Results by title
1218 books match the query 'African Americans' and 29 start with n
Nathan B. Young and the Struggle over Black Higher Education
Antonio F. Holland
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Born in slavery in Alabama, Young followed a love of learning to degrees from Talladega and Oberlin Colleges and a career in higher education. Employed by Booker T. Washington in 1892, he served at Tuskegee Institute until conflict with Washington’s vocational orientation led him to move on. During a brief tenure at Georgia State Industrial College under Richard R. Wright, Sr., he became disillusioned by efforts of whites to limit black education to agriculture and the trades. Hired as president of Florida A&M in 1901, he fought for twenty years to balance agricultural/vocational education with the liberal arts, only to meet with opposition from state officials that led to his ouster.
This principled educator finally found his place as president of Lincoln University in Missouri in 1923. Here Young made a determined effort to establish the school as a standard institution of higher learning. Holland describes how he campaigned successfully to raise academic standards and gain accreditation for Lincoln’s programs—successes made possible by the political and economic support of farsighted members of Missouri’s black community.
Holland shows that the great debate over black higher education was carried on not only in the rhetoric of Washington and Du Bois but also on the campuses, as Young and others sought to prepare African American students to become thinkers and creators. In tracing Young’s career, Holland presents a wealth of information on the nature of the education provided for former slaves and their descendents in four states—shedding new light on the educational environment at Oberlin and Tuskegee—and on the actions of racist white government officials to limit the curriculum of public education for blacks.
Although Young’s efforts to improve the schools he served were often thwarted, Holland shows that he kept his vision alive in the black community. Holland’s meticulous reconstruction of an eventful career provides an important look at the forces that shaped and confounded the development of black higher education during traumatic times.
Native Land Talk
Indigenous and Arrivant Rights TheoriesYael Ben-zvi
Dartmouth College Press, 2018
Negro Education in Alabama
A Study in Cotton and SteelHorace Mann Bond
University of Alabama Press, 1994
WINNER OF THE SUSAN COLVER ROSENBERGER AWARD
A foundational work of educational history, Horace Mann Bond’s study reveals how race, labor, and power shaped Black schooling in Alabama—and why those lessons still matter today.
Originally published in 1939, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel by Horace Mann Bond is a pioneering work of educational and social history. Drawing on extensive data and firsthand observation, Bond explores how the economic structures of the cotton South and the industrializing North influenced the development of Black education in Alabama. He examines disparities in funding, curriculum, and access, while also highlighting the resilience and agency of African American communities in pursuing educational advancement. This reissued edition preserves Bond’s critical insights and remains a vital resource for scholars of African American history, education policy, and Southern studies.
Negro Slavery in Arkansas
Orville Taylor
University of Arkansas Press, 2000
Long out of print and found only in rare-book stores, it is now available to a contemporary audience with this new paperback edition.
When slavery was abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation, there were slaves in every county of the state, and almost half the population was directly involved in slavery as either a slave, a slaveowner, or a member of an owner’s family. Orville Taylor traces the growth of slavery from John Law’s colony in the early eighteenth century through the French and Spanish colonial period, territorial and statehood days, to the beginning of the Civil War. He describes the various facets of the institution, including the slave trade, work and overseers, health and medical treatment, food, clothing, housing, marriage, discipline, and free blacks and manumission.
While drawing on unpublished material as appropriate, the book is, to a great extent, based on original, often previously unpublished, sources. Valuable to libraries, historians in several areas of concentration, and the general reader, it gives due recognition to the signficant place slavery occupied in the life and economy of antebellum Arkansas.
Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915
Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. WashingtonAugust Meier
University of Michigan Press, 1963
Neither Black Nor White
Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United StatesCarl Degler
University of Wisconsin Press, 1986
Carl Degler’s 1971 Pulitzer-Prize-winning study of comparative slavery in Brazil and the United States is reissued in the Wisconsin paperback edition, making it accessible for all students of American and Latin American history and sociology.
