Results by title
1218 books match the query 'African Americans' and 119 start with a
A Biscuit for Your Shoe
Beatrice Upshaw
University of North Texas Press, 2020
A Black Gambler’s World of Liquor, Vice, and Presidential Politics
William Thomas Scott of Illinois, 1839–1917Bruce L. Mouser
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
Scott helped build the National Negro Liberty Party to forward economic, political, and legal rights for his race. But the hustling that had brought him business success proved his undoing as a national political figure. He was the NNLP's initial presidential nominee, only to be replaced by a better-educated and more socially acceptable candidate, George Edwin Taylor.
A Black Intellectual's Odyssey
From a Pennsylvania Milltown to the Ivy LeagueMartin Kilson
Duke University Press, 2021
He gives a sweeping sociological tour of Ambler as a multiethnic, working-class company town while sketching the social, economic, and racial elements that marked everyday life. From narrating the area's history of persistent racism and the racial politics in the integrated schools to describing the Black church's role in buttressing the town's small Black community, Kilson vividly renders his experience of northern small-town life during the 1930s and 1940s.
At Lincoln University, Kilson's liberal political views coalesced as he became active in the local NAACP chapter. While at Lincoln and during his graduate work at Harvard, Kilson observed how class, political, and racial dynamics influenced his peers' political engagement, diverse career paths, and relationships with white people. As a young professor, Kilson made a point of assisting Harvard's African American students in adapting to life at a white institution.
Throughout his career, Kilson engaged in pioneering scholarship while mentoring countless students. A Black Intellectual's Odyssey features contributions from three of his students: a foreword by Cornel West and an afterword by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten.
A Carpetbagger in Reverse
Arthur W. Mitchell, America's First Black Democratic CongressmanJohn Morris Knapp
University of Alabama Press, 2025
From Alabama to Congress—Arthur W. Mitchell’s fight for justice rewrote the rules of Black political power.
A Carpetbagger in Reverse offers a landmark reassessment of the life, career, and accomplishments of groundbreaking Congressman Arthur W. Mitchell, the first Black Democrat elected to Congress and the only Black member of Congress during his four terms of service from 1935 to 1943.
Born to former enslaved people in Alabama in 1883, Mitchell studied with Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute and later moved to Washington DC and became a lawyer. He continued his career in Chicago, where the Great Migration had helped transform the city’s South Side into a vibrant, multiracial enclave.
As a congressman, Mitchell helped to create an enduring alliance between Black Americans and the Democratic party. Seeing his primary role as representing the South’s disempowered Black population, his belief that solutions to the region’s racial problems should arise from a new cadre of locally trained leaders brought him into frequent, vituperative conflict with the NAACP, the Republican Party, and the Black press. The first Black lawyer to argue successfully before the Supreme Court, his unanimous victory in Mitchell v. United States would have long-term consequences for the Civil Rights Movement.
A Carpetbagger in Reverse is the first publication significantly based on Mitchell’s papers, an essential and often overlooked source of insights about the development of Black political and culture life in the 1930s and 1940s.
A Change Is Gonna Come
Music, Race & the Soul of AmericaCraig Werner
University of Michigan Press, 2006
—Notes
"No one has written this way about music in a long, long time. Lucid, insightful, with real spiritual, political, intellectual, and emotional grasp of the whole picture. A book about why music matters, and how, and to whom."
—Dave Marsh, author of Louie, Louie and Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story
"This book is urgently needed: a comprehensive look at the various forms of black popular music, both as music and as seen in a larger social context. No one can do this better than Craig Werner."
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
"[Werner has] mastered the extremely difficult art of writing about music as both an aesthetic and social force that conveys, implies, symbolizes, and represents ideas as well as emotion, but without reducing its complexities and ambiguities to merely didactic categories."
—African American Review
A Change Is Gonna Come is the story of more than four decades of enormously influential black music, from the hopeful, angry refrains of the Freedom movement, to the slick pop of Motown; from the disco inferno to the Million Man March; from Woodstock's "Summer of Love" to the war in Vietnam and the race riots that inspired Marvin Gaye to write "What's Going On."
Originally published in 1998, A Change Is Gonna Come drew the attention of scholars and general readers alike. This new edition, featuring four new and updated chapters, will reintroduce Werner's seminal study of black music to a new generation of readers.
Craig Werner is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and author of many books, including Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse and Up Around the Bend: An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival. His most recent book is Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul.
A Circle of Trust
Remembering SNCCGreenberg, Cheryl L
Rutgers University Press, 1998
"The reminiscences and reflections voiced at the SNCC reunion remind us of the remarkable vision and courageous dedication of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Framed by Cheryl Greenberg's eloquent and probing introduction, the SNCC veterans' comments about the triumphs and limitations of their movement represent a major contribution to the historical literature on race and power in modern America." --Raymond Arsenault, University of South Florida
On the occasion of the SNCC's 25th anniversary, more than 500 people gathered at Trinity College in Connecticut to both celebrate and critique its accomplishments. More than 40 SNCC members tell their stories and reflect on the contributions, limits and legacies of the movement in A Circle of Trust. Engaging in spirited debate with each other, with historians of the movement, and with contemporary political culture more broadly, these former and perpetual activists speak of their vision of a just society and what still remains to be done. With increasing racial tension and the continued debate over integration and separatism in America in the 1990s, the content of this conference is more relevant than ever.
