Drawing on student publications of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as interviews with student activists, former administrators, and faculty, Williamson discusses the emergence of Black Power ideology, what constituted "blackness," and notions of self-advancement versus racial solidarity. Promoting an understanding of the role of black youth in protest movements, Black Power on Campus is an important contribution to the literature on African American liberation movements and the reform of American higher education.
Ian Rocksborough-Smith’s meticulous research and adept storytelling provide the first in-depth look at how these committed individuals leveraged Chicago’s black public history. Their goal: to engage with the struggle for racial equality. Rocksborough-Smith shows teachers working to advance curriculum reform in public schools, while well-known activists Margaret and Charles Burroughs pushed for greater recognition of black history by founding the DuSable Museum of African American History. Organizations like the Afro-American Heritage Association, meanwhile, used black public history work to connect radical politics and nationalism. Together, these people and their projects advanced important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labor that paralleled the shifting terrain of mid-twentieth-century civil rights.
A deep dive into mid-century African American newspapers, exploring how Black pulp fiction reassembled genre formulas in the service of racial justice
In recent years, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Marvel’s Black Panther, and HBO’s Watchmen have been lauded for the innovative ways they repurpose genre conventions to criticize white supremacy, celebrate Black resistance, and imagine a more racially just world—important progressive messages widely spread precisely because they are packaged in popular genres. But it turns out, such generic retooling for antiracist purposes is nothing new.
As Brooks E. Hefner’s Black Pulp shows, this tradition of antiracist genre revision begins even earlier than recent studies of Black superhero comics of the 1960s have revealed. Hefner traces it back to a phenomenon that began in the 1920s, to serialized (and sometimes syndicated) genre stories written by Black authors in Black newspapers with large circulations among middle- and working-class Black readers. From the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American, Hefner recovers a rich archive of African American genre fiction from the 1920s through the mid-1950s—spanning everything from romance, hero-adventure, and crime stories to westerns and science fiction. Reading these stories, Hefner explores how their authors deployed, critiqued, and reassembled genre formulas—and the pleasures they offer to readers—in the service of racial justice: to criticize Jim Crow segregation, racial capitalism, and the sexual exploitation of Black women; to imagine successful interracial romance and collective sociopolitical progress; and to cheer Black agency, even retributive violence in the face of white supremacy.
These popular stories differ significantly from contemporaneous, now-canonized African American protest novels that tend to represent Jim Crow America as a deterministic machine and its Black inhabitants as doomed victims. Widely consumed but since forgotten, these genre stories—and Hefner’s incisive analysis of them—offer a more vibrant understanding of African American literary history.
The contributors consider representations of the black queer body, black queer literature, the pedagogical implications of black queer studies, and the ways that gender and sexuality have been glossed over in black studies and race and class marginalized in queer studies. Whether exploring the closet as a racially loaded metaphor, arguing for the inclusion of diaspora studies in black queer studies, considering how the black lesbian voice that was so expressive in the 1970s and 1980s is all but inaudible today, or investigating how the social sciences have solidified racial and sexual exclusionary practices, these insightful essays signal an important and necessary expansion of queer studies.
Contributors. Bryant K. Alexander, Devon Carbado, Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Keith Clark, Cathy Cohen, Roderick A. Ferguson, Jewelle Gomez, Phillip Brian Harper, Mae G. Henderson, Sharon P. Holland, E. Patrick Johnson, Kara Keeling, Dwight A. McBride, Charles I. Nero, Marlon B. Ross, Rinaldo Walcott, Maurice O. Wallace
Distinctive, Powerful, Transformational
This book collects the presentations of twelve leading Africana scholars who participated in the groundbreaking #Black Scholars Matter virtual symposium held in August 2020 that was organized by the Society of Biblical Literature's Black Scholars Matter Task Force in coordination with the SBL’s Committee on Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession. These scholars share their perspectives on biblical studies and their experiences in the discipline on a range of topics, including blatant and subtle forms of bias and racism; mentoring; lessons of struggle, sacrifice, and lack of support; reflections on the obstacles of national tragedies, geographical locations, and academic disciplines; and the challenges of creating a more welcoming environment for the next generation of Black biblical scholars. Eight additional contributors and stakeholders that have administrative and decision-making responsibilities within theological and other settings address the need for institutional and personal accountability. Contributors include Efraín Agosto, Cheryl B. Anderson, Randall C. Bailey, Gay L. Byron, Ronald Charles, Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, Steed Vernyl Davidson, Sharon Watson Fluker, John F. Kutsko, Vanessa Lovelace, Madipoane Masenya (Ngwan'a Mphahlele), Raj Nadella, Hugh R. Page Jr., Adele Reinhartz, Kimberly D. Russaw, Abraham Smith, Shively T. J. Smith, Mai-Anh Le Tran, Renita J. Weems, and Vincent L. Wimbush.