Until Degler’s groundbreaking work, scholars were puzzled by the differing courses of slavery and race relations in the two countries. Brazil never developed a system of rigid segregation, such as appeared in the United States, and blacks in Brazil were able to gain economically and retain far more of their African culture. Rejecting the theory of Giberto Freyre and Frank Tannenbaum—that Brazilian slavery was more humane—Degler instead points to a combination of demographic, economic, and cultural factors as the real reason for the differences.
“In the early 1970s when studies in social history were beginning to blossom on the North American scene, Carl Degler’s prize-winning contribution was a thoughtful provocative essay in comparative history. Its thoughtfulness has not diminished with the years. Indeed, it is as topical today as when it was first published. The Brazilian experience with rapid industrialization and its attempt to restore democratic government indicates that the issues which Degler treated in the early 1970s are more pertinent than ever today.”—Franklin W. Knight, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University.
Neo-Passing
Performing Identity after Jim CrowEdited by Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young: Foreword by Gayle Wald Afterword by Michele Elam
University of Illinois Press, 2018
New Day in Babylon
The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975William L. Van Deburg
University of Chicago Press, 1992
"New Day in Babylon is an extremely intelligent synthesis, a densely textured evocation of one of American history's most revolutionary transformations in ethnic group consciousness."—Bob Blauner, New York Times
Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center Outstanding Book Award, 1993
New Deal / New South
An Anthony J. Badger ReaderAnthony J. Badger
University of Arkansas Press, 2007
New Growth
The Art and Texture of Black HairJasmine Nichole Cobb
Duke University Press, 2022
New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition
Edited by Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley D. Farmer
Northwestern University Press, 2018
The book examines four central themes within the black intellectual tradition: black internationalism, religion and spirituality, racial politics and struggles for social justice, and black radicalism. The essays identify the emergence of black thought within multiple communities internationally, analyze how black thinkers shaped and were shaped by the historical moment in which they lived, interrogate the ways in which activists and intellectuals connected their theoretical frameworks across time and space, and assess how these strains of thought bolstered black consciousness and resistance worldwide.
Defying traditional temporal and geographical boundaries, New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition illuminates the origins of and conduits for black ideas, redefines the relationship between black thought and social action, and challenges long-held assumptions about black perspectives on religion, race, and radicalism. The intellectuals profiled in the volume reshape and redefine the contours and boundaries of black thought, further illuminating the depth and diversity of the black intellectual tradition.
Next to the Color Line
Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du BoisSusan Gillman
University of Minnesota Press, 2007
Nigger Heaven
Carl Van Vechten
University of Illinois Press, 1926
"The book and not the title is the thing," James Weldon Johnson insisted with regard to Nigger Heaven, and the book is indeed a nuanced and vibrant portrait of "the great black walled city" of Harlem. Opening on a scene of tawdry sensationalism, Nigger Heaven shifts decisively to a world of black middle-class respectability, defined by intellectual values, professional ambition, and an acute consciousness of class and racial identity.
Here is a Harlem where upper-class elites discuss art in well-appointed drawing rooms; rowdy and lascivious drunks spend long nights in jazz clubs and speakeasies; and politically conscious young intellectuals drink coffee and debate "the race problem" in walk-up apartments. At the center of the story, two young people--a quiet, serious librarian and a volatile aspiring writer--struggle to love each other as their dreams are slowly suffocated by racism.
This reissue is based on the seventh printing, which included poetry composed by Langston Hughes especially for the book. Kathleen Pfeiffer's astute introduction investigates the controversy surrounding the shocking title and shows how the novel functioned in its time as a site to contest racial violence. She also signals questions of racial authenticity and racial identity raised by a novel about black culture written by a white admirer of that culture.
Ninety Degrees In The Shade
Clarence E. Cason
University of Alabama Press, 1983
In 1935, Cason collected his thoughts in a small book of essays titled 90° in the Shade. In it, he declared that climate and the relaxation afforded by field and stream had given southerners excellent reasons for their notoriously slow pace of life. Still, he wrote, "there is much work that ought to be done below the Potomac." Cason captured the pathos of race relations and other persistent problems and declared that the abominable practice of lynching would end when the best people of the South risked their personal and commercial standing to denounce it. Just days before the book's publication, however, Cason shot himself in his campus office. He left no explanation, but apparently he feared angry reaction from fellow citizens to his mild criticisms and gentle suggestions for change.
