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During most of the twentieth century, Archibald J. Carey Sr. (1868–1931) and Archibald J. Carey Jr. (1908–1981), father and son, exemplified a blend of ministry and politics that many African American religious leaders pursued. Their sacred and secular concerns merged in efforts to improve the spiritual and material well-being of their congregations. But as political alliances became necessary, both wrestled with moral consequences and varied outcomes. Both were ministers to Chicago’s largest African Methodist Episcopal Church congregations—the senior Carey as a bishop, and the junior Carey as a pastor and an attorney. Bishop Carey associated himself mainly with Chicago mayor William Hale Thompson, a Republican, whom he presented to black voters as an ally. When the mayor appointed Carey Sr. to the city’s civil service commission, Carey Sr. helped in the hiring and promotion of local blacks. But alleged impropriety for selling jobs marred the bishop’s tenure. Carey Jr., also a Republican and an alderman, became head of the panel on anti-discrimination in employment for the Eisenhower administration, and aided innumerable black federal employees. Although an influential benefactor of CORE and SCLC, he associated with notorious FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and compromised support for Martin Luther King, Jr. Both Careys believed politics offered clergy the best opportunities to empower the black population. Their imperfect alliances and mixed results, however, proved the complexity of combining the realms of spirituality and politics.

This is a study of the terrible racial violence that erupted in four different communities of America during the post World War I years, violence that left hundreds dead or injured and a massive amount of destruction in its wake. Although the igniting incident or event varied somewhat, there was a similarity in the racial climate that existed in each town. The emerging blacks, boosted economically and idealistically by the war effort, were viewed as a threat by some of the whites. The bloody riots described here were grave evidence of the intensity of the fear and hatred that existed between a portion of the races.

Anywhere But Here: Black Intellectuals, The Atlantic World and Beyond brings together new scholarship on the cross-cultural experiences of intellectuals of African descent since the 18th century. The intent of this book is not to dismantle Paul Gilroy’s thesis but to embrace it and venture “beyond” the traditional organization and symbolism of the “Black Atlantic.” This collection of essays is not organized geographically or historically by era; instead, contributions are arranged into three sections which highlight the motivations and characteristics that connect a certain set of “agents,” thinkers, and intellectuals: 1) Re-ordering Worldviews: Rebellious Thinkers, Poets, Writers, and Political Architects; 2) Crafting Connections: Strategic and Ideological Alliances; 3) Cultural Mastery in Foreign Spaces: Evolving Visions of Home and Identity. These essays are intentionally organized to expand categories and to suggest patterns at play that have united individuals and communities across the African Diaspora. They highlight the self-determined stories of individuals, who from their intercultural, and often marginalized, positioning, challenged the status quo, created strategic (and at times, unexpected) international alliances, cultivated expertise and cultural competency abroad in places that were unfamiliar to them, as well as, crafted physical and intellectual spaces for their self-expression and dignity to thrive. What, for example, connects the 18th century Igbo author, Olaudah Equiano with 1940s literary figure, Richard Wright; 19th century expatriate anthropologist, Antenor Fermin with 1960s Haitian émigrés to the Congo; Japanese Pan-Asianists and Southern Hemisphere Aboriginal activists with Jamaican-born, Marcus Garvey; or Angela Davis with artists of the British Black Arts Movement Ingrid Pollard and Zarina Bhimji? They are all part of a mapping that reaches across and beyond geographical, historical, and ideological boundaries typically associated with the “Black Atlantic.” They reflect accounts of individuals and communities that are equally united in their will to seek out better realities, often, as the title suggests, “anywhere but here.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, black fraternities and sororities, also known as black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs), were an integral part of what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “talented tenth.” This was the top ten percent of the black community that would serve as a cadre of educated, upper-class, motivated individuals who acquired the professional credentials, skills, and capital to assist the race to attain socio-economic parity. Today, however, BGLOs struggle to find their place and direction in a world drastically different from the one that witnessed their genesis. In recent years, there has been a growing body of scholarship on BGLOs. This book seeks to push those who think about BGLOs to engage in more critically and empirically based analysis. It also seeks to move BGLO members and those who work with them beyond conclusions based on hunches, conventional wisdom, intuition, and personal experience. In addition to a rich range of scholars, the book includes a kind of call and response feature between scholars and prominent members of the BGLO community.

