Black History Month
Welcome to our digital exhibit celebrating Black History Month. This page is a companion to the physical display in the HKS Library Commons, available through February 2024. Harvard affiliates can request books via HOLLIS, for pick-up at the library of your choice.
This display focuses on Black resistance, featuring texts that recount struggles for Black self-determination in the U.S. from rebellions of enslaved people to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to Black Lives Matter and beyond. Several of the books in this display are drawn from the African American Intellectual History Society's #Charlestonsyllabus.
On Black resistance, from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH):
"African Americans have resisted historic and ongoing oppression, in all forms, especially the racial terrorism of lynching, racial pogroms, and police killings since our arrival upon these shores. These efforts have been to advocate for a dignified self-determined life in a just democratic society in the United States and beyond the United States political jurisdiction. The 1950s and 1970s in the United States was defined by actions such as sit-ins, boycotts, walk outs, strikes by Black people and white allies in the fight for justice against discrimination in all sectors of society from employment to education to housing. Black people have had to consistently push the United States to live up to its ideals of freedom, liberty, and justice for all. Systematic oppression has sought to negate much of the dreams of our griots, like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and our freedom fighters, like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Septima Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer fought to realize. Black people have sought ways to nurture and protect Black lives, and for autonomy of their physical and intellectual bodies through armed resistance, voluntary emigration, nonviolence, education, literature, sports, media, and legislation/politics. Black led institutions and affiliations have lobbied, litigated, legislated, protested, and achieved success."
More on Black History Month from the HKS Office of Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging:
"Black History Month celebrates the contributions and achievements that Black Americans have made to U.S. history. It was first celebrated and observed as 'Negro History Week' in 1926 under the leadership of Carter G. Woodson, a Harvard-trained historian, and the organization which we he co-founded, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). The month of February was chosen to coincide with the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, two prominent Americans who positively shaped Black history. In 1976, 50 years after it was first observed, it was extended to a month-long celebration as President Ford decreed Black History Month a national observance.
Woodson set the foundation for today's national Black History Month where we collectively celebrate Black history, Black people, and Black joy. However, much work remains in educating Americans about the racial injustices that persist today in the United States of America. As a leading policy school, we must all continue to examine how racist policies of the past which are rooted in white supremacy have had lasting consequences and still continue today in different forms. Black Americans have endured racial oppression and marginalization due to institutional and systemic racism, and if we are to address these injustices, we must take a stand in our everyday lives to fight for racial justice and strive to be anti-racists. So, we encourage the HKS community to critically think about racial inequality, the injustices that persist in the United States, and the role we can play in addressing these challenges."
Even more on Black History Month:
- "Celebrating the founder of Black History Month" - The Harvard Gazette (February 1, 2022)
Harvard Library Resources
For related resources beyond the books in this display - including databases, journals, collections, and more - visit the following research guides.
- [FAS] Music: R&B to Neo Soul (the Library Guide)
- AFRAMER 97 Sophomore Tutorial: Understanding Race and Racism
- African American Education 1740-1974
- African American Library Resources at Harvard
- African American Women
- Black America and COVID-19
- Black Teacher Archive Guide
- Black Women Oral History Project Interviews, 1976–1981
- Environmental Justice and Space, Place, & Identity
- Hutchins Center Fellows Research Guide
- Newly Acquired Published Materials at the Schlesinger Library
Additional resources from the HKS Library:
- Racial Justice, Racial Equity, and Anti-Racism Reading List - curated in the wake of violence against Black Americans and in a moment of national reckoning in Summer 2020.
- Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging (DIB) Collection - books and other resources that represent and celebrate the multitude of identities and backgrounds that make up our vibrant HKS community.
- Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Research Guide - starting point for research on DEI-related topics like Race & Ethnicity, Gender & Sexuality, Different Abilities, and more.
- Sustainable Change Toward Racial Equity - Behind the Book video with Robert Livingston on The Conversation.
