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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.

For many African Americans, getting a public sector job has historically been one of the few paths to the financial stability of the middle class, and in New York City, few such jobs were as sought-after as positions in the fire department (FDNY). For over a century, generations of Black New Yorkers have fought to gain access to and equal opportunity within the FDNY. Tracing this struggle for jobs and justice from 1898 to the present, David Goldberg details the ways each generation of firefighters confronted overt and institutionalized racism. An important chapter in the histories of both Black social movements and independent workplace organizing, this book demonstrates how Black firefighters in New York helped to create affirmative action from the “bottom up,” while simultaneously revealing how white resistance to these efforts shaped white working-class conservatism and myths of American meritocracy. Full of colorful characters and rousing stories drawn from oral histories, discrimination suits, and the archives of the Vulcan Society (the fraternal society of Black firefighters in New York), this book sheds new light on the impact of Black firefighters in the fight for civil rights.

In 1948, journalist Ray Sprigle traded his whiteness to live as a black man for four weeks. A little over a decade later, John Howard Griffin famously “became” black as well, traveling the American South in search of a certain kind of racial understanding. Contemporary history is littered with the surprisingly complex stories of white people passing as black, and here Alisha Gaines constructs a unique genealogy of “empathetic racial impersonation”--white liberals walking in the fantasy of black skin under the alibi of cross-racial empathy. At the end of their experiments in “blackness,” Gaines argues, these debatably well-meaning white impersonators arrived at little more than false consciousness. Complicating the histories of black-to-white passing and blackface minstrelsy, Gaines uses an interdisciplinary approach rooted in literary studies, race theory, and cultural studies to reveal these sometimes maddening, and often absurd, experiments of racial impersonation. By examining this history of modern racial impersonation, Gaines shows that there was, and still is, a faulty cultural logic that places enormous faith in the idea that empathy is all that white Americans need to make a significant difference in how to racially navigate our society.

In the antebellum Natchez district, in the heart of slave country, black people sued white people in all-white courtrooms. They sued to enforce the terms of their contracts, recover unpaid debts, recuperate back wages, and claim damages for assault. They sued in conflicts over property and personal status. And they often won. Based on new research conducted in courthouse basements and storage sheds in rural Mississippi and Louisiana, Kimberly Welch draws on over 1,000 examples of free and enslaved black litigants who used the courts to protect their interests and reconfigure their place in a tense society. To understand their success, Welch argues that we must understand the language that they used—the language of property, in particular—to make their claims recognizable and persuasive to others and to link their status as owner to the ideal of a free, autonomous citizen. In telling their stories, Welch reveals a previously unknown world of black legal activity, one that is consequential for understanding the long history of race, rights, and civic inclusion in America.

Most Americans see the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the culmination of the civil rights movement. When the law was enacted, black voter registration in Mississippi soared. Few black candidates won office, however. This book describes black Mississippians' battle for meaningful voting rights, bringing the story up to 1986, when Mike Espy was elected as Mississippi's first black member of Congress in this century. To nullify the impact of the black vote, white Mississippi devised a political “massive resistance” strategy, adopting such disenfranchising devices as at-large elections, racial gerrymandering, making elective offices appointive, and revising the qualifications for candidates for public office. As legal challenges to these mechanisms mounted, Mississippi once again became the testing ground for deciding whether the promises of the Fifteenth Amendment would be fulfilled, and the author describes the court battles that ensued until black voters obtained relief.

Beginning in the 1930s, Max Krochmal tells the story of the decades-long struggle for democracy in Texas, when African American, Mexican American, and white labor and community activists gradually came together to empower the state’s marginalized minorities. At the ballot box and in the streets, these diverse activists demanded not only integration but economic justice, labor rights, and real political power for all. Their efforts gave rise to the Democratic Coalition of the 1960s, a militant, multiracial alliance that would take on and eventually overthrow both Jim Crow and Juan Crow. Using rare archival sources and original oral history interviews, Krochmal reveals the often-overlooked democratic foundations and liberal tradition of one of our nation’s most conservative states. Blue Texas remembers the many forgotten activists who, by crossing racial lines and building coalitions, democratized their cities and state to a degree that would have been unimaginable just a decade earlier--and it shows why their story still matters today.

When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Prince Edward County, Virginia, home to one of the five cases combined by the Court under Brown, abolished its public school system rather than integrate. This book situates the crisis in Prince Edward County within the seismic changes brought by Brown and Virginia's decision to resist desegregation. While school districts across the South temporarily closed a building here or there to block a specific desegregation order, only in Prince Edward did local authorities abandon public education entirely—and with every intention of permanence. When the public schools finally reopened after five years of struggle—under direct order of the Supreme Court—county authorities employed every weapon in their arsenal to ensure that the newly reopened system remained segregated, impoverished, and academically substandard. Intertwining educational and children's history with the history of the black freedom struggle, the author draws on little-known archival sources and new interviews to reveal the ways that ordinary people, black and white, battled, and continue to battle, over the role of public education in the United States.

This book offers a reconsideration of twentieth-century black activism, the prison system, and the origins of mass incarceration. Throughout the civil rights era, radical black activists thrust the prison into public view, turning prisoners into symbols of racial oppression while arguing that confinement was an inescapable part of black life in America. Arguing that the prison was the central focus of the black radical imagination from the 1950s through the 1980s, the book traces the rich and important history of this political struggle, which established prisoners as symbols of blackness at a time when notions of race and nation were in flux. From civil rights demonstrators willfully risking arrests to the many current and former prisoners that built organizations such as the Black Panther Party, the prison shaped the rise and spread of black activism. The book examines best-selling prisoner author and activist George Jackson, then looks to his influence on prisoner organizations that followed in his wake, proving that such activism made prison walls porous and their ideas infiltrated through generations of activists that followed.

In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African-American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. This book draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia's prison system and what their labor accomplished.

Black Mississippians’ fight for freedom did not end with passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This book considers how the statewide Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) Head Start program became a vehicle through which African Americans mobilized for quality education, well-paying jobs, healthcare, and black self-determination after 1965. Head Start was a War on Poverty program created to improve the lives of poor children and their families. The federal early childhood education program provided black children from low-income families with nutritious meals, medical screenings, educational opportunities that prioritized racial pride and civic engagement. Head Start also offered Mississippi’s black working-class women jobs as preschool teachers. These jobs, independent of the local white power structure, gave black women the financial freedom to vote and send their children to previously all-white schools. CDGM’s Head Start program antagonized white supremacists at both the local and state levels who were unaccustomed to financially independent and assertive blacks. It provoked opposition that significantly diminished the transformative possibilities of Head Start and the War on Poverty program.