Search

Maria W. Stewart was a trailblazing political philosopher and social reformer, who migrated from the Connecticut of her birth, south to Baltimore and then Washington, D.C. on the eve of the Civil War. Stewart was a free-born African American who became a teacher, journalist, lecturer, abolitionist, and women's rights activist. She is the first known American woman to offer political lectures before an interracial audience of men and woman. Maria W. Stewart: Essential Writings of a 19th-Century Black Abolitionist offers the most comprehensive and contextually dynamic collection of Stewart's fascinating corpus to date. In addition to including an intellectual biography on this formidable female historical figure. Douglas A. Jones brings together Stewart's known essays, lectures, and fiction, including recently discovered texts, all of which directly influenced other major black abolitionist contemporaries, including Frederick Douglass and many others. The volume's extended introduction and detailed notes situate Stewart's then-radical political philosophy in the rich intellectual contexts in which she worked, including abolitionism, black nationalism, feminism, and sentimentalism.

'James Baldwin was born for truth. It called upon him to tell it on the mountains, to preach it in Harlem, to sing it on the Left Bank in Paris.... He was a giant.'— Maya AngelouThis collectible edition celebrates James Baldwin's 100th-year anniversary, delving into his years in France and SwitzerlandOriginally published in Notes of a Native Son, the essays,'Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown,''A Question of Identity,''Equal in Paris,'and'Stranger in the Village'will appeal to readers interested in Baldwin's observations as a Black man overseas.During his transformative time in Europe, Baldwin uncovers what it means to be American, immersing the reader in his life as a foreigner, his troubling encounter with a Parisian prison, and his unprecedented arrival to a tiny Swiss village.This final collection in the Baldwin centennial anniversary series raises issues of identity, belonging, nationhood, and race within a global context. Encounter on the Seine: Essays showcases Baldwin's strengths as a storyteller, revealing how his years in Paris transformed his understanding of American identity.

How medieval-inspired racial feudalism reigned in early America and was challenged by Black liberal thinkersThough the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America's resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national conscience.Against those seeking to maintain what Frederick Douglass called an “aristocracy of the skin,” Keidrick Roy shows how a group of Black thinkers, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hosea Easton, and Harriet Jacobs, challenged the medievalism in their midst—and transformed the nation's founding liberal tradition. He demonstrates how they drew on spiritual insight, Enlightenment thought, and a homegrown political philosophy that gave expression to their experiences at the bottom of the American social order. Roy sheds new light on how Black abolitionist writers and activists worked to eradicate the pernicious ideology of racial feudalism from American liberalism and renew the country's commitment to values such as individual liberty, social progress, and egalitarianism.American Dark Age reveals how the antebellum Black liberal tradition holds vital lessons for us today as hate groups continue to align themselves with fantasies of a medieval past and openly call for a return of all-powerful monarchs, aristocrats, and nobles who rule by virtue of their race.

“History shows that it does not matter who is in power... those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others, never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they did in the beginning.”Dr. Carter G. Woodson was an extraordinary scholar and an important figure in the Afrocentrism movement. Being one of the first people to study African-American history and the history of the African diaspora at large, he is known today as the “Father of Black History,” for his incredible contributions to the field. His magnum opus, The Miseducation of the Negro (1933) and it's spiritual predecessor The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (1919) are considered to be among the most comprehensive studies of the history of African-American education in the United States published in the early twentieth century. As individual works, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 functions as a documentation of the ways in which obtaining education provided mental and intellectual freedom to both enslaved and freed Africans in America; and The Miseducation of the Negro explores the effects of slavery on Black minds, challenging the effectiveness and overall intent of the United States Educational System in regard to the cultural indoctrination of Black Americans. Together, these two works laid the foundation for Woodson's argument in favor of Black History Week, which would eventually grow to be recognized nationally as Black History Month; and are essential to the cultural understanding of the importance in recognizing African-American history as a legitimate field of study.Professionally typeset with a beautifully designed cover, this edition of The Miseducation of the Negro is indispensable reimagining of a crucial work of Black History for the modern reader. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

'The Classic Collection of Marcus Garvey'is a remarkable compilation of the essential writings and speeches of Marcus Garvey, a visionary leader, and influential figure in the Pan-African and civil rights movements of the early 20th century. This anthology features some of Garvey's most significant works, including'The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey,''Message to the People,'and a selection of his powerful writings and speeches. In this comprehensive collection, readers will embark on a journey through the life and ideas of Marcus Garvey, exploring his philosophies on black nationalism, self-reliance, and the importance of unity among people of African descent. Garvey's eloquent and impassioned speeches are presented alongside his written works, offering a holistic view of his commitment to empowering marginalized communities and advocating for social and political change. Contents: The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey Or, Africa for the Africans Preface Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Message To The People Lesson 1. Intelligence, Education, Universal Knowledge, And How To Get It Lesson 2. Leadership Lesson 3. Aims And Objects Of The U.N.I.A. Lesson 4. Elocution Lesson 5. God Lesson 6. Christ Lesson 7. Character Lesson 8. The Social System Lesson 9. Diplomacy Lesson 10. Economy Lesson 11. Man Lesson 12. The Purpose Of Institutions Lesson 13. The Universe Lesson 14. Self-Initiative Lesson 15. Personality Lesson 16. Propaganda Lesson 17. Communism Lesson 18. Commercial And Industrial Transactions Lesson 19. Winning Mankind By Kindness Lesson 20. Living For Something Lesson 21. History Of The U.N.I.A. Lesson 22. The Five-Year Plan Of The U.N.I.A. Selected Writings and Speeches The Negro's Greatest Enemy West Indies in the Mirror of Truth Unemployment Leadership The Handwriting Is on the Wall The Hidden Spirit of America Africa for the Africans Hon. Marcus Garvey Tells of Interview with the Ku Klux Klan Climbing Upward The World Gone Mad—Force Only Argument to Correct Human Ills Biggest Case in the History of the Negro Race