- Does Slavery Still Impact Modern U.S. Politics? - Behind the Book video with Maya Sen and Matthew Blackwell on Deep Roots.
- COLORS and Body of Forensics - HKS student art exhibits that explore race and belonging at the School.
Databases, digital collections, and journals:
- Umbra Search: African American History - search engine for digitized documents and artifacts of African American history from more than 1,000 libraries and archives.
- Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom - Houghton Library's digital collection of materials relating Black experiences in the Americas.
- Oxford African American studies Center (HarvardKey required) - extensive reference resource on the history of African Americans and the African diaspora, including essays, biographies, primary sources, maps, and images.
- The HistoryMakers (HarvardKey required) - oral history archive of interviews with prominent African Americans.
- Journal of African American History (HarvardKey required) - started in 1916, the JAAH is one of the oldest and most significant academic journals in the field of African American studies.
- Journal of Black Studies - significant source for research on Black experiences.
- ProQuest Black Studies (HarvardKey required) - "This database combines multi-format primary and secondary sources, like historical Black newspapers, archival documents, government materials, videos, scholarly journals, essays and more" to support research, teaching, and learning on Black Studies.
Resources around HKS & Harvard
- In Focus: Black History Month - curated resources from across Harvard including collections, podcasts, books, articles, and people.
- Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative - deeply researched report on Harvard's ties to slavery and subsequent efforts toward reckoning and repair.
- Black Panther printed ephemera - Houghton Library collection of fliers, newspapers, newsletters, posters, pamphlets and "other items on political change, race relations, health care, etc., largely from Black Panther Party chapters" in Philadelphia, New Haven, and New York.
- Institutional Antiracism and Accountability (IARA) Project - situated within the HKS Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, this project seeks to answer the question, "What policies and practices truly spark antiracist change in organizations?"
- Opposing Racism and Discrimination through Public Policy and Leadership - collection of recent HKS scholarship on race, justice, protest, and policing.
- Justice Matters Podcast - hosted by Carr Center Executive Director Sushma Raman.
- The United States pays reparations every day—just not to Black America - PolicyCast episode with Cornell William Brooks and Linda Bilmes.
- If the Electoral College is a racist relic, why has it endured? - PolicyCast episode with Alex Keyssar.
- Anti-Racism Policy Journal - HKS student journal exploring "the intersection of anti-racism and policy, the history of race and colonialism, and the visions for a just and equitable future."
- HKS Journal of African American Public Policy - HKS student journal that "seeks to educate and provide leadership to improve public policies affecting the African-American community." Explore archived issues of this journal.
- Anti-Racism Policy Caucus - HKS student organization that "examine[s] how policies, practices, and history contribute to structural racism globally."
- Black Student Union - HKS student organization that "strives to create an inclusive environment that advances relevant issues to Black communities."
- Women of Color: Working Beyond the Margins - HKS student organization that "provide[s] an effective support network for Women of Color at HKS and other programs, who are working or plan to work with our respective communities."
From the Political Buttons Collection
The Political Buttons at HKS Collection includes over 1,500 political buttons from the 20th and 21st centuries, representing U.S. political campaigns at every level, ballot initiatives, social issues and movements, and political demonstrations. Curated selections from our Political Buttons Collection are available as interactive digital exhibits, including Decades of Resistance: Political Movement Pins. Below are excerpts from the Civil Rights (1960s) and Racial Justice (1970s) sections of the exhibit.
"The Civil Rights Movement was a mass movement in the mid-20th that strove for freedom and equal citizenship for Black Americans. In the mid-1960s, the movement achieved its largest legislative gains following over a decade of grassroots organizing. Actions like the Greensboro sit-ins (1960), the Birmingham Children's Crusade (1963), and the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) played a significant role in the passage of three pieces of legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The movement led to the end of legal segregation, the enforcement of equal rights legislation, and an enormous rise in Black political power as African Americans were voted into political office at all levels. 'We Shall Overcome,' the slogan on our featured button, is an African American spiritual that became a popular anthem and refrain in the civil rights movement.
