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This compelling work recovers a neglected episode in the Black community's long struggle for full citizenship when police and Klansmen stormed First African Baptist Church and brutalized over 600 unarmed protestors preparing to march for freedom. Bloody Tuesday, as Tuscaloosa residents called the day, is one of the most violent episodes in the civil rights movement.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments _
- Prologue: "The Memory You Choose"
- Introduction: "It Was Like Slavery from Another Era": Tuscaloosa, 1964
- Chapter One: "The White Folks Are Going to Kill Him": The Arrival of Rev. T. Y. Rogers
- Chapter Two: "God, Himself, was the Author of Segregation": The Rise of Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton
- Chapter Three: "The Publicity is What Creates the Mayhem": The Making of Police Chief William Marable
- Chapter Four: "No End to the Floggings and Murders": Protesting in Tuscaloosa
- Chapter Five: "We Want Freedom Now": Bloody Tuesday and the Sacking of First African Baptist
- Chapter Six: "You Can't Do Nothing but Kill Me": Fighting Back
- Chapter Seven: "How Could There Be a God and Allow This to Happen?": Testing the Civil Rights Act
- Chapter Eight: "Sit Where Anybody Wants To": Boycotting Druid City Transit
- Chapter Nine: "The Voices of Dissent Must Be Heard": Legacies
- Epilogue: "Just Give Us Fifty Years and We'll Take It All Back"
- Note on the Sources
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
John M. Giggie is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. He is creator of "History of Us," the first Black history class taught daily in a public school in Alabama. Giggie is also director of the Alabama Memory Project, which seeks to recapture and memorialize the over 650 lives lost to lynching in Alabama, and a founding member of the Tuscaloosa Civil Rights History and Reconciliation Foundation. He is the author of After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African America Religion in the Delta, 1875-1915 (OUP, 2007).
Summary
This compelling work recovers a neglected episode in the Black community's long struggle for full citizenship when police and Klansmen stormed First African Baptist Church and brutalized over 600 unarmed protestors preparing to march for freedom. Bloody Tuesday, as Tuscaloosa residents called the day, is one of the most violent episodes in the civil rights movement.
Additional text
Bloody Tuesday is a vivid and gracefully written account of a neglected but vitally important event in Alabama history. And this book reminds us how much of our history we have yet to learn.
