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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.

Situating U.S. governmental and American Indian rhetoric in a colonial context, Native Dualities examines the ways that both the government’s rhetoric and American Indian voices contributed to the policies of Native-U.S. relations throughout the removal and allotment eras. These discourses co-constructed the silhouette of both the U.S. government and American Indian communities and contributed textures to the relationship. Such interactions – though certainly not equal between the two – illustrated the hybrid-like potentialities of Native-U.S. rhetoric in the nineteenth century. That is, both colonizing discourse and decolonizing discourse added arguments, identity constructions, and rhetorical moves to the colonizing relationship. Native Dualities demonstrates how American Indians decolonized dominant rhetoric in terms of impeding the realization of the removal and allotment policies. Likewise, by turning around the U.S. government’s discursive frameworks and inventing their own rhetorical tactics, American Indian communities helped restyle their own and the government’s identities. Interestingly, during the first third of the twentieth century, Native decolonization was shown to impact the Native-U.S. relationship as American Indians urged for the successful passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and the Indian New Deal of 1934. In the end, Native communities were granted increased rhetorical power through decolonization, though the U.S. government still retained a powerful colonial influence over them. This duality of inclusion (controlled citizenship) and exclusion (controlled sovereignty) was built incrementally through the removal and allotment periods, and existed as residues of nineteenth century Native-U.S. rhetorical relations.

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.

The story of the civil rights movement is not simply the history of its major players but is also the stories of a host of lesser-known individuals whose actions were essential to the movement’s successes. Duncan M. Gray Jr., an Episcopal priest who served various Mississippi parishes between 1953 and 1974, when he was elected bishop of Mississippi, is one of these individuals. This book is his story. From one perspective, Gray (b. 1926) would seem an unlikely spokesman for racial equality and reconciliation. He could have been content simply to become a member of the white, male Mississippi “club.” Gray could have embraced a comfortable life and ignored the burning realities around him. But he chose instead to use his priesthood to speak in unpopular but prophetic support of justice and equality for African Americans. From his student days at the seminary at the University of the South, to his first church in Cleveland, Mississippi, and most famously to St. Peter’s Parish in Oxford, where he confronted rioters in 1962, Gray steadfastly and fearlessly fought the status quo. He continued to work for racial reconciliation, inside and outside of the church, throughout his life. This biography tells not only Gray’s story, but also reveals the times and people that helped make him. The book’s question is “What makes a good person?” The book suggests there is much to learn from Gray’s choices and his struggle.

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.”

The Architecture of William Nichols: Building the South in North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi is the first comprehensive biography and monograph of a significant, yet overlooked, architect in the American South. William Nichols designed three major university campuses: the University of North Carolina, the University of Alabama, and the University of Mississippi. He also designed the first state capitols of North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. Nichols’s architecture profoundly influenced the built of landscape of the South but due fire, neglect, and demolition, most of his work was lost and his legacy was forgotten. Paul Hardin Kapp copiously researched through archives in North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi and produced a narrative of the life and times of William Nichols. This latest book on Nichols’s life and career as an architect is over eighty-six thousand words in length and is richly illustrated with over two hundred archival photographs, drawings from the Historic American Building Survey, current photographs and sketches of architectural details by the author. It is an important and timely contribution to the architecture history of the American South.

How did the average American learn about art in the mid-nineteenth century? With public art museums still in their infancy, and few cities and towns large enough to support art galleries or print shops, Americans relied on mass-circulated illustrated magazines. One group of magazines in particular, known collectively as the Philadelphia pictorials, circulated fine art engravings of paintings, some produced exclusively for circulation in these monthlies, to an eager middle-class reading audience. These magazines achieved print circulations far exceeding those of other print media (such as illustrated gift books, or catalogs from art-union membership organizations). Godey’s, Graham’s, Peterson’s, Miss Leslie’s, and Sartain’s Union Magazine included two to three fine art engravings monthly, “tipped in” to the fronts of the magazines, and designed for pull-out and display. Featuring the work of a fledgling group of American artists who chose American rather than European themes for their paintings, these magazines were crucial to the distribution of American art beyond the purview of the East Coast elite to a widespread middle-class audience. Contributions to these magazines enabled many an American artist and engraver to earn, for the first time in the young nation’s history, a modest living through art. This book examines the economics of artistic production, innovative engraving techniques, regional imitators, the textual “illustrations” accompanying engravings, and the principal artists and engravers contributing to these magazines.