As a border city Baltimore made an ideal arena to push for change during the civil rights movement. It was a city in which all forms of segregation and racism appeared vulnerable to attack by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s methods. If successful in Baltimore, the rest of the nation might follow with progressive and integrationist reforms. The Baltimore branch of the NAACP, one of the first chapters in the nation and the largest branch by 1946, undertook various forms of civil rights activity from 1914 through the 1940s that later were mainstays of the 1960s movement. Nonviolent protest, youth activism, economic boycotts, marches on state capitols, campaigns for voter registration, and pursuit of anti-lynching cases all had test runs. Remarkably, Baltimore’s NAACP had the same branch president for thirty-five years starting in 1935, a woman, Lillie M. Jackson. Her work highlights gender issues and the social and political transitions among the changing civil rights groups. This book evaluates Jackson’s leadership amid challenges from radicalized youth groups and the Black Power Movement. Baltimore was an urban industrial center that shared many characteristics with the North, and African Americans could vote there. The city absorbed a large number of black economic migrants from the South, and exhibited racial patterns that made it more familiar to Southerners. It was one of the first places to begin desegregating its schools in September 1954 after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

On Sunday, September 9, 1739, twenty Kongolese slaves armed themselves by breaking into a storehouse near the Stono River south of Charleston, South Carolina. They killed twenty-three white colonists, joined forces with other slaves, and marched toward Spanish Florida. There the rebels expected to find freedom. One report claims they were overheard shouting, “Liberty!” Before the day ended, however, the rebellion was crushed, and afterwards, many surviving rebels were executed. South Carolina rapidly responded with a comprehensive slave code. The Negro Act reinforced white power through laws meant to control the ability of slaves to communicate and congregate. It was an important model for many slaveholding colonies and states, and its tenets greatly inhibited African American access to the public sphere for years to come. The Stono Rebellion serves as a touchstone for this book, an exploration of human rights in early America. Expanding upon historical analyses of this rebellion, it suggests a relationship between the Stono rebels and human rights discourse in early American literature. Though human rights scholars and policy makers usually offer the European Enlightenment as the source of contemporary ideas about human rights, this book repositions the sources of these important and often-challenged American ideals.

Postcolonial discourses on African Diaspora history and relations have traditionally focused intensely on highlighting the common experiences and links between black Africans and African Americans. This is especially true of Afrocentric scholars and supporters who use Africa to construct and validate a monolithic, racial, and culturally essentialist worldview. Publications by Afrocentric scholars such as Molefi Asante, Marimba Ani, Maulana Karenga, and the late John Henrik Clarke have emphasized the centrality of Africa to the construction of Afrocentric essentialism. In the last fifteen years, however, countervailing critical scholarship has challenged essentialist interpretations of Diaspora history. Critics such as Stephen Howe, Yaacov Shavit, and Clarence Walker have questioned and refuted the intellectual and cultural underpinnings of Afrocentric essentialist ideology. This book deconstructs Afrocentric essentialism by illuminating and interrogating the problematic situation of Africa as the foundation of a racialized worldwide African Diaspora. It attempts to fill an intellectual gap by analyzing the contradictions in representations of Afrocentrism in Africa. These include multiple, conflicting, and ambivalent portraits of Africa; the use of the continent as a global, unifying identity for all blacks; the de-emphasizing and nullification of New World acculturation; and the ahistoristic construction of a monolithic African Diaspora worldwide.

Based on new research and combining multiple scholarly approaches, this book’s chapters tell new stories about the civil rights movement in the state most resistant to change. Chapters raise questions about how civil rights organizing took place. Three pairs of chapters address African Americans’ and whites’ stories on education, religion, and the issues of violence. These chapters analyze civil rights issues on the campuses of Jackson State University and the University of Mississippi. Further chapters study people who confronted the question of how their religion related to their possible involvement in civil rights activism. By studying the Ku Klux Klan and the Deacons for Defense in Mississippi, the text also ask who chose to use violence or to raise its possibility. The final three chapters describe some of the consequences and continuing questions raised by the civil rights movement. One chapter analyzes the degree to which voting rights translated into political power for African American legislators. Another studies a Freedom School that started in recent years in the Mississippi Delta. A last chapter details the conflicting memories of Claiborne County residents and the parts of the civil rights movement they recall or ignore.