Beyond the Civil Rights Movement, the fight against systemic anti-Black racism continued throughout the 1970s and into the present-day. Prominent campaigns for racial justice in the 1970s include urban desegregation via compulsory busing; defense of affirmative action in college admission policy ; the pivotal Attica Prison Rebellion for better living conditions and political rights for prisoners; and the release of Black Panther Angela Davis from prison."
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Display Books: Black Resistance
Click on the circular "i" icons to view book descriptions. Click on the Harvard shield icons to access ebooks (Harvard Key required).
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by
"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country's very origin. The 1619 Project tells this new origin story, placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country. Orchestrated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by MacArthur 'genius' and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this collection of essays and historical vignettes includes some of the most outstanding journalists, thinkers, and scholars of American history and culture--including Linda Villarosa, Jamelle Bouie, Jeneen Interlandi, Matthew Desmond, Wesley Morris, and Bryan Stevenson. Together, their work shows how the tendrils of 1619--of slavery and resistance to slavery--reach into every part of our contemporary culture, from voting, housing and health care, to the way we sing and dance, the way we tell stories, and the way we worship. Interstitial works of flash fiction and poetry bring the history to life through the imaginative interpretations of some of our greatest writers. The 1619 Project ultimately sends a very strong message: We must have a clear vision of this history if we are to understand our present dilemmas. Only by reckoning with this difficult history and trying as hard as we can to understand its powerful influence on our present, can we prepare ourselves for a more just future."-- Provided by the publisher.
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Publication Date: 2021
An African American and Latinx History of the United States by
Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers' Day, when migrant laborers--Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth--united in resistance on the first "Day Without Immigrants." As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of "America First" rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas.
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Publication Date: 2018
An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States by
The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America. Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. He explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart. Whether to end African enslavement and Indigenous removal or eradicate capitalism and colonialism, Mays show how the fervor of Black and Indigenous peoples calls for justice have consistently sought to uproot white supremacy. Mays uses a wide-array of historical activists and pop culture icons, “sacred” texts, and foundational texts like the Declaration of Independence and Democracy in America. He covers the civil rights movement and freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and explores current debates around the use of Native American imagery and the cultural appropriation of Black culture. Mays compels us to rethink both our history as well as contemporary debates and to imagine the powerful possibilities of Afro-Indigenous solidarity. Includes an 8-page photo insert featuring Kwame Ture with Dennis Banks and Russell Means at the Wounded Knee Trials; Angela Davis walking with Oren Lyons after he leaves Wounded Knee, SD; former South African president Nelson Mandela with Clyde Bellecourt; and more. -- Provided by publisher.
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Publication Date: 2021
Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle by
In many histories of Boston, African Americans have remained almost invisible. Partly as a result, when the 1972 crisis over school desegregation and busing erupted, many observers professed shock at the overt racism on display in the "cradle of liberty." Yet the city has long been divided over matters of race, and it was also home to a far older Black organizing tradition than many realize. A community of Black activists had fought segregated education since the origins of public schooling and racial inequality since the end of northern slavery. Before Busing tells the story of the men and women who struggled and demonstrated to make school desegregation a reality in Boston. It reveals the legal efforts and battles over tactics that played out locally and influenced the national Black freedom struggle. And the book gives credit to the Black organizers, parents, and children who fought long and hard battles for justice that have been left out of the standard narratives of the civil rights movement. What emerges is a clear picture of the long and hard-fought campaigns to break the back of Jim Crow education in the North and make Boston into a better, more democratic city-a fight that continues to this day.