This book offers a thoroughly researched history of the struggle of the Garifuna people to preserve their freedom on the island of St. Vincent. Today, thousands of Garifuna people live in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and the United States, preserving their unique culture and speaking a language that directly descends from that spoken in the Caribbean at the time of Columbus. All trace their origins back to St. Vincent, where their ancestors were native Carib Indians and shipwrecked or runaway West African slaves—hence the name by which they were known to French and British colonialists: Black Caribs. In the 1600s they encountered Europeans as adversaries and allies. But from the early 1700s, white people, particularly the French, began to settle on St. Vincent. The treaty of Paris in 1763 handed the island to the British, who wanted the Black Caribs’ land to grow sugar. Conflict was inevitable, and in a series of bloody wars punctuated by uneasy peace the Black Caribs took on the might of the British Empire. Over decades, leaders such as Tourouya, Bigot, and Chatoyer organized the resistance of a society that had no central authority but united against the external threat. Finally, abandoned by their French allies, the Black Caribs were defeated, and the survivors deported to Central America in 1797. The book draws on extensive research in Britain, France, and St. Vincent to offer a compelling narrative of the formative years of the Garifuna people.

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.

Black intellectualism has been misunderstood by the American public and by scholars for generations. Historically maligned by their peers and by the lay public as inauthentic or illegitimate, black intellectuals have found their work misused, ignored, or discarded. Black intellectuals have also been reductively placed into one or two main categories: they are usually deemed liberal or, less frequently, as conservative. This book explores several prominent intellectuals, from left-leaning leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois to conservative intellectuals like Thomas Sowell, from well-known black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins to Marxists like Claudia Jones, to underscore the variety of black intellectual thought in the United States. Chapters situate the development of the lines of black intellectual thought within the broader history from which these trends emerged. The result gathers chapters that offer entry into a host of rich intellectual traditions.

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.

This book describes how, between 1865 and 1914, ten Natchez mercantile families emerged as leading purveyors in the wholesale plantation supply and cotton handling business, and soon became a dominant force in the social and economic Reconstruction of the Natchez District. They were able to take advantage of postwar conditions in Natchez to gain mercantile prominence by supplying planters and black sharecroppers in the plantation supply and cotton buying business. They parlayed this initial success into cotton plantation ownership and became important local businessmen in Natchez, participating in many civic improvements and politics that shaped the district into the twentieth century. This book digs deep in countless records (including census, tax, property, and probate, as well as thousands of chattel mortgage contracts) to explore how these traders functioned as entrepreneurs in the aftermath of the Civil War, examining closely their role as furnishing merchants and land speculators, as well as their relations with the area’s planters and freed black population. Their use of favorable laws protecting them as creditors, along with a solid community base that was civic-minded and culturally intact, greatly assisted them in their success. These families prospered partly because of their good business practices, and partly because local whites and blacks embraced them as useful agents in the emerging new marketplace. The situation created by the aftermath of the war and emancipation provided an ideal circumstance for the merchant families.

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.

