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1563 books match the query 'African American & Black Studies' and 117 start with s

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Sacred Sisterhoods

A Celebration of Black Women's Friendships on Television and in Film

Edited by Imani M. Cheers

The Ohio State University Press, 2025

The dramatic expansion of Black women into creative positions in television and film production since the 1990s has introduced a previously invisible range of themes in Black women’s lives to wide audiences. In Imani M. Cheers’s richly interdisciplinary Sacred Sisterhoods, contributors offer an overdue analysis and elevation of Black women’s creative authority in popular culture: its history, successes, influence, and future possibilities. Focusing on the theme of Black women’s friendship, star voices from across academia, journalism, the arts, and activism offer critical-cultural commentary and personal reflections on the evolution of Black women directors, writers, producers, and showrunners from the 1930s through 2023.

Creative visionaries from Debbie Allen to Quinta Brunson, along with shows and films from Living Single to Hidden Figures—and many others—receive their due in these rigorous, lively, and accessible essays. Spotlighting the nuances and normalcy of Black women’s sacred sisterhoods, contributors reveal the indelible mark modern Black consciousness and creative control leave on our popular culture every day in an anthology that will be essential to scholars and students of contemporary media, race, and gender, as well as to general readers.

Contributors:
Imani M. Cheers, Monique A. Gamble, Marquita Gammage, Kandace Harris, Crystal L. Holmes, Makeba Lavan, Rondrea Danielle Mathis, Miriam J. Petty-Adams, De Anna Reese, Randi Richardson, Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, Andrene M. Taylor, Kristen Warner, and Shauntae Brown White

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Sacred Steel

Inside an African American Steel Guitar Tradition

Robert Stone

University of Illinois Press, 2010

In this book, Robert L. Stone follows the sound of steel guitar into the music-driven Pentecostal worship of two related churches: the House of God and the Church of the Living God. A rare outsider who has gained the trust of members and musicians inside the church, Stone uses nearly two decades of research, interviews, and fieldwork to tell the story of a vibrant musical tradition that straddles sacred and secular contexts.

Most often identified with country and western bands, steel guitar is almost unheard of in African American churches--except for the House of God and the Church of the Living God, where it has been part of worship since the 1930s. Sacred Steel traces the tradition through four generations of musicians and in some two hundred churches extending across the country from Florida to California, Michigan to Alabama. Presenting detailed portraits of musical pioneers such as brothers Troman and Willie Eason and contemporary masters such as Chuck Campbell, Glenn Lee, and Robert Randolph, Stone expertly outlines the fundamental tensions between sacred steel musicians and church hierarchy.

In this thorough analysis of the tradition, Stone explores the function of the music in church meetings and its effect on the congregations. He also examines recent developments such as the growing number of female performers, the commercial appeal of the music, and younger musicians' controversial move of the music from the church to secular contexts.

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Safe in a Midwife's Hands

Birthing Traditions from Africa to the American South

Linda Janet Holmes

The Ohio State University Press, 2023

A Ms. Magazine “Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2023” After a less-than-positive experience giving birth as a Black woman in the 1970s, Linda Janet Holmes launched a lifetime of work as an activist dedicated to learning about and honoring alternative birth traditions and the Black women behind them. Safe in a Midwife’s Hands brings together what Holmes has gleaned from the countless midwives who have shared with her their experiences, at a time when their knowledge and holistic approaches are essential counterbalances to a medical system that routinely fails Black mothers and babies. Building on work she began in the 1980s, when she interviewed traditional Black midwives in Alabama and Virginia, Holmes traveled to Ghana, Ethiopia, and Kenya to visit midwives there. In detailing their work, from massage to the uses of medicinal plants to naming ceremonies, she links their voices to those of midwives and doulas in the US. She thus illuminates parallels between birthing traditions that have survived hundreds of years of colonialism, enslavement, Jim Crow, and ongoing medical racism to persist as vital cultural practices that promote healthy outcomes for mothers and babies during pregnancy, birth, and beyond.

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Samurai among Panthers

Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life

Diane C. Fujino

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

An iconic figure of the Asian American movement, Richard Aoki (1938–2009) was also, as the most prominent non-Black member of the Black Panther Party, a key architect of Afro-Asian solidarity in the 1960s and ’70s. His life story exposes the personal side of political activism as it illuminates the history of ethnic nationalism and radical internationalism in America.

A reflection of this interconnection, Samurai among Panthers weaves together two narratives: Aoki’s dramatic first-person chronicle and an interpretive history by a leading scholar of the Asian American movement, Diane C. Fujino. Aoki’s candid account of himself takes us from his early years in Japanese American internment camps to his political education on the streets of Oakland, to his emergence in the Black Panther Party. As his story unfolds, we see how his parents’ separation inside the camps and his father’s illegal activities shaped the development of Aoki’s politics. Fujino situates his life within the context of twentieth-century history—World War II, the Cold War, and the protests of the 1960s. She demonstrates how activism is both an accidental and an intentional endeavor and how a militant activist practice can also promote participatory democracy and social service.

The result of these parallel voices and analysis in Samurai among Panthers is a complex—and sometimes contradictory—portrait of a singularly extraordinary activist and an expansion and deepening of our understanding of the history he lived.

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Sanctuary Stage

The Greenwich Mews Theatre, 1951-1974

Hillary Miller

University of Michigan Press, 2027

In 1951, white and Black artists from the progressive theaters of downtown and Harlem came together to create the Greenwich Mews Theatre. For over two decades the venue defied Jim Crow casting practices and Red Scare censorship; the theatre provided refuge to blacklisted artists and a stage for dramas of the civil rights movement. In Sanctuary Stage: The Greenwich Mews Theatre, 1951-1974, author Hillary Miller tells the history of this groundbreaking West Village institution through its productions and its network of leftist dramatists. Jointly sponsored and protected by a Presbyterian church and a synagogue, the Mews and its innovative producer Stella Holt earned accolades with staging works by Alice Childress, Langston Hughes, Loften Mitchell, Seán O’Casey, and George Tabori, and in its final chapter, the creation of the bilingual Greenwich Mews Spanish Theatre. Miller traces the rise and demise of this interracial and interfaith hub for cultural expression until its final fracture amid artistic and social turbulence in the 1970s.