Cheryl Lynn Greenberg begins with an overview of SNCC and introduces each of the chapters of oral history. Participants explore the origins of SNCC, its early adoption of nonviolent protest, its ultimate renunciation of liberal integration and embrace of militant black radicalism, its refusal to repudiate far-left organizations, and controversies over the roles of women in SNCC and society at large. The result is a thoughtful, moving, sometimes acrimonious, sometimes celebratory account of one of the most significant civil rights organizations and its successes and failures.
A City within a City
The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids, MichiganTodd E Robinson
Temple University Press, 2012
A City within a City cogently argues that the post-war political reform championed by local Republicans transformed the city's racial geography, creating a racialized "city within a city," featuring a system of "managerial racism" designed to keep blacks in declining inner-city areas. As Robinson indicates, this bold, provocative framework for understanding race relations in Grand Rapids has broader implications for illuminating the twentieth-century African American urban experience in secondary cities.
A Colored Man Round the World
David F. Dorr
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Malini Johar Schueller has edited and annotated the 1858 text and added a critical introduction that provides a useful context for understanding and appreciating this important but heretofore neglected document. Her edition of A Colored Man Round the World provides a fascinating account of Dorr's negotiation of the conflicting roles of slave versus man, taking into account all of the racial complexities that existed at the time. As a traveler abroad, Dorr claimed an American selfhood that allowed him mobility in Europe, and he benefited from the privileges accorded American "Orientalists" venturing in the near East. However, any empowerment that Dorr experienced while a tourist vanished upon his return to America.
The book will be welcomed for the rare perspective it provides of the mid-nineteenth century, through the eyes of an African-American slave and for the light it casts on world and U.S. history as well as on questions of racial and national identity.
Malini Johar Schueller is Professor of English, University of Florida.
A Cry for Justice
Daniel Rudd and His Life in Black Catholicism, Journalism, and Activism, 1854-1933Gary B. Agee
University of Arkansas Press, 2017
A Death in Harlem
A NovelKarla FC Holloway
Northwestern University Press, 2019
In A Death in Harlem, famed scholar Karla FC Holloway weaves a mystery in the bon vivant world of the Harlem Renaissance. Taking as her point of departure the tantalizingly ambiguous “death by misadventure” at the climax of Nella Larsen’s Passing, Holloway accompanies readers to the sunlit boulevards and shaded sidestreets of Jazz Age New York. A murder there will test the mettle, resourcefulness, and intuition of Harlem’s first “colored” policeman, Weldon Haynie Thomas.
Clear glass towers rising in Manhattan belie a city where people are often not what they seem. For some here, identity is a performance of passing—passing for another race, for another class, for someone safe to trust. Thomas’s investigation illuminates the societies and secret societies, the intricate code of manners, the world of letters, and the broad social currents of 1920s Harlem.
A Death in Harlem is an exquisitely crafted, briskly paced, and impeccably stylish journey back to a time still remembered as a peak of American glamour. It introduces Holloway as a fresh voice in storytelling, and Weldon Haynie Thomas as an endearing and unforgettable detective.
A Decisive Decade
An Insider's View of the Chicago Civil Rights Movement during the 1960sRobert B. McKersie, Foreword by James R. Ralph Jr.
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
The deeply personal story of a historic time in Chicago, Robert B. McKersie’s A Decisive Decade follows the unfolding action of the Civil Rights Movement as it played out in the Windy City. McKersie’s participation as a white activist for black rights offers a unique, firsthand viewpoint on the debates, boycotts, marches, and negotiations that would forever change the face of race relations in Chicago and the United States at large.
Described within are McKersie’s intimate observations on events as they developed during his participation in such historic occasions as the impassioned marches for open housing in Chicago; the campaign to end school segregation under Chicago Schools Superintendent Benjamin Willis; Operation Breadbasket’s push to develop economic opportunities for black citizens; and dialogs with corporations to provide more jobs for blacks in Chicago. In addition, McKersie provides up close and personal descriptions of the iconic Civil Rights leaders who spearheaded some of the most formative battles of Chicago’s Civil Rights movement, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Reverend Jesse Jackson, Timuel Black Jr. and W. Alvin Pitcher. The author illumines the tensions experienced by two major institutions in responding to the demands of the civil rights movement: the university and the church. Packed with historical detail and personal anecdotes of these history-making years, A Decisive Decade offers a never-before-seen perspective on one of our nation’s most tumultuous eras.
A Different Hunger
Writings on Black ResistanceA. Sivanandan
Pluto Press, 1991
A Festival of Violence
An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930Stewart Tolnay and E.M. Beck
University of Illinois Press, 1995
practice. Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck empirically test competing explanations of the causes of lynching, using U.S. Census and historical voting data and a newly constructed inventory of southern lynch victims. Among their surprising findings: lynching responded to fluctuations in the price of cotton, decreasing in frequency when prices rose and increasing when they fell.
