jacob graham’s Reviews > These Truths: A History of the United States > Status Update

"Jim Crow thrived because . . . reformers who had earlier fought for the cause of civil rights abandoned it for the sake of forging a reunion between the states and the federal government and between the North and the South . . . [T]his was . . . an abdication of struggle, and abandonment of justice."

"If the railroad served as the symbol of progress in the nineteenth century, the automobile served as its symbol in the twentieth, a consumer commodity that celebrated individualism and choice. Announced Ford: 'Machinery is the new Messiah.'"

"'If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched,' the governor of Mississippi pledged in 1903 . . . By one estimate, someone in the South was hanged or burned alive every four days."

"'How does it feel to be a problem?' W. E. B. Du Bois asked, the year after Plessy v. Ferguson established the doctrine of separate but equal. 'One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.'"

2/2: "Courthouses provided separate Bibles. Bars provided separate stools. Post offices mandated separate windows. Playgrounds had separate swings. In Birmingham, for a black child to play checkers with a white child in a public park became a crime. Slavery had ended; segregation had only begun."

1/2: "Political equality had been possible, in the South, only at the barrel of a gun. As soon as federal troops withdrew . . . the era of black men's enfranchisement came to a violent and terrible end . . . All-white legislatures began passing . . . Jim Crow laws, that segregated blacks from whites in every conceivable public place . . ."

2/2: "In mourning [Lincoln] . . . Americans deferred a different grief, a vaster and more dire reckoning with centuries of suffering and loss, not captured by any camera, not settled by any amendment . . . millions of men, women, and children, stolen, shackled, hunted, whipped . . . and buried in unmarked graves . . . With Lincoln's death, it was as if millions of people had been crammed into his tomb . . ."

1/2: "With the nation still draped in black, the Thirteenth Amendment, Lincoln's last legacy, went to the states . . . A great debate had been ended. A terrible war had been won. Slavery was over. But the unfinished work of a great nation remained undone: the struggle for equality had only just begun."

"History teems with mishaps and might-have-beens: . . . storms not far from port, narrowly contested elections, court cases lost and won, political visionaries drowned. But over the United States in the 1850s, a sense of inevitability fell, as if there were a fate, a dismal dismantlement, that no series of events or accidents could thwart."

"The religious revival that had brought women into moral reform also carried them into politics . . . [L]ong before women could vote, they brought into the parties a political style they'd perfected first as abolitionists and then as prohibitionists: the moral crusade, pious and uncompromising. No election has been the same since."