All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw

The extraordinary autobiography of a black sharecropper from rural Alabama covering the period from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement is a classic work of literature and history.

Nate Shaw’s father was born under slavery. Nate Shaw was born into a bondage that was only a little gentler. At the age of nine, he was picking cotton for thirty-five cents an hour. At the age of forty-seven, he faced down a crowd of white deputies who had come to confiscate a neighbor’s crop. His defiance cost him twelve years in prison. This triumphant autobiography, assembled from the eighty-four-year-old Shaw’s oral reminiscences, is the plain-spoken story of an over-average man who witnessed wrenching changes in the lives of Southern black people – and whose unassuming courage helped bring those changes about.