A Fire You Can't Put Out
The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred ShuttlesworthAndrew M. Manis
University of Alabama Press, 2001
WINNER, LILLIAN SMITH AWARD
WINNER, JAMES F. SULZBY, JR. AWARD
The fire of freedom that changed Birmingham—and America.
When Fred Shuttlesworth suffered only a bump on the head in the 1956 bombing of his home, members of his church called it a miracle. Shuttlesworth took it as a sign that God would protect him on the mission that had made him a target that night. Standing in front of his demolished home, Shuttlesworth vigorously renewed his commitment to integrate Birmingham's buses, lunch counters, police force, and parks. The incident transformed him, in the eyes of Birmingham's blacks, from an up-and-coming young minister to a virtual folk hero and, in the view of white Birmingham, from obscurity to rabble-rouser extraordinaire.
From his 1956 founding of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights through the historic demonstrations of 1963, driven by a sense of divine mission, Shuttlesworth pressured Jim Crow restrictions in Birmingham with radically confrontational acts of courage. His intensive campaign pitted him against the staunchly segregationist police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor and ultimately brought him to the side of Martin Luther King Jr. and to the inner chambers of the Kennedy White House.
First published in 1999, Andrew Manis's award-winning biography of "one of the nation's most courageous freedom fighters" demonstrates compellingly that Shuttleworth's brand of fiery, outspoken confrontation derived from his prophetic understanding of the pastoral role. Civil rights activism was tantamount to salvation in his understanding of the role of Christian minister.
A Force for Change
Beatrice Morrow Cannady and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Oregon, 1912-1936Kimberley Mangun
Oregon State University Press, 2010
A Force for Change is the first full-length study of the life and work of one of Oregon’s most dynamic civil rights activists, African American journalist Beatrice Morrow Cannady. Between 1912 and 1936, Cannady tirelessly promoted interracial goodwill and fought segregation and discrimination.
She gave hundreds of lectures to high school and college students and shared her message with radio listeners across the Pacific Northwest. She was assistant editor, and later publisher, of The Advocate, Oregon’s largest African American newspaper. Cannady was the first black woman to graduate from law school in Oregon, and the first to run for state representative. She held interracial teas in her home in Northeast Portland and protested repeated showings of the racist film The Birth of a Nation. And when the Ku Klux Klan swept into Oregon, she urged the governor to act quickly to protect black Oregonians’ right to live and work without fear. Despite these accomplishments—and many more during her twenty-five-year career—Beatrice Cannady fell into obscurity when she left Oregon in about 1938.
A Force for Change illuminates Cannady’s important role in advocating for better race relations in Oregon in the early decades of the twentieth century. It describes her encounters with the period’s leading black artists, editors, politicians, and intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, A. Philip Randolph, Oscar De Priest, Roland Hayes, and James Weldon Johnson. It dispels the myth that African Americans played little part in Oregon’s history and enriches our understanding of the black experience in Oregon.
A Force for Change is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of women’s history, gender studies, African American history, journalism history, and Pacific Northwest history. It belongs on the shelf of any reader interested in a richer understanding of the civil rights movement in Oregon and across the country.
A Gallery of Harlem Portraits
Melvin B. Tolson, Edited & Afterword by Robert M. Farnsworth
University of Missouri Press, 1979
Tolson eventually attempted to incorporate the technical achievements of T.S. Eliot and the New Criticism into a complex modern poetry which would accurately represent the extraordinary tensions, paradoxes, and sophistication, both highbrow and lowbrow, of modern Harlem. As a consequence his position in literary history is problematical. The publication of this earliest of his manuscripts will help clarify Tolson's achievement and surprise many of his readers with its readily accessible, warmly human poetic portraiture.
A Ghetto Takes Shape
Black Cleveland, 1870-1930Kenneth L. Kusmer
University of Illinois Press, 1976
A History of Fort Worth in Black & White
165 Years of African-American LifeRichard F. Selcer
University of North Texas Press, 2015
A History of Southland College
The Society of Friends and Black Education in ArkansasThomas Kennedy
University of Arkansas Press, 2009
A House for the Struggle
The Black Press and the Built Environment in ChicagoE. James West
University of Illinois Press, 2022
- Winner of the 2023 Michael Nelson Prize of International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST)
- Recipient of the 2022 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award
- Winner of the 2023 American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year
- Winner of the 2023 ULCC’s (Union League Club of Chicago) Outstanding Book on the History of Chicago Award
- Recipient of a 2023 Best of Illinois History Superior Achievement award from the Illinois State Historical Society
- Winner of the 2023 BAAS Book Prize (British Association for American Studies)
- Winner of a 2023 The Brinck Book Award and Lecture series (University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning)
- Honorable Mention for the 2021-22 RSAP Book Prize (Research Society for American Periodicals)
Buildings once symbolized Chicago's place as the business capital of Black America and a thriving hub for Black media. In this groundbreaking work, E. James West examines the city's Black press through its relationship with the built environment. As a house for the struggle, the buildings of publications like Ebony and the Chicago Defender embodied narratives of racial uplift and community resistance. As political hubs, gallery spaces, and public squares, they served as key sites in the ongoing Black quest for self-respect, independence, and civic identity. At the same time, factors ranging from discriminatory business practices to editorial and corporate ideology prescribed their location, use, and appearance, positioning Black press buildings as sites of both Black possibility and racial constraint.
