{"product_id":"the-progressive-era-and-race-reaction-and-reform-1900-1917-the-american-history-series","title":"The Progressive Era and Race: Reaction and Reform  1900 - 1917 (The American History Series)","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn this comprehensive  unflinching account  David W. Southern persuasively argues that race was the primary blind spot of the Progressive Movement. Based on the voluminous secondary works produced over the last forty years and his own primary research  Southerns synthesis vividly portrays the ruthless exploitation  brutality  and violence that whites inflicted on African Americans in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the former Confederate states  where almost 90 percent of blacks resided  white progressives followed the lead of racist demagogues such as Pitchfork Ben Tillman and James Vardaman by consolidating the Jim Crow system of legal segregation and the disfranchisement of blacks  resulting in the emergence of the one-party Democratic South. When legal discrimination did not sufficiently subordinate blacks  southern whites resorted liberally to fraud  intimidation  and violencemost notably in ghastly lynchings and urban race riots. Yet  most northern progressives were either indifferent to the fate of southern blacks or actively supported the social system in the South. Yankee reformers obsessed over the concept of race and became ensnared in a web of scientific racism that convinced them that blacks belonged to an inferior breed of human beings. The tenures of both Theodore Roosevelt  who wrote more about race than any other American president  and Woodrow Wilson  who was reared in the Deep South  proved disastrous for African Americans  who reached their nadir even as Wilson led the United States on a crusade to make the world safe for democracy. Southern goes on to persuasively reveal that African Americans courageously fought to change the implacably racist system in which they lived  against overwhelming odds. Indeed  it was the rise of the militant New Negro during the Progressive Era that provoked much of the anti-black repression and violence. Dr. Southern further examines how the origins of the modern civil rights movement emerged in the wake of the rivalry between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois  going beyond an analysis of their leadership to illuminate other important African American activists who held strong views of their own. Finally  an epilogue assesses the malignant racial heritage of the progressives by looking at the discrimination against African Americans  both those in and newly returned home from the armed forces  during World War I and the numerous race riots in northern cities that were in part occasioned by the large-scale migration of southern blacks.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44974670610485,"sku":"ByrdShop_088295234X","price":48.88,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780882952345.jpg?v=1770667849","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-progressive-era-and-race-reaction-and-reform-1900-1917-the-american-history-series","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}