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Best of
Race

1956

Proud Shoes

history

non-fiction

memoir

nonfiction

Pauli Murray - 1956

First published in 1956, Proud Shoes is the remarkable true story of slavery, survival, and miscegenation in the South from the pre-Civil War era through the Reconstruction.

Written by Pauli Murray the legendary civil rights activist and one of the founders of NOW, Proud Shoes chronicles the lives of Murray's maternal grandparents. From the birth of her grandmother, Cornelia Smith, daughter of a slave whose beauty incited the master's sons to near murder to the story of her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald, whose free black father married a white woman in 1840, Proud Shoes offers a revealing glimpse of our nation's history.

The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South

Kenneth M. Stampp - 1956

Winner of the Lincoln PrizeStampp's classic study of American slavery as a deliberately chosen, practical system of controlling and exploiting labor is one of the most important and influential works of American history written in our time."A thoughtful and deeply moving book.

. . . Mr. Stampp wants to show specifically what slavery was like, why it existed, and what it did to the American people."--Bruce Catton

Best ofRace

1956

Proud Shoes

The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South

Best of
Race