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This book suggests that the genesis of Black American foodways, and soul food in particular, was the survival and preservation of the Black community. However, if soul food is to remain a response to social and food injustice in the Black community, given the myriad of ways industrial agriculture harms Black people—economically, environmentally, ideologically—what should soul food look like today? In seeking to answer this question, this book explores the relationship between and among food, Christian, and cultural identity among African Americans by examining the U.S. food system and the impact that current policies and practices have on Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Using liberation theology and decolonial methods, the book argues for and constructs an anti-oppressive theological anthropology that serves as the foundation for liberatory Black foodways. The book concludes by offering three theologically grounded food practices as a way to begin addressing food injustice and to move toward food sovereignty in Black and other marginalized communities: soulfull eating (of which an agent and context specific black veganism is seen as ideal), seeking justice for food workers, and caring for the earth.

A Matter of Moral Justice explores the little-studied power laundry industry and its workers, beginning with the birth of the industry at the turn of the twentieth century and concluding with an epilogue on the state of the industry in the early twenty-first century. While providing a broad overview of working conditions, the book focuses on the activism of Black women, who by 1930 comprised a significant proportion of the power laundry workforce. In the urban industrial North, where the industry flourished, Black women eager to escape domestic service actively sought jobs in power laundries, taking their place, albeit on the lowest rungs, on the industrial ladder. This book examines the working conditions and occupational structure in the laundry industry and then narrows the focus to New York City, a leading center of the industry and one of the few places where the workers won union representation. The workers’ campaign spanned many decades and elicited the intervention of some of New York’s most prominent laborites, including New York Women’s Trade Union League president Rose Schneiderman; Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America president Sidney Hillman and his partner and fellow labor leader, Bessie Hillman; Negro Labor Committee president Frank Crosswaith; and a cadre of committed communist and African American organizers. The campaign took place during a period of cataclysmic change for American workers, one that saw the birth and growth of industrial feminism; the Great Migration of more than six million Black southerners to the urban industrial centers of the North and West; the rise of the “New Negro,” inspired by mass migration, Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist movement, and the explosion of Black trade unionism; the emergence of the CIO and New Deal Order; the heyday of Communist Party organizing; two world wars; and the burgeoning civil rights and women’s movements. This book locates the women’s activism within the context of these movements, which inspired and shaped their organizing and to which they contributed. The book explores the multitude of factors that led to unionization in 1937, including the Wagner Act, the emergence of the CIO, communist organizing, and, most importantly, the militant and interracial organizing of the workers themselves. The final third of the book explores what happened to the workers once they organized under the ACWA-affiliated Laundry Workers Joint Board and thus provides an opportunity to assess the relationship between the industrial union movement and women and people of color employed in the traditionally low-wage industrial service sector. Following LWJB as it transitioned from its radical, grassroots, community-based origins into a bureaucratic organization led by white men illuminates some of the limitations of the industrial union movement for women and people of color but also demonstrates how Black working-class women overcame seemingly insurmountable odds and used the openings provided to mobilize in pursuit of equal treatment and dignity at work. Their stories challenge assumptions about worker passivity and about the inability of the most exploited to organize. Resurrecting these moments of resistance complicates the history of the industrial union movement and provides insights on organizing in the twenty-first century, when women and people of color in the postindustrial service and care sectors have been leading some of the most militant battles for economic and social justice. This story then contributes to our understanding of how race and gender shape working conditions, the formulation of union tactics, and the struggle for union control and union power in modern America.

The 1831 Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner included an entire community involved in resistance efforts that led to, and learned from, what happened. Surviving Southampton rediscovers the enslaved women and children and free people of color who lived in Southampton County before, during, and after the insurrection. Mapping the region's multilayered human geography, it draws a fuller picture of the inhabitants, revealing not only their interactions with physical locations but also their social relationships in space and time. Vanessa Holden’s analysis recasts the Southampton Rebellion as one event on a continuum of practices that sustained resistance and survival among local people of color. The book then follows those practices into the future, showing how Southampton’s women, and community, raised children who remembered and heeded the lessons absorbed during the calamitous events of 1831. A bold challenge to traditional accounts, Surviving Southampton sheds new light on the places and people surrounding a momentous event in American history.

