49 pages • 1 hour read
Henry Louis Gates Jr.Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Essay Topics
What were the main goals of the Reconstruction era? What goals did the country achieve? Which goals remain unfulfilled today?
Why, and by what means, did the South erode Reconstruction gains during Redemption and Jim Crow?
How were Black people depicted in mass-produced images during Redemption and Jim Crow? What impact did this depiction have on Black and white people?
Discuss Frederick Douglass’s self-portraits. How did he present himself? What were his goals with this type of self-representation?
Discuss the concept of the New Negro in relation to the Old Negro. What gave rise to the New Negro? How did the New depart from the Old? And what was the relationship between the two?
Gates addresses successive versions of the New Negro. When and why did these newer New Negroes emerge? What can their emergence tell us about society?
Discuss W. E. B. Du Bois’s Exhibit of American Negroes at the Paris Exposition of 1900. How did he fund the exhibit? What types of images did he select and why?
What is the Harlem Renaissance? What were its goals and achievements? How does it relate to the idea of the New Negro?
How does Gates connect history to more recent times? What parallels does he see between Reconstruction and Obama’s presidency?
What are sharecropping and convict leasing? Why does Gates call them new forms of enslavement? How do they relate to the mass incarceration of Black men?