The University of Alabama Press brought the book back into print in 1983. This new edition of Cason's classic features an introduction by journalist and UA professor H. Bailey Thomson, allowing yet another generation the enjoyment of Cason's perceptive writing, not so much for any remedy he proposed but rather for the open-minded and loving way in which he addressed the region's tragic experience.
Ninety Degrees in the Shade
Clarence E. Cason
University of Alabama Press, 2001
A candid, courageous portrait of the South as told by a writer unafraid to confront its heat, its history, and its humanity.
Clarence Cason belonged to that restless generation of southern intellectuals who, between the world wars, questioned the South's stubborn traditionalism, even as they tried to explain and defend its distinctiveness. From his professorial perch at The University of Alabama, Cason wrote polished essays for leading national publications while contributing weekly editorials for newspaper readers. As a journalist in academia, he cultivated a broad audience for his eloquent though tentative observations about the "character" of a region that seemed to be a separate province of the nation.
In 1935, Cason collected his thoughts in a small book of essays titled 90° in the Shade. In it, he declared that climate and the relaxation afforded by field and stream had given southerners excellent reasons for their notoriously slow pace of life. Still, he wrote, "there is much work that ought to be done below the Potomac." Cason captured the pathos of race relations and other persistent problems and declared that the abominable practice of lynching would end when the best people of the South risked their personal and commercial standing to denounce it. Just days before the book's publication, however, Cason shot himself in his campus office. He left no explanation, but apparently he feared angry reaction from fellow citizens to his mild criticisms and gentle suggestions for change.
The University of Alabama Press brought the book back into print in 1983. This new edition of Cason's classic features an introduction by journalist and UA professor H. Bailey Thomson, allowing yet another generation the enjoyment of Cason's perceptive writing, not so much for any remedy he proposed but rather for the open-minded and loving way in which he addressed the region's tragic experience.
This second reprint edition of a classic work on southern culture will allow a new generation of readers to enjoy Cason's observant, graceful writing.
No Easy Walk
Newark, 1980-1993Helen M. Stummer
Temple University Press, 1994
No Longer Outsiders
Black and Latino Interest Group Advocacy on Capitol HillMichael D. Minta
University of Chicago Press, 2021
In No Longer Outsiders, Minta provides a comprehensive account of the effectiveness of minority civil rights organizations and their legislative allies. He finds that the organizations’ legislative priorities are consistent with black and Latino preferences for stronger enforcement of civil rights policy and immigration reform. Although these groups focus mainly on civil rights for blacks and immigration issues for Latinos, their policy agendas extend into other significant areas. Minta concludes with an examination of how diversity in Congress helps groups gain greater influence and policy success despite many limits placed upon them.
No Quittin' Sense
By the Reverend C. C. White and Ada Morehead Holland
University of Texas Press, 1994
This story, set in the Piney Woods country of East Texas, spans most of a century, from shortly after the close of the Civil War to the 1960's. It is the story of Charley White, who was born in the middle of those woods—in a decaying windowless log cabin a few years after his mother and father were freed from slavery. His childhood, lived in almost unbelievable poverty, was followed by financial stability achieved in middle age through years of struggle. And then, in order to obey God's will, he abandoned this secure life, and for forty years he waged a one-man war on poverty and intolerance.
Winner of the Carr P. Collins Award (best nonfiction book) of the Texas Institute of Letters, No Quittin' Sense presents the story of Rev. C. C. "Charley" White, whose life has inspired thousands of readers since the book was first published in 1969.