The Negro Problem is a collection of essays edited by Charles W. Chesnutt and published in 1903. The book explores the complex issues surrounding race and racism in America at the turn of the 20th century. It includes essays from a variety of perspectives, including both black and white writers, and covers a range of topics, such as the economic, social, and political conditions of African Americans, the history of slavery, and the psychology of race relations. The book also includes personal accounts of racism and discrimination and proposes various solutions to the'negro problem'including education, economic independence, and political representation. The book is considered an important historical document in the ongoing discussion of race and inequality in America.

The most influential work by “the father of Black history”, reflecting the long-standing tradition of antiracist teaching pioneered by Black educatorsA Penguin ClassicThe Mis-education of the Negro (1933) is Woodson's most popular classic work of Black social criticism, drawing on history, theory, and memoir. As both student and teacher, Woodson witnessed distortions of Black life in the history and literature taught in schools and universities. He identified a relationship between these distortions in curriculum and the violence circumscribing Black life in the material world, declaring, “There would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.” Woodson's primary focus was the impact dominant modes of schooling had on Black youth. This systematic process of mis-education undermined Black people's struggles for freedom and justice, and it was an experience that scholars before and after Woodson recognized and worked to challenge.Woodson argued that students, teachers, and leaders needed to be educated in a manner that was accountable to Black experiences and lived realities, both past and present. This edition includes an appendix of selected letters and articles by Woodson, and Suggestions for Further Reading.

In Annotations Nahum Dimitri Chandler offers a philosophical interpretation of W. E. B. Du Bois's 1897 American Negro Academy address, “The Conservation of Races.” Chandler approaches Du Bois as a generative and original philosophical thinker-writer on the status and historical implication of matters of human difference, both the fact of and the very idea thereof. Chandler proposes both a close reading of Du Bois's engagement of the concept of so-called race and a deep meditation on Du Bois's conceptualization of historicity in general. He elaborates on the way Du Bois's thought in this address can give an account of the organization of the historicity that yields the emergence of something like the African American, at once with its own internal dimensions and yet also as an originary articulation of forces and possibilities that have world historical implications. Chandler refigures Du Bois's thought as a vital theoretical resource for rethinking our concepts of differences among humans and, so too, our understanding of modern historicity itself.

In April 1865, as the Civil War came to a close, Abraham Lincoln announced his support for voting rights for at least some of the newly freed enslaved people. Esteemed historian Paul Escott takes this milestone as an opportunity to explore popular sentiment in the North on this issue and, at the same time, to examine the vigorous efforts of Black leaders, in both North and South, to organize, demand, and work for their equal rights as citizens.As Escott reveals, there was in the spring of 1865 substantial and surprisingly general support for Black suffrage, most notably through the Republican Party, which had succeeded in linking the suffrage issue to the securing of the Union victory. This would be met with opposition, however, from Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, and, just as important, from a Democratic Party—including Northern Democrats—that had failed during the course of the war to shed its racism. The momentum for Black suffrage would be further threatened by conflicts within the Republican Party over the issue.Based on extensive research into Republican and Democratic newspapers, magazines, speeches, and addresses, Escott's latest book illuminates the vigorous national debates in the pivotal year of 1865 over extending the franchise to all previously enslaved men—crucial debates that have not yet been examined in full—revealing both the nature and significance of growing support for Black suffrage and the depth of white racism that was its greatest obstacle.

By examining Jewish experiences between the American Civil War and the African American Civil Rights Revolution, this book focuses on citizens who usually spent their daily lives in Black and white “peoplehoods.” Some of the white ones, commanding the nation's “public square,” structured a segregated republic and capitalist economy that would experience WWII and the news about the Holocaust that murdered millions of Jews. This political economy sustained a hierarchy of privatized ethnic groups whose race and religion, in their norms of “ethnicking,” was used to deprive them of legal and equal collective standing. This Was America is a book about those privatized identities that the years of the Civil Rights Revolution would bring into the republic's public square.

Beginning in the late seventeenth century and concluding with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, Almost Dead reveals how the thousands of captives who lived, bled, and resisted in the Black Urban Atlantic survived to form dynamic communities. Michael Lawrence Dickinson uses cities with close commercial ties to shed light on similarities, variations, and linkages between urban Atlantic slave communities in mainland America and the Caribbean. The study adopts the perspectives of those enslaved to reveal that, in the eyes of the enslaved, the distinctions were often of degree rather than kind as cities throughout the Black Urban Atlantic remained spaces for Black oppression and resilience. The tenets of subjugation remained all too similar, as did captives'need to stave off social death and hold on to their humanity. Almost Dead argues that urban environments provided unique barriers to and avenues for social rebirth: the process by which African-descended peoples reconstructed their lives individually and collectively after forced exportation from West Africa. This was an active process of cultural remembrance, continued resistance, and communal survival. It was in these urban slave communities—within the connections between neighbors and kinfolk—that the enslaved found the physical and psychological resources necessary to endure the seemingly unendurable. Whether sites of first arrival, commodification, sale, short-term captivity, or lifetime enslavement, the urban Atlantic shaped and was shaped by Black lives.