This book makes disability legible in the histories of both slavery and race, arguing that disability is a critical category of historical analysis. Bondage complicated and contributed to enslaved people’s experiences of complexly embodied conditions that ranged across the physical, sensory, cognitive, and psychological. Ableist histories of racial slavery have long overlooked how the social relations of disability shaped people’s everyday lives, particularly within enslaved families, communities, and culture. At the same time, antebellum Americans persistently constructed and framed racial ideology through ideas about disability, producing and naturalizing links between blackness and disability on the one hand and whiteness and ability on the other. Disability was central to the larger relations of power that structured antebellum society and figured prominently in racial projects that unfolded in the laws of slavery, medical discourses of race, pro- and antislavery political rhetoric, and popular culture like blackface minstrelsy and freak shows. The disabling images of blackness created in these various registers of American life resounded long after slavery’s end, gradually fading into less specific notions of black inferiority and damage imagery. The Mark of Slavery simultaneously examines relations of power and the materiality of the body and makes clear that just as blackness and disability were not mutually exclusive categories, enslaved people’s lived experiences of disability were not entirely separate from and unrelated to representations of disability that fueled racial ideology.

Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving: Black Women’s Philanthropy during Jim Crow presents the first comprehensive story of Walker’s philanthropic giving arguing that she was a significant philanthropist who challenged Jim Crow and serves as a foremother of African American philanthropy today. Born Sarah Breedlove (1867-1919) to formerly enslaved parents on a cotton plantation during Reconstruction, Madam C. J. Walker became a beauty-culture entrepreneur and was known as America’s first self-made female millionaire. This book presents the story of Madam Walker’s philanthropic actions through the author’s use of historical methods and archival research. The result is a philanthropic biography that reinterprets Walker’s life, legacy, and meaning through giving. Using analytical frameworks from philanthropic studies and black women’s history, the author constructs the appropriate lenses for interpreting Walker’s lived experiences as a philanthropist through her own words, motivations, relationships, and actions. Organized around five types of gifts that Walker made—opportunity, education, activism, material resources, and legacy—the text illustrates the broader cultural contexts and philanthropic practices of generosity that informed black women’s lives and giving at the beginning of the twentieth century. Madam Walker’s Gospel of Giving provides a different view of who counts as a philanthropist and what counts as philanthropy in the public and scholarly conversations dominated by the perspectives of white wealthy elite donors. It reclaims and names black women as philanthropists using Walker as an example.

This book follows California’s history of segregation from statehood to the beginning of the long civil rights movement, arguing that the state innovated methods to control and contain African Americans and other people of color. While celebrated in popular discourse for its forward-thinking culture, politics, and science, California also pioneered new ways to keep citizenship white. Schools, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, parks, beaches, and pools were places of contestation where the presence of black bodies elicited forceful responses from segregationists. Black Californians employed innovative measures to dismantle segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they borrowed some tactics from race rebels in the South, others they improvised. West of Jim Crow uses California to highlight the significance of African American resistance to racial restrictions in places often deemed marginal to mainstream civil rights histories. Examining segregation in the state sheds light on the primacy of gender and sexuality in the minds of segregationists and the significance of black women, black bodies, and racial science, in the years preceding the modern civil rights struggle. California has much to teach us about the lives of African Americans who crossed the color line and the variety of tactics and strategies employed by freedom fighters across the United States.

Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press is an examination of the coverage of sexuality in the Black Press between 1925 and 1940, otherwise known as the interwar period in the United States. In the book, Kim Gallon argues that the Black Press made sexuality a major topic of news to appease African American readers’ imagined desires for sexual coverage. In so doing, Gallon argues that Black Press coverage produced a number of black sexual public spheres that offered early-twentieth-century African Americans opportunities to debate and discuss particular sexual topics. In their simplest form, black sexual public spheres were discursive arenas in which readers debated and discussed sexual matters. They also served as mechanisms for readers to critique and sound off on a wide range of issues, including respectability, interracial marriage, divorce, the sexualization of women’s bodies, and homosexuality within early-twentieth-century black communities. Overall, Pleasure in the News provides an expanded understanding of the ways readers interacted with the Black Press and representations of sexuality.

This anthology engages questions about origins of the Black Chicago Renaissance (1930-1955) from wide-ranging disciplinary perspectives. It traces a foundational stage from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to onset of the Depression. Eleven essays contribute to recovering understudied black artists and intellectuals, remapping African American cultural geography beyond and before 1920s Harlem, and reconceptualizing the paradigm of urban black renaissance. Contributors probe the public lives and achievements, class and family backgrounds, education and training, areas of residency, and institutional affiliations of such African American cultural pioneers as writers Fannie Barrier Williams, James David Corrothers, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Fenton Johnson; visual artists William E. Scott, Charles C. Dawson, and King Daniel Ganaway; and dance teacher Hazel Thompson Davis. Organized chronologically and deploying rich archival explorations, these essays unearth local resonances of such world-changing events as the Columbian Exposition, First World War, Great Migration, 1919 Red Summer, and Jazz Age. They identify internally-generated, transformative forces that supported emergence of creative individuals and cultural circles committed to professional work in arts and letters. These individuals were often identified with the appellation “New Negro,” whose multiple (sequential, overlapping) meanings are explored in relation to the formation and growth of a geographically compact, racially homogenous, and increasingly autonomous Black Metropolis.

This is the first book-length study of Caribbean slavery to make disability its primary focus. The book sets out to answer the following questions: How does colonialism—specifically slavery—challenge the way we think about histories of disability, race, and labor? In what ways might slavery and the expansion of the slave trade have transformed English understandings of supposedly defective bodies and minds in the metropole and colonies? How did disability, disfigurement, and deformity among the enslaved—whether transient, permanent, natural, or inflicted—influence English understandings of race and ability in the colonial period? How did slavery-induced disability shape the embodied reality of enslavement in the British Caribbean? The analysis of disability in the context of Atlantic world slavery is threefold. First, it explores representations of disability as they connect with enslavement and the development of an English antiblack racism from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Second, it moves between the realms of representation and reality in order to examine the embodied, physical, emotional, and psychological impairments produced by the institution of slavery and endured by the enslaved. Third, it examines slave law as an institutionally driven system of enforced disablement. This book illustrates that the histories of disability and slavery overlap in significant ways, and second, that Caribbean bondspeople form an integral part of wider disability history.

Anthony Overton is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most significant African American entrepreneurs. Overton, at his peak, presided over a Chicago-based financial empire that included a personal care products company (Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company) a bank (Douglass National Bank), an insurance company (Victory Life Insurance Company) a popular periodical (the Half-Century Magazine), and a newspaper (Chicago Bee). This impressive business portfolio contributed to Overton being the first businessman to win the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1927, as well as him currently being acknowledged in the Harvard University Business School’s database of “American Business Leaders of the Twentieth Century” as the first African American to head a major business conglomerate. Nevertheless, despite Overton’s noteworthy entrepreneurial accomplishments, he remains a mysterious figure. The most readily apparent reason for this is the unavailability of his business records and personal papers. Still, because of Anthony Overton’s prominence, a large body of scattered alternative primary and secondary sources were available to construct this biography. Along with examining Anthony Overton and his accomplishments, this book places his activities in the context of larger societal occurrences in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Moreover, by recounting Overton’s life story, this biography seeks to more fully illuminate the role of business and entrepreneurship in the African American experience.