This book examines the relationship between African Americans and one country, Germany. Germans and African Americans encountered one another within the context of their national identities and group experiences. In the nineteenth century, German immigrants to America and to such communities as Charleston and Cincinnati interacted within the boundaries of their old-world experiences and ideas, and within surrounding regional notions of a nation fracturing over slavery. In the post-Civil War era in America through the Weimar era, Germany became a place to which African American entertainers, travelers, and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois could go to escape American racism and find new opportunities. With the rise of the Third Reich, Germany became the personification of racism, and African Americans in the 1930s and 1940s could use Adolf Hitler’s evil example to goad America about its own racist practices. Postwar West Germany regained an image as a land more tolerant to African American soldiers than America. African Americans were important to Cold War discourse, especially in the internal ideological struggle between Communist East Germany and democratic West Germany. Unlike many other countries in Europe, Germany has played a variety of different and conflicting roles in the African American narrative and relationship with Europe. It is this diversity of roles that adds to the complexity of African American and German interactions and mutual perceptions over time.

The Second Great Migration, the movement of African Americans between the South and the North that began in the early 1940s and tapered off in the late 1960s, transformed America. This migration of approximately five million people helped improve the financial prospects of black Americans, who, in the next generation, moved increasingly into the middle class. Over seven years, the author of this book gathered oral histories with women migrants and their children, two groups largely overlooked in the story of this event, and also utilized existing oral histories with migrants and southerners in leading archives. In extended excerpts from the oral histories, and in scholarly analysis of the voices, the book offers a window onto African American women’s history. These oral histories reveal much that is surprising. Although the Jim Crow South presented persistent dangers, the women retained warm memories of southern childhoods. Notwithstanding the burgeoning war industry, most women found themselves left out of industrial work. The North offered its own institutionalized racism; the region was not the promised land. Additionally, these African American women juggled work and family long before such battles became a staple of mainstream discussion. In the face of challenges, the women who share their tales here crafted lives of great meaning from the limited options available, making a way out of no way.

In his final speech “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his support of African American garbage workers on strike in Memphis. Although some consider this oration his finest, it is mainly known for its concluding two minutes, wherein King compares himself to Moses and seems to predict his own assassination. But King gave an hour-long speech, and the concluding segment can only be understood in relation to the whole. King scholars generally focus on his theology, not his relation to the Bible or the circumstance of a Baptist speaking in a Pentecostal setting. Even though King cited and explicated the Bible in hundreds of speeches and sermons, this book is the first to analyze his approach to the Bible and its importance to his rhetoric and persuasiveness. It argues that King challenged dominant Christian supersessionist conceptions of Judaism in favor of a Christianity that affirms Judaism as its wellspring. In his final speech, King implicitly but strongly argues that one can grasp Jesus only by first grasping Moses and the Hebrew prophets. The book also traces the roots of King’s speech to its Pentecostal setting and to the Pentecostals in his audience. In doing so, it puts forth scholarship that credits the mostly unknown but brilliant African American architect who created the large yet compact church sanctuary that made possible the unique connection between King and his audience on the night of his last speech.

From abolition through the years just before the civil rights struggle began, African American women recognized that a mixed-race woman made for a powerful and, at times, very useful figure in the battle for racial justice. This book traces many key instances in which black women have wielded the image of a racially mixed woman to assault the color line. In the oratory and fiction of black women from the late 1840s through the 1950s, it finds the mulatta to be a metaphor of increasing potency. Before the Civil War, white female abolitionists created the image of the “tragic mulatta,” caught between races, rejected by all. African American women put the mulatta to diverse political use. Black women used the mulatta figure to invoke and manage American and British abolitionist empathy and to contest racial stereotypes of womanhood in the postbellum United States. The mulatta aided writers in critiquing the “New Negro Renaissance” and gave them leverage to subvert the aims of mid-twentieth-century mainstream American culture. The book focuses on the antislavery lectures and appearances of Ellen Craft and Sarah Parker Remond, the domestic fiction of Pauline Hopkins and Frances Harper, the Harlem Renaissance novels of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, and the little-known 1950s texts of Dorothy Lee Dickens and Reba Lee. Throughout, the book discovers the especially valuable and as yet unexplored contributions of these black women, and their uses of the mulatta in prose and speech.