This book explores the transformative energy and excitement that African Americans expressed in aesthetic and civic currents that percolated during the opening of the 20th century and proved to be a force in the modernization of America.This engaging reference text represents the voices of the era in poetry and prose, in full or excerpted from anecdotes, editorials, essays, manifestoes, orations, and reminiscences, with appearances by major figures and often overlooked contributors to the Harlem Renaissance.Organized topically and, within topics, chronologically, the volume reaches beyond the typical representation of the spirit and substance of the movement, examinations of which are typically confined to the New York City community and from U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 to the depths of the Great Depression in 1935. It carries readers from the opening of the Harlem Renaissance, which began at the top of the 20th century, to its heights in the 1920s and'30s and through to its artistic and literary echoes in the shadows of World War II (1939–1945).

An illuminating historical biography for students and scholars alike, this book gives readers insight into the life and times of Booker T. Washington.Booker T. Washington was an integral figure in mid-19th to early-20th century America who successfully transitioned from a life in slavery and poverty to a position among the Black elite. This book highlights Washington's often overlooked contributions to the African and African American experience, particularly his support of higher education for Black students through fundraising for Fisk and Howard universities, where he served as a trustee. A vocal advocate of vocational and liberal arts alike, Washington eventually founded his own school, the Tuskegee Institute, with a well-rounded curriculum to expand opportunities and encourage free thinking for Black students. While Washington was sometimes viewed as a'great accommodator'by his critics for working alongside wealthy, white elites, he quietly advocated for Black teachers and students as well as for desegregation. This book will offer readers a clearly written, fully realized overview of Booker T. Washington and his legacy.

The civil rights movement was among the most important historical developments of the twentieth century and one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. Not only did it decisively change the legal and political status of African Americans, but it prefigured as well the moral premises and methods of struggle for other historically oppressed groups seeking equal standing in American society. And, yet, despite a vague, sometimes begrudging recognition of its immense import, more often than not the movement has been misrepresented and misunderstood. For the general public, a singular moment, frozen in time at the Lincoln Memorial, sums up much of what Americans know about that remarkable decade of struggle. In The Movement, Thomas C. Holt provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, privileging the aspirations and initiatives of the ordinary, grassroots people who made it. Holt conveys a sense of these developments as a social movement, one that shaped its participants even as they shaped it. He emphasizes the conditions of possibility that enabled the heroic initiatives of the common folk over those of their more celebrated leaders. This groundbreaking book reinserts the critical concept of'movement'back into our image and understanding of the civil rights movement.

Winner of the 2021 Book of the Year Award from the Religious Communication AssociationWinner of the 2021 Top Book Award from the National Communication Association's African American Communication and Culture Division & Black CaucusNo Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner is a history of the career of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915), specifically focusing on his work from 1896 to 1915. Drawing on the copious amount of material from Turner's speeches, editorial, and open and private letters, Andre E. Johnson tells a story of how Turner provided rhetorical leadership during a period in which America defaulted on many of the rights and privileges gained for African Americans during Reconstruction. Unlike many of his contemporaries during this period, Turner did not opt to proclaim an optimistic view of race relations. Instead, Johnson argues that Turner adopted a prophetic persona of a pessimistic prophet who not only spoke truth to power but, in so doing, also challenged and pushed African Americans to believe in themselves. At this time in his life, Turner had no confidence in American institutions or that the American people would live up to the promises outlined in their sacred documents. While he argued that emigration was the only way for African Americans to retain their “personhood” status, he also would come to believe that African Americans would never emigrate to Africa. He argued that many African Americans were so oppressed and so stripped of agency because they were surrounded by continued negative assessments of their personhood that belief in emigration was not possible. Turner's position limited his rhetorical options, but by adopting a pessimistic prophetic voice that bore witness to the atrocities African Americans faced, Turner found space for his oratory, which reflected itself within the lament tradition of prophecy.

The American North's commitment to preventing a southern secession rooted in slaveholding suggests a society united in its opposition to slavery and racial inequality. The reality, however, was far more complex and troubling. In his latest book, Paul Escott lays bare the contrast between progress on emancipation and the persistence of white supremacy in the Civil War North. Escott analyzes northern politics, as well as the racial attitudes revealed in the era's literature, to expose the nearly ubiquitous racism that flourished in all of American society and culture.Contradicting much recent scholarship, Escott argues that the North's Democratic Party was consciously and avowedly'the white man's party,'as an extensive examination of Democratic newspapers, as well as congressional debates and other speeches by Democratic leaders, proves. The Republican Party, meanwhile, defended emancipation as a war measure but did little to attack racism or fight for equal rights. Most Republicans propagated a message that emancipation would not disturb northern race relations or the interests of northern white voters: freed slaves, it was felt, would either leave the nation or remain in the South as subordinate laborers.Escott's book uncovers the substantial and destructive racism that lay beyond the South's borders. Although emancipation represented enormous progress, racism flourished in the North, and assumptions of white supremacy remained powerful and nearly ubiquitous throughout America.

The MisEducation of the Negro is a book originally published in 1933 by Dr. Carter G. Woodson. The thesis of Dr. Woodson's book is that blacks of his day were being culturally indoctrinated, rather than taught, in American schools. This conditioning, he claims, causes blacks to become dependent and to seek out inferior places in the greater society of which they are a part. He challenges his readers to become autodidacts and to'do for themselves', regardless of what they were taught. This book should most definitely be required reading in every high school English class across America. This is the book that has inspired recent protest movements in the United States. A must-read book.

