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4 books match the query 'Black Freedom Struggle'
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.
From Rights to Lives
The Evolution of the Black Freedom StruggleEdited by Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.
Vanderbilt University Press, 2024
From Rights to Lives critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. The book’s contributors explore what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other. They grapple with how our understanding of the postwar moment shapes our analysis of #BLM and wherein lie the discontinuities, in order to glean lessons for future moments of insurgency.
Grassroots at the Gateway
Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75Clarence Lang
University of Michigan Press, 2010
"This is a theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly documented historical case study of the movements for African American liberation in St. Louis. Through detailed analysis of black working class mobilization from the depression years to the advent of Black Power, award-winning historian Clarence Lang describes how the advances made in earlier decades were undermined by a black middle class agenda that focused on the narrow aims of black capitalists and politicians. The book is a major contribution to our understanding of the black working class insurgency that underpinned the civil rights and Black Power campaigns of the twentieth century."
---V. P. Franklin, University of California, Riverside
"A major work of scholarship that will transform historical understanding of the pivotal role that class politics played in both civil rights and Black Power activism in the United States. Clarence Lang's insightful, engagingly written, and well-researched study will prove indispensable to scholars and students of postwar American history."
---Peniel Joseph, Brandeis University
Breaking new ground in the field of Black Freedom Studies, Grassroots at the Gateway reveals how urban black working-class communities, cultures, and institutions propelled the major African American social movements in the period between the Great Depression and the end of the Great Society. Using the city of St. Louis in the border state of Missouri as a case study, author Clarence Lang undermines the notion that a unified "black community" engaged in the push for equality, justice, and respect. Instead, black social movements of the working class were distinct from---and at times in conflict with---those of the middle class. This richly researched book delves into African American oral histories, records of activist individuals and organizations, archives of the black advocacy press, and even the records of the St. Louis' economic power brokers whom local black freedom fighters challenged. Grassroots at the Gateway charts the development of this race-class divide, offering an uncommon reading of not only the civil rights movement but also the emergence and consolidation of a black working class.
Clarence Lang is Assistant Professor in African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Photo courtesy Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri, St. Louis
Jim Crow from the Harbor
Black Freedom Struggle and Downtown Baltimore, 1945–1980John R. Tilghman
Temple University Press, 2026
How do poor Black communities co-exist with downtown revitalization? How do Black social movements respond to urban renewal to ensure access to better housing and city spaces? John Tilghman investigates these interlocking questions in Jim Crow from the Harbor. Looking at Baltimore, Maryland’s redevelopment in the post-war era of deindustrialization and population decline through white flight, Tilghman tells the story of how Black activists clashed with urban regimes.
Tilghman follows the money—redevelopment profits—which created tensions that prompted anti-freeway campaigns and affirmative action efforts. Through grassroots activism, protests, and community building, participants in the Black Freedom Struggle undermined downtown interests’ efforts to reinforce racial segregation as well as other civil, political, and economic inequalities.
While their efforts met with both success and limitations, Tilghman emphasizes the strengths of this minority majority population as they strove for urban equality. Jim Crow from the Harbor provides a new perspective that helps explain what has provoked today’s struggles in Baltimore for Black Americans.