From questioning forces that have constrained sexual choices to examining how Blacks have forged healthy sexual identities in an oppressive environment, Black Sexualities acknowledges the diversity of the Black experience and the shared legacy of racism. Contributors seek resolution to Blacks' understanding of their lives as sexual beings through stories of empowerment, healing, self-awareness, victories, and other historic and contemporary life-course panoramas and provide practical information to foster more culturally relative research, tolerance, and acceptance.
An insightful exploration of the impact of urban change on Black culture, identity, and language
Across the United States, cities are changing. Gentrification is transforming urban landscapes, often pushing local Black populations to the margins. As a result, communities with rich histories and strong identities grapple with essential questions. What does it mean to be from a place in flux? What does it mean to be a specific kind of person from that place? What does gentrification mean for the fabric of a community?
In The Black Side of the River, sociolinguist Jessi Grieser draws on ten years of interviews with dozens of residents of Anacostia, a historically Black neighborhood in Washington, DC, to explore these ideas through the lens of language use. Grieser finds that residents use certain speech features to create connections among racial, place, and class identities; reject negative characterizations of place from those outside the community; and negotiate ideas of belonging. In a neighborhood undergoing substantial class gentrification while remaining decisively Black, Grieser finds that Anacostians use language to assert a positive, hopeful place identity that is inextricably intertwined with their racial one.
Grieser’s work is a call to center Black lived experiences in urban research, confront the racial effects of urban change, and preserve the rich culture and community in historic Black neighborhoods, in Washington, DC, and beyond.
Often seen as a political sop to the racial fears of white voters, aggressive policing and draconian sentencing for illegal drug possession and related crimes have led to the imprisonment of millions of African Americans—far in excess of their representation in the population as a whole. Michael Javen Fortner shows in this eye-opening account that these punitive policies also enjoyed the support of many working-class and middle-class blacks, who were angry about decline and disorder in their communities. Black Silent Majority uncovers the role African Americans played in creating today’s system of mass incarceration.
Current anti-drug policies are based on a set of controversial laws first adopted in New York in the early 1970s and championed by the state’s Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller. Fortner traces how many blacks in New York came to believe that the rehabilitation-focused liberal policies of the 1960s had failed. Faced with economic malaise and rising rates of addiction and crime, they blamed addicts and pushers. By 1973, the outcry from grassroots activists and civic leaders in Harlem calling for drastic measures presented Rockefeller with a welcome opportunity to crack down on crime and boost his political career. New York became the first state to mandate long prison sentences for selling or possessing narcotics.
Black Silent Majority lays bare the tangled roots of a pernicious system. America’s drug policies, while in part a manifestation of the conservative movement, are also a product of black America’s confrontation with crime and chaos in its own neighborhoods.
Blacks under Spanish rule in Florida lived in a more complex and international world that linked the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe with a powerful and diverse Indian hinterland. Jane Landers’s pioneering study of people of the African diaspora under Spain’s colonial rule rewrites Florida history and enriches our understanding of the powerful links between race relations and cultural custom.
As Landers shows, Spanish Florida was a sanctuary to Blacks fleeing enslavement on plantations. Castilian law, meanwhile, offered many avenues out of slavery. In St. Augustine and elsewhere, society accepted European-African unions, with families developing community connections through marriage, concubinage, and godparents. Assisted by Spanish traditions and ever-present geopolitical threats, people of African descent leveraged linguistic, military, diplomatic, and artisanal skills into citizenship and property rights. Landers details how Blacks became homesteaders, property owners, and entrepreneurs, and in the process enjoyed greater legal and social protection than in the two hundred years of Anglo history that followed.
In the pre-Civil War and Civil War periods the Illinois black code deprived blacks of suffrage and court rights, and the Illinois Free Schools Act kept most black children out of public schooling. But, as McCaul documents, they did not sit idly by. They applied the concepts of “bargaining power” (rewarding, punishing, and dialectical) and the American ideal of “community” to participate in winning two major victories during this era.