Policing, incarceration, capital punishment: these forms of crime control were crucial elements of Jim Crow regimes. White southerners relied on them to assert and maintain racial power, which led to the growth of modern state bureaucracies that eclipsed traditions of local sovereignty. Friction between the demands of white supremacy and white southern suspicions of state power created a distinctive criminal justice system in the South, elements of which are still apparent today across the United States. In this collection, Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring present nine groundbreaking essays about the carceral system and its development over time. Topics range from activism against police brutality to the peculiar path of southern prison reform to the fraught introduction of the electric chair. The essays tell nuanced stories of rapidly changing state institutions, political leaders who sought to manage them, and African Americans who appealed to the regulatory state to protect their rights. Contributors: Pippa Holloway, Tammy Ingram, Brandon T. Jett, Seth Kotch, Talitha L. LeFlouria, Vivien Miller, Silvan Niedermeier, K. Stephen Prince, and Amy Louise Wood

The My Itty-Bitty Bio series are biographies for the earliest readers. This book examines the life of Ida B. Wells in a simple, age-appropriate way that will help children develop word recognition and reading skills. Includes a timeline and other informative backmatter.

Waxkeep Publishing Collections provide history's greatest authors'collected works in a convenient collection complete with a linked table of contents. Waxkeep Publishing's goal is to provide the most complete, and most easy to read collections in the marketplace.

Based on careful reading of Du Bois'writings and with a combination of analytical and narrative approaches, the author probes the reasons and dynamics behind the changes of Du Bois strategies concerning the solution to the American race problem.

Booker T. Washington was an educated black man who was very influential in the transition in the United States from the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery to the election of President Barack Obama. He believed education was key in helping lift African Americans out of poverty and built the Tuskegee Institute to provide that education.

Atlantic Crossings in the Wake of Frederick Douglass takes its bearings from the Maryland-born former slave Frederick Douglass's 1845 sojourn in Ireland and Britain—a voyage that is understood in editors Mark P. Leone and Lee M. Jenkins'collection as paradigmatic of the crossings between American, African American, and Irish historical experience and culture with which the collection as a whole is concerned. In crossing the Atlantic, Douglass also completed his journey from slavery to freedom, and from political and cultural marginality into subjective and creative autonomy. Atlantic Crossings traces the stages of that journey in chapters on literature, archaeology, and spatial culture that consider both roots and routes—landscapes of New World slavery, subordination, and state-sponsored surveillance, and narratives of resistance, liberation, and intercultural exchange generated by transatlantic connectivities and the transnational transfer of ideas.ContributorsLee M. Jenkins, Mark P. Leone, Katie Ahern, Miranda Corcoran, Ann Coughlan, Kathryn H. Deeley, Adam Fracchia, Mary Furlong Minkoff, Tracy H. Jenkins, Dan O'Brien, Eoin O'Callaghan, Elizabeth Pruitt, Benjamin A. Skolnik and Stefan Woehlke

African-American historian, author, journalist and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, one of the first scholars to study African-American history and has been referred to as the “father of black history.” His announcement of the celebration of “Negro History Week” in February 1926 has been cited as the precursor to Black History Month. First published serially in 1903, “The Mis-Education of the Negro” is Dr. Carter G. Woodson's thesis regarding the education, or lack thereof, of African Americans in the early part of the 20th century. His principal assertion was that African Americans were not really being taught in American schools but rather that they were being culturally indoctrinated. Dr. Woodson was highly critical of this trend for as he writes “When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place'and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.” Dr. Woodson's book is a compelling argument regarding the need for better education in the African American community which is surprisingly still relevant today.

From 1890-1915, the most influential black man in America was Booker T. Washington, who less than 35 years earlier had been born into slavery. The young boy worked laboriously until emancipation before going on to seek an education. By the time he was 40, he was consolidating a network of supporters that came to be known as the “Tuskegee Machine,” helping coordinate action with the support of black businesses, religious communities, and others. With his position of power, Washington spoke out against Jim Crow laws and Southern disfranchisement of blacks. By the early 20th century, Washington's tactics were questioned by other black leaders, notably W. E. B. Du Bois, who wanted to protest more vehemently in an effort to secure civil rights. Washington believed confrontation would only hurt the cause, and that cooperation and softer tones would wear down racism over time. To that end, both men wrote voluminously in support of their stances and thoughts. Washington wrote 14 books, including his renowned autobiography, Up From Slavery, which was published in 1901. Washington continues to be recognized for helping to improve the relationships between blacks and whites, as well as helping blacks get further access to education and civil rights.