This book contains eight essays on African American history from the Jacksonian era through the early twentieth century. Taken together, these essays, inspired by noted scholar John F. Marszalek, demonstrate the many nuances of African Americans’ struggle to grasp freedom, respect, assimilation, and basic rights of American citizens. The book examines Andrew Jackson Donelson’s struggle to keep his plantations operating within the ever-growing debate over slavery in mid-nineteenth-century America; Southern Unionism during the Civil War and the difficulty of finding hard evidence due to sparse sources; the issues of race in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, regarding which it is found that blacks involved themselves in both armies, curiously clouding issues of slavery and freedom; how Mississippi slaves and Union soldiers interacted during the Vicksburg campaign—Union treatment of freedmen and of U.S. colored troops demonstrated that blacks escaping slavery were not always welcomed; and the role that sports, especially boxing, played in blending black and white relations in the West during the early twentieth century. It explores the roles of African Americans who participated in the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps during the creation of the Shiloh National Military Park. The book also analyzes the efforts of two twentieth-century historians who wished to debunk the old, racist views of Reconstruction known as the Dunning school of interpretation. A concluding essay ties together the essays in the book.

The Black Panther Party suffers from a distorted image largely framed by television and print media, including the Panthers’ own newspaper. These sources frequently reduced the entire organization to the Bay Area where the Panthers were founded, emphasizing the Panthers’ militant rhetoric and actions rather than their community survival programs. This image, however, does not mesh with reality. The Panthers worked tirelessly at improving the life chances of the downtrodden regardless of race, gender, creed, or sexual orientation. In order to chronicle the rich history of the Black Panther Party, this anthology examines local Panther activities throughout the United States—in Seattle, Washington; Kansas City, Missouri; New Orleans, Louisiana; Houston, Texas; Des Moines, Iowa; and Detroit, Michigan. This approach features the voices of people who served on the ground—those who kept the offices in order, prepared breakfasts for school children, administered sickle cell anemia tests, set up health clinics, and launched free clothing drives. The essays shed new light on the Black Panther Party, re-evaluating its legacy in American cultural and political history. Just as important, it gives voice to those unsung Panthers whose valiant efforts have heretofore gone unnoticed, unheard, or ignored.

This book presents the history of the nation’s forgotten Dutch slave community and free Dutch-speaking African-Americans from seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to nineteenth-century New York and New Jersey. It also develops a provocative new interpretation of one of America’s most intriguing black folkloric traditions, Pinkster. Dewulf rejects the traditional interpretation of this celebration of a “slave king” as a form of carnival. Instead, he shows that it is a ritual rooted in mutual aid and slave brotherhood traditions. By placing Pinkster in an Atlantic context, Dewulf identifies striking parallels to royal election rituals in slave communities elsewhere in the Americas, which he relates to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and the historical impact of Portuguese culture in West-Central Africa. Whereas the importance of African-American fraternities providing mutual aid has long been acknowledged for the post-slavery era, Dewulf’s focus on the social capital of slaves traces concern for mutual aid back to seventeenth-century Manhattan. He suggests a stronger impact of Manhattan’s first slave community on the development of African-American identity in New York and New Jersey than has hitherto been assumed. While the earliest historians working on slave culture in a North American context were mainly interested in an assumed process of assimilation according to European standards, later generations pointed out the need to look for indigenous African continuities. The findings of this book suggest the necessity to complement the latter with an increased focus on the contact Africans had with European?primarily Portuguese?culture before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas.