By the use of dialectical power, exerted mainly via John Jones’ tract, The Black Laws of Illinois, they helped secure the repeal of the state’s black code; by means of punishing power, mainly through boycotts and ‘‘invasions,’’ they exerted pressures that brought a cancellation of the Chicago public school policy of racial segregation.
McCaul makes clear that the blacks’ struggle for school rights is but one of a number of such struggles waged by disadvantaged groups (women, senior citizens, ethnics, and immigrants). He postulates a “stage’’ pattern for the history of the black struggle—a pattern of efforts by federal and state courts to change laws and constitutions, followed by efforts to entice, force, or persuade local authorities to comply with the laws and constitutional articles and with the decrees of the courts.
Uniting the latest scholarship on race, labor, and civil rights, The Black Worker aims to establish the richness of the African American working-class experience, and the indisputable role of black workers in shaping the politics and history of labor and race in the United States.
To capture the complexity of African Americans’ experiences in the workplace, this reader examines workers engaged in a wide array of jobs, including sharecropping, coal mining, domestic service, longshoring, automobile manufacturing, tobacco processing, railroading, prostitution, lumbering, and municipal employment. The essays’ subjects include black migration, strikebreaking, black conservatism, gender, and the multiple forms of employment discrimination in the South and North. Other contributions deal explicitly with state policy and black workers during the transition from slavery to freedom, World Wars I and II, and the 1960s.
The variety of challenges made by these workers, both quiet and overt, served as clear reminders to the supporters of white supremacy that, despite their best efforts through violence, fraud, and the law, as long as they insisted on racial inequality, the “race question” would never be fully resolved.
Contributors: Eric Arnesen, Beth Tompkins Bates, Cynthia M. Blair, Tera W. Hunter, William Powell Jones, Brian Kelly, Robert Korstad, Nelson Lichtenstein, Joseph A. McCartin, Steven A. Reich, Leslie A. Schwalm, Nan Elizabeth Woodruff
Horace Huntley and David Montgomery curate a collection of annotated oral interviews of black workers who served on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama. As the interviewees recount their struggles against discrimination, they show how collective action--whether through unions, the Movement, or networks of workplace activists--sought to gain access to better jobs, municipal services, housing, and less restrictive voter registration.
Powerful and honest, Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham draws on work by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to offer readers vivid eyewitness accounts of American history in the making.
Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It? takes readers on a cultural trip through Chicago’s literary history. Editor Richard R. Guzman compiles the first comprehensive collection of the works of Chicago’s black writers from 1861 to the present day. The anthology, which includes works from newspaper writing, poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and historical and social commentary, seeks not only to represent a broad range of writings but also to focus tightly on such themes as hope and despair, racism and equality, spirituality and religion. More than sixty writers, from the anonymous “J. W. M. (Colored)” to Ken Green, unfold a story that reflects the literary periods in black American history. Each author’s selection is preceded by a biographical and a bibliographical introduction. Readers interested in Chicago, race relations, and literature, as well as scholars of history, sociology, urban studies, and cultural studies, will find the collection invaluable.
Race relations in twenty-first-century America will not be just a black-and-white issue. The 2000 census revealed that Hispanics already slightly outnumber African Americans as the largest ethnic group, while together Blacks and Hispanics constitute the majority population in the five largest U.S. cities. Given these facts, black-brown relations could be a more significant racial issue in the decades to come than relations between minority groups and Whites.
Offering some of the first in-depth analyses of how African Americans and Hispanics perceive and interact with each other, this pathfinding study looks at black-brown relations in Houston, Texas, one of the largest U.S. cities with a majority ethnic population and one in which Hispanics outnumber African Americans. Drawing on the results of several sociological studies, the authors focus on four key issues: how each group forms and maintains stereotypes of the other, areas in which the two groups conflict and disagree, the crucial role of women in shaping their communities' racial attitudes, and areas in which Hispanics and African Americans agree and can cooperate to achieve greater political power and social justice.
Houston is the largest city in the Gulf South, a region sometimes referred to as the “black belt” because of its sizeable African American population. Yet, over the last thirty years, Latinos have become the largest ethnic minority in Houston, which is surpassed only by Los Angeles and New York in the number of Latino residents. Examining the history and effects of this phenomenon, Black-Brown Solidarity describes the outcomes of unexpected coalitions that have formed between the rapidly growing Latino populations and the long-held black enclaves in the region.