When on May 15, 1918 a French lieutenant warned Henry Johnson of the 369th to move back because of a possible enemy raid, Johnson reportedly replied:'I'm an American, and I never retreat.'The story, even if apocryphal, captures the mythic status of the Harlem Rattlers, the African-American combat unit that grew out of the 15th New York National Guard, who were said to have never lost a man to capture or a foot of ground that had been taken. It also, in its insistence on American identity, points to a truth at the heart of this book—more than fighting to make the world safe for democracy, the black men of the 369th fought to convince America to live up to its democratic promise. It is this aspect of the storied regiment's history—its place within the larger movement of African Americans for full citizenship in the face of virulent racism—that Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War brings to the fore.With sweeping vision, historical precision, and unparalleled research, this book will stand as the definitive study of the 369th. Though discussed in numerous histories and featured in popular culture (most famously the film Stormy Weather and the novel Jazz), the 369th has become more a matter of mythology than grounded, factually accurate history—a situation that authors Jeffrey T. Sammons and John H. Morrow, Jr. set out to right. Their book—which eschews the regiment's famous nickname, the'Harlem Hellfighters,'a name never embraced by the unit itself—tells the full story of the self-proclaimed Harlem Rattlers. Combining the'fighting focus'of military history with the insights of social commentary, Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War reveals the centrality of military service and war to the quest for equality as it details the origins, evolution, combat exploits, and postwar struggles of the 369th.The authors take up the internal dynamics of the regiment as well as external pressures, paying particular attention to the environment created by the presence of both black and white officers in the unit. They also explore the role of women—in particular, the Women's Auxiliary of the 369th—as partners in the struggle for full citizenship. From its beginnings in the 15th New York National Guard through its training in the explosive atmosphere in the South, its singular performance in the French army during World War I, and the pathos of postwar adjustment—this book reveals as never before the details of the Harlem Rattlers'experience, the poignant history of some of its heroes, its place in the story of both World War I and the African American campaign for equality—and its full importance in our understanding of American history.

The Mis-Education of the Negro is one of the most important books on education ever written. Carter G. Woodson shows us the weakness of Euro-centric based curriculums that fail to include African American history and culture. This system mis-educates the African American student, failing to prepare them for success and to give them an adequate sense of who they are within the system that they must live. Woodson provides many strong solutions to the problems he identifies. A must-read for anyone working in the education field.

One of the cruelest abuses of slavery in America was that slaves were forbidden to read and write. Consigned to illiteracy, they left no records of their thoughts and feelings apart from the few exceptional narratives of Frederick Douglass and others who escaped to the North—or so we have long believed. But as Christopher Hager reveals, a few enslaved African Americans managed to become literate in spite of all prohibitions, and during the halting years of emancipation thousands more seized the chance to learn. The letters and diaries of these novice writers, unpolished and hesitant yet rich with voice, show ordinary black men and women across the South using pen and paper to make sense of their experiences.Through an unprecedented gathering of these forgotten writings—from letters by individuals sold away from their families, to petitions from freedmen in the army to their new leaders, to a New Orleans man's transcription of the Constitution—Word by Word rewrites the history of emancipation. The idiosyncrasies of these untutored authors, Hager argues, reveal the enormous difficulty of straddling the border between slave and free.These unusual texts, composed by people with a unique perspective on the written word, force us to rethink the relationship between literacy and freedom. For African Americans at the end of slavery, learning to write could be liberating and empowering, but putting their hard-won skill to use often proved arduous and daunting—a portent of the tenuousness of the freedom to come.

This disquieting yet important book describes the injustices, humiliations, and brutalities inflicted on African Americans in a racist culture that was created-and protected-by the forces of law and order.Jim Crow Laws presents the history of the discriminatory laws that segregated people by race in the American South from the end of the Civil War through passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act. To paint a true picture of these deplorable restrictions, this book provides a detailed analysis of the creation, defense, justification, and fight against the Jim Crow system.Among the subjects covered here are the origins of legal inequality for African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War; the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in weakening constitutional protections against discrimination established in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; the white justification of segregation; and the extreme brutality of Jim Crow's defenders. Equally important, readers will learn about the psychological, political, social, and economic costs endured by the victims of Jim Crow inequality, as well as about the motivations, rejections, and successes faced by those who stood against these abominations.

Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the Army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi's diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy. Jim and Jap Crow follows Kikuchi's personal odyssey among fellow Japanese American intellectuals, immigrant activists, Chicago School social scientists, everyday people on Chicago's South Side, and psychologically scarred veterans in the hospitals of New York. The book chronicles a remarkable moment in America's history in which interracial alliances challenged the limits of the elusive democratic ideal, and in which the nation was forced to choose between civil liberty and the fearful politics of racial hysteria. It was an era of world war and the atomic bomb, desegregation in the military but Jim and Jap Crow elsewhere in America, and a hopeful progressivism that gave way to Cold War paranoia. Jim and Jap Crow looks at Kikuchi's life and diaries as a lens through which to observe the possibilities, failures, and key conversations in a dynamic multiracial America.

One of the most important and controversial figures in the history of race relations in America and the world at large, Marcus Garvey was the first great black orator of the twentieth century. The Jamaican-born African-American rights advocated dismayed his enemies as much as he dazzled his admirers. Of him, Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level, to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny, and make the Negro feel that he was somebody.”A printer and newspaper editor in his youth, Garvey furthered his education in England and eventually traveled to the United States, where he impressed thousands with his speeches and millions more through his newspaper articles. His message of black pride resonated in all his efforts. This anthology contains some of his most noted writings, among them “The Negro's Greatest Enemy,”'Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World,'and'Africa for the Africans,'as well as powerful speeches on unemployment, leadership, and emancipation.Essential reading for students of African-American history, this volume will also serve as a useful reference for anyone interested in the history of the civil rights movement.

