They Left Great Marks on Me

This is a brilliant, harrowing book that should be must-reading for anyone who might still be swayed by the worn-out moonlight-and-magnolias mythology of the “Old South.”

Drawing heavily on a wealth of remarkable first-person testimony, Williams chronicles the systematic brutalization of usually helpless Black women by white men. In particular, she makes all too clear that rape and other forms of sexual abuse were not just incidental but central to the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan in its campaign to assert power over freed people.

Although women couldn’t vote, the abuse of wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers was a… show more.

I found this book inspirational as I wrestled with my own research on violence against Black people after the Civil War. Williams deals with the legacy of violence and the wounds left physically and emotionally when people—in this case African Americans—receive little justice for crimes against them. She demonstrates time and again the need to bear witness and testify to these crimes so that there may be the possibility of an accounting. It took courage for African Americans to report crimes to the Freedmen’s Bureau, to testify in front of Congress about Klan violence, and to battle against lynching while… show more.