This book is the companion text to collector James Allen's extraordinarily disturbing website of the same name. The text includes many of the postcards and photographs taken as souvenirs at lynchings all across America during the Jim Crow years, a document for anyone skeptical of the reality of this grim piece of United States history.

The second novel in a trilogy about Radical Reconstruction, The Clansman depicts the postwar years as a catastrophe in which former Black slaves terrorized the white South, made a mockery of government, and raped virginal Southern belles. The book provided the inspiration for D.W. Griffith's blockbuster film, The Birth of a Nation, which portrays the Ku Klux Klan as a group of Southern freedom fighters.

Historian, novelist, and Black activist W. E. B. Du Bois published this collection of autobiographical essays after spending years living and teaching in the Jim Crow South. Within the text, he reflects on race relations in the post-Civil War South and offers a sharp critique of Booker T. Washington and his policies of accommodation.

A classic of American fiction, To Kill a Mockingbird is set in Alabama during the years of the Great Depression and narrated by the young daughter of Atticus Finch, a white lawyer who's decided to defend a Black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman.

Historian Leon Litwack offers an abundantly detailed account of the ways in which Blacks in the Jim Crow South were disenfranchised and stripped of their opportunities to advance themselves intellectually and economically. He describes the sometimes brutal tactics used by whites to punish those who were too assertive, too ambitious, or too successful, and reveals the many different ways Black men, women, and children responded to the day-to-day pressures to remain subordinate.

All God's Dangers is a rich autobiography of an illiterate Alabama sharecropper who recalled for his interviewer, Theodore Rosengarten, vivid details from nearly every moment of his life in the Jim Crow South. It's a powerful and moving account of the economic and social obstacles facing Black Southerners from generation to generation.

Up from Slavery is the second autobiography published by Washington, but remains, to this day, his best-selling work. His first-hand account of slavery, emancipation, and his life-long struggle to gain an education is often upbeat and optimistic—a tale of a man seeking to achieve the "American Dream."

African-American author Richard Wright takes his readers on a personalized journey, first through the Jim Crow South and then into the urban North. Wright, who was born outside Natchez, Mississippi in 1908, describes his confusing and painful racial coming-of-age; through a series of interactions with Southern whites, Southern Blacks, friends, and family members, Wright discovers the strict boundaries within which he and other African Americans must act each day in order to survive.