Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

A profound rendering of the struggle by African Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them.

The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: If emancipation sparked "a new birth of freedom" in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In Stony the Road, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African American experience, seeks to answer that question through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind.