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In the famous photograph of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, one man kneels beside him, trying to staunch the blood: an undercover Memphis police officer embedded with the Invaders, a militant Black group in talks with King. This spy, the kneeling man, was Leta McCollough Seletzky’s father. Marrell ‘Mac’ McCollough was a Black man working secretly with the white power structure. To understand this, Leta began looking into her father’s life—his motivations, his career with the police and the CIA, and the truth behind accusations of his involvement in King’s murder. What would Leta uncover, and did she want to know? How might Mac’s story change her own feelings about her place in Trump’s America? The Kneeling Man is a compelling personal and political tale of alienation and ambivalence; struggle, self-definition and compromised choices. Set vividly in the sharecropper South, on the streets of Memphis and in the halls of power, the twists and turns of this one man’s life tell the story of twentieth-century Black America.
Mason Temple, the headquarters of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), looms large in the history of the Civil Rights Movement because of its connection to the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who delivered his last sermon there during the Sanitation Workers Strike on April 3, 1968. This book highlights the unsung contributions local activists from the COGIC made to the historic strike and to the broader civil rights struggle in Memphis. It troubles the rigid otherworldly versus this-worldly binary that has inaccurately framed black religious activism and bolstered the view that saints’ theology influenced their detachment from the civil rights struggle. It explores the Memphis Mov...
A comprehensive history of school choice in the US, from its birth in the 1950s as the most effective weapon to oppose integration to its lasting impact in reshaping the public education system today. Most Americans today see school choice as their inalienable right. In The Choice We Face, scholar Jon Hale reveals what most fail to see: school choice is grounded in a complex history of race, exclusion, and inequality. Through evaluating historic and contemporary education policies, Hale demonstrates how reframing the way we see school choice represents an opportunity to evolve from complicity to action. The idea of school choice, which emerged in the 1950s during the civil rights movement, w...
In a bold departure from previous scholarship, Le’Trice D. Donaldson locates the often overlooked era between the Civil War and the end of World War I as the beginning of black soldiers’ involvement in the long struggle for civil rights. Donaldson traces the evolution of these soldiers as they used their military service to challenge white notions of an African American second-class citizenry and forged a new identity as freedom fighters willing to demand the rights of full citizenship and manhood. Through extensive research, Donaldson not only illuminates this evolution but also interrogates the association between masculinity and citizenship and the ways in which performing manhood thr...
Rabaka explores funk as a distinct multiform of music, aesthetics, politics, social vision, and cultural rebellion that has been remixed and continues to influence contemporary Black popular music and Black popular culture, especially rap music and the Hip Hop Movement. The Funk Movement was a sub-movement within the larger Black Power Movement and its artistic arm, the Black Arts Movement. Moreover, the Funk Movement was also a sub-movement within the Black Women’s Liberation Movement between the late 1960s and late 1970s, where women’s funk, especially Chaka Khan and Betty Davis’s funk, was understood to be a form of “Black musical feminism” that was as integral to the movement a...
Southern Conference on African American Studies, Inc., C. Calvin Smith Book Award This volume highlights the little-known story of Robert R. Church Jr., the most prominent black Republican of the 1920s and 1930s. Tracing Church’s lifelong crusade to make race an important part of the national political conversation, Darius Young reveals how Church was critical to the formative years of the civil rights struggle. A member of the black elite in Memphis, Tennessee, Church was a banker, political mobilizer, and civil rights advocate who worked to create opportunities for the black community despite the notorious Democrat E. H. “Boss” Crump’s hold over Memphis politics. Spurred by...
Southern Conference on African American Studies Inc. C. Calvin Smith Book Award Between Washington and Du Bois describes the life and work of James Edward Shepard, the founder and president of the first state-supported black liberal arts college in the South. Arguing that black college presidents of the early twentieth century were not only academic pioneers but also race leaders, Reginald Ellis shows how Shepard played a vital role in the creation of a black professional class during the Jim Crow era.
During the civil rights era, Memphis gained a reputation for having one of the South’s strongest NAACP branches. But that organization, led by the city’s black elite, was hardly the only driving force in the local struggle against racial injustice. In the late sixties, Black Power proponents advocating economic, political, and cultural self-determination effectively mobilized Memphis’s African American youth, using an array of moderate and radical approaches to protest and change conditions on their campuses and in the community. While Black Power activism on the coasts and in the Midwest has attracted considerable scholarly attention, much less has been written about the movement’s ...
Born enslaved in 1861, by 1892 Margaret Murray Washington of Macon, Mississippi, married the twice-widowed race leader Booker T. Washington and joined the ranks of the rising black middle class. While one cannot discount the accomplishments of her storied husband, Washington’s own successes warrant further exploration. In this first biography of Margaret Murray Washington, author Sheena Harris discusses Washington’s importance as an active clubwoman, educational reformer, and integral partner to her husband and his success with the Tuskegee Institute. Individual black, female leadership continues to be a blind spot in much scholarly historical literature. Washington was an important educ...
The story of activist youth in America is usually framed around the Vietnam War, the counterculture, and college campuses, focusing primarily on college students in the 1960s and 1970s. But a remarkably effective tradition of Black high school student activism in the civil rights era has gone understudied. In 1951, students at R. R. Moton High School in rural Virginia led a student walkout and contacted the law firm of Hill, Martin, and Robinson in Richmond, Virginia, to file one of the five pivotal court cases that comprised the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In 1960, twenty-four Burke High School students in Charleston, South Carolina, organized the first direct action, nonviolent p...