November 2005

Review by Brian Huseby

When did the civil rights movement begin? With the Montgomery bus boycott and the lunch counter sit-ins of the 1950s?

In Emancipation Betrayed, Evergreen graduate Paul Ortiz convincingly demonstrates that the struggle for black liberation began long before the 1950s. Ortiz takes us from the fights of slaves for freedom in the antebellum U.S. to the struggle for black voting rights in Florida, culminating in the presidential election of 1920. Along the way, Ortiz gives numerous examples of blacks using armed self-defense to protect themselves from white attacks, rather than . . .