Through its oppositional performance practices, the collective blurred the lines between the mainstream and the underground, bringing together multiethnic theater communities, anti-fascist activists, pro-labor audiences, and circles of interfaith justice movements.

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Sandlot Seasons

SPORT IN BLACK PITTSBURGH

Rob Ruck

University of Illinois Press, 1987

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Satchel Paige's America

William Price Fox

University of Alabama Press, 2005

Captures the sometimes outrageous, often humorous, and always bigger-than-life spirit of the World's Greatest Pitcher, Leroy Satchel Paige

This book began when the author met "the Satch" for the first time at the Twilight Zone Lounge of the Rhythm Lanes Bowling Alley in Kansas City. What started as a simple interview for Holiday magazine quickly grew into an animated conversation that lasted nearly a week as Paige and Fox moved from bar to club to restaurant to auto repair shop and from one topic to the next. Fox describes, with amazement, the reception the legendary baseball player received at Gates' Place, a famous barbecue restaurant, and The Flamingo, a big dance club. Over the course of the week, Paige shared stories about his start in the Negro leagues, his time with the Kansas City Monarchs, and barnstorming around the country, sleeping on the ground because there were no hotels for blacks. He also tells of his breakthrough to the big leagues when he signed with the Cleveland Indians and later pitched two shutouts against the Chicago White Sox.

In addition to his baseball career, Paige tells Fox about his childhood in Mobile, Alabama, catching fish during the Jubilee, throwing rocks at white boys, hustling bags at the train station, and working in the Depression era medicine shows. In contrast to these humble beginnings, Satchel recounts his later connections with film and music celebrities like Orson Welles, Jelly Roll Morton, Billie Holliday, and Cab Calloway. He also expounds on his friendships with other sports greats, including Goose Tatum, Meadowlark Lemon, and Sugar Ray Robinson.

The ironic intersections between oppression and fame, and between poverty and wealth, that emerge from Paige's narrative memoir exemplify the affliction of talent and genius in an era of racial discrimination and segregation.

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Saved for a Purpose

A Journey from Private Virtues to Public Values

James A. Joseph

Duke University Press, 2015

The son of a minister, James A. Joseph grew up in Louisiana’s Cajun country, where his parents taught him the value of education and the importance of serving others. These lessons inspired him to follow a career path that came to include working in senior executive or advisory positions for four U. S. Presidents and with the legendary Nelson Mandela to build a new democracy in South Africa. Saved for a Purpose is Joseph’s ethical autobiography, in which he shares his moral philosophy and his insights on leadership.

In an engaging and personal style, Joseph shows how his commitment to applying moral and ethical principles to large groups and institutions played out in his work in the civil rights movement in Alabama and as a college chaplain in California in the turbulent 1960s. His time later as vice president of the Cummins Engine Company provided an opportunity to promote corporate ethics, and his tenure as Under Secretary of the Interior in the Carter Administration underscored the difficulty and weight of making the right decisions while balancing good policy analysis with transcendent moral principles.

In 1996 President Clinton selected Joseph to become the United States Ambassador to South Africa. His recollections of working with Nelson Mandela, whom he describes as a noble and practical politician, and his observations about what he learned from Desmond Tutu and others about reconciliation contain some of the book’s most poignant passages.

Saved for a Purpose is unique, as Joseph combines his insights from working to integrate values into America’s public and private sectors with his long engagement with ethics as an academic discipline and as a practical guide for social behavior. Ultimately, it reflects Joseph’s passionate search for values that go beyond the personal to include the ethical imperatives that should be applied to the communal.

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Savoring the Salt

The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara

edited by Linda Janet Holmes and Cheryl A. Wall

Temple University Press, 2007

The extraordinary spirit of Toni Cade Bambara lives on in Savoring the Salt, a vibrant and appreciative recollection of the work and legacy of the multi-talented African American writer, teacher, filmmaker, and activist. Among the contributors who remember Bambara, reflect on her work, and examine its meaning today are Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Pearl Cleage, Ruby Dee, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Nikki Giovanni, Avery Gordon, Audre Lorde, and Sonia Sanchez.

Admiring readers have kept Bambara's fiction in print since her first collection of stories, Gorilla, My Love, was published in 1972. She continued to write -- and her audience and reputation continued to grow -- until her untimely death in 1995. Savoring the Salt includes excerpts from her published and unpublished writings, along with interviews and photos of Bambara. The mix of poets and scholars, novelists and critics, political activists and filmmakers represented here testifies to the ongoing importance and enduring appeal of her work.

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Scarlet and Black, Volume Two

Constructing Race and Gender at Rutgers, 1865-1945

Kendra Boyd

Rutgers University Press, 2020

The 250th anniversary of the founding of Rutgers University is a perfect moment for the Rutgers community to reconcile its past, and acknowledge its role in the enslavement and debasement of African Americans and the disfranchisement and elimination of Native American people and culture. Scarlet and Black, Volume 2, continues to document the history of Rutgers’s connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor accidental—nor unusual. Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty; it depended on the sale of black people to fund its very existence. This second of a planned three volumes continues the work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History. This latest volume includes: an introduction to the period studied (from the end of the Civil War through WWII) by Deborah Gray White; a study of the first black students at Rutgers and New Brunswick Theological Seminary; an analysis of African-American life in the City of New Brunswick during the period; and profiles of the earliest black women to matriculate at Douglass College.

To learn more about the work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History, visit the project's website at http://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu

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Schooling Citizens

The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America

Hilary J. Moss

University of Chicago Press, 2009

While white residents of antebellum Boston and New Haven forcefully opposed the education of black residents, their counterparts in slaveholding Baltimore did little to resist the establishment of African American schools. Such discrepancies, Hilary Moss argues, suggest that white opposition to black education was not a foregone conclusion. Through the comparative lenses of these three cities, she shows why opposition erupted where it did across the United States during the same period that gave rise to public education.

As common schooling emerged in the 1830s, providing white children of all classes and ethnicities with the opportunity to become full-fledged citizens, it redefined citizenship as synonymous with whiteness. This link between school and American identity, Moss argues, increased white hostility to black education at the same time that it spurred African Americans to demand public schooling as a means of securing status as full and equal members of society. Shedding new light on the efforts of black Americans to learn independently in the face of white attempts to withhold opportunity, Schooling Citizens narrates a previously untold chapter in the thorny history of America’s educational inequality.

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Schools Betrayed

Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education

Kathryn M. Neckerman

University of Chicago Press, 2007

The problems commonly associated with inner-city schools were not nearly as pervasive a century ago, when black children in most northern cities attended school alongside white children. In Schools Betrayed, her innovative history of race and urban education, Kathryn M. Neckerman tells the story of how and why these schools came to serve black children so much worse than their white counterparts.

Focusing on Chicago public schools between 1900 and 1960, Neckerman compares the circumstances of blacks and white immigrants, groups that had similarly little wealth and status yet came to gain vastly different benefits from their education. Their divergent educational outcomes, she contends, stemmed from Chicago officials’ decision to deal with rising African American migration by segregating schools and denying black students equal resources. And it deepened, she shows, because of techniques for managing academic failure that only reinforced inequality. Ultimately, these tactics eroded the legitimacy of the schools in Chicago’s black community, leaving educators unable to help their most disadvantaged students.

Schools Betrayed will be required reading for anyone who cares about urban education.

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Scratchin' and Survivin'

Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions

Adrien Sebro

Rutgers University Press, 2024

The 1970s was a golden age for representations of African American life on TV sitcoms: Sanford & Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons. Surprisingly, nearly all the decade’s notable Black sitcoms were made by a single company, Tandem Productions. Founded by two white men, the successful team behind All in the Family, writer Norman Lear and director Bud Yorkin, Tandem gave unprecedented opportunities to Black actors, writers, and producers to break into the television industry. However, these Black auteurs also struggled to get the economic privileges and creative autonomy regularly granted to their white counterparts.

Scratchin’ and Survivin’ discovers surprising parallels between the behind-the-scenes drama at Tandem and the plotlines that aired on their sitcoms, as both real and fictional African Americans devised various strategies for getting their fair share out of systems prone to exploiting their labor. The media scholar Adrien Sebro describes these tactics as a form of “hustle economics,” and he pays special attention to the ways that Black women—including actresses like LaWanda Page, Isabel Sanford, and Esther Rolle—had to hustle for recognition. Exploring Tandem’s complex legacy, including its hit racially mixed sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, he showcases the Black talent whose creative agency and labor resilience helped to transform the television industry.

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Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film

Nadia Allyson Field and Marsha Gordon, editors

Duke University Press, 2019

Although overlooked by most narratives of American cinema history, films made for purposes outside of theatrical entertainment dominated twentieth-century motion picture production. This volume adds to the growing study of nontheatrical films by focusing on the ways filmmakers developed and audiences encountered ideas about race, identity, politics, and community outside the borders of theatrical cinema. The contributors to Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film examine the place and role of race in educational films, home movies, industry and government films, anthropological films, and church films as well as other forms of nontheatrical filmmaking. From filmic depictions of Native Americans and films by 1920s African American religious leaders to a government educational film about the unequal treatment of Latin American immigrants, these films portrayed—for various purposes and intentions—the lives of those who were mostly excluded from the commercial films being produced in Hollywood. This volume is more than an examination of a broad swath of neglected twentieth-century filmmaking; it is a reevaluation of basic assumptions about American film culture and the place of race within it.

Contributors. Crystal Mun-hye Baik, Jasmyn R. Castro, Nadine Chan, Mark Garrett Cooper, Dino Everett, Allyson Nadia Field, Walter Forsberg, Joshua Glick, Tanya Goldman, Marsha Gordon, Noelle Griffis, Colin Gunckel, Michelle Kelley, Todd Kushigemachi, Martin L. Johnson, Caitlin McGrath, Elena Rossi-Snook, Laura Isabel Serna, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Dan Streible, Lauren Tilton, Noah Tsika, Travis L. Wagner, Colin Williamson

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Seems Like Murder Here

Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition

Adam Gussow

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Winner of the 2004 C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

Seems Like Murder Here offers a revealing new account of the blues tradition. Far from mere laments about lost loves and hard times, the blues emerge in this provocative study as vital responses to spectacle lynchings and the violent realities of African American life in the Jim Crow South. With brilliant interpretations of both classic songs and literary works, from the autobiographies of W. C. Handy, David Honeyboy Edwards, and B. B. King to the poetry of Langston Hughes and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Seems Like Murder Here will transform our understanding of the blues and its enduring power.

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Selected Poems

Lorna Goodison

University of Michigan Press, 1993

A selection of poems by Lorna Goodison, who in 2017 was named Poet Laureate of Jamaica.

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Selling Black History for Carter G. Woodson

A Diary, 1930-1933

Lorenzo J. Greene, Edited & Intro by Arvarh E. Strickland

University of Missouri Press, 1996

In the summer of 1930, Lorenzo Johnston Greene, a graduate of Howard University and a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, became a book agent for the man with the undisputed title of "Father of Negro History," Carter G. Woodson. With little more than determination, Greene, along with four Howard University students, traveled throughout the South and Southeast selling books published by Woodson's Associated Publishers. Their dual purpose was to provide needed funds for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and to promote the study of African American history. Greene returned east by way of Chicago, and, for a time, he settled in Philadelphia, selling books there and in the nearby cities of Delaware and New Jersey. He left Philadelphia in 1931 to conduct a survey in Washington, D.C., of firms employing and not employing black workers.

From 1930 until 1933, when Greene began teaching at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, Selling Black History for Carter G. Woodson provides a unique firsthand account of conditions in African American communities during the Great Depression. Greene describes in the diary, often in lyrical terms, the places and people he visited. He provides poignant descriptions of what was happening to black professional and business people, plus working-class people, along with details of high school facilities, churches, black business enterprises, housing, and general conditions in communities. Greene also gives revealing accounts of how the black colleges were faring in 1930.

Selling Black History for Carter G. Woodson offers important glimpses into the private thoughts of a young man of the 1930s, a developing intellectual and scholar. Greene's diary also provides invaluable insights into the personality of Carter Woodson that are not otherwise available. This fascinating and comprehensive view of black America during the early thirties will be a welcome addition to African American studies.

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Selling the Race

Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955

Adam Green

University of Chicago Press, 2006

In Selling the Race, Adam Green tells the story of how black Chicagoans were at the center of a national movement in the 1940s and ’50s, a time when African Americans across the country first started to see themselves as part of a single culture. Along the way, he offers fascinating reinterpretations of such events as the 1940 American Negro Exposition, the rise of black music and the culture industry that emerged around it, the development of the Associated Negro Press and the founding of Johnson Publishing, and the outcry over the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till.

By presenting African Americans as agents, rather than casualties, of modernity, Green ultimately reenvisions urban existence in a way that will resonate with anyone interested in race, culture, or the life of cities.

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Separate Games

African American Sport behind the Walls of Segregation

David K. Wiggins

University of Arkansas Press, 2017

Winner of the 2017 NASSH Book Award for best edited collection.

The hardening of racial lines during the first half of the twentieth century eliminated almost all African Americans from white organized sports, forcing black athletes to form their own teams, organizations, and events. This separate sporting culture, explored in the twelve essays included here, comprised much more than athletic competition; these “separate games” provided examples of black enterprise and black self-help and showed the importance of agency and the quest for racial uplift in a country fraught with racialist thinking and discrimination.

The significance of this sporting culture is vividly showcased in the stories of the Cuban Giants baseball team, basketball’s New York Renaissance Five, the Tennessee State Tigerbelles track-and-field team, black college football’s Turkey Bowl Classic, car racing’s Gold and Glory Sweepstakes, Negro League Baseball’s East-West All-Star game, and many more. These teams, organizations, and events made up a vibrant national sporting complex that remained in existence until the integration of sports beginning in the late 1940s. Separate Games explores the fascinating ways sports helped bind the black community and illuminate race pride, business acumen, and organizational abilities.

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Settler Colonialism is the Disaster

A Critique of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Cassandra Shepard

University of Illinois Press, 2026

Rebuilding efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and during the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed perpetual disaster on New Orleans’ Black and Indigenous communities. Neoliberalism masked by the auspices of repair, progress, and inclusion reinforced the plight of the urban poor while exacerbating the racial and class inequalities that existed before the storm. Cassandra Shepard’s analysis draws on ideas of settler-colonialism to chart how depriving Black and Indigenous people of critical resources intensified the harm, violence, and death inherent in systems of colonization. As Shepard shows, the rhetoric of improvement allows coloniality to masquerade as rebuilding while white elites consolidate power, profit, and privilege. Displaced and disenfranchised people of color, meanwhile, experience the impact of racial-disaster capitalism, with the chaos surrounding Katrina and COVID-19 obscuring the for-profit economic, political, and social exploitation of non-white New Orleanians. Ambitious and provocative, Settler Colonialism is the Disaster refutes the myth of New Orleans’ presumptive revival by shining new light on the ongoing colonization project at its heart.

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Settlin’

Stories of Madison’s Early African American Families

Muriel Simms

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018

Only a fraction of what is known about Madison’s earliest African American settlers and the vibrant and cohesive communities they formed has been preserved in traditional sources. The rest is contained in the hearts and minds of their descendants. Seeing a pressing need to preserve these experiences, lifelong Madison resident Muriel Simms collected the stories of twenty-five African Americans whose families arrived, survived, and thrived here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While some struggled to find work, housing, and acceptance, they describe a supportive and enterprising community that formed churches, businesses, and social clubs—and frequently came together in the face of adversity and conflict. A brief history of African American settlement in Madison begins the book to set the stage for the oral histories.

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Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners

Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy

LaShawn Harris

University of Illinois Press, 2016

During the early twentieth century, a diverse group of African American women carved out unique niches for themselves within New York City's expansive informal economy. LaShawn Harris illuminates the labor patterns and economic activity of three perennials within this kaleidoscope of underground industry: sex work, numbers running for gambling enterprises, and the supernatural consulting business. Mining police and prison records, newspaper accounts, and period literature, Harris teases out answers to essential questions about these women and their working lives. She also offers a surprising revelation, arguing that the burgeoning underground economy served as a catalyst in working-class black women ™s creation of the employment opportunities, occupational identities, and survival strategies that provided them with financial stability and a sense of labor autonomy and mobility. At the same time, urban black women, all striving for economic and social prospects and pleasures, experienced the conspicuous and hidden dangers associated with newfound labor opportunities.

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Sex, Race, and Merit

Debating Affirmative Action in Education and Employment

Faye J. Crosby and Cheryl VanDeVeer, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Since its inception, affirmative action has been a controversial policy, and on all sides of the issue passions run high. Sometimes commentators have looked with clarity at the deep and complex issues surrounding affirmative action, but too often facts have been in shorter supply than misinformed opinions. Sex, Race, and Merit: Debating Affirmative Action in Education and Employment is designed to enhance intelligent discussion of the issues, presenting all sides of the controversy and working to separate fact from fiction. Sex, Race, and Merit brings together a rich array of material, including newspaper articles and essays by leading scholars. including William Bowen, Derek Bok, Barbara Bergmann, Christopher Edley, Barbara Reskin, Claude Steele, and Patricia Williams. Also featured are excerpts from primary sources, including the legislative documents that established affirmative action policy; the text of California Proposal 200, which ended such policy in that state; and excerpts from key legal cases, including the Bakke case and other recent cases. Sex, Race, and Merit is a useful tool in eliciting thoughtful, informed, and useful debate on the subject of affirmative action. It neither advocates in favor of affirmative action, nor does it speak against it. Rather, by including both factual and polemical materials, the book allows readers to explore the contours of the debate as well as the facts being debated. It is designed for an audience of nonspecialist readers, including students from secondary school through college, but will also be useful to scholars interested in the evolution and current status of this critical policy debate.

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Sexual Discretion

Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing

Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr.

University of Chicago Press, 2014

African American men who have sex with men while maintaining a heterosexual lifestyle in public are attracting increasing interest from both the general media and scholars. Commonly referred to as “down-low” or “DL” men, many continue to have relationships with girlfriends and wives who remain unaware of their same-sex desires, and in much of the media, DL men have been portrayed as carriers of HIV who spread the virus to black women. Sexual Discretion explores the DL phenomenon, offering refreshingly innovative analysis of the significance of media, space, and ideals of black masculinity in understanding down low communities.

In Sexual Discretion, Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr. provides the first in-depth examination of how the social expectations of black masculinity intersect and complicate expressions of same-sex affection and desire. Within these underground DL communities, men aren’t as highly policed—and thus are able to maintain their public roles as “properly masculine.” McCune draws from sources that range from R&B singer R. Kelly’s epic hip-hopera series Trapped in the Closet to Oprah's high-profile exposé on DL subculture; and from E. Lynn Harris’s contemporary sexual passing novels to McCune’s own interviews and ethnography in nightclubs and online chat rooms. Sexual Discretion details the causes, pressures, and negotiations driving men who rarely disclose their intimate secrets.

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Shade-Grown Slavery

The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba

William C. Van Norman

Vanderbilt University Press, 2013

Within the world of Cuban slave-holding plantations, all enslaved people had to negotiate a life defined by forces beyond their control, and indeed beyond the control of their masters. Slaves on coffee farms survived in ways that allowed them to marry, have children, and maintain and redefine cultural practices that they passed on to their children. Slaves were an important factor in creating a nascent Afro-Cuban culture and identity.

In this broad, interdisciplinary study, William Van Norman describes how each type of plantation and the amount of manual labor it required directly influenced the nature of slave life in that community. Slaves on coffee plantations lived in a unique context in comparison to that of their fellow slaves on sugar plantations, one that gave them greater flexibility in cultural and artistic creativity. To gain a deeper understanding of plantation slavery in Cuba, Van Norman explores what life and labor was like for coffee slaves and how it was different from what sugar slaves experienced. Shade-Grown Slavery reconstructs their world and in turn deconstructs the picture we now have of Cuba in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Ultimately, Shade-Grown Slavery reveals the lives of enslaved Africans on Cuban coffee plantations and shows how they were able to maintain and transform their cultural traditions in spite of slavery.

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Shaded Lives

African American Women and Television

Beretta E Smith-Shomade

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Since its invention, television has been one of the biggest influences on American culture. Through this medium, multiple visions and disparate voices have attempted to stake a place in viewer consumption. Yet even as this programming supposedly reflects characteristics of the general American populace, television-generated images are manipulated and contradictory, predicated by the various economic, political, and cultural forces placed upon it.

In Shaded Lives, Beretta Smith-Shomade sets out to dissect images of the African American woman in television from the 1980s. She calls their depiction "binaristic," or split. African American women, although an essential part of television programming today, are still presented as distorted and deviant. By closely examining the television texts of African-American women in comedy, music video, television news and talk shows (Oprah Winfrey is highlighted), Smith-Shomade shows how these voices are represented, what forces may be at work in influencing these images, and what alternate ways of viewing might be available.

Smith-Shomade offers critical examples of where the sexist and racist legacy of this country collide with the cultural strength of Black women in visual and real-lived culture. As the nation's climate of heightened racial divisiveness continues to relegate the representation of Black women to depravity and display, her study is not only useful, it is critical.

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Shades of Black

Nathalie Etoke

Seagull Books, 2021

One might say that the womb of death—the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonization—gave birth to Black populations. Taking this observation as her point of departure, Nathalie Etoke examines Black existence today in her riveting new book, Shades of Black. In a white supremacist world, Black bodies hold a specific position, invested with a range of meaning that maintains them in a fixed role, with a script they did not write. The white world has invented and defined the Black person according to its own interests, endowing her with a bereaved humanity. The Black person is confronted with an essential paradox—exist as Black or as a human being? Does the Black person exist for herself or for the other? In the white world, is the Black race the embodiment of a sub-humanity?

Situated at the crossroads of three countries—Cameroon, France, and, now, the United States—Nathalie Etoke is uniquely positioned for this polyphonic reflection on race. She examines what happens when race obliterates historical, social, cultural, and political differences among populations of African descent from different parts of the world. Focusing on recent and ongoing topics in the United States, including the murder of George Floyd, police brutality, the complex symbolism of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, Etoke explores the relations of violence, oppression, dispossession, and inequalities that have brought us here, face to face with these existential questions: Are you breathing? Are we breathing?

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Shadow Bodies

Black Women, Ideology, Representation, and Politics

Jordan-Zachery, Julia S.

Rutgers University Press, 2018

What does it mean for Black women to organize in a political context that has generally ignored them or been unresponsive although Black women have shown themselves an important voting bloc? How for example, does #sayhername translate into a political agenda that manifests itself in specific policies? Shadow Bodies focuses on the positionality of the Black woman’s body, which serves as a springboard for helping us think through political and cultural representations. It does so by asking: How do discursive practices, both speech and silences, support and maintain hegemonic understandings of Black womanhood thereby rendering some Black women as shadow bodies, unseen and unremarked upon?

Grounded in Black feminist thought, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery looks at the functioning of scripts ascribed to Black women’s bodies in the framing of HIV/AIDS, domestic abuse, and mental illness and how such functioning renders some bodies invisible in Black politics in general and Black women’s politics specifically.

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Shadowed Dreams

Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance

McKay, Nellie

Rutgers University Press, 2006

The first edition of Shadowed Dreams was a groundbreaking anthology that brought to light the contributions of women poets to the Harlem Renaissance. This revised and expanded version contains twice the number of poems found in the original, many of them never before reprinted, and adds eighteen new voices to the collection to once again strike new ground in African American literary history. Also new to this edition are nine period illustrations and updated biographical introductions for each poet.

Shadowed Dreams features new poems by Gwendolyn Bennett, Anita Scott Coleman, Mae Cowdery, Blanche Taylor Dickinson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Gladys Casely Hayford (a k a Aquah Laluah), Virginia Houston, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helene Johnson, Effie Lee Newsome, Esther Popel, and Anne Spencer, as well as writings from newly discovered poets Carrie Williams Clifford, Edythe Mae Gordon, Alvira Hazzard, Gertrude Parthenia McBrown, Beatrice Murphy, Lucia Mae Pitts, Grace Vera Postles, Ida Rowland, and Lucy Mae Turner, among others.

Covering the years 1918 through 1939 and ranging across the period’s major and minor journals, as well as its anthologies and collections, Shadowed Dreams provides a treasure trove of poetry from which to mine deeply buried jewels of black female visions in the early twentieth century.

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Shapeshifters

Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship

Aimee Meredith Cox

Duke University Press, 2015

In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter's residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women's experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit's history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.

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Shaping the Future of African American Film

Color-Coded Economics and the Story Behind the Numbers

Monica White Ndounou

Rutgers University Press, 2014

Received the Distinction Honor for the 2016 C. Calvin Smith Book Award from the Southern Conference on African American Studies, Inc.

In Hollywood, we hear, it’s all about the money. It’s a ready explanation for why so few black films get made—no crossover appeal, no promise of a big payoff. But what if the money itself is color-coded? What if the economics that governs film production is so skewed that no film by, about, or for people of color will ever look like a worthy investment unless it follows specific racial or gender patterns? This, Monica Ndounou shows us, is precisely the case. In a work as revealing about the culture of filmmaking as it is about the distorted economics of African American film, Ndounou clearly traces the insidious connections between history, content, and cash in black films.

How does history come into it? Hollywood’s reliance on past performance as a measure of potential success virtually guarantees that historically underrepresented, underfunded, and undersold African American films devalue the future prospects of black films. So the cycle continues as it has for nearly a century. Behind the scenes, the numbers are far from neutral. Analyzing the onscreen narratives and off-screen circumstances behind nearly two thousand films featuring African Americans in leading and supporting roles, including such recent productions as Bamboozled, Beloved, and Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Ndounou exposes the cultural and racial constraints that limit not just the production but also the expression and creative freedom of black films. Her wide-ranging analysis reaches into questions of literature, language, speech and dialect, film images and narrative, acting, theater and film business practices, production history and financing, and organizational history.

By uncovering the ideology behind profit-driven industry practices that reshape narratives by, about, and for people of color, this provocative work brings to light existing limitations—and possibilities for reworking stories and business practices in theater, literature, and film.

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Shattered

Fragments of a Black Life

Matthieu Chapman

West Virginia University Press, 2023

From a distance, Matthieu Chapman’s life and accomplishments serve as an example of racial progress in America: the first in his family to go to college, he earns two master’s degrees and a doctorate and then becomes a professor of theater. Despite his personal and academic success, however, the specter of antiblackness continues to haunt his every moment and interaction.

Told through fragments, facets, shards, slivers, splinters, and absences, Shattered places Chapman’s own story in dialogue with US history and structural analysis of race to relay the experience of being very alive in a demonstrably antiblack society—laying bare the impact of the American way on black bodies, black psyches, and black lives. From the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the offices of higher education, from a Loyal White Knights flyer on his windshield to a play with black students written by a black playwright, Chapman’s life story embodies the resistance that occurs, the shattering, collapsing, and reconfiguring of being that happens in the collisions between conceptions of blackness. Shattered is a heartrending and thought-provoking challenge to narratives of racial progress and postracial America—an important reminder that systemic antiblack racism affects every black person regardless of what they achieve in spite of it.

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Show Us How You Do It

Marshall Keeble and the Rise of Black Churches of Christ in the United States, 1914-1968

Edward J. Robinson

University of Alabama Press, 2008

Marshall Keeble (1878–1968) was the premier evangelist in black Churches of Christ from 1931 until his death in 1968. Born and reared in middle Tennessee, Keeble came under the influence of Preston Taylor, Samuel Womack, and Alexander Campbell, as well as the social influence of Booker T. Washington. In 1914, Keeble committed himself to full-time evangelism and by the 1920s had established himself as a noteworthy preacher. By the time of his death, he reportedly had baptized 40,000 people and had established more than 200 congregations, some of which still flourish today. Show Us How You Do It is the first critical study of Keeble and his evangelical career.

Based on primary sources, Edward Robinson reconstructs the life, public ministry, missionary activities, and the reception of Keeble among Churches of Christ. He also explores Keeble’s relationship with white businessmen and how he secured white support in establishing a large fellowship of African American Churches of Christ in the South. Show Us How You Do It details Keeble’s theology, ethos, and polemics toward other churches. Robinson demonstrates Keeble’s legacy in the labor of his African American co-workers and of the students who attended Nashville Christian Institute.

Of the approximately 2.5 million members of the Churches of Christ in the U.S., an estimated 10 percent are African-Americans, and many in this fellowship can trace their affiliation to Keeble and to those whom he trained.

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Showdown in Desire

The Black Panthers Take a Stand in New Orleans

Orissa Arend

University of Arkansas Press, 2009

Showdown in Desire portrays the Black Panther Party in New Orleans in 1970, a year that included a shootout with the police on Piety Street, the creation of survival programs, and the daylong standoff between the Panthers and the police in the Desire housing development. Through interviews with Malik Rahim, the Panther; Robert H. King, Panther and member of the Angola 3; Larry Preston Williams, the black policeman; Moon Landrieu, the mayor; Henry Faggen, the Desire resident; Robert Glass, the white lawyer; Jerome LeDoux, the black priest; William Barnwell, the white priest; and many others, Orissa Arend tells a nuanced story that unfolds amid guns, tear gas, desperate poverty, oppression, and inflammatory rhetoric to capture the palpable spirit of rebellion, resistance, and revolution of an incendiary summer in New Orleans.

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Showing Out

Fashion in Harlem

Peter "Souleo" Wright

Rutgers University Press, 2027

Showing Out: Fashion in Harlem explores the unprecedented and enduring impact of the Harlem Institute of Fashion (HIF) on American culture and style. Founded in 1966 by Lois K. Alexander-Lane, HIF produced legendary fashion shows for the annual HARLEM WEEK festival. With their eye-catching costumes, dramatic runway presentations, and embrace of the local community, the shows became one of HIF’s most popular and successful initiatives, spotlighting the underrepresented talents of Black fashion designers, models, and administrators. Tracing HIF’s legacy within the larger narrative of fashion history, Showing Out uses fashion shows as a portal, showcasing previously unpublished archival photos; first-hand accounts from HIF alumni, and contemporary collectives that continue to celebrate the Black contribution to fashion. In the wake of Black Lives Matter, anti-DEI policies, and ongoing political and racial turmoil, Showing Out is the much-needed voice of inspiration to reshape the narrative around fashion.

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Sierra Leone's Settler Women Traders

Women on the Afro-European Frontier

E. Frances White

University of Michigan Press, 1987

The early part of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of West Africa’s Sierra Leone settlement as an important center for the expanding trade economy. A surprising number of Sierra Leonean traders were Krio women, whose crosscultural background helped them to mediate the contact between European and African markets.In Sierra Leone's Settler Women Traders, E. Frances White has unearthed the fascinating social and economic history of these women traders from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Using a lively mixture of newspaper accounts, contemporary observations, colonial documents, and oral histories, this book tells the story of former slaves and captives from Jamaica, North America, and other areas of West Africa who became successful traders linking their regional trade networks with the international economy. The study traces the eventual decline of the Sierra Leone traders’ influence under the extension of colonial rule and documents the gradual shift of Krio women into professional and semiprofessional occupations.Sierra Leone's Settler Women Traders rescues these women from the invisibility that often befails colonial subcultures and sheds new light on the role of women as cultural brokers across ethnic boundaries, resulting in a study that makes a significant contribution to the ongoing debate over the impact of colonial rule on women in Africa.

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Signifying Without Specifying

Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama

Li, Stephanie

Rutgers University Press, 2011

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama faced a difficult task—rallying African American voters while resisting his opponents’ attempts to frame him as “too black” to govern the nation as a whole. Obama’s solution was to employ what Toni Morrison calls “race-specific, race-free language,” avoiding open discussions of racial issues while using terms and references that carried a specific cultural resonance for African American voters.

Stephanie Li argues that American politicians and writers are using a new kind of language to speak about race. Challenging the notion that we have moved into a “post-racial” era, she suggests that we are in an uneasy moment where American public discourse demands that race be seen, but not heard. Analyzing contemporary political speech with nuanced readings of works by such authors as Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Colson Whitehead, Li investigates how Americans of color have negotiated these tensions, inventing new ways to signal racial affiliations without violating taboos against open discussions of race.

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Signs and Cities

Black Literary Postmodernism

Madhu Dubey

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy.

Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression.

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Simple Not Easy

Reflections on community social responsibility and tolerance

Terrence Roberts

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2010

HE MADE HISTORY. HE TELLS THE TRUTHS HE KNOWS.
LEAD TITLE/Our National Conversation Series

"Terrence Roberts is in the truest sense an upstander - an individual whose voice and actions compel us to explore difficult topics and challenge us to face our shared history, honestly. His words and reflections celebrate the notion of difference, model socially responsible behavior and promote tolerance in our daily lives. Reading this book, you will be inspired, in Dr. Roberts's words, to 'think beyond the ordinary."
----Margot Stern Strom, Executive Director, Facing History and Ourselves, Inc.

"Terrence Roberts challenges all of us to make the world more inclusive by adjusting our 'mental maps.' He reminds us that we will not achieve that long-sought beloved community until we recognize the value of each individual-until we affirm each other. Simple, NotEasy is one trailblazer's mingling of history and contemporary mattersto engage a new conversations on community, social responsibility and tolerance. A powerful book by a civil rights legend."
--- Lawrence J. Pijeaux, Jr., Ed.D.,

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Sing and Sing On

Sentinel Musicians and the Making of the Ethiopian American Diaspora

Kay Kaufman Shelemay

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A sweeping history of Ethiopian musicians during and following the 1974 Ethiopian revolution.

Sing and Sing On is the first study of the forced migration of musicians out of the Horn of Africa dating from the 1974 Ethiopian revolution, a political event that overthrew one of the world’s oldest monarchies and installed a brutal military regime. Musicians were among the first to depart the region, their lives shattered by revolutionary violence, curfews, and civil war. Reconstructing the memories of forced migration, Sing and Sing On traces the challenges musicians faced amidst revolutionary violence and the critical role they played in building communities abroad.

Drawing on the recollections of dozens of musicians, Sing and Sing On details personal, cultural, and economic hardships experienced by musicians who have resettled in new locales abroad. Kay Kaufman Shelemay highlights their many artistic and social initiatives and the ways they have offered inspiration and leadership within and beyond a rapidly growing Ethiopian American diaspora. While musicians held this role as sentinels in Ethiopian culture long before the revolution began, it has taken on new meanings and contours in the Ethiopian diaspora. The book details the ongoing creativity of these musicians while exploring the attraction of return to their Ethiopian homeland over the course of decades abroad. Ultimately, Shelemay shows that musicians are uniquely positioned to serve this sentinel role as both guardians and challengers of cultural heritage.

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Sissy Insurgencies

A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness

Marlon B. Ross

Duke University Press, 2022

In Sissy Insurgencies Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington’s practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin’s self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.

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Sista, Speak!

Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy

By Sonja L. Lanehart

University of Texas Press, 2002

2003 — Honorable Mention, Myers Outstanding Book Award – The Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America

The demand of white, affluent society that all Americans should speak, read, and write "proper" English causes many people who are not white and/or middle class to attempt to "talk in a way that feel peculiar to [their] mind," as a character in Alice Walker's The Color Purple puts it. In this book, Sonja Lanehart explores how this valorization of "proper" English has affected the language, literacy, educational achievements, and self-image of five African American women—her grandmother, mother, aunt, sister, and herself.

Through interviews and written statements by each woman, Lanehart draws out the life stories of these women and their attitudes toward and use of language. Making comparisons and contrasts among them, she shows how, even within a single family, differences in age, educational opportunities, and social circumstances can lead to widely different abilities and comfort in using language to navigate daily life. Her research also adds a new dimension to our understanding of African American English, which has been little studied in relation to women.

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Sister

An African American Life in Search of Justice

Sylvia Bell White and Jody LePage

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

Raised with twelve brothers in a part of the segregated South that provided no school for African American children through the 1940s, Sylvia Bell White went North as a teenager, dreaming of a nursing career and a freedom defined in part by wartime rhetoric about American ideals. In Milwaukee she and her brothers persevered through racial rebuffs and discrimination to find work. Barred by both her gender and color from employment in the city’s factories, Sylvia scrubbed floors, worked as a nurse’s aide, and took adult education courses.

When a Milwaukee police officer killed her younger brother Daniel Bell in 1958, the Bell family suspected a racial murder but could do nothing to prove it—until twenty years later, when one of the two officers involved in the incident unexpectedly came forward. Daniel’s siblings filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city and ultimately won that four-year legal battle. Sylvia was the driving force behind their quest for justice.

Telling her whole life story in these pages, Sylvia emerges as a buoyant spirit, a sparkling narrator, and, above all, a powerful witness to racial injustice. Jody LePage’s chapter introductions frame the narrative in a historical span that reaches from Sylvia’s own enslaved grandparents to the nation’s first African American president. Giving depth to that wide sweep, this oral history brings us into the presence of an extraordinary individual. Rarely does such a voice receive a hearing.

Winner, Wisconsin Historical Society Book Award of Merit

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Sisters in the Life

A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making

Yvonne Welbon and Alexandra Juhasz, editors

Duke University Press, 2018

From experimental shorts and web series to Hollywood blockbusters and feminist porn, the work of African American lesbian filmmakers has made a powerful contribution to film history. But despite its importance, this work has gone largely unacknowledged by cinema historians and cultural critics. Assembling a range of interviews, essays, and conversations, Sisters in the Life tells a full story of African American lesbian media-making spanning three decades. In essays on filmmakers including Angela Robinson, Tina Mabry and Dee Rees; on the making of Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman (1996); and in interviews with Coquie Hughes, Pamela Jennings, and others, the contributors center the voices of black lesbian media makers while underscoring their artistic influence and reach as well as the communities that support them. Sisters in the Life marks a crucial first step in narrating the history and importance of these compelling yet unsung artists.

Contributors. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Jennifer DeClue, Raul Ferrera-Balanquet, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Thomas Allen Harris, Devorah Heitner, Pamela L. Jennings, Alexandra Juhasz, Kara Keeling, Candace Moore, Marlon Moore, Michelle Parkerson, Roya Rastegar, L. H. Stallings, Yvonne Welbon, Patricia White, Karin D. Wimbley

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Sistuhs in the Struggle

An Oral History of Black Arts Movement Theater and Performance

La Donna L. Forsgren

Northwestern University Press, 2021

Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE

The first oral history to fully explore the contributions of black women intellectuals to the Black Arts Movement, Sistuhs in the Struggle reclaims a vital yet under-researched chapter in African American, women’s, and theater history. This groundbreaking study documents how black women theater artists and activists—many of whom worked behind the scenes as directors, designers, producers, stage managers, and artistic directors—disseminated the black aesthetic and emboldened their communities.

Drawing on nearly thirty original interviews with well-known artists such as Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez as well as less-studied figures including distinguished lighting designer Shirley Prendergast, dancer and choreographer Halifu Osumare, and three-time Tony-nominated writer and composer Micki Grant, La Donna L. Forsgren centers black women’s cultural work as a crucial component of civil rights and black power activism. Sistuhs in the Struggle is an essential collection for theater scholars, historians, and students interested in learning how black women’s art and activism both advanced and critiqued the ethos of the Black Arts and Black Power movements.

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