The War at Home: Police Brutality Reader (2025)

$ 45.00

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In January 1900, anti-lynching pioneer Ida B. Wells wrote the following: “Although lynchings have steadily increased in number and barbarity during the last twenty years, there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter.”[1] Wells, who was writing regarding the lynching of black men in America without right to trial by jury, ignited an international effort to collect and disseminate information on lynchings, and to produce media reports that would balance the dominant press’ reports which sought to condemn black men as the cause of their own vicious murder. The 2014 killing of Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, ignited a national dialogue regarding the use of deadly force and illuminated the many highly militarized police presence in the United States before an international stage.

[1] Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Lynch Law in America,” The Arena 23.1 (January 1900): 15-24.

Jesse Thornton has just returned from WWII to face a harsh reality — he will never taste the freedom he risked his life for abroad. America is the same — mob lynchings, Jim Crow, separate but unequal, and racial terrorism. Based on the true story of Jesse Thornton, as investigated by the Civil Rights & Restorative Justice Project in Boston, MA — the story tells of a black veteran, chicken farm manager who was killed by a white police officer for refusing to call him “Mr.” “The War at Home” is a story of black soldiers who fought for freedoms they would never know, the untold sacrifices of black women who were not honored as Rosie the Riveter’s, and a country grasping for answers to the: what is democracy in America for the Negro? This is a story about how America lost World War II.