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The Civil War and the Summer of 2020

Online ISBN:
9781531507602
Print ISBN:
9781531504991
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

The Civil War and the Summer of 2020

Hilary N. Green (ed.),
Hilary N. Green
(ed.)

James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies

Davidson College
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Andrew L. Slap (ed.)
Andrew L. Slap
(ed.)

Professor of History

East Tennessee State University
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
2 April 2024
Online ISBN:
9781531507602
Print ISBN:
9781531504991
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020 sparked a national reckoning for the United States that had been four hundred years in the making. Millions of Americans took to the streets to protest both the murder and the centuries of systematic racism that already existed among European colonists but transformed with the arrival of the first African American slaves in 1619. The violence needed to enforce that systematic racism for all those years, from the slave driver’s whip to state sponsored police brutality, attracted the primary attention of the protesters. The resistance of the protestors echoed generations of African Americans resisting the violence and oppression of white supremacy. Their resistance to violence, though, soon spread to other aspects of systematic racism, including a cultural hegemony built on and reinforcing white supremacy. At the heart of this white supremacist culture is the memory of the Civil War era, when in 1861 eight million white Americans revolted against their country to try to safeguard their enslavement of four million African Americans. The volume has three interconnected sections that build on one another. The first explores systematic racism in the Civil War era and now with essays on topics including slavery, policing, and slave patrols. The second shows how African Americans resisted the violence for the last two centuries with essays discussing matters including self-emancipation and African American soldiers. The last section investigates the ways Americans have remembered both violence and resistance since the Civil War, including Confederate Monuments and historical markers.

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