Engaging and innovative, A House for the Struggle reconsiders the Black press's place at the crossroads where aspiration collided with life in one of America's most segregated cities.
A Life In The Struggle
Ivory Perry and the Culture of OppositionGeorge Lipsitz
Temple University Press, 1995
A Little More Freedom
African Americans Enter the Urban Midwest, 1860–1930Jack S. Blocker
The Ohio State University Press, 2008
A Motorcycle on Hell Run
Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964–1974Seth M. Markle
Michigan State University Press, 2017
A New Anthology of Art Songs by African American Composers
Selected by Margaret R. Simmons and Jeanine Wagner. Foreword by William Brown
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004
A diverse repertoire of art songs for piano and voice
The art song—a delicate and inspiring blend of music and poetry—has been performed by singers and pianists and appreciated by audiences around the world for more than two hundred years. While collections of art songs abound, this welcome volume and its accompanying compact discs make readily available the contributions of contemporary African American composers to the popular genre. Including thirty-nine pieces for voice and piano created since 1968 by eighteen artists, ANew Anthology of Art Songs by African American Composers navigates a varied musical terrain from classical European traditions to jazz and spirituals. With nearly half of the featured songs composed by women and with others by lesser-known and emerging composers, this important collection offers a diverse, representative sampling of African American art songs and works to secure the places of these songs and artists in the canon of contemporary American music.
Selected by Jeanine Wagner and Margaret R. Simmons, prolific and celebrated performers who have presented recitals throughout the world featuring the art songs of African American composers, this dazzling new repertoire of twentieth-century music is cogently framed by a thorough introduction and substantial biographies of each composer. The compact discs feature piano tracks of all thirty-nine compositions.
The featured composers are H. Leslie Adams, Mable Bailey, Charles S. Brown, Wallace McClain Cheatham, Adolphus Hailstork, Jacqueline B. Hairston, William H. Henderson, Jeraldine Saunders Herbison, Betty Jackson King, William Foster
McDaniel, Undine Smith Moore, Byron Motley, Barbara Sherrill, Robert Owens, Nadine Shanti, Frederick Tillis, Dolores White, and Julius P. Williams.
A New Deal for All?
Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era BaltimoreAndor Skotnes
Duke University Press, 2012
A New Deal for Bronzeville
Housing, Employment, and Civil Rights in Black Chicago, 1935-1955Lionel Kimble Jr.
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
During the Great Migration of the 1920s and 1930s, southern African Americans flocked to the South Side Chicago community of Bronzeville, the cultural, political, social, and economic hub of African American life in the city, if not the Midwest. The area soon became the epicenter of community activism as working-class African Americans struggled for equality in housing and employment. In this study, Lionel Kimble Jr. demonstrates how these struggles led to much of the civil rights activism that occurred from 1935 to 1955 in Chicago and shows how this working-class activism and culture helped to ground the early civil rights movement. Despite the obstacles posed by the Depression, blue-collar African Americans worked with leftist organizations to counter job discrimination and made strong appeals to New Deal allies for access to public housing. Kimble details how growing federal intervention in local issues during World War II helped African Americans make significant inroads into Chicago’s war economy and how returning African American World War II veterans helped to continue the fight against discrimination in housing and employment after the war. The activism that appeared in Bronzeville was not simply motivated by the “class consciousness” rhetoric of the organized labor movement but instead grew out of everyday struggles for racial justice, citizenship rights, and improved economic and material conditions. With its focus on the role of working-class African Americans—as opposed to the middle-class leaders who have received the most attention from civil rights historians in the past—A New Deal for Bronzeville makes a significant contribution to the study of civil rights work in the Windy City and enriches our understanding of African American life in mid-twentieth-century Chicago.
This publication is partially funded by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan fund.
A Nickel and a Prayer
Jane Edna Hunter, Edited by Rhondda Robinson Thomas, with a foreword by Joycelyn Moody
West Virginia University Press, 2010
This new and annotated edition of A Nickel and a Prayer includes the final chapter, “Fireside Musings,” that Hunter added to the second, limited printing of her autobiography and an introduction that lauds her as a multifaceted social activist who not only engaged in racial uplift work, but impacted African American cultural production, increased higher education opportunities for women, and invigorated African American philanthropy. This important text restores Jane Edna Harris Hunter to her rightful place among prominent African American race leaders of the twentieth century.
A Peculiar Imbalance
The Fall and Rise of Racial Equality in Minnesota, 1837–1869William D. Green
University of Minnesota Press, 2015
A Peculiar Imbalance is the little-known history of the black experience in Minnesota in the mid-1800s, a time of dramatic change in the region. William D. Green explains how, as white progressive politicians pushed for statehood, black men who had been integrated members of the community, owning businesses and maintaining good relationships with their neighbors, found themselves denied the right to vote or to run for office in those same communities.
