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.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or coauthored twenty-two books and created eighteen documentary films, including Finding Your Roots. His six-part PBS documentary, The African Americans- Many Rivers to Cross, earned an Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program-Long Form, as well as a Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and NAACP Image Award.
One of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2019
One of Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2019
Finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Nonfiction Literature
“Stony the Road presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white
nationalism. . . . In our current politics we recognize
African-American history—the spot under our country’s rug where the
terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept.
Stony the Road lifts the rug. . . . essential . . . a history
that very much needs telling and hearing in these times.” —Nell
Irvin Painter, New York Times Book Review
“[A] luminous history of Reconstruction, and the savage white
backlash that derailed it. . . . Few authors approach such
difficult history with the unblinking clarity of Gates, the
esteemed Harvard professor, historian, and scholar . . . If anyone
wants to understand how the groundbreaking election of Barack Obama
as this nation’s first black president was answered with Donald
Trump’s feral white nationalism, Gates has provided a road map.”
—The Boston Globe
“Concise, powerful . . . an important addition to America’s
evolving view of its own history.” –The Economist
“If you will read the first 38 pages of Stony the Road by Henry
Louis Gates Jr., I believe several things are likely to happen: You
will commit to reading the rest of the book. Any remaining
illusions about a prevailing racial harmony you may have brought to
the Trump era will dissipate. And on reflection, you’ll pretty much
completely understand how we got into our national racial
consciousness, as well as our current national political
pickle.” —Martha's Vineyard Times
“A necessary—and disturbingly relevant—read.” —People magazine
"The academics study the tides of history, while the popular
historians go out fishing to find (and tag) the big fish that
presumably make the ocean worth watching. The tidalists have the
tenure, but the fishermen sell all the books. Gates, who is expert
at both, catching fish while seeing tides, leaves us with a simple,
implicit moral: a long fight for freedom, with too many losses
along the way, can be sustained only by a rich and complicated
culture. Resilience and resistance are the same activity, seen at
different moments in the struggle. It’s a good thought to hold on
to now." —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
“Lively . . . A compressed, yet surprisingly comprehensive
narrative sweep . . . With a dazzling selection of cartoon
stereotypes, the author shows that in the white-supremacist
reaction ‘all along, the issue had been about the fabrication of
hateful imagery in order to justify robbing black people of their
constitutional rights and their economic potential.’” —The
Washington Post
“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. 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' analysis is predictably brilliant,
but he's also just a joy to read.” —NPR
“Harrowing but necessary.” —Time
"A timely chronicle of the battle to define blackness that raged
from the Civil War through civil rights . . . Gates, whose own
portrait hangs in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery,
writes not only as a scholar of this culture war but as an
influential participant." —Julian Lucas, Harper’s
“Insightfully demonstrates how history repeats itself . . . This
excellent text, augmented by a disturbing collection of late-19th-
and early-20th-century racist images, is indispensable for
understanding American history.” —Publishers Weekly, starred
review
“A provocative, lucid, and urgent contribution to the study of race
in America. “ —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“In Stony the Road, Gates demonstrates his chops as a lyrical
narrative historian. He surveys an era full of pain and loss but
also human persistence and astonishing cultural renewal in African
American life. Reconstruction and its long aftermath down to the
1920s was a series of revolutions and counter-revolutions and
Gates's success here is in telling it as a moving and complex story
about politics, science, art, and ideas all wrapped in one form
after another of racism, managed and blunted by
resistance. White supremacy triumphs in this long dark era; it
left many casualties along the by-ways of America's worst
sins. But this is a work that shows that good history can also
rise up as a redemption song when we know the facts of what
happened and why and how people endure, thrive and create their own
new worlds.” —David W. Blight, Yale University, and author of
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
“In this insightful, provocative book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
reminds us how the hopes inspired by emancipation and
Reconstruction were dashed by a racist backlash, and how a new
system of inequality found cultural expression in Lost Cause
mythology and degrading visual images of African
Americans. With debate raging over how we should remember the
Confederacy, and basic rights again under threat, this unflinching
look at our history could not be more timely.” —Eric Foner, DeWitt
Clinton Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University, and
author of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution and the
forthcoming The Second Founding: How the Civil War and
Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
“How does white supremacy work? What does
it look like? In this piercing, haunting study, Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., chronicles an American tragedy, the story of how
white supremacy and Jim Crow became the South’s—and white
America’s—brutal answer to Emancipation and Reconstruction. Who has
best dismantled white supremacy, and how? Gates tells those
powerful stories, too, from Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells to
W. E. B. DuBois, through generations of New Negroes, and New, New
Negroes, battling back, in struggles not yet ended.” —Jill Lepore,
author of These Truths: A History of the United States
“Stony the Road, a must-read post Reconstruction history from one
of the foremost historians of our time, proves that the past can be
prologue. It is the history we are doomed to repeat if we remain
unwilling to build a democracy at peace with itself in America, a
democracy that respects the dignity and worth of every human
being.” —Rep. John Lewis
“Drawing on the finest current scholarship, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
offers a chilling account of Reconstruction's overthrow and the
rise of American apartheid. His book then forcefully recasts the
rise of the concept of the New Negro as a weapon in the war against
a resurgent white racism and the phantasmagoria of Jim Crow popular
culture that was all too real and all too pervasive. As elements of
that culture persist, Stony the Road is all the more timely.” —Sean
Wilentz, author of Bancroft Prize winner The Rise of American
Democracy
"With vivid frankness, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., confronts how the
creation of the mythical 'Old Negro,' a subordinate, nearly
undercut black America's best hopes. Redemption only came through
African American self-invention. The 'New Negro' was a citizen who
carved out a way forward with brilliance and beauty as expressed in
pictures, politics, and prose. With the lyrical grace of a
storyteller and the sage insight of a master teacher, Professor
Gates's Stony the Road tells how one people's struggle came to
define the best of America's ideals." —Martha S. Jones,
Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor at Johns Hopkins
University and author of Birthright Citizens
“In [Gates’s] signature lucid and compelling approach to history .
. . a fresh, much-needed inquiry into a misunderstood yet urgently
relevant era.” — Booklist, starred review
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