Racial Uplift and American Music 1878-1943 traces the career of racial uplift ideology as a factor in elite African Americans'embrace of classical music around the turn of the previous century, from the collapse of Reconstruction to the death of composer/conductor R. Nathaniel Dett, whose music epitomized'uplift.'After Reconstruction many black leaders had retreated from emphasizing'inalienable rights'to a narrower rationale for equality and inclusion: they now sought to rehabilitate the Race's image by stressing class distinctions, respectable middle-class behavior, and service to the masses. Musically, the black intelligentsia resorted to European models as vehicles for cultural vindication. Their response to racism was to create and promote morally positive, politically inoffensive art that represented the Race in idealized terms. By incorporating black folk elements into the dignified genres of art song, symphony, and opera,'uplifters'demonstrated worthiness through high achievement in acknowledged arenas. Their efforts were variously opposed, tolerated, or supported by a range of white elites with their own notions about black culture. The resulting conversation--more a stew of arguments than a dialogue--occupied the pages of black newspapers and informed the work of white philanthropists. Women also played crucial roles. Racial Uplift and American Music 1878-1943 examines the lives and thought of personalities central to musical uplift-- Dett, Sears CEO Julius Rosenwald, author James Monroe Trotter, sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, journalist Nora Douglas Holt, and others--with an eye to recognizing their contributions and restoring their stature.

In January 1890, journalist T. Thomas Fortune stood before a delegation of African American activists in Chicago and declared,'We know our rights and have the courage to defend them,'as together they formed the Afro-American League, the nation's first national civil rights organization. Over the next two decades, Fortune and his fellow activists organized, agitated, and, in the process, created the foundation for the modern civil rights movement.An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP traces the history of this first generation of activists and the organizations they formed to give the most comprehensive account of black America's struggle for civil rights from the end of Reconstruction to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. Here a host of leaders neglected by posterity—Bishop Alexander Walters, Mary Church Terrell, Jesse Lawson, Lewis G. Jordan, Kelly Miller, George H. White, Frederick McGhee, Archibald Grimké—worked alongside the more familiar figures of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, who are viewed through a fresh lens.As Jim Crow curtailed modes of political protest and legal redress, members of the Afro-American League and the organizations that formed in its wake—including the Afro-American Council, the Niagara Movement, the Constitution League, and the Committee of Twelve—used propaganda, moral suasion, boycotts, lobbying, electoral office, and the courts, as well as the call for self-defense, to end disfranchisement, segregation, and racial violence. In the process, the League and the organizations it spawned provided the ideological and strategic blueprint of the NAACP and the struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century, demonstrating that there was significant and effective agitation during'the age of accommodation.'

An incredible treasure trove of more than 150 illustrations detailing a small nation of African Americans prepared to make their mark on America

The night broke open in a storm of explosions and fire. The sound of shells whizzing overhead, screeching through the night like wounded pheasants, was terrifying. When the shells exploded prematurely overhead, a rain of shrapnel fell on the men below -- better than when the shells exploded in the trenches... In A More Unbending Battle, journalist and author Pete Nelson chronicles the little-known story of the 369th Infantry Regiment -- the first African-American regiment mustered to fight in WWI. Recruited from all walks of Harlem life, the regiment had to fight alongside the French because America's segregation policy prohibited them from fighting with white U.S. soldiers. Despite extraordinary odds and racism, the 369th became one of the most successful -- and infamous -- regiments of the war. The Harlem Hellfighters, as their enemies named them, spent longer than any other American unit in combat, were the first Allied unit to reach the Rhine, and showed extraordinary valor on the battlefield, with many soldiers winning the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. Replete with vivid accounts of battlefield heroics, A More Unbending Battle is the thrilling story of the dauntless Harlem Hellfighters.

A look at the violent “Red Summer of 1919” and its intersection with the highly politicized New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance With the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s was a landmark decade in African American political and cultural history, characterized by an upsurge in racial awareness and artistic creativity. In Spectres of 1919 Barbara Foley traces the origins of this revolutionary era to the turbulent year 1919, identifying the events and trends in American society that spurred the black community to action and examining the forms that action took as it evolved. Unlike prior studies of the Harlem Renaissance, which see 1919 as significant mostly because of the geographic migrations of blacks to the North, Spectres of 1919 looks at that year as the political crucible from which the radicalism of the 1920s emerged. Foley draws from a wealth of primary sources, taking a bold new approach to the origins of African American radicalism and adding nuance and complexity to the understanding of a fascinating and vibrant era.

This book narrates and analyzes the southern tours that Booker T. Washington and his associates undertook in 1908-1912, relating them to Washington's racial philosophy and its impact on the various parts of black society.

Illuminating the class issues that shaped the racial uplift movement, Toure Reed explores the ideology and policies of the national, New York, and Chicago Urban Leagues during the first half of the twentieth century. Reed argues that racial uplift in the Urban League reflected many of the class biases pervading contemporaneous social reform movements, resulting in an emphasis on behavioral, rather than structural, remedies to the disadvantages faced by Afro-Americans. Reed traces the Urban League's ideology to the famed Chicago School of Sociology. The Chicago School offered Leaguers powerful scientific tools with which to foil the thrust of eugenics. However, Reed argues, concepts such as ethnic cycle and social disorganization and reorganization led the League to embrace behavioral models of uplift that reflected a deep circumspection about poor Afro-Americans and fostered a preoccupation with the needs of middle-class blacks. According to Reed, the League's reform endeavors from the migration era through World War II oscillated between projects to'adjust'or even'contain'unacculturated Afro-Americans and projects intended to enhance the status of the Afro-American middle class. Reed's analysis complicates the mainstream account of how particular class concerns and ideological influences shaped the League's vision of group advancement as well as the consequences of its endeavors.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Dusk of Dawn, published in 1940, is an explosive autobiography of the foremost African American scholar of his time. Du Bois writes movingly of his own life, using personal experience to elucidate the systemic problem of race. He reflects on his childhood, his education, and his intellectual life, including the formation of the NAACP. Though his views eventually got him expelled from the association, Du Bois continues to develop his thoughts on separate black economic and social institutions in Dusk of Dawn. Readers will find energetic essays within these pages, including insight into his developing Pan-African consciousness. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by Kwame Anthony Appiah, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.

