The Maid Narratives shares the memories of black domestic workers and the white families they served, uncovering the often intimate relationships between maid and mistress. Based on interviews with over fifty people -- both white and black -- these stories deliver a personal and powerful message about resilience and resistance in the face of oppression in the Jim Crow South. The housekeepers, caretakers, sharecroppers, and cooks who share their experiences in The Maid Narratives ultimately moved away during the Great Migration.

Shreveport Sounds in Black and White presents that evolution in a collection of scholarly and popular writing that covers institutions and people who nurtured the musical life of the city and surroundings. The contributions of icons like Leadbelly and Hank Williams, and such lesser-known names as Taylor-Griggs Melody Makers and Eddie Giles come to light. 

Rough Justice is the first national cross-regional study of the history of lynching and criminal justice in the United States. Working from extensive research in newspapers, court records, coroner's inquests, and personal correspondence, the book ties lynching to understandings of criminal justice, strongly influenced by notions of race and gender, that varied across social classes and regions. It is dedicated to the victims of lynching and legal execution.

Taken as a whole, the essays in this volume complicate and expand our understanding of the civil rights movement and race relations in Louisiana. They also remind us that, for all its distinctiveness, Louisiana's history mirrored much of what happened in other southern states.

The poultry processing industry in El Dorado, Arkansas, was an economic powerhouse in the latter half of the twentieth century. It was the largest employer in the interconnected region of South Arkansas and North Louisiana surrounding El Dorado, and the fates of many related companies and farms depended on its continued financial success. We Just Keep Running the Line is the story of the rise of the poultry processing industry in El Dorado and the labor force -- composed primarily of black women -- upon which it came to rely.

Praised as “viscerally powerful” (Publishers Weekly), this remarkable work of oral history captures the searing experience of the Jim Crow years—enriched by memories of individual, family, and community triumphs and tragedies. In vivid, compelling accounts, men and women from all walks of life tell how their day-to-day lives were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression.

Focusing on the agency of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the South, this work argues for the systematic unveiling and recovery of subjugated knowledge, histories, and cultural practices of those traditionally silenced and overlooked by national heritage projects and national public memories. Jackson uses both ethnographic and ethnohistorical data to show the various ways African Americans actively created and maintained their own heritage and cultural formations.

Lynched chronicles the history and aftermath of lynching in America. By rooting her work in oral histories, Angela D. Sims gives voice to the memories of African American elders who remember lynching not only as individual acts but as a culture of violence, domination, and fear.

Hailed as one of the best treatments of the civil rights movement, Race and Democracy is also one of the most comprehensive and detailed studies of the movement at the state level. This far-reaching and dramatic narrative ranges in time from the founding of the New Orleans branch of the NAACP in 1915 to the beginning of Edwin Edwards’s first term as governor in 1972. In his new preface Adam Fairclough brings the narrative up to date, demonstrating the persistence of racial inequalities and the continuing importance of race as a factor in politics.

In The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South, Wayne A. and Shirley A. Wiegand tell the comprehensive story of the integration of southern public libraries. As in other efforts to integrate civic institutions in the 1950s and 1960s, the determination of local activists won the battle against segregation in libraries. In particular, the willingness of young black community members to take part in organized protests and direct actions ensured that local libraries would become genuinely free to all citizens.