Publication Date: 2022
Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by
In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the U.S., the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism. In the face of intense repression, the Party flourished, becoming the center of a revolutionary movement with offices in 68 U.S. cities and powerful allies around the world. Black against Empire is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. The authors analyze key political questions, such as why so many young black people across the country risked their lives for the revolution, why the Party grew most rapidly during the height of repression, and why allies abandoned the Party at its peak of influence. Bold, engrossing, and richly detailed, this book cuts through the mythology and obfuscation, revealing the political dynamics that drove the explosive growth of this revolutionary movement, and its disastrous unraveling. Informed by twelve years of meticulous archival research, as well as familiarity with most of the former Party leadership and many rank-and-file members, this book is the definitive history of one of the greatest challenges ever posed to American state power.
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Publication Date: 2013
Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy by
Despite black gains in modern America, the end of racism is not yet in sight. Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century, a long civil rights era, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognized as central to the history of black struggle. It is through the words and thought of key black intellectuals, like Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, C. L. R. James, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and others, as well as movement activists like Malcolm X and Black Panthers, that vital new ideas emerged and circulated. Their most important achievement was to create and sustain a vibrant, black public sphere broadly critical of U.S. social, political, and civic inequality. Finding racism hidden within the universalizing tones of reform-minded liberalism at home and global democratic imperatives abroad, race radicals alienated many who saw them as dangerous and separatist. Few wanted to hear their message then, or even now, and yet, as Singh argues, their passionate skepticism about the limits of U.S. democracy remains as indispensable to a meaningful reconstruction of racial equality and universal political ideals today as it ever was.
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Publication Date: 2004
The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 by
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is an extraordinary window into the black freedom struggle in the United States, offering a treasure trove of fresh archival information about the Black Power movement from 1967 to 1975 and vivid portraits of some of its most dynamic participants, including Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael. "This powerful book linked to the poignant film is a grand contribution to our understanding of contemporary America." --Cornel West
Publication Date: 2014
A Black Women's History of the United States by
"A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are--and have always been--instrumental in shaping our country. In centering Black women's stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women's unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today. A Black Women's History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women's lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women's history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation."--Publisher's website.
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Publication Date: 2020
Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence by
On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist entered Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and sat with some of its parishioners during a Wednesday night Bible study session. An hour later, he began expressing his hatred for African Americans, and soon after, he shot nine church members dead, the church's pastor and South Carolina state senator, Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, among them. The ensuing manhunt for the shooter and investigation of his motives revealed his beliefs in white supremacy and reopened debates about racial conflict, southern identity,systemic racism, civil rights, and the African American church as an institution. In the aftermath of the massacre, Professors Chad Williams, Kidada Williams, and Keisha N. Blain sought a way to put the murder-and the subsequent debates about it in the media-in the context of America's tumultuous history of race relations and racial violence on a global scale. They created the Charleston Syllabus on June 19, starting it as a hashtag on Twitter linking to scholarly works on the myriad of issues related to the murder. The syllabus's popularity exploded and is already being used as a key resource in discussions of the event. Charleston Syllabus is a reader-a collection of new essays and columns published in the wake of the massacre, along with selected excerpts from key existing scholarly books and general-interest articles. The collection draws from a variety of disciplines-history, sociology, urban studies, law, critical race theory-and includes a selected and annotated bibliography for further reading, drawing from such texts as the Confederate constitution, South Carolina's secession declaration, songs, poetry, slave narratives, and literacy texts. As timely as it is necessary, the book will be a valuable resource for understanding the roots of American systemic racism, white privilege, the uses and abuses of the Confederate flag and its ideals, the black church as a foundation for civil rights activity and state violence against such activity, and critical whiteness studies.
Publication Date: 2016
The Counter-Revolution Of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by
The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt. For European colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. It was a real and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition throughout the colonies--a possibility the founding fathers feared would bring slave rebellions to their shores. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.
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Publication Date: 2014
The Fire Next Time by
At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.