Together, minority residents have put the spotlight on prominent Old South issues such as racial profiling and police brutality. Expressions of solidarity, John D. Márquez argues, have manifested themselves in expressive forms such as hip-hop music, youth gang cultural traits, and the storytelling of ordinary residents in working-class communities. Contrary to a growing discourse regarding black-brown conflict across the United States, the blurring of racial boundaries reflects broader arguments regarding hybrid cultures that unsettle the orders established by centuries-old colonial formations. Accentuating what the author defines as a racial state of expendability—the lynchpin of vigilante violence and police brutality—the new hybridization has resulted in shared wariness of a linked fate. Black-Brown Solidarity also explores the ways in which the significance of African American history in the South has influenced the structures through which Latinos have endured and responded to expendability. Mining data from historical archives, oral histories, legal documents, popular media, and other sources, this work is a major contribution to urban studies, ethnic studies, and critical race theory.
A Black-Jewish dialogue lifts a veil on these groups’ unspoken history, shedding light on the challenges and promises facing American democracy from its inception to the present
In this uniquely structured conversational work, two scholars—one of African American politics and religion, and one of contemporary American Jewish culture—explore a mystery: Why aren't Blacks and Jews presently united in their efforts to combat white supremacy? As alt-right rhetoric becomes increasingly normalized in public life, the time seems right for these one-time allies to rekindle the fires of the civil rights movement.
Blacks and Jews in America investigates why these two groups do not presently see each other as sharing a common enemy, let alone a political alliance. Authors Terrence L. Johnson and Jacques Berlinerblau consider a number of angles, including the disintegration of the “Grand Alliance” between Blacks and Jews during the civil rights era, the perspective of Black and Jewish millennials, the debate over Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Ultimately, this book shows how the deep roots of the Black-Jewish relationship began long before the mid-twentieth century, changing a narrative dominated by the Grand Alliance and its subsequent fracturing. By engaging this history from our country’s origins to its present moment, this dialogue models the honest and searching conversation needed for Blacks and Jews to forge a new understanding.
The radical black left that played a crucial role in twentieth-century struggles for equality and justice has largely disappeared. Michael Dawson investigates the causes and consequences of the decline of black radicalism as a force in American politics and argues that the conventional left has failed to take race sufficiently seriously as a historical force in reshaping American institutions, politics, and civil society.
African Americans have been in the vanguard of progressive social movements throughout American history, but they have been written out of many histories of social liberalism. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the Black Power movement, Dawson examines successive failures of socialists and Marxists to enlist sympathetic blacks, and white leftists’ refusal to fight for the cause of racial equality. Angered by the often outright hostility of the Socialist Party and similar social democratic organizations, black leftists separated themselves from these groups and either turned to the hard left or stayed independent. A generation later, the same phenomenon helped fueled the Black Power movement’s turn toward a variety of black nationalist, Maoist, and other radical political groups.
The 2008 election of Barack Obama notwithstanding, many African Americans still believe they will not realize the fruits of American prosperity any time soon. This pervasive discontent, Dawson suggests, must be mobilized within the black community into active opposition to the social and economic status quo. Black politics needs to find its way back to its radical roots as a vital component of new American progressive movements.
While black men and women have played important roles in Tennessee’s growth and history; slavery, caste, and segregation have forced them to live apart and to create a separate history. In this historical analysis, Lester Lamon offers an understanding of the history of black Tennesseans, recognizing that they have been both a part of and apart from the developments affecting the dominant white population of the state. The different economic priorities, political loyalties, and racial populations evident in the three “Grand Divisions” of the state have created superficial differences in the historical experiences of blacks in the three regions. Intrastate competition has reinforced these sectional differences, but a common factor found in the black experience has been a racial “givenness”—the idea that blacks should not expect equality or free association with whites. Tennessee’s black history is not one of a surrender to racial pressure, but, instead, is a story of courage, sacrifice, frustration, and dreams of freedom, equality, and respect for human dignity.
Blacks in Tennessee provides a necessary and culturally enriching addition to the traditional history of the state.