Prison Power centers imprisonment in the history of black liberation as a rhetorical, theoretical, physical, and media resource as activists developed movement tactics and ideology to counter white supremacy. In highlighting imprisonment as a site for both political and personal transformation, Prison Power underscores how imprisonment shaped movement leaders by influencing their political analysis and organizational strategies. The book suggests that prison became the critical space for the transformation from civil rights to Black Power, especially as southern civil rights activists faced setbacks in achieving equality. In centering the prison as a locus of political inquiry, Black Power activists produced autobiographical writings, essays, and letters about and from prison beginning with the early sit-in movement. Prison Power introduces the critical optic of the “Black Power vernacular” to describe how Black Power activists deployed rhetorical forms in their writings that invented new forms of black identification and encouraged support for black liberation from prison. In using Black Power vernacular forms, imprisoned activists improved their visibility while simultaneously documenting the racist abuses of the judicial system. This new vernacular emerged to force various publics to acknowledge and end the massive brutality perpetrated against black people in prison and in the streets in the name of law and order thereby helping to shore up support for Black Power organizations and initiatives.

This book focuses on two connected issues: representations of lynching in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century American photographs, poetry, and fiction; and those representations’ effects. It shows how putting representations of lynching in dialogue with the history of lynching uncovers the profound investment of African American literature—as an enterprise that continually seeks to create conceptual spaces for the disenfranchised culture it represents—in matters of property and territory. Through studies ranging from lynching photographs to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved, the book demonstrates how representations of lynching demand that we engage and discuss various forms of possession and dispossession. The multiple meanings of the word “representation” are familiar to literary critics, but the book insists that its other key term, “effects,” also needs to be understood in both of its primary senses. On the one hand, it indicates the social and cultural repercussions of how lynching was portrayed—what effects its representations had. On the other hand, the word signals, too, the possessions or what might be called the personal effects conjured up by these representations. These possessions were not only material—as for example property in land or the things one owned. The effects of representation also included diverse, less tangible but no less real possessions shared by individuals and groups: the aura of a lynching site, the ideological construction of white womanhood, or the seemingly default capacity of lynching iconography to encapsulate the history of ostensibly all forms of violence against black people.

Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union examines Obama’s election and administration, while engaging the voices of some of the most preeminent race scholars writing on the topic. The prepublished essays were selected for their stellar analyses in helping elucidate some critical aspect of the central theme of the book—“a more perfect union.” Individually, they stand out among the myriad publications on the Obama phenomenon and will remain relevant to any future discussions; combined into an anthology their critical resonance is augmented.87

Raymond Pace Alexander (1897–1974) was a prominent black attorney in Philadelphia and a distinguished member of the National Bar Association, the oldest and largest association of African American lawyers and judges. A contemporary of such nationally known black attorneys as Charles Hamilton Houston, William Hastie, and Thurgood Marshall, he litigated civil rights cases and became well known in Philadelphia. Yet Alexander’s legacy to the civil rights struggle has received little national recognition. As a New Negro lawyer during the 1930s, Alexander worked with left-wing organizations to desegregate an all-white elementary school in Berwin, Pennsylvania. After World War II, he became an anti-communist liberal and formed coalitions with like-minded whites. In the sixties, Alexander criticized Black Power rhetoric, but shared some philosophies with Black Power such as black political empowerment and studying black history. By the late sixties, he focused on economic justice by advocating a Marshall Plan for poor Americans and supporting affirmative action. Alexander was a major contributor to the northern civil rights struggle and was committed to improving the status of black lawyers. He was representative of a generation who created opportunities for African Americans but was later often ignored or castigated by younger leaders who did not support the tactics of the old guard’s pioneers.

Using the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass, as well as the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, this book examines how women’s bodies are used in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power. In tracing representations of ideal black masculinities and femininities, it shows how black men’s struggles for gendered agency are inextricably entwined with their complicated relation to white men and normative masculinity. The historical context in which this study couches these struggles highlights the extent to which shifting socioeconomic circumstances dictate the ideological, cultural, and emotional terms upon which black men conceptualize identity. Yet, the book quickly moves to texts that challenge traditional constructions of black masculinity. It traces how the emergence of collaboratively gendered discourses, or a blending of black female/male feminist consciousnesses, are reshaping black masculinities, femininities, and intraracial relations for a new century.