Publication Date: 1992
For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer by
The youngest of twenty children of sharecroppers in rural Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer witnessed throughout her childhood the white cruelty, political exclusion, and relentless economic exploitation that defined black existence in the Delta. In this intimate biography, Chana Kai Lee documents Hamer's lifelong crusade to empower the poor through collective action, her rise to national prominence as a civil rights activist, and the personal costs of her ongoing struggle to win a political voice and economic self-sufficiency for blacks in the segregated South. Lee traces Hamer's early work as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in rural Mississippi, documenting the partial blindness she suffered after being arrested and beaten by local officials for leading a group of blacks to register for the vote. Hamer's dramatic appearance at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, where she led a group from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in a bid to unseat the all-white Mississippi delegation, brought both Hamer and the virtual powerlessness of black Mississippians to the nation's attention; but the convention also marked her first debilitating encounter with the middle class of the national civil rights movement. Despite her national visibility, Hamer remained a militant grassroots leader who never stopped working for the betterment of her own community in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Among many local initiatives, she established the Freedom Farm Corporation, a revolutionary cooperative venture aimed at facilitating economic self-sufficiency for the rural poor.
Publication Date: 1999
Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 by
Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume "community" history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith--instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness. This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.
Publication Date: 2021
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by
This exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora throughout the twentieth century begins with the premise that the catalyst for political engagement has rarely been misery, poverty, or oppression. People are drawn to social movement because of hope: their dreams of a new world radically different from the one they inherited. Our imagination may be the most revolutionary tool available to us, and yet we have failed to understand its political importance and recognize it as a powerful social force. From Paul Robeson to Aime Cesaire to Jayne Cortez, Kelley unearths freedom dreams in African and Third World liberation movements, in the hope that Communism offered, in the imaginative mindscapes of Surrealism, in the transformative potential of radical feminism, and in the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. With Freedom Dreams, Kelley affirms his place as "a major new voice on the intellectual left" (Frances Fox Piven) and shows us that any serious movement toward freedom must begin in the mind.
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Publication Date: 2002
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by
The eruption of mass protests in the wake of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City have challenged the impunity with which officers of the law carry out violence against Black people and punctured the illusion of a postracial America. The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new generation of activists. In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.
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Publication Date: 2016
From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century by
Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. Perhaps no moment was more opportune than the early days of Reconstruction, when the U.S. government temporarily implemented a major redistribution of land from former slaveholders to the newly emancipated enslaved. But neither Reconstruction nor the New Deal nor the civil rights struggle led to an economically just and fair nation. Today, systematic inequality persists in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. Economic data indicates that for every dollar the average white household holds in wealth the average black household possesses a mere ten cents. In From Here to Equality, William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen confront these injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. After opening the book with a stark assessment of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on black economic well-being, Darity and Mullen look to both the past and the present to measure the inequalities borne of slavery. Using innovative methods that link monetary values to historical wrongs, they next assess the literal and figurative costs of justice denied in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War. Finally, Darity and Mullen offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program, including a substantial payment to each documented U.S. black descendant of slavery. Taken individually, any one of the three eras of injustice outlined by Darity and Mullen--slavery, Jim Crow, and modern-day discrimination--makes a powerful case for black reparations. Taken collectively, they are impossible to ignore.
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Publication Date: 2020
I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by
This momentous work offers a groundbreaking history of the early civil rights movement in the South with new material that situates the book in the context of subsequent movement literature.
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Publication Date: 2007
The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson by
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has always been vitally important in southern and black history. With the publication of this book, the boycott becomes a milestone in the history of American women as well.
Publication Date: 1987
A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration by
This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people--an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice. Emphasizing the importance of kinship, labor, and networks of communication, A Nation under Our Feet explores the political relations and sensibilities that developed under slavery and shows how they set the stage for grassroots mobilization. Hahn introduces us to local leaders, and shows how political communities were built, defended, and rebuilt. He also identifies the quest for self-governance as an essential goal of black politics across the rural South, from contests for local power during Reconstruction, to emigrationism, biracial electoral alliances, social separatism, and, eventually, migration. Hahn suggests that Garveyism and other popular forms of black nationalism absorbed and elaborated these earlier struggles, thus linking the first generation of migrants to the urban North with those who remained in the South. He offers a new framework--looking out from slavery--to understand twentieth-century forms of black political consciousness as well as emerging battles for civil rights. It is a powerful story, told here for the first time, and one that presents both an inspiring and a troubling perspective on American democracy.