As Minnesota was transformed from a wilderness territory to a state, the concepts of race and ethnicity and the distinctions among them made by Anglo-Americans grew more rigid and arbitrary. A black man might enjoy economic success and a middle-class lifestyle but was not considered a citizen under the law. In contrast, an Irish Catholic man was able to vote—as could a mixed-blood Indian—but might find himself struggling to build a business because of the ethnic and religious prejudices of the Anglo-American community. A Peculiar Imbalance examines these disparities, reflecting on the political, social, and legal experiences of black men from 1837 to 1869, the year of black suffrage.
A Peculiar Paradise
A History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788-1940Elizabeth McLagan
Oregon State University Press, 2022
A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon 1788–1940 remains the most comprehensive chronology of Black life in Oregon more than forty years after its original publication in 1980. The book has long been a resource for those seeking information on the legal and social barriers faced by people of African descent in Oregon. Elizabeth McLagan’s work reveals how in spite of those barriers, Black individuals and families made Oregon their home, and helped create the state’s modern Black communities. Long out of print, the book is available again through this co-publication with Oregon Black Pioneers, Oregon’s statewide African American historical society. The revised second edition includes additional details for students and scholars, an expanded reading list, a new selection of historic images, and a new foreword by Gwen Carr and an afterword by Elizabeth McLagan.
A Promise And A Way Of Life
White Antiracist ActivismBecky Thompson
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
The first in-depth look at white people’s activism in fighting racism during the past fifty years.
Not since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when many white college students went south to fight against Jim Crow laws, has white antiracist activity held the public’s attention. Yet there have always been white people involved in fighting racism. In this passionate work, Becky Thompson looks at white Americans who have struggled against racism, offering examples of both successes and failures, inspirations, practical philosophies, and a way ahead.
A Promise and a Way of Life weaves an account of the past half-century based on the life histories of thirty-nine people who have placed antiracist activism at the center of their lives. Through a rich and fascinating narrative that links individual experiences with social and political history, Thompson shows the ways, both public and personal, in which whites have opposed racism during several social movements: the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, multiracial feminism, the Central American peace movement, the struggle for antiracist education, and activism against the prison industry. Beginning with the diverse catalysts that started these activists on their journeys, this book demonstrates the contributions and limitations of white antiracism in key social justice movements.
Through these stories, crucial questions are raised: Does antiracist work require a repudiation of one’s whiteness or can that identity be transformed through political commitment and alliances? What do white people need to do to undermine white privilege? What would it take to build a multiracial movement in which white people are responsible for creating antiracist alliances while not co-opting people of color?
Unique in its depth and thoroughness, A Promise and a Way of Life is essential for anyone currently fighting racism or wondering how to do so. Through its demonstration of the extraordinary personal and social transformations ordinary people can make, it provides a new paradigm for movement activity, one that will help to incite and guide future antiracist activism.
A Renegade Union
Interracial Organizing and Labor RadicalismLisa Phillips
University of Illinois Press, 2013
A Rift in the Clouds
Race and the Southern Federal Judiciary, 1900-1910Brent J. Aucoin
University of Arkansas Press, 2007
A Right to Read
Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama's Public Libraries, 1900–1965Patterson Toby Graham
University of Alabama Press, 2006
This original and significant contribution to the historiography of the civil rights movement and education in the South details a dramatic and disturbing chapter in American cultural history.
The tradition of American public libraries is closely tied to the perception that these institutions are open to all without regard to social background. Such was not the case in the segregated South, however, where public libraries barred entry to millions of African Americans and provided tacit support for a culture of white supremacy. A Right to Read is the first book to examine public library segregation from its origins in the late 19th century through its end during the tumultuous years of the 1960s civil rights movement. Graham focuses on Alabama, where African Americans, denied access to white libraries, worked to establish and maintain their own "Negro branches." These libraries-separate but never equal-were always underfunded and inadequately prepared to meet the needs of their constituencies.
By 1960, however, African Americans turned their attention toward desegregating the white public libraries their taxes helped support. They carried out "read-ins" and other protests designed to bring attention and judicial pressure upon the segregationists. Patterson Toby Graham contends that, for librarians, the civil rights movement in their institutions represented a conflict of values that pitted their professional ethics against regional mores. He details how several librarians in Alabama took the dangerous course of opposing segregationists, sometimes with unsettling results.
This groundbreaking work built on primary evidence will have wide cross-disciplinary appeal. Students and scholars of southern and African-American history, civil rights, and social science, as well as academic and public librarians, will appreciate Graham's solid research and astute analysis.
A Sound History
Lawrence Gellert, Black Musical Protest, and White DenialSteven P. Garabedian
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
Lawrence Gellert has long been a mysterious figure in American folk and blues studies, gaining prominence in the left-wing folk revival of the 1930s for his fieldwork in the U.S. South. A “lean, straggly-haired New Yorker,” as Time magazine called him, Gellert was an independent music collector, without formal training, credentials, or affiliation. At a time of institutionalized suppression, he worked to introduce white audiences to a tradition of black musical protest that had been denied and overlooked by prior white collectors.
