On July 2 and 3, 1917, a mob of white men and women looted and torched the homes and businesses of African Americans in the small industrial city of East St. Louis, Illinois. When the terror ended, the attackers had destroyed property worth millions of dollars, razed several neighborhoods, injured hundreds, and forced at least seven thousand black townspeople to seek refuge across the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri. By the official account, nine white men and thirty-nine black men, women, and children lost their lives.

In American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics, Charles Lumpkins reveals that the attacks were orchestrated by businessmen intent on preventing black residents from attaining political power and determined to clear the city of African Americans.

After the devastating riots, black East St. Louisans participated in a wide range of collective activities that eventually rebuilt their community and restored its political influence. Lumpkins situates the activities of the city’s black citizens in the context of the African American quest for freedom, citizenship, and equality. This study of African American political actions in East St. Louis ends in 1945, on the eve of the post–World War II civil rights movement that came to galvanize the nation in the 1950s and 1960s.

For all the talk about a new postracial America, the fundamental realities of American racism—and the problems facing black political movements—have not changed. Michael C. Dawson lays out a nuanced analysis of the persistence of racial inequality and structural disadvantages, and the ways that whites and blacks continue to see the same problems—the disastrous response to Katrina being a prime example—through completely different, race-inflected lenses. In fact, argues Dawson, the new era heralded by Barack Obama’s election is more racially complicated, as the widening class gap among African Americans and the hot-button issue of immigration have the potential to create new fissures for conservative and race-based exploitation. Through a thoughtful analysis of the rise of the Tea Party and the largely successful “blackening” of President Obama, Dawson ultimately argues that black politics remains weak—and that achieving the dream of racial and economic equality will require the sort of coalition-building and reaching across racial divides that have always marked successful political movements.

Polemical but astute, passionate but pragmatic, Not in Our Lifetimes forces us to rethink easy assumptions about racial progress—and begin the hard work of creating real, lasting change.