Description
"An arresting piece of popular history." --Sean Wilentz, The New York Times Book Review
Nicholas Lemann opens this extraordinary 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 began 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. Redemption is the first book to describe in uncompromising detail this organized racial violence, which reached its apogee in Mississippi in 1875.
Author: Nicholas Lemann
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
Published: 08/21/2007
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.90d
ISBN13: 9780374530693
ISBN10: 0374530696
BISAC Categories:
- History | United States | 19th Century
- History | United States | State & Local | South (AL,AR,FL,GA,KY,LA,MS,
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies
About the Author
Nicholas Lemann, dean of the School of Journalism at Columbia University, is author of The Big Test (FSG, 1999) and the prizewinning The Promised Land. He lives with his family in Pelham, New York.