Between 1880 and 1930, Southern mobs hanged, burned, and otherwise tortured to death at least 3,300 African Americans. And yet the rest of the nation largely ignored the horror of lynching or took it for granted, until a young schoolteacher from Tennessee raised her voice. Her name was Ida B. Wells. In'They Say,'historian James West Davidson recounts the first thirty years of this passionate woman's life--as well as the story of the great struggle over the meaning of race in post-emancipation America. Davidson captures the breathtaking, often chaotic changes that swept the South as Wells grew up in Holly Springs, Mississippi: the spread of education among the free blacks, the rise of political activism, the bitter struggles for equality in the face of entrenched social custom. As Wells came of age she moved to bustling Memphis, eager to worship at the city's many churches (black and white), to take elocution lessons and perform Shakespeare at evening soirées, to court and spark with the young men taken by her beauty. But Wells'quest for fulfillment was thwarted as whites increasingly used race as a barrier separating African Americans from mainstream America. Davidson traces the crosscurrents of these cultural conflicts through Ida Wells'forceful personality. When a conductor threw her off a train for not retreating to the segregated car, she sued the railroad--and won. When she protested conditions in the segregated Memphis schools, she was fired--and took up full-time journalism. And in 1892, when an explosive lynching rocked Memphis, she embarked full-blown on the career for which she is now remembered, as an outspoken writer and lecturer against lynching. Richly researched and deftly written,'They Say'offers a gripping portrait of the young Ida B. Wells, shedding light not only on how one black American defined her own aspirations and her people's freedom, but also on the changing meaning of race in America.

Americans have always defined themselves in terms of their freedoms--of speech, of religion, of political dissent. How we interpret our history of slavery--the ultimate denial of these freedoms--deeply affects how we understand the very fabric of our democracy. This extraordinary collection of essays by some of America's top historians focuses on how African Americans resisted slavery and how they responded when finally free. Ira Berlin sets the stage by stressing the relationship between how we understand slavery and how we discuss race today. The remaining essays offer a richly textured examination of all aspects of slavery in America. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger recount actual cases of runaway slaves, their motivations for escape and the strains this widespread phenomenon put on white slave-owners. Scott Hancock explores how free black Northerners created a proud African American identity out of the oral history of slavery in the south. Edward L. Ayers, William G. Thomas III, and Anne Sarah Rubin draw upon their remarkable Valley of the Shadow website to describe the wartime experiences of African Americans living on both borders of the Mason-Dixon line. Noah Andre Trudeau turns our attention to the war itself, examining the military experience of the only all-black division in the Army of the Potomac. And Eric Foner gives us a new look at how black leaders performed during the Reconstruction, revealing that they were far more successful than is commonly acknowledged--indeed, they represented, for a time, the fulfillment of the American ideal that all people could aspire to political office. Wide-ranging, authoritative, and filled with invaluable historical insight, Slavery, Resistance, Freedom brings a host of powerful voices to America's evolving conversation about race.

Scholars have sought, over many decades, to understand the mystique surrounding Booker T. Washington. He is an enigma and continues to be lauded by those who offer him and his ideas as a model for Black Progress. He was both simple and complex; a passive observer on some issues and an active participant in others; non-assuming, yet egoistic, and a very public man who talked freely with others, yet, a private man who kept certain social tactics and strategies close to his chest. He sought to both make sense of his world, then to manipulate that world in order to obtain from it those things he most wanted and needed. This volume provides the reader with a wide inter-disciplinary landscape with which to assess Washington. We continue to study and research the life and works of Washington because, though we've moved beyond Washington and the ideology of race and racial politics of his times on certain levels, yet in reality, this generation is confronted with all the contradictions and ambiguities around race, and class, which Washington encountered and for which he sought solutions. For example, as black Americans continue to be mired in the deficits of educational opportunity and development, employment opportunities and occupational advancements, and health and medical problems, we are reminded of Washington's arguments for greater individual and group black self-sufficiency and self-reliance, as well as the need for practical educational objectives which Washington advocated under aegis of vocational education. As we move into the new century, the economic and educational goals and programs highlighted by Washington remain forgotten and unfulfilled. Hopefully, the articles in this volume will force a re-thinking of Washington's economic and educational objectives and strategies. This may prompt the emergence of new thinkers and builders who will create the educational and economic bases, similar to the ones created by Washington. This volume uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine Washington's life. It reflects on obstacles that remain despite Washington's influence, and aspires to serve as an inspirational vehicle towards educational and economic change.

The first professional classicist of African American descent, William Sanders Scarborough rose from slavery to become president of Wilberforce University in Ohio. Excelling at Latin and Greek, he crossed the color line both socially and intellectually with his entry into a field of study commonly seen as elitist and dominated by white men. Although unknown to classicists today, Scarborough had a distinguished career in the field and held membership in many learned societies and had an active publication record. His life as an engaged intellectual, public citizen, and concerned educator was admired and emulated by W. E. B. Du Bois. This collection, which spans a half a century from the end of Reconstruction through the vagaries of World War I and the rise of Jim Crow, gives us window we have not had before into the challenges and ambiguities of this period. As a committed intellectual, concerned educator and loyal citizen, he served as an ambassador to and for his race to several generations of people both in the U.S and abroad. In Scarborough's writings we have a portrait of a man whose struggle for physical and intellectual freedom can inform us all.

