From the Publisher
"The historiography of the civil rights movement is still young. Even the seemingly well-known episodes turn out to be subject to major, irrevocable revision. Beyond the overlooked aspects in any particular story, we simply do not have enough solid local or episodic accounts of the movement to be able to make sound generalizations about the larger movement. This is but one reason for the critical importance of John Giggie's Bloody Tuesday, which fills an important gap in the story of the freedom movement in the South. The intimacy and insights of its detail paint a vivid picture of a Black community's long struggle for full citizenship. The historiographical questions it addresses are the important ones. Its literary qualities are notable. It promises to be a crucial and compelling contribution to our knowledge of the movement." — Timothy B. Tyson, Author of The Blood of Emmett Till
"In attempts to racially desegregate Alabama cities such as Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, one is reminded of Malcom X's famous admonition, 'There is no such thing as a bloodless revolution.' John Giggie's Bloody Tuesday is an important fulcrum in the expanding civil rights history of the state, offering a compelling account of the horrifying brutality Tuscaloosa officials unleashed on its Black citizens in the face of their concerted effort to desegregate the city and the protracted efforts to belie the toll of state-sanctioned racial terrorism." — Derryn E. Moten, Alabama State University"A welcome resurrection of a forgotten episode in the sorrowful history of segregation." — Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal
05/01/2024
Giggie (history, Univ. of Alabama; After Redemption) spearheads oral history projects documenting segregation. His latest book examines what happened on June 9, 1964, in Tuscaloosa, AL. That's when police, KKK members, and deputized citizens violently attacked more than 600 people who were inside First African Baptist Church. The latter group was preparing to protest a new courthouse that featured segregated facilities. The Reverend Linton of Howard & Linton Barbershop, who offered shelter that day, now recounts the horrors he witnessed. He encouraged Giggie to tell the story; this book is the result. The courthouse eventually integrated, but the community remained traumatized and called that day Bloody Tuesday. It became one of the most violent scenes in the entire civil rights movement. But racist violence in Tuscaloosa wasn't limited to one day; it remained an ingrained institution, with Black people living under oppression and an imposed loss of opportunities, education, and life. VERDICT A powerful analysis and assemblage of oral histories from Black residents of Tuscaloosa, AL, demonstrating racism's lingering effect on people, generation after generation.—Jessica A. Bushore
Kirkus Reviews
2024-04-20
Searching history of an event long hidden in the annals of the Civil Rights Movement.
Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham: Alabama’s cities have long been commemorated as flashpoints in the Black struggle for equality. Tuscaloosa, writes University of Alabama professor Giggie, should be mentioned in the same breath as “an important battleground in the escalating conflict between Black activists and white segregationists in the South during the 1960s.” There, on June 9, 1964, a combined force of city police and KKK members attacked Black protestors, sending almost 100 to jail and badly injuring dozens more. One of the instigators was Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton, who drew on a force of an estimated 10,000 members and sympathizers in Alabama alone. Local police were squarely on the side of the segregationists, backed by the infamous Bull Connor in Birmingham. That the violent suppression in Tuscaloosa isn’t better known, writes Giggie, can be attributed to many factors. Other events crowded it off the front page, most survivors and onlookers kept silent out of fear, and “none of the white people responsible for the violence were compelled to explain themselves and be held accountable.” Justice slowly arced all the same: One KKK attack met with armed response from the Black community; a confrontation with actor Jack Palance (assumed to be Black due to his deeply tanned appearance) led to negative publicity for the city; Shelton lost his job; the chief of police eventually turned on the KKK; and, in time, the University of Alabama was desegregated, along with other city and state institutions. For all that, notes the author, the current right-wing move to suppress the history of civil rights means that it will be all the more difficult for the lessons of Tuscaloosa to be aired.
A welcome resurrection of a forgotten episode in the sorrowful history of segregation.