Martin R. Delany’s Blake (1859, 1861–1862) is one of the most important African American—and indeed American—works of fiction of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of Henry Blake’s escape from a southern plantation and his subsequent travels across the United States, into Canada, and to Africa and Cuba. His mission is to unite the black populations of the American Atlantic regions, both free and slave, in the struggle for freedom, whether through insurrection or through emigration and the creation of an independent black state. Blake is a rhetorical masterpiece, all the more strange and mysterious for remaining incomplete, breaking off before its final scene.
This edition of Blake, prepared by textual scholar Jerome McGann, offers the first correct printing of the work in book form. It establishes an accurate text, supplies contextual notes and commentaries, and presents an authoritative account of the work’s composition and publication history. In a lively introduction, McGann argues that Delany employs the resources of fiction to develop a critical account of the interconnected structure of racist power as it operated throughout the American Atlantic. He likens Blake to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, in its willful determination to transform a living and terrible present.
Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition will be used in undergraduate and graduate classes on the history of African American fiction, on the history of the American novel, and on black cultural studies. General readers will welcome as well the first reliable edition of Delany’s fiction.
As one of the first African American vocalists to be recorded, Bessie Smith is a prominent figure in American popular culture and African American history. Michelle R. Scott uses Smith's life as a lens to investigate broad issues in history, including industrialization, Southern rural to urban migration, black community development in the post-emancipation era, and black working-class gender conventions.
Arguing that the rise of blues culture and the success of female blues artists like Bessie Smith are connected to the rapid migration and industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Scott focuses her analysis on Chattanooga, Tennessee, the large industrial and transportation center where Smith was born. This study explores how the expansion of the Southern railroads and the development of iron foundries, steel mills, and sawmills created vast employment opportunities in the postbellum era. Chronicling the growth and development of the African American Chattanooga community, Scott examines the Smith family's migration to Chattanooga and the popular music of black Chattanooga during the first decade of the twentieth century, and culminates by delving into Smith's early years on the vaudeville circuit.
"BookMarks is a moving and revelatory memoir... a work of fiercely intelligent scholarship." - Susan Larson,
"Erudite and emotional in turns, [BookMarks] is full of truths that appeal to the head and the heart." - Charlotte News Observer"
What are you reading? What books have been important to you? Whether you are interviewing for a job, chatting with a friend or colleague, or making small talk, these questions arise almost unfailingly. Some of us have stock responses, which may or may not be a fiction of our own making. Others gauge their answers according to who is asking the question. Either way, the replies that we give are thoughtfully crafted to suggest the intelligence, worldliness, political agenda, or good humor that we are hoping to convey. We form our answers carefully because we know that our responses say a lot.
But what exactly do our answers say? In BookMarks, Karla FC Holloway explores the public side of reading, and specifically how books and booklists form a public image of African Americans. Revealing her own love of books and her quirky passion for their locations in libraries and on bookshelves, Holloway reflects on the ways that her parents guided her reading when she was young and her bittersweet memories of reading to her children. She takes us on a personal and candid journey that considers the histories of reading in children’s rooms, prison libraries, and “Negro” libraries of the early twentieth century, and that finally reveals how her identity as a scholar, a parent, and an African American woman has been subject to judgments that public cultures make about race and our habits of reading.
Holloway is the first to call our attention to a remarkable trend of many prominent African American writers—including Maya Angelou, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates, Malcolm X, and Zora Neale Hurston. Their autobiographies and memoirs are consistently marked with booklists—records of their own habits of reading. She examines these lists, along with the trends of selection in Oprah Winfrey’s popular book club, raising the questions: What does it mean for prominent African Americans to associate themselves with European learning and culture? How do books by black authors fare in the inevitable hierarchy of a booklist?
BookMarks provides a unique window into the ways that African Americans negotiate between black and white cultures. This compelling rumination on reading is a book that everyone should add to their personal collections and proudly carry “cover out.”
Winner of the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History
Winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize
Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize
Winner of the Mary Nickliss Prize
Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize
Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock, but it does not end there. Bound in Wedlock is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Drawing from plantation records, legal documents, and personal family papers, it reveals the many creative ways enslaved couples found to upend white Christian ideas of marriage.
“A remarkable book… Hunter has harvested stories of human resilience from the cruelest of soils… An impeccably crafted testament to the African-Americans whose ingenuity, steadfast love and hard-nosed determination protected black family life under the most trying of circumstances.”
—Wall Street Journal
“In this brilliantly researched book, Hunter examines the experiences of slave marriages as well as the marriages of free blacks.”