In 1933, American historian and educator Carter Woodson (1875-1950) delivered a powerful and prophetic denouncement of'Euro-centric'school curricula that still rings true. Woodson inspired black Americans to demand relevant learning opportunities that were inclusive of their own culture and heritage. In issuing this challenge, Woodson laid the foundation for more progressive and egalitarian educational institutions.The thoughts Woodson expressed in addresses and articles formed the basis for this work, described by The New York Times as a challenging book that'throws down the gauntlet to those who have had anything to do with Negro education, whether of white or black race.'The founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Woodson was also the author of more than sixteen books and the founder and editor of the Journal of Negro History and the Negro History Bulletin. This landmark work remains essential reading for educators and everyone who seeks to understand the African-American experience.

In a pathbreaking new assessment of the shaping of black male identity in the early twentieth century, Martin Summers explores how middle-class African American and African Caribbean immigrant men constructed a gendered sense of self through organizational life, work, leisure, and cultural production. Examining both the public and private aspects of gender formation, Summers challenges the current trajectory of masculinity studies by treating black men as historical agents in their own identity formation, rather than as screens on which white men projected their own racial and gender anxieties and desires.Manliness and Its Discontents focuses on four distinct yet overlapping social milieus: the fraternal order of Prince Hall Freemasonry; the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association, or the Garvey movement; the modernist circles of the Harlem Renaissance; and the campuses of historically black Howard and Fisk Universities. Between 1900 and 1930, Summers argues, dominant notions of what it meant to be a man within the black middle class changed from a Victorian ideal of manliness--characterized by the importance of producer values, respectability, and patriarchy--to a modern ethos of masculinity, which was shaped more by consumption, physicality, and sexuality. Summers evaluates the relationships between black men and black women as well as relationships among black men themselves, broadening our understanding of the way that gender works along with class, sexuality, and age to shape identities and produce relationships of power.

Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim are widely recognized as the trinity of sociological theory. While these three sociologists were trailblazing social theorists who enhanced the study of human behavior and its relationship to social institutions, other, more contemporary scholars were just as innovative - one of those scholars being W. E. B. Du Bois. W. E. B. Du Bois was a political and literary giant of the 20th century, publishing over twenty books and thousand of essays and articles throughout his life. In The Social Theory of W. E. B. Du Bois, editor Phil Zuckerman assembles Du Bois′s work from a wide variety of sources, including articles Du Bois published in newspapers, speeches he delivered, selections from well-known classics such as The Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater, and lesser-known, hard-to-find material written by this revolutionary social theorist. W. E. B Du Bois is arguably one of the most imaginative, perceptive, and prolific founders of the sociological discipline. In addition to leading the Pan-African movement and being an activist for civil rights for African Americans, Du Bois was a pioneer of urban sociology, an innovator of rural sociology, a leader in criminology, the first American sociologist of religion, and most notably the first great social theorist of race. The Social Theory of W. E. B. Du Bois is the first book to examine Du Bois′s writings from a sociological perspective and emphasize his theoretical contributions. This volume covers topics such as the meaning of race, race relations, international relations, economics, labor, politics, religion, crime, gender, and education.The Social Theory of W. E. B. Du Bois offers an excellent introduction to the sociological theory of one of the 20th century′s intellectual beacons. It is a dynamic text for undergraduate and graduate students studying sociological theory, African American studies, and race and ethnicity.

When E. Franklin Frazier was elected the first black president of the American Sociological Association in 1948, he was established as the leading American scholar on the black family and was also recognized as a leading theorist on the dynamics of social change and race relations. By 1948 his lengthy list of publications included over fifty articles and four major books, including the acclaimed Negro Family in the United States. Frazier was known for his thorough scholarship and his mastery of skills in both history and sociology. With the publication of Bourgeoisie Noire in 1955 (translated in 1957 as Black Bourgeoisie), Frazier apparently set out on a different track, one in which he employed his skills in a critical analysis of the black middle class. The book met with mixed reviews and harsh criticism from the black middle and professional class. Yet Frazier stood solidly by his argument that the black middle class was marked by conspicuous consumption, wish fulfillment, and a world of make-believe. While Frazier published four additional books after 1948, Black Bourgeoisie remained by far his most controversial. Given his status in American sociology, there has been surprisingly little study of Frazier's work. In E. Franklin Frazier and Black Bourgeoisie, a group of distinguished scholars remedies that lack, focusing on his often-scorned Black Bourgeoisie. This in-depth look at Frazier's controversial publication is relevant to the growing concerns about racism, problems in our cities, the limitations of affirmative action, and the promise of self-help.

Published in 1944, What the Negro Wants was a direct and emphatic call for the end of segregation and racial discrimination that set the agenda for the civil rights movement to come.With essays by fourteen prominent African American intellectuals, including Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Mary McLeod Bethune, A. Philip Randolph, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Roy Wilkins, What the Negro Wants explores the policies and practices that could be employed to achieve equal rights and opportunities for Black Americans, rejecting calls to reform the old system of segregation and instead arguing for the construction of a new system of equality. Stirring intense controversy at the time of publication, the book serves as a unique window into the history of the civil rights movement and offers startling comparisons to today's continuing fight against racism and inequality.Originally gathered together by distinguished Howard University historian Rayford W. Logan in 1944, our 2001 edition of the book includes Rayford Logan's introduction to the 1969 reprint, a new introduction by Kenneth Janken, and an updated bibliography.