No State Shall Abridge
The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of RightsMichael Kent Curtis
Duke University Press, 1990
“Curtis effectively settles a serious legal debate: whether the framers of the 14th Amendment intended to incorporate the Bill of Rights guarantees and thereby inhibit state action. Taking on a formidable array of constitutional scholars, . . . he rebuts their argument with vigor and effectiveness, conclusively demonstrating the legitimacy of the incorporation thesis. . . . A bold, forcefully argued, important study.”—Library Journal
Nobody Is Supposed to Know
Black Sexuality on the Down LowC. Riley Snorton
University of Minnesota Press, 2014
Since the early 2000s, the phenomenon of the “down low”—black men who have sex with men as well as women and do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual—has exploded in news media and popular culture, from the Oprah Winfrey Show to R & B singer R. Kelly’s hip hopera Trapped in the Closet. Most down-low stories are morality tales in which black men are either predators who risk infecting their unsuspecting female partners with HIV or victims of a pathological black culture that repudiates openly gay identities. In both cases, down-low narratives depict black men as sexually dangerous, duplicitous, promiscuous, and contaminated.
In Nobody Is Supposed to Know, C. Riley Snorton traces the emergence and circulation of the down low in contemporary media and popular culture to show how these portrayals reinforce troubling perceptions of black sexuality. Reworking Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the “glass closet,” Snorton advances a new theory of such representations in which black sexuality is marked by hypervisibility and confinement, spectacle and speculation. Through close readings of news, music, movies, television, and gossip blogs, Nobody Is Supposed to Know explores the contemporary genealogy, meaning, and functions of the down low.
Snorton examines how the down low links blackness and queerness in the popular imagination and how the down low is just one example of how media and popular culture surveil and police black sexuality. Looking at figures such as Ma Rainey, Bishop Eddie L. Long, J. L. King, and Will Smith, he ultimately contends that down-low narratives reveal the limits of current understandings of black sexuality.
North of Slavery
The Negro in the Free StatesLeon F. Litwack
University of Chicago Press, 1965
This book was a landmark when it was published in 1965, and it has remained a crucial source for our understanding of American history ever since.
Not Free, Not for All
Public Libraries in the Age of Jim CrowCheryl Knott
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
Winner of the 2016 Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award and the 2016 Lillian Smith Book Award
Americans tend to imagine their public libraries as time-honored advocates of equitable access to information for all. Through much of the twentieth century, however, many black Americans were denied access to public libraries or allowed admittance only to separate and smaller buildings and collections. While scholars have examined and continue to uncover the history of school segregation, there has been much less research published on the segregation of public libraries in the Jim Crow South. In fact, much of the writing on public library history has failed to note these racial exclusions.
In Not Free, Not for All, Cheryl Knott traces the establishment, growth, and eventual demise of separate public libraries for African Americans in the South, disrupting the popular image of the American public library as historically welcoming readers from all walks of life. Using institutional records, contemporaneous newspaper and magazine articles, and other primary sources together with scholarly work in the fields of print culture and civil rights history, Knott reconstructs a complex story involving both animosity and cooperation among whites and blacks who valued what libraries had to offer. African American library advocates, staff, and users emerge as the creators of their own separate collections and services with both symbolic and material importance, even as they worked toward dismantling those very institutions during the era of desegregation.
Not Slave, Not Free
The African American Economic Experience Since the Civil WarJay R. Mandle
Duke University Press, 1992
Not Slave, Not Free focuses first on rural southern society before World War II and the role played by African Americans in that setting. The South was the least developed part of the United States, a fact that Mandle considers fundamental in accounting for the poverty of African Americans in the years before the War. At the same time, however, the concentration of the black labor force in plantation work significantly retarded the South’s economic growth. Tracing the postwar migration of blacks from the South, Mandle shifts attention to the problems and opportunities that confronted African Americans in cities. He shows how occupational segregation and income growth accelerated this migration.
Instrumental to an understanding of the history of the political economy of the United States, this book also directs readers and policymakers to the central issues confronting African Americans today.
Not in Our Lifetimes
The Future of Black PoliticsMichael C. Dawson
University of Chicago Press, 2011
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.
Nothing Less Than Equality
The Battle over Segregated Education in the Nation’s CapitalTikia K. Hamilton
University of Chicago Press, 2026
The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, which barred racial segregation in American public schools, wasn’t the only path for Black parents, teachers, and activists who sought equality of educational opportunity. Some believed that the solution to inequality lay in pressing the federal government to live up to the Jim Crow doctrine of “separate but equal” by providing more resources to Black schools. And for a time, this seemed true in Washington, DC, where Black activists leveraged their status as residents of the nation’s capital to advocate on behalf of Black education. However, disappointments with the “separate but equal” strategy and a sea change in activism led to an embrace of integration.