—Vibe
“A groundbreaking history… Illuminates the complex and flexible character of black intimacy and kinship and the precariousness of marriage in the context of racial and economic inequality. It is a brilliant book.”
—Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother
Brave black women have played important roles in American history. Before the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, black women bore the bonds of slavery with courage and strength. Since Emancipation, black women have supported schools, churches, and civic organizations, entered many professions, and helped to build strong communities. This book dramatizes their impressive story and celebrates their achievements.
Writing especially for students in grades four through eight, Ruthe Winegarten and Sharon Kahn trace the history of black women from slavery until today. Their story includes many heroines, from Emily Morgan, "the Yellow Rose of Texas," to pioneer aviator Bessie Coleman, astronaut Mae Jemison, opera singer Barbara Conrad, actresses Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen, and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, whose life story forms the final chapter.
In addition to these famous black women, the book also profiles teachers, businesswomen, civil rights leaders, community activists, doctors, nurses, athletes, musicians, artists, and political leaders. Adapted from the award-winning Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph, it will be fascinating reading for children and their parents and grandparents, teachers, and librarians.
Bricks Without Straw is Tourgée’s fictionalized account of how Reconstruction was sabotaged. It is a chilling picture of violence against African Americans condoned, civil rights abrogated, constitutional amendments subverted, and electoral fraud institutionalized. Its plot revolves around a group of North Carolina freedpeople who strive to build new lives for themselves by buying land, marketing their own crops, setting up a church and school, and voting for politicians sympathetic to their interests, until Klan terrorism and the ascendancy of a white supremacist government reduce them to neo-slavery. This edition of Bricks Without Straw is enhanced by Carolyn L. Karcher’s introduction, which sets the novel in historical context and provides an overview of Albion W. Tourgée’s career, a chronology of the significant events of both the Reconstruction era and Tourgée’s life, and explanatory notes identifying actual events fictionalized in the novel.
Bright Radical Star traces the evolution of frontier Iowa from arguably the most racist free state in the antebellum Union to one of its most outspokenly egalitarian, linking these midwesterners' extraordinary collective behavior with the psychology and sociology of race relations. Diverse personalities from a variety of political cultures—Yankees and New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians and Ohioans, Southerners from Virginia and Maryland and North Carolina, immigrant Irish, Germans, Scandinavians—illuminate this saga, which begins in 1833 with Iowa officially opened to settlement, and continues through 1880, the end of the pioneer era.
Within this half-century, the number of Iowans acknowledging the justice of black civil equality rose dramatically from a handful of obscure village evangelicals to a demonstrated majority of the Hawkeye State's political elite and electorate. How this came about is explained for the first time by Robert Dykstra, whose narrative reflects the latest precepts and methods of social, legal, constitutional, and political history.
Based largely on an exhaustive use of local resources, the book also offers cutting-edge quantitative analysis of Iowa's three great equal rights referendums, one held just before the war, one just after, and one at the close of Reconstruction. The book will appeal to American historians, especially to historians of the frontier, the Civil War era, and African-American history; sociologists and others interested in historical perspectives on race relations in America will find it both stimulating and useful.
Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council gives a comprehensive account of the National Afro-American Council, the first truly nationwide U.S. civil rights organization, which existed from 1898 to 1908. Based on exhaustive research, the volume chronicles the Council’s achievements and its annual meetings and provides portraits of its key leaders.
Led by four of the most notable African American leaders of the time—journalist T. Thomas Fortune, Bishop Alexander Walters, educator Booker T. Washington, and Congressman George Henry White—the Council persevered for a decade despite structural flaws and external pressures that eventually led to its demise in 1908.
Author Benjamin R. Justesen provides historical context for the Council’s development during an era of unprecedented growth in African American organizations. Justesen establishes the National Afro-American Council as the earliest national arena for discussions of critical social and political issues affecting African Americans and the single most important united voice lobbying for protection of the nation’s largest minority. In a period marked by racial segregation, widespread disfranchisement, and lynching violence, the nonpartisan council helped establish two more enduring successor organizations, providing core leadership for both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League.
Broken Brotherhood traces the history of the Council and the complicated relationships among key leaders from its creation in Rochester in 1898 to its last gathering in Baltimore in 1907, drawing on both private correspondence and contemporary journalism to create a balanced historical portrait. Enhanced by thirteen illustrations, the volume also provides intriguing details about the ten national gatherings, describes the Council’s unsuccessful attempt to challenge disfranchisement before the U.S. Supreme Court, and sheds light on the gradual breakdown of Republican solidarity among African American leaders in the first decade of the twentieth century.
