Browse

The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, the author of this book reveals, but instead a time of profound response from African American intellectuals. The book explores how the Jim Crow system triggered significant artistic and intellectual responses from African American writers, deeply marking the beginnings of literary modernism and, ultimately, notions of American modernity. In identifying the Jim Crow period with the coming of modernity, the author upsets the customary assessment of the Harlem Renaissance as the first nationally significant black arts movement, showing how artists reacted to Jim Crow with migration narratives, poetry about the black experience, black performance of popular culture forms, and more. He introduces a whole cast of characters, including understudied figures such as William Stanley Braithwaite and Fenton Johnson, and more familiar authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson. By considering the legacy of writers and artists active between the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, the author illuminates their influence on the black and white U.S. modernists who followed.

The place of women's rights in African American public culture has been an enduring question, one that has long engaged activists, commentators, and scholars. This book explores the roles black women played in their communities' social movements, and the consequences of elevating women into positions of visibility and leadership. It reveals how, through the nineteenth century, the “woman question” was at the core of movements against slavery and for civil rights. The book explains that, like white women activists, who often created their own institutions separate from men, black women often organized within already existing institutions: churches, political organizations, mutual aid societies, and schools. Covering three generations of black women activists, it demonstrates that their approach was neither unanimous nor monolithic but changed over time and took a variety of forms, from a woman's right to control her body to her right to vote.

Compiled by a prominent abolitionist, this book combines information taken from witnesses, and from active and former slave owners, to generate a condemnation of slavery from both those who observed it and those who perpetuated it. The narrative describes the appalling day-to-day conditions of the over 2,700,000 men, women and children in slavery in the United States. It demonstrates how even prisoners—in the United States and in other countries—were significantly better fed than American slaves. Readers will find one of the most meticulous records of slave life available in this text. Unlike personal slave narratives, which focus on a single man or woman's experience, this book details the overall conditions of slaves across multiple states and several years.

African American freedom is often defined in terms of emancipation and civil rights legislation, but it did not arrive with the stroke of a pen or the rap of a gavel. This book argues that no single event makes this more plain than the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike, which culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Exploring the notion of “freedom” in postwar Memphis, it demonstrates that the civil rights movement was battling an ongoing “plantation mentality” based on race, gender, and power, which permeated southern culture long before—and even after—the groundbreaking legislation of the mid-1960s. With its slogan “I AM a Man!” the Memphis strike provides a clarion example of how the movement fought for a black freedom that consisted of not only constitutional rights but also social and human rights. As the sharecropping system crumbled and migrants streamed to the cities during and after World War II, the struggle for black freedom touched all aspects of daily life. The book traces the movement to new locations, from protests against police brutality and racist movie censorship policies to innovations in mass culture, such as black-oriented radio stations. Incorporating scores of oral histories, it demonstrates that the interplay of politics, culture, and consciousness is critical to truly understanding freedom and the black struggle for it.

Long before the Montgomery bus boycott ushered in the modern civil rights movement, black and white southerners struggled to forge interracial democracy in America. This book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics. Melding social, cultural, and political history, the author chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political cooperation across the color line. She demonstrates that the power of racial rhetoric, and the divisiveness of racial politics, derived from the everyday experiences of individual Virginians—from their local encounters on the sidewalk, before the magistrate's bench, in the schoolroom. In the process, she reveals the power of black and white southerners to both create and resist new systems of racial discrimination. The story of the Readjusters shows how hard white southerners had to work to establish racial domination after emancipation, and how passionately black southerners fought each and every infringement of their rights as Americans.

This is the life story of Elizabeth Keckley, a shrewd entrepreneur who, while enslaved, raised enough money to purchase freedom for herself and her son. Keckley moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked as a seamstress and dressmaker for the wives of influential politicians. She eventually became a close confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln. Several years after President Lincoln's assassination, when Mrs Lincoln's financial situation had worsened, Keckley helped organize an auction of the former first lady's dresses, eliciting strong criticism from members of the Washington elite. This book is, therefore, both a slave narrative and Keckley's attempt to defend the motives behind the auction. However, the book's publication prompted an even greater public outcry, with the added racial subtext of white society's disdain for Keckley's audacity in publishing details of the Lincolns' private lives. Keckley's dressmaking business failed, the Lincoln family cut all ties with her, and she lived out her final days in a home for the indigent.

