in the nation.”—Garna Christian, author of Black Soldiers in Jim Crow, Texas, 1899–1917

“Anti-Black Violence in Twentieth-Century Texas is a welcome and long overdue addition to the literature on African American history in the Lone Star State. This landmark study is more than a historical analysis. By providing a rich description and analysis of important events, it becomes an insightful discussion of collective violence meted to African Americans. In a word, it fills a serious gap in the history of racial violence in this country, especially Texas.”—Merline Pitre, Professor of History, Texas Southern University and coauthor of Southern Black Women in the Modern Civil Rights Movement.

" A brutal and striking exploration of the tragic racial violence that gripped the Lone Star State during the majority of the twentieth century." — Southwestern Historical Quarterly

"...stellar as a work of history and a piece of social commentary... unrelentingly powerful." —East Texas Historical Journal