Immediately after the war legislation enacted in the South made severe
provision with reference to vagrancy. Negroes were arrested on the
slightest pretexts and their labor as that of convicts leased to
landowners or other business men. When, a few years later, Negroes,
dissatisfied with the returns from their labor on the farms, began a
movement to the cities, there arose a tendency to make the vagrancy
legislation still more harsh, so that at last a man could not stop work
without technically committing a crime. Thus in all its hideousness
developed the convict lease system. -from "The Negro in the New South"
This 1921 volume offers a new examination of the history of black people
in America in light of the new flowering of cultural interest-on the
part of whites as well as blacks-in the post-World War I period. A
highly readable and tremendously informative foundational overview of
the grand and terrible story of Africans in the New World, this work
explores: . the role of the Negro in the Spanish exploration of America
. the development of the slave trade . the difficult social positions of
the Indian, the mulatto, and the free Negro . early slave insurrections
. the Negro in the American Revolution . first steps toward abolition .
Negroes in the West . the impact of Nat Turner and the Amistad case .
Sojourner Truth and the influence of the women's suffrage movement . the
Civil War and Emancipation . the problems of enfranchisement . Mob
violence and election troubles at the turn of the 20th century . Negro
migration around America . the place of the Negro in American life . and
much more. African-American author and educator BENJAMIN GRIFFITH
BRAWLEY (1882-1939) wrote extensively on black culture, including Women
of Achievement (1919).