By the folk and blues revival of the 1960s, however, when his work would again seem apt in the context of the civil rights movement, Gellert and his collection of Negro Songs of Protest were a conspicuous absence. A few leading figures in the revival defamed Gellert as a fraud, dismissing his archive of black vernacular protest as a fabrication—an example of left-wing propaganda and white interference. A Sound History is the story of an individual life, an excavation of African American musical resistance and dominant white historiography, and a cultural history of radical possibility and reversal in the defining middle decades of the U.S. twentieth century.
A Time to Speak
The Story of a Young American Lawyer's Struggle for His City—and HimselfCharles Morgan Jr., With a New Foreword by Senator Doug Jones
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Brings back into print a classic account of courage and calamity in the long march toward racial justice in the South, and the nation
On September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young Black girls. The very next day, a prominent white lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr. was scheduled to speak at a luncheon held by the Young Men’s Business Club of Birmingham. A well-regarded figure in the city’s legal and business establishment, Morgan had been mentioned frequently as a candidate for political office. To the shock of his longtime friends and associates, Morgan deviated from his planned remarks, instead using his platform to place the blame for the murder of the four young girls squarely on the shoulders of the city’s white middle-class establishment, those seated before him.
As much as his stand was admired nationally, in Birmingham the results were destructive for him personally. Threats against his life and the lives of his family poured in daily by phone and mail, his political career was finished, and he was faced with financial ruin. Within weeks, he moved his family out of the state, and thenceforward committed himself to legal action in the name of racial justice. In 1964, he established the regional office of the ACLU in Atlanta. In the 1964 Supreme Court case Reynolds v. Sims, Morgan successfully argued that districts in state legislatures needed to be of nearly equal size, establishing the principle of “one man, one vote” to effectively end the use of gerrymandering.
A Time to Speak was originally published in 1964, a mere year after Morgan and his family fled Birmingham. The memoir recounts not only his speech, but his entire upbringing and the political, cultural, and social milieus in which he was raised and which gave rise to the cowardice, institutional silence, fear, and hate that those conditions nursed. This new edition features a foreword from US Senator Doug Jones.
A Voice of Thunder
A BLACK SOLDIER'S CIVIL WAREdited by Donald Yacovone
University of Illinois Press, 1997
important African-American war correspondent of his era, served in the
famed black Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, subject of the film Glory.
His letters from the front, published in the New York Weekly Anglo-African,
brilliantly detail two wars: one against the Confederacy and one against
the brutal, debilitating racism within his own Union Army. Together with
Donald Yacovone's biographical introduction detailing Stephens's life
and times, they provide a singular perspective on the greatest crisis
in the history of the United States.
Stephens chronicled the African-American
quest for freedom in reports from southern Maryland and eastern Virginia
in 1861 and 1862 that detailed, among other issues of the day, the Army
of the Potomac's initial encounter with slavery, the heroism of fugitive
slaves, and the brutality both Southerners and Union troops inflicted
on them.
From the inception of the
Fifty-fourth early in 1863 Stephens was the unit's voice, telling of its
struggle against slavery and its quest to win the pay it had been promised.
His description of the July 18, 1863, assault on Battery Wagner near Charleston,
South Carolina, and his writings on the unit's eighteen-month campaign
to be paid as much as white troops are gripping accounts of continued
heroism in the face of persistent insult.
The Weekly Anglo-African
was the preeminent African-American newspaper of its time. Stephens's
correspondence, intimate and authoritative, takes in an expansive array
of issues and anticipates nearly all modern assessments of the black role
in the Civil War. His commentary on the Lincoln administration's wartime
policy and his conviction that the issues of race and slavery were central
to nineteenth-century American life mark him as a major American social
critic.
A World More Concrete
Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South FloridaN. D. B. Connolly
University of Chicago Press, 2014
A World More Concrete argues that black and white landlords, entrepreneurs, and even liberal community leaders used tenements and repeated land dispossession to take advantage of the poor and generate remarkable wealth. Through a political culture built on real estate, South Florida’s landlords and homeowners advanced property rights and white property rights, especially, at the expense of more inclusive visions of equality. For black people and many of their white allies, uses of eminent domain helped to harden class and color lines. Yet, for many reformers, confiscating certain kinds of real estate through eminent domain also promised to help improve housing conditions, to undermine the neighborhood influence of powerful slumlords, and to open new opportunities for suburban life for black Floridians.
Concerned more with winners and losers than with heroes and villains, A World More Concrete offers a sober assessment of money and power in Jim Crow America. It shows how negotiations between powerful real estate interests on both sides of the color line gave racial segregation a remarkable capacity to evolve, revealing property owners’ power to reshape American cities in ways that can still be seen and felt today.
A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights
Cornelius L. Bynum
University of Illinois Press, 2010
Aaron Henry of Mississippi
Inside AgitatorMinion K. C. Morrison
University of Arkansas Press, 2015
When Aaron Henry returned home to Mississippi from World War II service in 1946, he was part of wave of black servicemen who challenged the racial status quo. He became a pharmacist through the GI Bill, and as a prominent citizen, he organized a hometown chapter of the NAACP and relatively quickly became leader of the state chapter.
From that launching pad he joined and helped lead an ensemble of activists who fundamentally challenged the system of segregation and the almost total exclusion of African Americans from the political structure. These efforts were most clearly evident in his leadership of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation, which, after an unsuccessful effort to unseat the lily-white Democratic delegation at the Democratic National Convention in 1964, won recognition from the national party in 1968.
The man who the New York Times described as being “at the forefront of every significant boycott, sit-in, protest march, rally, voter registration drive and court case” eventually became a rare example of a social-movement leader who successfully moved into political office. Aaron Henry of Mississippi covers the life of this remarkable leader, from his humble beginnings in a sharecropping family to his election to the Mississippi house of representatives in 1979, all the while maintaining the social-change ideology that prompted him to improve his native state, and thereby the nation.
Abandoning the Black Hero
Sympathy and Privacy in the Postwar African American White-Life NovelCharles, John C
Rutgers University Press, 2012
Abandoning the Black Hero is the first book to examine the postwar African American white-life novel—novels with white protagonists written by African Americans. These fascinating works have been understudied despite having been written by such defining figures in the tradition as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes, as well as lesser known but formerly best-selling authors Willard Motley and Frank Yerby.
John C. Charles argues that these fictions have been overlooked because they deviate from two critical suppositions: that black literature is always about black life and that when it represents whiteness, it must attack white supremacy. The authors are, however, quite sympathetic in the treatment of their white protagonists, which Charles contends should be read not as a failure of racial pride but instead as a strategy for claiming creative freedom, expansive moral authority, and critical agency.
In an era when “Negro writers” were expected to protest, their sympathetic treatment of white suffering grants these authors a degree of racial privacy previously unavailable to them. White writers, after all, have the privilege of racial privacy because they are never pressured to write only about white life. Charles reveals that the freedom to abandon the “Negro problem” encouraged these authors to explore a range of new genres and themes, generating a strikingly diverse body of novels that significantly revise our understanding of mid-twentieth-century black writing.
Across the Color Line
Reporting 25 Years in Black CincinnatiMark Curnutte
Ohio University Press, 2019
Published by the University of Cincinnati Press
Across the Color Line: Reporting 25 Years in Black Cincinnati presents newspaper reporter Mark Curnutte’s stories published in The Cincinnati Enquirer over a twenty-five-year period beginning in 1993. With hard-won insights gained from years of community reporting, Curnutte describes experiences of African-Americans living in Cincinnati through individual and neighborhood profiles, explorations of community institutions, historical perspectives, and issue stories. The anthology tells a sweeping narrative of a city suffering and maturing through turn-of-the-century racial growing pains and increased racial sophistication and diversity. These stories are complimented by excerpts from Curnutte’s personal journal, providing his reflection on his role as a white man and reporter making the intentional decision to work and live across the color line.
Act Like You Know
African-American Autobiography and White IdentityCrispin Sartwell
University of Chicago Press, 1998
There is, Sartwell contends, a fundamental elusiveness to that identity. Whiteness defines itself as normative, as a neutral form of the human condition, marking all other forms of identity as "racial" or "ethnic" deviations. Invisible to itself, white identity seeks to define its essence over and against those other identities, in effect defining itself through opposition and oppression. By maintaining fictions of black licentiousness, violence, and corruption, white identity is able to cast itself as humane, benevolent, and pure; the stereotype fabricates not only the oppressed but the oppressor as well. Sartwell argues that African-American autobiography perceives white identity from a particular and unique vantage point; one that is knowledgeable and intimate, yet fundamentally removed from the white world and thus unencumbered by its obfuscating claims to normativity.
Throughout this provocative work, Sartwell steadfastly recognizes the many ways in which he too is implicated in the formulation and perpetuation of racial attitudes and discourse. In Act Like You Know, he challenges both himself and others to take a long, hard look in the mirror of African-American autobiography, and to find there, in the light of those narratives, the visible features of white identity.
Acting Up and Getting Down
Plays by African American TexansBy Sandra M. Mayo and Elvin Holt
University of Texas Press, 2014
One of the few books of its kind, Acting Up and Getting Down brings together seven African American literary voices that all have a connection to the Lone Star state. Covering Texas themes and universal ones, this collection showcases often-overlooked literary talents to bring to life inspiring facets of black theatre history.
Capturing the intensity of racial violence in Texas, from the Battle of San Jacinto to a World War I–era riot at a Houston training ground, Celeste Bedford Walker’s Camp Logan and Ted Shine’s Ancestors provide fascinating narratives through the lens of history. Thomas Meloncon’s Johnny B. Goode and George Hawkins’s Br’er Rabbit explore the cultural legacies of blues music and folktales. Three unflinching dramas (Sterling Houston’s Driving Wheel, Eugene Lee’s Killingsworth, and Elizabeth Brown-Guillory’s When the Ancestors Call) examine homosexuality, a death in the family, and child abuse, bringing to light the private tensions of intersections between the individual and the community.
Supplemented by a chronology of black literary milestones as well as a playwrights’ canon, Acting Up and Getting Down puts the spotlight on creative achievements that have for too long been excluded from Texas letters. The resulting anthology not only provides new insight into a regional experience but also completes the American story as told onstage.
Adrienne Kennedy Reader
Adrienne Kennedy
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
Adrienne Kennedy has been a force in American theatre since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights with her hauntingly fragmentary lyrical dramas. Exploring the violence racism visits upon people’s lives, Kennedy’s plays express poetic alienation, transcending the particulars of character and plot through ritualistic repetition and radical structural experimentation. Frequently produced, read, and taught, they continue to hold a significant place among the most exciting dramas of the past fifty years.
This first comprehensive collection of her most important works traces the development of Kennedy’s unique theatrical oeuvre from her Obie-winning Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) through significant later works such as A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), Ohio State Murders (1992), and June and Jean in Concert, for which she won an Obie in 1996. The entire contents of Kennedy’s groundbreaking collections In One Act and The Alexander Plays are included, as is her earliest work "Because of the King of France" and the play An Evening with Dead Essex (1972). More recent prose writings "Secret Paragraphs about My Brother," "A Letter to Flowers," and "Sisters Etta and Ella" are fascinating refractions of the themes and motifs of her dramatic works, even while they explore new material on teaching and writing. An introduction by Werner Sollors provides a valuable overview of Kennedy’s career and the trajectory of her literary development.
Adrienne Kennedy (b. 1931) is a three-time Obie-award winning playwright whose works have been widely performed and anthologized. Among her many honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters award and the Guggenheim fellowship. In 1995-6, the Signature Theatre Company dedicated its entire season to presenting her work. She has been commissioned to write works for the Public Theater, Jerome Robbins, the Royal Court Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, and Juilliard, and she has been a visiting professor at Yale, Princeton, Brown, the University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard. She lives in New York City.
Affirmative Action and the Stalled Quest for Black Progress
W. Avon Drake and Robert D. Holsworth
University of Illinois Press, 1996
Insightful and path-breaking, Affirmative Action and the Stalled Quest for Black Progress examines the accomplishments and limitations of the set-aside programs once at the center of political debates about affirmative action in the United States.
Affrilachian Tales
Folktales from the African-American Appalachian TraditionLynette Ford
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2012
Folktales from the African American Appalachian tradition. Told by Lyn Ford, one of America’s busiest touring storytellers. The power of Lyn's storytelling comes straight out of her family heritage, which is the content of this, her first book. Here she tells how she learned stories from her father and grandfather—and she includes many of the stories they told her.
African American History Reconsidered
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie
University of Illinois Press, 2010
This groundbreaking volume establishes new perspectives on black history--its scholarship and pedagogy, scholars and interpreters, and evolution as a profession.
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie discusses a wide range of issues and themes for understanding and analyzing African American history, the twentieth century black historical enterprise, and the teaching of African American history for the twenty-first century. Additional topics include the hip-hop generation's relationship to and interpretations of African American history; past, present, and future approaches to the subject; and the social construct of knowledge in African American historiography. An examination of definitions of black history from W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and a survey of early black women historians lend further dimension and authenticity to the volume. A bold contribution to the growing fields of African American historiography and the philosophy of black history, African American History Reconsidered offers numerous analytical frameworks for understanding and delving into a variety of dimensions of the African American historical experience.
African American Jeremiad Rev
Appeals For Justice In AmericaDavid Howard-Pitney
Temple University Press, 2005
African American Life in the Rural South, 1900-1950
Edited with an introduction by R. Douglas Hurt
University of Missouri Press, 2003
African American Literacies Unleashed
Vernacular English and the Composition ClassroomArnetha F. Ball and Ted Lardner
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005
This pioneering study of African American students in the composition classroom lays the groundwork for reversing the cycle of underachievement that plagues linguistically diverse students. African American Literacies Unleashed: Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom approaches the issue of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in terms of teacher knowledge and prevailing attitudes, and it attempts to change current pedagogical approaches with a highly readable combination of traditional academic discourse and personal narratives.
Realizing that composition is a particular form of social practice that validates some students and excludes others, Arnetha Ball and Ted Lardner acknowledge that many African American students come to writing and composition classrooms with talents that are not appreciated. To empower and inform practitioners, administrators, teacher educators, and researchers, Ball and Lardner provide knowledge and strategies that will help unleash the potential of African American students and help them imagine new possibilities for their successes as writers.
African American Literacies Unleashed asserts that necessary changes in theory and practice can be addressed by refocusing attention from teachers’ knowledge deficits to the processes through which teachers engage information relevant to culturally informed pedagogy. Providing strategies for unlearning racism in the classroom and changing the status quo, this volume stresses the development and maintenance of a real sense of teaching efficacy—teachers’ beliefs in their abilities to connect with and work effectively with all students—and reflective optimism—teachers’ informed expectations that all students have the potential to succeed.