Creekridge Park is a multi-ethnic, mixed-income urban neighborhood in Durham, North Carolina. In order to better understand what living in a multi-ethnic neighborhood means to residents and what kind of interracial relationships they have, this book's author participated in neighborhood events, conducted intensive interviews, and surveyed the pseudonymous neighborhood's black, white, and Latino households. While the evidence that residential segregation helps maintain racial inequality is well-established, the book demonstrates that the relationship between spatial proximity (how closely different racial-ethnic groups live to each other) and equity is not fixed. In addition to contributing to conversations on residential integration, the book addresses issues of diversity and inclusion in multi-ethnic spaces. It explains how contemporary understandings of diversity are neither about equity nor justice, but instead reinforce stubbornly resilient white privilege. Ultimately, a desire for diversity and good intentions alone do not challenge structural inequality. This book makes a case for how privilege is reproduced in quotidian environments, through banal and seemingly innocuous practices, and calls on readers to interrogate common-sense understandings of space, power, and inequality to better understand how race functions in multi-ethnic America.

This collection brings together original work from sixteen scholars in various disciplines, ranging from theater and literature to history and music, to address the complex roles of black performers, entrepreneurs, and consumers in American mass culture during the early twentieth century. Moving beyond the familiar territory of blackface and minstrelsy, the chapters present a fresh look at the history of African Americans and mass culture. With subjects ranging from representations of race in sheet-music illustrations to African American interest in Haitian culture, the book recovers the history of forgotten or obscure cultural figures and shows how these historical actors played a role in the creation of American mass culture. The chapters explore the predicament that blacks faced at a time when white supremacy crested, and innovations in consumption, technology, and leisure made mass culture possible. Underscoring the importance and complexity of race in the emergence of mass culture, the book depicts popular culture as a crucial arena in which African Americans struggled to secure a foothold as masters of their own representation and architects of the nation's emerging consumer society.

The 1960s civil rights movement has been properly memorialized as an era of tremendous social progress in America. Yet the integration of public accommodations and passage of federal laws started a much longer process toward racial equality and justice that still persists. In Beyond Integration: The Black Freedom Struggle in Escambia County, Florida, 1960-2000, J. Michael Butler examines the accomplishments, contradictions, and limitations of the continuing black freedom struggle in one southern community. The racial unrest that surfaced during the 1970s regarding the use of Confederate imagery at Escambia High School and the persistent police brutality that resulted in the deaths of African American men demonstrates that the local movement did not end, but evolved to confront blatant reminders that blacks remained second class citizens in Northwest Florida. The power that white civic leaders possessed over issues that effected racial minorities beyond the 1960s—and the African American powerlessness to alter the status quo—culminated in the arrest and conviction of Reverend H. K. Matthews, the county’s foremost organizer, and revealed that economic, political, and educational discrepancies plagued local race relations into the twenty-first century. Beyond Integration offers a new perspective on the literature of the black freedom struggle and reveals how with each legal step taken toward racial equality, notions of black inferiority became more entrenched in Northwest Florida.

In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration—unwilling to antagonize a powerful southern congressional bloc—refused to endorse legislation that openly sought to improve political, economic, and social conditions for African Americans. Instead, as this book shows, the administration recognized and celebrated African Americans by offering federal support to notable black intellectuals, celebrities, and artists. The book illustrates how programs within the Federal Arts Projects and several war agencies gave voice to such notable African Americans as Lena Horne, Joe Louis, Duke Ellington, and Richard Wright, as well as lesser-known figures. It argues that these New Deal programs represent a key moment in the history of American race relations, as the cultural arena provided black men and women with unique employment opportunities and new outlets for political expression. Equally important, the book contends that these cultural programs were not merely an attempt to appease a black constituency but were also part of the New Deal's larger goal of promoting a multiracial nation. Yet, while federal projects ushered in creativity and unprecedented possibilities, they were also subject to censorship, bigotry, and political machinations.