In an account based on extensive archival research, including work in the Liberian National Archives, Sundiata explains how Garvey’s plan collapsed when faced with opposition from the Liberian elite, opposition that belied his vision of a unified Black World. In 1930 the League of Nations investigated labor conditions and, damningly, the United States, land of lynching and Jim Crow, accused Liberia of promoting “conditions analogous to slavery.” Subsequently various plans were put forward for a League Mandate or an American administration to put down slavery and “modernize” the country. Threatened with a loss of its independence, the Liberian government turned to its “brothers beyond the sea” for support. A varied group of white and black anti-imperialists, among them W. E. B. Du Bois, took up the country’s cause. In revealing the struggle of conscience that bedeviled many in the black world in the past, Sundiata casts light on a human rights predicament which, he points out, continues in twenty-first-century African nations as disparate as Sudan, Mauritania, and the Ivory Coast.
Contributors: Jason P. Chambers, Marcia Chatelain, Will Cooley, Robert Howard, Christopher Robert Reed, Myiti Sengstacke Rice, Clovis E. Semmes, Juliet E. K. Walker, and Robert E. Weems Jr.
"James F. Wilson uncovers fascinating new material on the Harlem Renaissance, shedding light on the oft-forgotten gay and lesbian contributions to the era's creativity and Civil Rights. Extremely well researched, compellingly written, and highly informative."
---David Krasner, author of A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927
Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies shines the spotlight on historically neglected plays and performances that challenged early twentieth-century notions of the stratification of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. On Broadway stages, in Harlem nightclubs and dance halls, and within private homes sponsoring rent parties, African American performers of the 1920s and early 1930s teased the limits of white middle-class morality. Blues-singing lesbians, popularly known as "bulldaggers," performed bawdy songs; cross-dressing men vied for the top prizes in lavish drag balls; and black and white women flaunted their sexuality in scandalous melodramas and musical revues. Race leaders, preachers, and theater critics spoke out against these performances that threatened to undermine social and political progress, but to no avail: mainstream audiences could not get enough of the riotous entertainment.
Many of the plays and performances explored here, central to the cultural debates of their time, had been previously overlooked by theater historians. Among the performances discussed are David Belasco's controversial production of Edward Sheldon and Charles MacArthur's Lulu Belle (1926), with its raucous, libidinous view of Harlem. The title character, as performed by a white woman in blackface, became a symbol of defiance for the gay subculture and was simultaneously held up as a symbol of supposedly immoral black women. African Americans Florence Mills and Ethel Waters, two of the most famous performers of the 1920s, countered the Lulu Belle stereotype in written statements and through parody, thereby reflecting the powerful effect this fictional character had on the popular imagination.
Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies is based on historical archival research including readings of eyewitness accounts, newspaper reports, songs, and playscripts. Employing a cultural studies framework that incorporates queer and critical race theory, it argues against the widely held belief that the stereotypical forms of black, lesbian, and gay show business of the 1920s prohibited the emergence of distinctive new voices. Specialists in American studies, performance studies, African American studies, and gay and lesbian studies will find the book appealing, as will general readers interested in the vivid personalities and performances of the singers and actors introduced in the book.
James F. Wilson is Professor of English and Theatre at LaGuardia Community College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Like many black disc jockeys of his day, Montague played a role in his community beyond simply spreading the music of James Brown, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and other prominent artists. Montague served as an unofficial spokesman for his black listeners, reflecting their beliefs and acting as a sounding board for their concerns.
Montague was based in Los Angeles in 1965 when the Watts rioters seized on his incendiary slogan, turning the shout of musical appreciation into a rallying cry for racial violence. In Burn, Baby! BURN! Montague recalls these tumultuous times, including the personal struggle he faced over whether to remain true to his listeners or bend to political pressure and stop shouting his suddenly controversial slogan.
Since the mid-1950s Montague had also expressed his passion for African American culture by becoming a zealous collector of artifacts of black history. He has built a monumental collection, taking time out from his collecting to become only the second African American to build his own radio station literally from the ground up.
A compelling account of a rich and varied life, Burn, Baby! BURN! gives an insider's view of half a century of black history, told with on-the-air zest by the DJ/historian who was there to see it unfold.
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