A Long Dark Night

Lawyer and historian Martinez (Terrorist Attacks on American Soil: From the Civil War Era to the Present) tackles the subject of race through the decades following Reconstruction. Beginning with an account of the federal government's role in legitimizing discrimination under law, Martinez then moves onto the violent repression of African-American rights, the Southern Populist movements and their white architects, and a once-over survey of the Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois dichotomy. The Great Migration follows, and the book slides into a cultural perspective with diminished attention to the role of law as it attends to popular racist images of African-Americans in cartoons, advertisements, and film. (For example, by focusing on D.W. Griffith's fictionalization of the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation, Martinez elides the Klan's real-life deeds.) Martinez hits historical landmarks (e.g., Marcus Garvey, the Tuskegee Airmen) and is particularly informative when delving into juridical processes (e.g., Plessy v. Ferguson, the failed attempt to achieve anti-lynching legislation). Nevertheless, there remains a hit-or-miss quality to this ambitious undertaking, which seeks to merge legal, political, social, and cultural history into an instructive and well-meaning corrective to a lacuna in popular history. * Publishers Weekly *
"Martinez presents a nuanced and balanced account of political and social history of the racial struggle between black and white America during the eight decades following the Civil War. His even-handed and inclusive approach tells a story that is not as unremittingly bleak as the title would suggest. His account of southern populism in the early 20th century, for example, includes the neo-Bourbons, those white politicians who opposed the Klan at a time when the KKK was thriving. Martinez’s story ends with the Supreme Court’s invalidation of restrictive covenants and Truman’s executive orders integrating the military and requiring fair employment practices in the Federal government. By reminding us of these hopeful developments, Martinez presents a complete picture, presaging hopeful developments in the civil rights era that follows. He gives readers enough details so they can see the entire forest with its variety of trees without bogging readers down examining minutiae." -- George Schedler, Southern Illinois University
"A masterful synthesis, this book explores in fine detail the political, social, economic, cultural, and legal forces behind issues of African American agency in the midst of white supremacy. Grappling with the irony of American ideals and American race relations from Reconstruction through World War II, Martinez delivers a crucial context for understanding the prelude to the civil rights movement. He illuminates the complexity and tension of the black experience and grapples with profound questions of racial discrimination. This is a welcome and important contribution to American history, thoughtful, comprehensive, and engaging." -- Orville Vernon Burton, Creativity Professor of Humanities, Professor of History, Pan African Studies, and Sociology, Clemson University and author The Age of Lincoln
A Long Dark Night is a highly readable and well-researched survey of U.S. race relations from the Civil War to World War II – a complex epoch that every American needs to better understand. -- Cameron McWhirter, author of Red Summer: the Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America