SDARJ Book & Film Discussion Series

African Americans transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865 were besieged by a campaign of White supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond, but for too long their lived experiences have been sidelined. I Saw Death Coming is a breakthrough history of the Reconstruction period, transporting readers into the daily existence of formerly enslaved people. Williams deploys cutting-edge scholarship on trauma to consider how the effects of nighttime raids and Ku Klux Klan strikes would linger for decades — indeed, generations — to come.