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Bookended by remarks from African American diplomats Walter C. Carrington and Charles Stith, this book uses close readings of speeches, letters, historical archives, diaries, memoirs of policymakers, and newly available FBI files to confront much-neglected questions related to race and foreign relations in the United States. Why, for instance, did African Americans profess loyalty and support for the diplomatic initiatives of a nation that undermined their social, political, and economic well-being through racist policies and cultural practices? The book explores African Americans' history in the diplomatic and consular services and the influential roles of cultural ambassadors like Joe Louis and Louis Armstrong. It concludes with an analysis of the effects on race and foreign policy in the administration of Barack Obama. Groundbreaking and critical, the book expands on the scope and themes of recent collections to offer the most up-to-date scholarship to students in a range of disciplines, including U.S. and African American history, Africana studies, political science, and American studies.

Beginning in the 1930s, Black Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that lasted into the 1950s and rivaled the cultural outpouring of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. This book analyzes this prolific period of African American creativity in music, performance art, social science scholarship, and visual and literary artistic expression. Unlike Harlem, Chicago was an urban industrial center that gave a unique working-class and internationalist perspective to the cultural work being done in Chicago. The chapters discuss the forces that distinguished the Black Chicago Renaissance from the Harlem Renaissance and place the development of black culture in a national and international context. The chapters also provoke explorations of renaissances in other cities. Among the topics discussed in this volume are Chicago writers Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, The Chicago Defender and Tivoli Theater, African American music and visual arts, and the American Negro Exposition of 1940.

This book examines how various black Chicagoans used public history to engage with civil rights struggles. Numerous efforts to promote and teach this history demonstrated how dissident left-wing political currents from previous decades remained relevant to a vibrant and ideologically diffuse African American public sphere despite widespread Cold War dispersions, white-supremacist reactions, and anti-Communist repressions. The argument in this book proceeds by demonstrating how public-history projects strategically coalesced around a series of connected pedagogical endeavors. These endeavors included the work of schoolteachers on Chicago’s South Side who tried to advance curriculum reforms through World War II and afterwards; the activities of important cultural workers, such as Margaret T. G. Burroughs and Charles Burroughs, who politicized urban space and fought for greater recognition of black history in the public sphere through the advancement of their vision for a museum; and the Afro-American Heritage Association, which expressed a politics of black left nationalism that engaged with radical politics through black public-history labors. Collectively, these projects expressed important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labors that engaged closely with the rapidly shifting terrains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights and international anticolonialisms. Ultimately, this book offers a social history about how black left-wing cultural work in public history and similar forms of knowledge production were at the intersections of political realities and lived experience in U.S. urban life.

A leading African American Communist, lawyer William L. Patterson (1891–1980) was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the defeat of Jim Crow by virtue of his leadership of the Scottsboro campaign in the 1930s. This watershed biography shows how Patterson helped to advance African American equality by fostering and leveraging international support for the movement. The book highlights key moments in Patterson's global activism: his early education in the Soviet Union, his involvement with the Scottsboro trials and other high-profile civil rights cases of the 1930s to 1950s, his 1951 “We Charge Genocide” petition to the United Nations, and his later work with prisons and the Black Panther Party. Drawing from government and FBI documents, newspapers, periodicals, archival and manuscript collections, and personal papers, the book documents Patterson's effectiveness at carrying the freedom struggle into the global arena and provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century struggles for racial justice.

This book documents six decades of politically active black women, between the 1910s and the 1970s, in New York City who waged struggles for justice, rights, and equality not through grassroots activism but through formal politics. In tracing the paths of black women activists from women's clubs and civic organizations to national politics—including appointments to presidential commissions, congressional offices, and even a presidential candidacy—the book also articulates the vision of politics the women developed and its influence on the Democratic Party and its policies. Deftly examining how race, gender, and the structure of the state itself shape outcomes, the book exposes the layers of power and discrimination at work in all sectors of U.S. society. The book covers the fights for economic, social, and political rights of black activists, such as Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Irene Moorman Blackstone, Ruth Whitehead Whaley, and Shirley Chisholm. It analyses the great strides made by African American women in the United States during this period and discusses the progress of black activists in more recent years, such as the breaking down of racialized and gendered barriers to political power.