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Publication Date: 2005
The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction by
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.
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Publication Date: 2011
New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 by
The most comprehensive account available of the rise and fall of the Black Power Movement and of its dramatic transformation of both African-American and larger American culture. With a gift for storytelling and an ear for street talk, William Van Deburg chronicles a decade of deep change, from the armed struggles of the Black Panther party to the cultural nationalism of artists and writers creating a new aesthetic. Van Deburg contends that although its tactical gains were sometimes short-lived, the Black Power movement did succeed in making a revolution--one in culture and consciousness--that has changed the context of race in America.
Publication Date: 1992
The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change by
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Mrs. Rosa Parks, weary after a long day at work, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man...and ignited the explosion that was the civil rights movement in America. In this powerful saga, Morris tells the complete story behind the ten years that transformed America, tracing the essential role of the black community organizations that was the real power behind the civil rights movement. Drawing on interviews with more than fifty key leaders, original documents, and other moving firsthand material, he brings to life the people behind the scenes who led the fight to end segregation, providing a critical new understanding of the dynamics of social change.
Publication Date: 1986
The Oxford Handbook of African American Citizenship, 1865-Present by
When newly-liberated African American slaves attempted to enter the marketplace and exercise their rights as citizens of the United States in 1865, few, if any, Americans expected that, a century and a half later, the class divide between black and white Americans would be as wide as it is today. The United States has faced several potential key turning points in the status of African Americans over the course of its history, yet at each of these points the prevailing understanding of African Americans and their place in the economic and political fabric of the country was at best contested and resolved on the side of second-class citizenship. The Oxford Handbook of African American Citizenship, 1865-Present seeks to answer the question of what the United States would look like today if, at the end of the Civil War, freed slaves had been granted full political, social and economic rights. It does so by tracing the historical evolution of African American experiences, from the dawn of Reconstruction onward, through the perspectives of sociology, political science, law, economics, education and psychology. As a whole, the book is the first systematic study of the gap between promise and performance of African Americans since 1865. Over the course of thirty-four chapters, written by some of the most eminent scholars of African American studies and across every major social discipline, this handbook presents a full and powerful portrait of the particular hurdles faced by African Americans and the distinctive contributions African Americans have made to the development of U.S. institutions and culture. As such, it tracks where African Americans have been in order to better illuminate the path ahead.
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Publication Date: 2012
Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement by
The rarely heard stories of the brave women at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement Women were at the forefront of the civil rights struggle, but their indvidiual stories were rarely heard. Only recently have historians begun to recognize the central role women played in the battle for racial equality. In Sisters in the Struggle, we hear about the unsung heroes of the civil rights movements such as Ella Baker, who helped found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who took on segregation in the Democratic party (and won), and Septima Clark, who created a network of "Citizenship Schools" to teach poor Black men and women to read and write and help them to register to vote. We learn of Black women's activism in the Black Panther Party where they fought the police, as well as the entrenched male leadership, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where the behind-the-scenes work of women kept the organization afloat when it was under siege. It also includes first-person testimonials from the women who made headlines with their courageous resistance to segregation--Rosa Parks, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Dorothy Height. This collection represents the coming of age of African-American women's history and presents new stories that point the way to future study.
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Publication Date: 2001
The Souls of Black Folk by
In honor of the 150th anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois's birth in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the University of Massachusetts Library has prepared a new edition of Du Bois's classic, The Souls of Black Folk. Originally published in 1903, Souls introduced a number of now-canonical terms into the American conversation about race, among them double-consciousness, and it sounded the ominous warning that ""the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line."" In a new introduction, Shawn Leigh Alexander outlines the historical context of this critical work and provides rare documents from the special collections archive at the Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Unlike Du Bois's more scholarly work, Souls blends narrative and autobiographical essays, and it continues to reach a wide domestic and international readership. This moving homage to black life and culture and its sharp economic and historical critique are more important than ever, resonating with today's unequivocal demand that Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century.
