Product Description: Forging a Laboring Race foregrounds the working black body as both a category of analysis and lived experience. “How does it feel to be a problem?” asked W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk. For many thinkers across the color line, the “Negro problem” was inextricably linked to the concurrent “labor problem,” occasioning debates regarding blacks’ role in the nation’s industrial past, present and future...read more

Product Description: For a brief time following the end of the U.S. Civil War, American political leaders had an opportunity—slim, to be sure, but not beyond the realm of possibility—to remake society so that black Americans and other persons of color could enjoy equal opportunity in civil and political life...read more

The Great Migration―the mass exodus of blacks from the rural South to the urban North and West in the twentieth century―shaped American culture and life in ways still evident today. In Fly Away, Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott trace the ideas that inspired African Americans to abandon the South for freedom and opportunity elsewhere.Black southerners fled the Low Country of South Carolina, the mines and mills of Birmingham, Alabama, the farms of the Mississippi Delta, and the urban wards of Houston, Texas, for new opportunities in New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Los Angeles. They took with them the South’s rich traditions of religion, language, music, and art, recreating and preserving their southern identity in the churches, newspapers, jazz clubs, and neighborhoods of America’s largest cities. Rutkoff and Scott’s sweeping study explores the development and adaptation of African American culture, from its West African roots to its profound and lasting impact on mainstream America.Broad in scope and original in its interpretation, Fly Away illuminates the origins, development, and transformation of national culture during an important chapter in twentieth-century American history.

Book by Vickery, William R.

Product Description: “A fresh and engaging study that illuminates the important, related, yet neglected histories of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Council on African Affairs. Especially noteworthy is the perceptive treatment of the linkages between these related organizations’ domestic and international politics...read more

Product Description: A concise, engaging, and provocative history of African Americans since World War II, Peace Be Still is also nothing less than an alternate history of the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Organizing this history around culture, politics, and resistance, Matthew C...read more

Product Description: Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans’ bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress...read more

Product Description: The Materiality of Freedom uses the lens of archaeology to provide original perspectives on the painful Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras by studying the material culture inherent in the struggles for racial equality in America and the Caribbean...read more

Product Description: The New Black History anthology presents cutting-edge scholarship on key issues that define African American politics, life, and culture, especially during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. The volume includes articles by both established scholars and a rising generation of young scholars...read more

Product Description: In this exciting revisionist history, Stephen Tuck traces the black freedom struggle in all its diversity, from the first years of freedom during the Civil War to President Obama’s inauguration. As it moves from popular culture to high politics, from the Deep South to New England, the West Coast, and abroad, Tuck weaves gripping stories of ordinary black people—as well as celebrated figures—into the sweep of racial protest and social change...read more

Product Description: The Great Depression hit Americans hard, but none harder than African Americans and the working poor. To Ask for an Equal Chance explores black experiences during this period and the intertwined challenges posed by race and class...read more

Argues that the construction of race in southern history was not based merely on sight, but as mixed-race generations perpetuated, white southerners relied on touch, smell, sound, and taste to identify who was 'white.'

Product Description: Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council gives a comprehensive account of the National Afro-American Council, the first truly nationwide U.S. civil rights organization, which existed from 1898 to 1908...read more

Product Description: This is a participant-observer's account of African American life in a small Southern town just prior to the Civil Rights era. It also features a preface on the origins and impact of the 'Kent Trilogy' and an introduction detailing Lewis's field research.

Product Description: Pauline E. Hopkins (1859–1930) came to prominence in the early years of the twentieth century as an outspoken writer, editor, and critic. Frequently recognized for her first novel, Contending Forces, she is currently one of the most widely read and studied African American novelists from that period...read more

“Our problem is not racial, but human and economic. . . . We hold the Negro racially responsible for conditions common to all races on his economic plane.” The writings of reformer Lily Hardy Hammond (1859-1925) are filled with such forthright criticisms of southern white attitudes toward African Americans―enough so that her stature as a southern progressive thinker would seem assured. Yet Hammond, who once stood at the intellectual center of the southern women’s social gospel movement and was in her time the South’s most prolific female writer on the “race question,” has been marginalized.This volume reprints In Black and White, the most important of Hammond’s ten books, along with a sampling of the dozens of articles she published. Elna C. Green’s biographical introduction tells of Hammond’s marriage to a prominent Methodist minister and educator. It also traces Hammond’s career within the context of prevailing gender and racial attitudes in the Jim Crow South. Hammond, who had roots in Methodist home mission work, was also active in such secular and ecumenical organizations as the Southern Sociological Congress, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Hammond worked alongside blacks to promote education, improve living conditions, and stop lynching. As a suffragist and temperance advocate, she urged the leaders of those largely white women’s movements to partner with African Americans.Historians of religion, social science, and race relations will welcome the reintroduction of this remarkable but virtually forgotten figure.

Product Description: The victorious end to the first World War offered hope to African Americans who had fought for freedom abroad and hoped to find it at home. In this new work, historian Mark Schneider analyzes the dynamic 1920s that saw the enormous migration of African Americans to Northern urban centers and the formation of important African American religious, social and economic institutions...read more