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Stony the Road

Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

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Stony the Road

By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
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About this listen

 A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind.

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 this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the "nadir" of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance.

Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. Bringing a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a "New Negro" to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to America as it hurtled toward the modern age.

The story Gates tells begins with great hope, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Union victory, and the liberation of nearly 4 million enslaved African-Americans. Until 1877, the federal government, goaded by the activism of Frederick Douglass and many others, tried at various turns to sustain their new rights. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and a loss of Northern will, restored "home rule" to the South. The retreat from Reconstruction was followed by one of the most violent periods in our history, with thousands of black people murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation.

An essential tour through one of America's fundamental historical tragedies, Stony the Road is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells fought to create a counter-narrative, and culture, inside the lion's mouth. As sobering as this tale is, it also has within it the inspiration that comes with encountering the hopes our ancestors advanced against the longest odds.

*Includes a Bonus PDF of images from the book. Americas Black & African American Military Social Sciences United States Civil War War Social justice Equality Martin Luther King Abraham Lincoln Capitalism
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I had three problems with this book: the narration, the content and the style. The narration is wooden and the narrator does not give the impression that he really understands or cares about what he is reading. Overall, this means that the narration fails to convey authority which is a fatal flaw in a non-fiction book, because the voice of the author has to have authority to make it work.

The content was a disappointment because the subtitle of the book is unclear and a little misleading. I was hoping for a history of white supremacy and the implementation of the Jim Crow laws as they were enacted and practised in America after reconstruction - ie the actual experience of living under these hateful racist regimes. This book, however, is much more like a review of the philosophy and literature of the period. So you get a lot of theory from the people at the time who were either justifying racism or attacking it (from lots of different angles), but you don't get much, or any, of what it was actually like for ordinary African-Americans to live through or for the white supremacists who were operating it - how it was implemented, how it changed over time etc.

I also found the style difficult. In a popular history book, I am looking for an author who has done all the research and then uses it as the background to tell the story in a compelling way. This book is more like a textbook: you get a lot of lengthy quotes from contemporary historical source material strung together by linking passages from the author. It feels like the author has to display all the reserach he has done and does not have the confidencve to put it to one side and just tell you the story. I wish he had done.

Overall, if you are looking for a textbook style compilation of source material on the theories of and reactions to white supremacy and Jim Crow, then this book may be for you. That did not include me. Either way, I cannot recommend the narraton in this audiobook.

A bit of a disappointment

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