This book examines the entrepreneurial experiences of and contributions by African American entrepreneurs in Chicago. Through a careful examination of black business activity in areas such as finance, media, and the underground economy known as “Policy,” this work illuminates the manner in which blacks in Chicago built a network of competing and cooperative enterprises and a culture of entrepreneurship unique to the city. This network lay at the center of black business development in Chicago as it allowed blacks there greater opportunity to fund and build businesses reliant on other blacks rather than those whose interests lay outside the black community. Further, it examines how blacks’ business enterprises challenged and changed the economic and political culture of the city to help fashion black communities on Chicago’s South and West sides. For much of the 20^th century, Chicago was considered the single best demonstration of blacks’ entrepreneurial potential. From the time the city was founded by black entrepreneur Jean Baptiste DuSable and throughout the 20^th century, business enterprises have been part black community life. From DuSable through black business titans like John H. Johnson, Oprah Winfrey, and Anthony Overton black entrepreneurs called the city home and built their empires there. How they did so and the impact of their success (and failure) is a key theme within this book. Additionally, this work analyzes how blacks in Chicago built their enterprises at the same time grappling with the major cultural, political, and economic shifts in America in the 19^th and 20^th century.

In 1909, physician Lawrence A. Nixon fled the racial violence of central Texas to settle in the border town of El Paso. There he became a community and civil rights leader. His victories in two Supreme Court decisions paved the way for dismantling all-white political primaries across the South. This book delves into Nixon's lifelong struggle against Jim Crow. Linking Nixon's activism to his independence from the white economy, support from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the man's own indefatigable courage, the book also sheds light on Nixon's presence in symbolic and literal borderlands—as an educated professional in a time when few went to college, as an African American who made waves when most feared violent reprisal, and as someone living on the mythical American frontier as well as an international boundary. A powerful addition to the literature on African Americans in the Southwest, this book explores seldom-studied corners of the Black past and the civil rights movement.

This long overdue biography elevates Jane Matilda Bolin to her rightful place in American history as an activist, integrationist, jurist, and outspoken public figure in the political and professional milieu of New York City before the onset of the modern Civil Rights movement. When Bolin was appointed to New York City's domestic relations court in 1939 for the first of four 10-year terms, she became the nation's first African American woman judge. Drawing on archival materials as well as a meeting with Bolin in 2002, the author reveals how Bolin parlayed her judicial position to impact significant reforms of the legal and social service system in New York. Beginning with Bolin's childhood and educational experiences at Wellesley and Yale, the book chronicles Bolin's relatively quick rise through the ranks of a profession that routinely excluded both women and African Americans. The book links Bolin's activist leanings and integrationist zeal to her involvement in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and details her work as a critic and reformer of domestic relations courts and juvenile placement facilities.

A leading African American intellectual of the early twentieth century, Eugene Kinckle Jones (1885–1954) was instrumental in professionalizing black social work in America. In his role as executive secretary of the National Urban League, Jones worked closely with social reformers who advocated on behalf of African Americans and against racial discrimination in the United States. Coinciding with the Great Migration of African Americans to northern urban centers, Jones' activities on behalf of the Urban League included campaigning for equal hiring practices, advocating for the inclusion of black workers in labor unions, and promoting the importance of vocational training and social work for members of the black community. Drawing on rich interviews with Jones' colleagues and associates, as well as recently opened family and Urban League papers, the book freshly examines the growth of African American communities and the new roles played by social workers. In calling attention to the need for black social workers in the midst of the Great Migration, Jones and his colleagues sought to address problems stemming from race and class conflicts from within the community. This book blends the biography of a significant black leader with an in-depth discussion of the roles of black institutions and organizations to study the evolution of African American life immediately before the civil rights era.

Born shortly before the Civil War, activist and reformer Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944) became one of the most prominent educated black women of her generation. This book shows how Williams became “raced” for the first time in early adulthood, when she became a teacher in Missouri and Washington, D.C., and faced the injustices of racism and the stark contrast between the lives of freed slaves and her own privileged upbringing in a western New York village. She carried this new awareness to Chicago, where she joined forces with black and predominantly white women's clubs, the Unitarian church, and various other interracial social justice organizations to become a prominent spokesperson for progressive economic, racial, and gender reforms during the transformative period of industrialization. The book focuses on the critical role geography and social position played in Williams' life, illustrating how the reform activism of Williams and other black women was bound up with place and space. By highlighting how Williams experienced a set of freedoms in the North that were not imaginable in the South, the book expands how we understand intellectual possibilities, economic success, and social mobility in post-Reconstruction America.