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How the cotton industry restricted sharecroppers’ access to nutritious food, a public health crisis that spurred a wave of influential and inspiring activism.

Pellagra, a nutritional deficiency disease, was once widespread in the southern United States, where it was concentrated in areas of high-yield cotton production. This wasn’t a coincidence. In the early twentieth century, pellagra was ubiquitous in regions where monocultural cotton production foreclosed cotton workers’ access to nutritious foods. Planters paid sharecroppers and millworkers in their own currency—tokens, coins, and other substitutes for money—and sold them unhealthy and overpriced food in company-owned stores. Employers kept workers poor through wage theft, predatory credit systems, and labor coercion, all of which maintained a system of food scarcity.

In Malady of Monoculture, Dana Landress reveals how the unrelenting demands of the cotton economy during the Jim Crow South created a public health crisis in the form of pellagra. She carefully details a “closed food system” that restricted workers’ diets through employer-generated currency; the use of food as an instrument of labor compulsion; manufactured debt structures; alliances between government and private industry; and restrictions on foraging, gardening, and land use. Though official public health programs framed pellagra in personal and behavioral terms, those afflicted with the illness actively challenged the closed food system through union organizing, community health care, freedom farms, and collective action lawsuits. Excavating the landmark contributions of Black nutritionists to the field of public health, Landress spotlights the many constituencies that worked tirelessly to combat hunger and foregrounds their creativity, resilience, and determination.

This volume presents the first visual history of the people and organizations that led the fight for change during the civil rights era in Los Angeles.

During a 1963 speech to a crowd of nearly forty thousand at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the question of how Angelenos could contribute to the civil rights movement: “The most important thing that you can do is to set Los Angeles free, because you have segregation and discrimination here, and police brutality.”

Marching West illuminates the dynamic history of civil rights activism in Los Angeles and explores how the medium of photography both witnessed and advanced the fight for Black equality. Over one hundred images, some of which have never been previously published, reveal connections between the local and national movements and document the actions of Western coalitions, religious leaders, Hollywood stars, and concerned citizens. Drawn from the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), the Getty Research Institute, and other Southern California collections—including prints by Harry Adams, Howard Bingham, Charles Brittin, Joe Flowers, Vera Jackson, and Charles Williams—this unprecedented volume presents less familiar but essential stories about American progress toward social justice.

Maria Baldwin (1856–1922) held a special place in the racially divided society of her time, as a highly respected educator at a largely white New England school and an activist who carried on the radical spirit of the Boston area's internationally renowned abolitionists from a generation earlier.

African American sociologist Adelaide Cromwell called Baldwin “the lone symbol of Negro progress in education in the greater Boston area” during her lifetime. Baldwin used her respectable position to fight alongside more radical activists like William Monroe Trotter for full citizenship for fellow members of the black community. And, in her professional and personal life, she negotiated and challenged dominant white ideas about black womanhood. In Maria Baldwin's Worlds, Kathleen Weiler reveals both Baldwin's victories and what fellow activist W. E. B. Du Bois called her “quiet courage” in everyday life, in the context of the wider black freedom struggle in New England.

An interdisciplinary excavation of colonoware as a material archive of African, Indigenous, and colonial entanglements across the early American South.

In Materializing Colonial Identities in Clay, Jon Bernard Marcoux, Corey A. H. Sattes, and contributors examine colonoware to explore the active roles that African Americans and Indigenous people played in constructing southern colonial culture and part of their shared history with Europeans.

Colonoware was most likely produced by African and Indigenous potters and used by all colonial groups for cooking, serving, and storing food. It formed the foundation of colonial foodways in many settlements across the southeastern United States. Even so, compared with other ceramics from this period, less has been understood about its production and use because of the lack of documentation. This collection of essays fills this gap with valuable, recent archaeological data from which much may be surmised about the interaction among Europeans, Indigenous, and Africans, especially within the contexts of the African and Indigenous slave trade and plantation systems.

The chapters represent the full range of colonoware research: from the beginning to the end of its production, from urban to rural contexts, and from its intraregional variation in the Lowcountry to the broad patterns of colonialism across the early American Southeast. The book summarizes current approaches in colonoware research and how these may bridge the gaps between broader colonial American studies, Indigenous studies, and African Diaspora studies.

A concluding discussion contextualizes the chapters through the perspectives of intersectionality and Black feminist theory, drawing attention to the gendered and racialized meanings embodied in colonoware, and considering how colonialism and slavery have shaped these cultural dimensions and archaeologists’ study of them.
 

Originally written in 1980 by the Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary R. Kremer, and Antonio F. Holland and revised and updated in 1993 by Kremer and Holland, Missouri's Black Heritage, now in a greatly expanded third edition, remains the only book-length account of the rich and inspiring history of the Show-Me State's African American population. With more than one hundred photographs, most of them new to this third edition, Kremer and Holland incorporate the latest scholarship as they describe in detail the struggles many Black Missourians continue to face in the aftermath of their ancestors’ arduous and courageous struggles since Emancipation to achieve their full civil and political rights as U.S. citizens.