This book traces the life of Albert Raymond Forbes Webber (1880–1932), a distinguished Caribbean scholar, statesman, legislator, and novelist. Using Webber as a lens, it outlines the Guyanese struggle for justice and equality in an age of colonialism, imperialism, and indentureship. The author examines Webber’s emergence from the interior of Guyana to become a major presence in Caribbean politics. The book examines Webber’s insightful novel, Those That Be in Bondage; his travel writings; and his poetry. It chronicles Webber’s formation of the West Indian Press Association, his work on British Guiana’s constitution, and his championing of its people’s causes. The author studies Webber’s work with the British Guiana Labor Union to improve the conditions of the Guyanese working people and his authorship of the Centenary History and Handbook of British Guiana.

Historian Carter G. Woodson’s employment of the black press and modern public-relations techniques to preserve and popularize black history during the first half of the 20th century is rediscovered and examined in this study. This rarely explored side of Woodson, often called “The Father of Black History,” resurrects the lost image of a leading cultural icon who used his celebrity in multiple roles as an opinion journalist, newsmaker, and CEO/publicist of black history to bring veneration to a subject whose past was clouded by misinformation and contempt. During his era, 1915-1950, Woodson cultivated and won crucial press support for his Black History Movement, while merging his interests and the interests of the black newspapers. His cause became their cause.

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 various forms of comedic popular artifacts produced in America from 1861 to 1865, and looks at how wartime humor was created, disseminated, and received by both sides of the conflict. Song lyrics, newspaper columns, sheet music covers, illustrations, political cartoons, fiction, light verse, paper dolls, printed envelopes, and penny dreadful—from and for the Union and the Confederacy—are analyzed at length. The book argues that the war coincided with the rise of inexpensive mass printing in the United States and thus subsequently with the rise of the country’s widely distributed popular culture. As such, the war was as much a “paper war”—involving the use of publications to disseminate propaganda and ideas about the Union and the Confederacy’s positions—as one taking place on battlefields. Humor was a key element on both sides in deflating pretensions and establishing political stances (and ways of critiquing them). The book explores how the combatants portrayed Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, life on the home front, battles, and African Americans. It reproduces over sixty illustrations and texts created during the war, and provides close readings of these materials. At the same time, the book places this corpus of comedy in the context of wartime history, economies, and tactics. This comprehensive overview examines humor’s role in shaping and reflecting the cultural imagination of the nation during its most tumultuous period.

From the first Union attack on Vicksburg in the spring of 1862 through Benjamin Grierson’s last raid through Mississippi in late 1864 and early 1865, this book traces the campaigns, fighting, and causes and effects of armed conflict in central and North Mississippi, where major campaigns were waged and fighting occurred. It discusses the key military engagements in chronological order. The book begins with a prologue covering mobilization and other events leading up to the first military action within the state’s borders. It then covers all of the major military operations, including the campaign for and siege of Vicksburg, and battles at Iuka and Corinth, Meridian, Brice’s Crossroads, and Tupelo. The colorful cast of characters includes such household names as Sherman, Grant, Pemberton, and Forrest, as well as a host of other commanders and soldiers. The book discusses at length minority troops and others glossed over or lost in studies of the Mississippi military during the war.

Forrest County, Mississippi, became a focal point of the civil rights movement when, in 1961, the United States Justice Department filed a lawsuit against its voting registrar Theron Lynd. While thirty percent of the county’s residents were black, only twelve black persons were on its voting rolls. United States v. Lynd was the first trial that resulted in the conviction of a southern registrar for contempt of court. The case served as a model for other challenges to voter discrimination in the South, and was an important influence in shaping the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This book is a comprehensive account of the groundbreaking case, written by one of the Justice Department’s trial attorneys. The author, then a newly minted lawyer, traveled to Hattiesburg from Washington to help shape the federal case against Lynd. He met with and prepared the government’s sixteen black witnesses who had been refused registration, found white witnesses, and was one of the lawyers during the trial. Decades later, the author returned to Mississippi and interviewed the still-living witnesses, their children, and friends. He intertwines these current reflections with commentary about the case itself. The result is an impassioned fusion of reportage, oral history, and memoir about a trial that fundamentally reshaped liberty and the South.