A century after Appomattox, the civil rights movement won full citizenship for black Americans in the South. It should not have been necessary: by 1870 those rights were set in the Constitution. This is the story of the terrorist campaign that took them away. Nicholas Lemann opens his extraordinary new book with a riveting account of the horrific events of Easter 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where a white militia of Confederate veterans-turned-vigilantes attacked the black community there and massacred hundreds of people in a gruesome killing spree. This was the start of an insurgency that changed the course of American history: for the next few years white Southern Democrats waged a campaign of political terrorism aiming to overturn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and challenge President Grant's support for the emergent structures of black political power. The remorseless strategy of well-financed "White Line" organizations was to create chaos and keep blacks from voting out of fear for their lives and livelihoods. Redemption is the first book to describe in uncompromising detail this organized racial violence, which reached its apogee in Mississippi in 1875. Lemann bases his devastating account on a wealth of military records, congressional investigations, memoirs, press reports, and the invaluable papers of Adelbert Ames, the war hero from Maine who was Mississippi's governor at the time. When Ames pleaded with Grant for federal troops who could thwart the white terrorists violently disrupting Republican political activities, Grant wavered, and the result was a bloody, corrupt election in which Mississippi was "redeemed"—that is, returned to white control. Redemption makes clear that this is what led to the death of Reconstruction—and of the rights encoded in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. We are still living with the consequences.
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"In the days after the Civil War there was a concerted effort on the part of the white establishment to reinstate the supremacy of the whate race. It was done with violence, with trickery, with blatant racism. The results lasted up to the mid-20th century, making the Civil Rights movement necessary." — Rick (4 out of 5 stars)
"In the days after the Civil War there was a concerted effort on the part of the white establishment to reinstate the supremacy of the whate race. It was done with violence, with trickery, with blatant racism. The results lasted up to the mid-20th century, making the Civil Rights movement necessary."
" Great story, important history, but unfortunately not particularly well written or interesting in this telling. "
" What gives, America? Get it together. This is quick account of Reconstruction in the Deep South, when the Democratic party basically became a wing of the Klan, like Sinn Fein except with power. "
" Just started, but the prologue has me hooked! "
" Terrifying. Reconstruction seems an unfinished project. "
" Importance of the subject matter rates 5 stars, the execution rates 3. "
" It is very important for us to be aware of this period of history. First part tells the story of the Redemption as the story of General/Senator/Governor Ames. It is a story that needs to be told but seems to drag a bit. Nice units on historiography of the era. "
" One of the only books that's ever made me blood-boilingly angry as I was reading it. It's easy to greet the end of Congressional Reconstruction with a shrug of inevitability; Lemann shows exactly what could have been accomplished, and why we instead got Jim Crow. "
" A good argument for the revision of the longstanding view regarding reconstruction as overly harsh and the cause of its own demise. "
" Distracted reading over Christmas break. Journalistic take on one slice of reconstruction. Glaring error on page one is the main point that lingers... "
" This book does a great job of researching what happened to destroy reconstruction - very thoroughly documented and well-written. totally devastating. "
Nicholas Lemann, dean of the School of Journalism at Columbia University, is the author of The Big Test (FSG, 1999) and the prizewinning The Promised Land. He lives with his family in Pelham, New York.
Michael Prichard is a Los Angeles-based actor who has played several thousand characters during his career, over one hundred of them in theater and film. He is primarily heard as an audiobook narrator, having recorded well over five hundred full-length books. His numerous awards and accolades include an Audie Award for Tears in the Darkness by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman and six AudioFile Earphones Awards. He was named a Top Ten Golden Voice by SmartMoney magazine. He holds an MFA in theater from the University of Southern California.
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