Voices from a Century of Struggle: Writings of the Jim Crow Era

This Library of America volume presents the full March 1880 testimony of Henry Adams, a remarkable Black Southerner who served as a soldier and activist and testified before a Senate committee about the exodus of freed people from the South after Reconstruction. Introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Hahn, the edition situates Adams's account within the wider context of violence, disenfranchisement, and labor struggles that drove Black migration. The testimony illuminates grassroots resistance, the limitations of federal protection after Reconstruction, and the economic and social pressures experienced by African Americans. By publishing the complete record alongside a scholarly introduction, the volume makes accessible a primary document crucial to understanding the period's upheavals and migrations.

This two-volume Library of America edition, edited by Tyina L. Steptoe, compiles primary documents, essays, speeches, and firsthand accounts spanning 1876–1976 that illuminate the experience of racial segregation, disenfranchisement, and resistance in the United States. The collection foregrounds voices across the Black freedom struggle—journalists, activists, politicians, and ordinary citizens—documenting legal segregation, racial violence, and strategies of resistance. Steptoe contextualizes these writings to show how the Jim Crow regime was both legally enforced and socially enforced across the nation, not only in the South. The volumes include juxtaposed texts such as anti-segregation dissent, segregationist rhetoric, and pivotal speeches to help readers see the contest of ideas and power. Designed for both scholars and general readers, the set serves as a resource for understanding the long arc of racial struggle and its legacies into the present.