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Publication Date: 2018
There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America by
This account traces the history of black Americans from their origins in Africa to freedom at the end of the Civil War.
Publication Date: 1981
Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 by
Too Heavy a Load celebrates this century's rich history of black women defending themselves, from Ida B. Wells to Anita Hill. Although most prominently a history of the century-long struggle against racism and male chauvinism, Deborah Gray White also movingly illuminates black women's painful struggle to hold their racial and gender identities intact while feeling the inexorable pull of the agendas of white women and black men. Finally, it tells the larger and lamentable story of how Americans began this century measuring racial progress by the status of black women but gradually came to focus on the status of black men-the masculinization of America's racial consciousness. Writing with the same magisterial eye for historical detail as in her best-selling Ar'n't I a Woman, Deborah Gray White has given us a moving and definitive history of struggle and freedom.
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Publication Date: 1998
Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. by
In Waking from the Dream David L. Chappell--whose book A Stone of Hope the Atlantic Monthly called "one of the three or four most important books on the civil rights movement"-- provides a sweeping history of the fight to keep the civil rights movement alive following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination. Chappell reveals that, far from coming to an abrupt end with King's death, the civil rights movement continued to work to realize King's vision of an equal society. Entering a new phase where historic victories were no longer within reach, the movement's veterans struggled to rally around common goals; and despite moments where the movement seemed to be on the verge of dissolution, it kept building coalitions, lobbying for legislation, and mobilizing activists. Chappell chronicles five key events of the movement's post-King era: the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968; the debates over unity and leadership at the National Black Political Conventions; the campaign for full-employment legislation; the establishment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day; and Jesse Jackson's quixotic presidential campaigns. With Waking from the Dream, Chappell provides a revealing look into a seldom-studied era of civil rights history, examines King's place in American memory, and explains how a movement labored to overcome the loss of its leader.
Publication Date: 2016
Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age by
The era of the American Revolution was one of violent and unpredictable social, economic, and political change, and the dislocations of the period were most severely felt in the South. Sylvia Frey contends that the military struggle there involved a triangle--two sets of white belligerents and approximately 400,000 slaves. She reveals the dialectical relationships between slave resistance and Britain's Southern Strategy and between slave resistance and the white independence movement among Southerners, and shows how how these relationships transformed religion, law, and the economy during the postwar years.
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Publication Date: 1991
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by
A poetic and powerful memoir about what it means to be a Black woman in America--and the co-founding of a movement that demands justice for all in the land of the free. Raised by a single mother in an impoverished neighborhood in Los Angeles, Patrisse Khan-Cullors experienced firsthand the prejudice and persecution Black Americans endure at the hands of law enforcement. For Patrisse, the most vulnerable people in the country are Black people. Deliberately and ruthlessly targeted by a criminal justice system serving a white privilege agenda, Black people are subjected to unjustifiable racial profiling and police brutality. In 2013, when Trayvon Martin's killer went free, Patrisse's outrage led her to co-found Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. Condemned as terrorists and as a threat to America, these loving women founded a hashtag that birthed the movement to demand accountability from the authorities who continually turn a blind eye to the injustices inflicted upon people of Black and Brown skin. Championing human rights in the face of violent racism, Patrisse is a survivor. She transformed her personal pain into political power, giving voice to a people suffering inequality and a movement fueled by her strength and love to tell the country--and the world--that Black Lives Matter. When They Call You a Terroristis Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele's reflection on humanity. It is an empowering account of survival, strength and resilience and a call to action to change the culture that declares innocent Black life expendable.
Publication Date: 2018
Women, Race, & Class by
A powerful study of the women’s liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. From the widely revered and legendary political activist and scholar Angela Davis.--Publisher website.
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Publication Date: 2011