Documenting the African American experience from the horrors of slavery through the great victories over many generations, the book touches on the lives of people such as John Berry Meachum, a St. Louis slave who purchased his own freedom and then helped countless other slaves gain emancipation; Hiram Young, a Jackson County free black whose manufacturing of wagons for Sante Fe Trail travelers made him a legendary figure; James Milton Turner, who, after rising from slavery to become one of the best-educated blacks in Missouri worked with the Freedmen's Bureau and the State Department of Education to establish schools for blacks all over the state after the Civil War; and Annie Turnbo Malone, a St. Louis entrepreneur whose business skills made her one of the state's wealthiest African Americans in the early twentieth century.

A personal reminiscence by the late Lorenzo J. Greene, a distinguished African American historian whom many regard as one of the fathers of Black history, offers a unique view of Missouri's racial history and heritage, as do Kremer and Holland, in their new preface and introduction to the third edition.

A bold reconsideration of Hoodoo belief and practice

Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. She examines Hoodoo culture and history by tracing its emergence from African traditions to religious practices in the Americas. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the nineteenth century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile. The spread came about through the mechanism of the "African Religion Complex," eight distinct cultural characteristics familiar to all the African ethnic groups in the United States.

The first interdisciplinary examination to incorporate a full glossary of Hoodoo culture, Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System lays out the movement of Hoodoo against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Hazzard-Donald examines Hoodoo material culture, particularly the "High John the Conquer" root, which practitioners employ for a variety of spiritual uses. She also examines other facets of Hoodoo, including rituals of divination such as the "walking boy" and the "Ring Shout," a sacred dance of Hoodoo tradition that bears its corollaries today in the American Baptist churches. Throughout, Hazzard-Donald distinguishes between "Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo" and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.

Radical Black feminist refusal through the works of mid-twentieth-century African American women writers
 

Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction offers new and insightful readings of African American women’s writings in the 1930s–1950s, illustrating how these writers centered Black women’s satisfaction as radical resistance to the false and incomplete promise of liberal racial integration. Eve Dunbar examines the writings of Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks to show how these women explored self-fulfillment over normative and sanctioned models of national belonging. 

Paying close attention to literary moments of disruption, miscommunication, or confusion rather than ease, assimilation, or mutual understanding around race and gender, Dunbar tracks these writers’ dissatisfaction with American race relations. She shows how Petry, West, Childress, and Brooks redeploy the idea of monstrous work to offer potential modalities for registering Black women’s capacity to locate satisfaction within the domestic and interpersonal.

While racial integration may satisfy the national idea of equality and inclusion, it has not met the long-term needs of Black people’s quest for equity. Dunbar responds, demonstrating how these mid-century women offer new blueprints for Black life by creating narrative models for radical satisfaction: Black women’s completeness, joy, and happiness outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion.

Eclectic and essential, Music in Black American Life, 1600–1945 offers specialists and students alike a gateway to the history and impact of Black music in the United States.

Contributors: R. Reid Badger, Rae Linda Brown, Samuel A. Floyd Jr., Sandra Jean Graham, Jeffrey Magee, Robert M. Marovich, Harriet Ottenheimer, Eileen Southern, Katrina Dyonne Thompson, Stephen Wade, and Charles Wolfe

Part sourcebook and part survey of historic music scholarship, Music in Black American Life, 1945–2020 collects groundbreaking work that redefines our view of Black music and its place in American music history.

Contributors: Nelson George, Wayne Everett Goins, Claudrena N. Harold, Eileen M. Hayes, Loren Kajikawa, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tammy L. Kernodle, Cheryl L. Keyes, Gwendolyn Pough, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Mark Tucker, and Sherrie Tucker

Composers featured: Michael Abels, H. Leslie Adams, Lettie Beckon Alston, Thomas J. Anderson, Dwight Andrews, Regina Harris Baiocchi, David Baker, William C. Banfield, Ysaye Maria Barnwell, Billy Childs, Noel DaCosta, Anthony Davis, George Duke, Leslie Dunner, Donal Fox, Adolphus Hailstork, Jester Hairston, Herbie Hancock, Jonathan Holland, Anthony Kelley, Wendell Logan, Bobby McFerrin, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Jeffrey Mumford, Gary Powell Nash, Stephen Newby, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Michael Powell, Patrice Rushen, George Russell, Kevin Scott, Evelyn Simpson-Curenton, Hale Smith, Billy Taylor, Frederick C. Tillis, George Walker, James Kimo Williams, Julius Williams, Tony Williams, Olly Wilson, and Michael Woods