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

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.

This Library of America publication presents, for the first time in full, the March 1880 Senate testimony of Henry Adams, a remarkable post–Civil War figure—soldier, laborer, faith healer, and political activist—interrogated during a Senate inquiry into the exodus of freed people from the South. The edition includes an introduction by Stephen Hahn that situates Adams’s testimony within Reconstruction-era struggles over labor, political rights, and migration. Through Adams’s firsthand account, readers gain insight into the lived experiences and political organizing of freedpeople during the turbulent postwar transition. The volume aims to reshape understandings of Reconstruction by foregrounding a previously underappreciated primary source and illustrating how ordinary actors contested white supremacy. It is intended for scholars and general readers interested in Reconstruction, testimony records, and the politics of migration in the late 19th century.