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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.

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.

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 studies the multi-generational transition of rural and semi-rural southern black migrants to life in the embryonic urban-industrial town of Huntington, West Virginia, between 1871 and 1929. Strategically located adjacent to the Ohio River in the Tri-state region of southwestern West Virginia, southeastern Ohio, and eastern Kentucky, and founded as a transshipment station by financier Collis P. Huntington for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in 1871, Huntington grew from a non-descript village to the state’s most populated city by 1930. Huntington’s black population grew in concert: by 1930, the city’s black population comprised the second largest in the state, behind Charleston, the state capital. The urbanization process posed different challenges, burdens, and opportunities to the black migrant than those migrating to the rural-industrial southern West Virginia coal mines. Direct and intensive supervision marked the urban industrial workplace, unlike the autonomy black coal miners’ experienced in the mines. Forced to navigate the socioeconomic and political constraints and dynamics of Jim Crow Era dictates, what state officials euphemistically termed, “benevolent segregation,” Huntington’s black migrants made remarkable strides. In the quest to transition from slave to worker to professional, Huntington’s black migrants forged lives, raised families, build black institutions, purchased property, and become black professionals. This study centers the criticality of their efforts to Huntington’s growth as a commercial, manufacturing, industrial, and cultural center.

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 collection of nine original essays explores the development of a modern criminal justice system in the Jim Crow South, from the 1890s through the 1950s. It covers key transformations surrounding the practices of policing, incarceration, and capital punishment, as municipal police departments became professionalized and as authority over criminal punishment shifted from local jurisdictions to the state. The collection’s essays address the history of segregated police forces, black-on-black crime, police brutality, organized crime and government corruption, restrictions on ex-felons’ rights, convict labor, prison reform, and the introduction of the electric chair. Together, they make a case for southern distinctiveness. Criminal justice in the Jim Crow South looked quite different than it did in the North due to white southern demands for racial control, as well as white southerners’ suspicions of centralized state power and modern bureaucracies. This collection examines these relationships between white supremacy, the modernizing state, and crime control. In doing so, it provides a more nuanced portrait of the dynamic between state power and white supremacy in the South beyond a story of top-down social control. The essays reveal stories of state institutions grappling with their expanding authority, stories of political leaders and reformers anxious to render that power modern and efficient, and stories of African Americans appealing to the regulatory state in order to push back against racial injustice.

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.

This study reveals the previously hidden impact of Ebony magazine as a major producer and disseminator of popular black history during the second half of the twentieth century, stretching from its formation in 1945 to its role in the movement to establish a national holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1980s. Benefitting from unprecedented access to new archival materials at Chicago State and Emory University, it focuses on the impact of Lerone Bennett, Jr., the magazine’s in-house historian and senior editor. More broadly, West highlights the value placed upon Ebony’s role as a “history book” by its contributors and readers. Using Ebony as a window into the trajectory of the post-war “modern black history revival”, this study offers a bold reinterpretation of the magazine’s place within modern American cultural and intellectual history and highlights its role as a critical tool for black history empowerment and education on a local, national and international scale.

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.

This enlightening study employs the tools of archaeology to uncover a new historical perspective on the Underground Railroad. Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have focused on frightened fugitive slaves and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, this book focuses instead on free African American communities, the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred. This book foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on the treacherous southern edge of the free North in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. It demonstrates how landscape features such as waterways, iron forges, and caves played a key role in the conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Rich in oral histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, this examination of the “geography of resistance” tells the new, powerful, and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own liberation in the midst of oppression.

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union deplored the treatment of African Americans by the U.S. government as proof of hypocrisy in the American promises of freedom and equality. This probing history examines government attempts to manipulate international perceptions of U.S. race relations during the Cold War by sending African American athletes abroad on goodwill tours and in international competitions as cultural ambassadors and visible symbols of American values. The book follows the State Department's efforts from 1945 to 1968 to showcase prosperous African American athletes including Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, and the Harlem Globetrotters as the preeminent citizens of the African Diaspora rather than as victims of racial oppression. With athletes in baseball, track and field, and basketball, the government relied on figures whose fame carried the desired message to countries where English was little understood. However, eventually African American athletes began to provide counter-narratives to State Department claims of American exceptionalism, most notably with Tommie Smith and John Carlos's famous black power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

In the history of black America, the image of the mortal, wounded, and dead black body has long been looked at by others from a safe distance. This book questions the relationship between the spectator and victim and urges viewers to move beyond the safety of the “gaze” to cultivate a capacity for humane insight toward representations of human suffering. Utilizing the visual studies concept termed the “look,” the book interrogates how the notion of black humanity was articulated and recognized in oft-referenced moments within the African American experience: the graphic brutality of the 1834 Lalaurie affair; the photographic exhibition of lynching, Without Sanctuary; Emmett Till's murder and funeral; and the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Contemplating these and other episodes, the book traces how proponents of black freedom and dignity used the visual display of violence against the black body to galvanize action against racial injustice. An innovative cultural study that connects visual theory to African American history, the book asserts the importance of ethics in our analysis of race and visual culture, and reveals how representations of pain can become the currency of black liberation from injustice.

Many supporters of all-black male schools (ABMS) argue that they reduce black boys’ exposure to racist, “overly” feminized teachers. In casting black boys as victims of intersecting racial and gendered oppression, these supporters -- many of whom are black males -- demand an end to racism in the classroom and do so on the sexist assumption that women teachers are emasculating. This rationale for ABMS raises two questions that feminist theory has lost sight of. Why do oppressed groups articulate their experience in ways that challenge and reproduce inequality? Is it possible to build emancipatory political coalitions among groups who make such claims? This book answers these questions by articulating a new politics of experience. It begins by demonstrating that intersectionality is a politically fluid rather than an always feminist analytical framework. It also reveals a dialectical reality in which groups’ experiential claims rest on harmful assumptions and foster emancipatory demands. This book concludes that black male supporters of single-gender schools for black boys can build worthwhile coalitions around this complex reality when they interrogate their own as well as their critics’ assumptions and demands. Doing so enables these supporters to engage in educational advocacy that recognizes the value of public schools while criticizing the quality of such schools available to black boys and black girls.

Few literary figures are as commonly referenced in contemporary culture as James Baldwin. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the election of Donald Trump, and daily debates about walls, borders, and bans, Baldwin’s righteous indignation and prophetic warnings speak to the urgent mood of the present. His words appear on signs at rallies, in speeches, and on social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook; he has been the subject of countless features in major magazines, as well as the inspiration for a new academic journal (the James Baldwin Review) and an Oscar-nominated documentary (I Am Not Your Negro). This Baldwin renaissance, however, follows decades of dismissals and neglect, particularly of his late career. James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era zeroes in on his final decade, revealing a still-razor-sharp, provocative writer who, with the benefit of hindsight, holds up as one of the most prescient observers of the post-civil rights landscape. Indeed, contrary to the conventional narrative of his decline, Baldwin’s work in the 1980s proves remarkably engaged with the cultural milieu of a new generation, commenting on everything from the culture wars to the deterioration of inner cities, from the Reagan Revolution to the religious Right, from gender-bending in pop culture to the AIDS crisis. A groundbreaking new assessment of Baldwin in the context of the media-saturated Reagan era, James Baldwin and the 1980s offers the first in-depth study of the author’s final decade -- and shows why his work from this period is so relevant to the world we live in today.

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.