In Nothing Less Than Equality, Tikia K. Hamilton reveals the rich and complex history of educational activism in Washington prior to Brown v. Board of Education, illuminating complex dynamics that provide a counterpoint and backdrop to the landmark Supreme Court case. Hamilton thoroughly examines the multipronged strategies employed by parents, teachers, attorneys, and activists to democratize education, demonstrating that there was no linear path to Brown.
Nothing Like Sunshine
A Story in the Aftermath of the MLK AssassinationBen Kamin
Michigan State University Press, 2010
Rabbi Ben Kamin has written a definitive personal expression about race, coming of age in the 1960s, a forbidden friendship, and his personal love for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This is a story that spans a four-decade search for a lost high school chum, a deep misunderstanding, and a coming to terms with an America painfully evolving from the blood of MLK to the promise of Barack Obama.
The book is a remembrance of Kamin's life at Cincinnati's notorious Woodward High School, a microcosm of the 1960s and of America itself, as well as detailing Kamin's search-for Clifton, for America, for the key to understanding what race relations really are in the United States. Simultaneously, it is the story of the emerging rabbi's search for the legacy of his spiritual mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., taking Kamin from Cincinnati to Cleveland to Memphis to New Orleans and other points, and constantly bringing him home to his friend Clifton and "the heaving hallways" of that high school.
Now Is the Time!
Detroit Black Politics and Grassroots ActivismTodd C. Shaw
Duke University Press, 2009
Shaw uses the tools of social movement analysis, including the quantitative analysis of budgets, electoral data, and housing statistics, as well as historical research and personal interviews, to better understand the dilemmas, innovations, and dynamics of grassroots activism. He begins with a history of discriminatory housing practices and racial divisions that deeply affected Detroit following the Second World War and set the stage for the election of the city’s first black mayor, Coleman Young. By emphasizing downtown redevelopment, Mayor Young’s administration often collided with low-income housing advocates. Only through grassroots activism were those advocates able to delay or derail governmental efforts to demolish low-income housing in order to make way for more upscale development. Shaw then looks at present-day public housing activism, assessing the mixed success of the nationally sponsored HOPE VI project aimed at fostering home ownership in low-income areas. Descriptive and prescriptive, Now Is the Time! traces the complicated legacy of community activism to illuminate what is required for grassroots activists to be effective in demanding public accountability to poor and marginalized citizens.
Nursery Rhymes in Black
PoemsLatorial Faison
University of Alaska Press, 2025
The collection highlights family, overcoming adversity, and endurance from the Black female perspective and celebrates the individuals and experiences that shape life and have catapulted the author into a unique existence. Narrative poems give voice to the Black Southern girlhood experience of being saved, nurtured, inspired, and even challenged by plight and circumstance. Strengthened by her experiences, Faison provides power, courage, and wisdom that resonate deeply. These poems walk in naked truth on a lyrical, musical tightrope as each brings wisdom and honesty in the intimacy of arranged words. Faison takes readers along the development of her own identity, considering stories of unsung heroes, the hands that feed us, the ancestors and traditions that form us, and the challenging ways that race, history, education, and culture intersect. With this spiritually moving collection, Faison joins all poets and writers who have come to prolifically amplify Black voices, to tell Black stories, to continue the Black literary tradition we have been gifted.
In these poems, Faison calls readers into poetic fellowship with the memories, the legacies, the truths of Black women in the South. There is reverence, history, and glory on these pages celebrating the hands, hearts, work, trouble, and ways of Black women and all the ways they teach, become, fascinate, struggle, survive, and exist in the world. Nursery Rhymes in Black lulls us—but not to sleep—rather, to wake up, to speak out, to take a stand, to advocate as we pause to remember, understand, and celebrate.
neckbone
visual versesavery r. young; foreword by Theaster Gates
Northwestern University Press, 2019