The first part of the book deals with the backlash to Reconstruction by whites, including some white people who themselves opposed slavery: Stony the Road - which takes its name from a line in 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' often called 'the Negro national anthem' - seeks to explain how the racist dismantling of African-Americans' civil rights came about and how it influenced the way people of color experience the country today. It's an absorbing and necessary look at an era in which the hard-fought gains of African-Americans were rolled back by embittered Southern whites - an era that, in some ways, has never really ended. Gates' book is a fascinating social and intellectual history of the time between Reconstruction and the rise of the Jim Crow period of American history. puts it in his brilliant new book, Stony the Road, Redemption was 'when the gains of Reconstruction were systematically erased and the country witnessed the rise of a white supremacist ideology that, we might say, went rogue, an ideology that would long outlast the circumstances of its origin.' As literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. It's for this reason that while most Americans are generally familiar with Reconstruction, the period of time afterward that is sometimes called the 'Redemption' era frequently gets forgotten. Johnson, having indulgently listened to Martin Luther King Jr., signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, after which racism was solved and everything was better forever. To hear some tell it, the civil rights struggle of the 1960s ended when President Lyndon B. American history, as it exists in the popular imagination, has often tended toward the self-congratulatory.Įvents of the past are frequently filtered through a majority lens, focusing on the perceived heroics of, for example, white abolitionists and civil rights activists.

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