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The black separatist movement led by Marcus Garvey has long been viewed as a phenomenon of African American organization in the urban North. But as Mary Rolinson demonstrates, the largest number of Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) divisions and Garvey's most devoted and loyal followers were found in the southern Black Belt. Tracing the path of organizers from northern cities to Virginia, and then from the Upper to the Deep South, Rolinson remaps the movement to include this vital but overlooked region. Rolinson shows how Garvey's southern constituency sprang from cities, countryside churches, and sharecropper cabins. Southern Garveyites adopted pertinent elements of the movemen...
Beyond Blackface
The Populist Movement was the largest mass movement for political and economic change in the history of the American South until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Populist Movement in this book is defined as the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party, as well as the Agricultural Wheel and Knights of Labor in the 1880s and 1890s. The Populists threatened the political hegemony of the white racist southern Democratic Party during populism's high point in the mid-1890s; and the populists threw the New South into a state of turmoil Populism in the South Revisited: New Interpretations and New Departures brings together nine of the best new works on the populist movement in t...
The question of economic justice for Black Americans continues to be the subject of contentious political debate. Here, Michael K. Brown examines the meaning of racial equality during three transformative periods when economic opportunity appeared to be a real possibility: Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Political leaders who believed slavery and Jim Crow degraded Black people enacted policies to rehabilitate formerly subjugated individuals. Black Americans, on the other hand, repudiated the idea that they were damaged people in need of repair. Repeatedly, Black people’s vision of economic justice was based on antiprivilege egalitarianism, the idea that a just restitution for their oppression required abolishing the political and legal privileges whites had acquired. Black opposition reveals what was at stake at each historical moment and what might constitute economic justice in the twenty-first century.
In the 1920s, Americans talked of their times as “modern,” which is to say, fundamentally different, in pace and texture, from what went before—a new era. With the end of World War I, an array of dizzying inventions and trends pushed American society from the Victorian era into modernity. The New Era provides a history of American thought and culture in the 1920s through the eyes of American intellectuals determined to move beyond an older role as gatekeepers of cultural respectability and become tribunes of openness, experimentation, and tolerance instead. Recognizing the gap between themselves and the mainstream public, younger critics alternated between expressions of disgust at American conformity and optimistic pronouncements of cultural reconstruction. The book tracks the emergence of a new generation of intellectuals who made culture the essential terrain of social and political action and who framed a new set of arguments and debates—over women’s roles, sex, mass culture, the national character, ethnic identity, race, democracy, religion, and values—that would define American public life for fifty years.
With information on over 500 organizations, their founders and membership, this unique encyclopedia is an invaluable resource on the history of African-American activism. Entries on both historical and contemporary organizations include: * African Aid Society * African-Americans forHumanism * Black Academy of Arts and Letters * BlackWomen's Liberation Committee * Minority Women in Science* National Association of Black Geologists andGeophysicists * National Dental Association * NationalMedical Association * Negro Railway Labor ExecutivesCommittee * Pennsylvania Freedmen's Relief Association *Women's Missionary Society, African Methodist EpiscopalChurch * and many more.
Historians of the American South have come to consider the mechanization and consolidation of cotton farming—the “Southern enclosure movement”—to be a watershed event in the region’s history. In the decades after World War II, this transition pushed innumerable sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and smallholders off the land, redistributing territory and resources upward to a handful of large, mainly white operators. By disproportionately displacing Black farmers, enclosure also slowed the progress of the civil rights movement and limited its impact. John Cable’s Southern Enclosure is among the first studies to explore that process through the interpretive lens of settler colonialism...
For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and “American Negroes”—a group that included African Americans and black West Indians—established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements. Though African Americans suffered under Jim Crow racial discrimination, oppressed Africans saw African Americans as free people who had risen from slavery to success and were role models and potential liberators. Many African Americans, regarded initially by the South African government as “honorary whites” exempt from segregation, also saw their activities in Sou...
In the decades between the Berlin Conference that partitioned Africa and the opening of the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History, Americans in several fields and from many backgrounds argued that Africa had something to teach them. Jeannette Eileen Jones traces the history of the idea of Africa with an eye to recovering the emergence of a belief in “Brightest Africa”—a tradition that runs through American cultural and intellectual history with equal force to its “Dark Continent” counterpart. Jones skillfully weaves disparate strands of turn-of-the-century society and culture to expose a vivid trend of cultural engagement that involved both critique and activism. F...