"This is the story of how rural black people struggled against the oppressive sharecropping system of the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, white planters forged a world of terror and poverty for black workers, one that resembled the horrific deprivations of the African Congo under Belgium's King Leopold II."

"Delta planters did not cut off the heads and hands of their African American workers, but aided by local law enforcement and politicians, they engaged in peonage, murder, theft, and disenfranchisement, in order to retain a cheap and dependant labor force. This despotic reign included the massacre of hundreds of black men, women, and children in Elaine, Arkansas, following World War I, as well as myriad daily deprivations and abuses. Despite planter domination and a culture of intimidation and economic subjugation, black men and women fought back.

As individuals and through collective struggle, in conjunction with national organizations like the NAACP and local groups like the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, they demanded a just return for their crops and laid claim to a democratic vision of citizenship. Their efforts were amplified by the two world wars and the depression, which expanded the mobility and economic opportunities of black people and provoked federal involvement in the region."

"Nan Woodruff forces us to rethink the history of the black freedom struggle, so often considered a post-World War II phenomenon. American Congo shows how the freedom fighters of the 1960s would draw on this half-century tradition of protest in the Delta, thus expanding our standard notions of the civil rights movement, and illuminating a neglected but significant slice of the black American experience."--Jacket.