African Politics

The grandson of a slave, Dr. Ossian Sweet moved his family to an all-white Detroit neighborhood in 1925. When his neighbors attempted to drive him out, Sweet defended himself, resulting in the death of a white man and a murder trial for Sweet. There followed one of the most important (and shockingly unknown) cases in Civil Rights history. Also caught up in the intense courtroom drama were legal giant Clarence Darrow and the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Al apuntar a hombres negros por medio de la Guerra contra las Drogas y diezmando las comunidades de gente de color, el sistema de justicia criminal de Estados Unidos funciona como un sistema contemporaneo de control racial - al relegar a millones de personas a un estatus de segunda clase - incluso mientras este se adhiere al principio de ceguera para los colores.

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.

“Chilling and convincing, Antidemocratic is a must-read.” —Heather Cox Richardson, author of Democracy Awakening “David Daley has been at the absolute forefront of educating us about the theft of our elections by radical Republicans determined to subvert everyone else’s power to choose...

The United States is dogged by racism and racial disparities in income, wealth, health, education, and criminal justice. Philosophers disagree on what kind of politics is needed to address this problem. Do we pursue race-specific remedies to undo racism or do we assume the permanence of racism and opt for non-race-specific remedies in pursuit of a more egalitarian society? Paradoxically, the way to make racial progress in racist America is to downplay race.

The New Negro Movement of the 1920s marked a shift in the pursuit of African American equality. African American soldiers were returning home from World War I, and after fighting for freedoms abroad, they were inspired to continue that fight on their own soil. The “old” ways had focused on passively accepting social policies, but the “new” ways would harness their collective voices in defining their own identity. The intellectual and artistic movement of the Harlem Renaissance stirred a tremendous wave of social change.

America's great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire. From the murders of black youth by the police to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act to the disaster visited upon poor and middle-class black families by the Great Recession, it is clear that black America faces an emergency - at the very moment the election of the first black president has prompted many to believe we've solved America's race problem.

William Monroe Trotter (1872-1934), although still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized Black working-class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post-Reconstruction America. For more than 30 years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation.

Publicado originalmente em 1983, Tornar-se negro foi pioneiro ao conectar a psicanálise com a questão racial. De forma inovadora e potente, a psiquiatra e psicanalista Neusa Santos Souza dedicou um estudo acadêmico à vida emocional de negros e negras, justificado pela absoluta ausência de um discurso nesse nível elaborado pelo negro acerca de si mesmo. Partindo da própria experiência de ser negra numa sociedade de hegemonia branca, Neusa analisa uma série de depoimentos dados a ela, assinalando neles as consequências brutais do racismo.

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Millicent E. Brown's family home at 270 Ashley Avenue in Charleston, South Carolina, was a center of civil rights activity. There Brown gained intimate knowledge of the struggle for racial justice, and those experiences set her on a life course dedicated to the civil rights struggle. Best known as the named plaintiff in the federal court case that, in 1963, forced the initial desegregation of public schools in South Carolina, her experiences as an activist range across years and well beyond her native state. Another Sojourner Looking for Truth is Brown's insightful reflection.

Decades before the impeachment of an American president for a similar offense, Angelo Herndon was charged under Georgia law with "attempting to incite insurrection"—a crime punishable by death. In 1932, the eighteen-year-old Black Communist Party organizer was arrested and had his room illegally searched and his radical literature seized. Charged under an old slave insurrection statute, Herndon was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to eighteen to twenty years on a chain gang.

Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Our History Has Always Been Contraband was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States.

Too often, all oppressed people in America are lumped together under the moniker people of color, as if each group's experience under the yoke of systemic racism has the same repercussions. But the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) hold a unique claim: ADOS, after all, is the only group whose ancestors were forcibly brought to America, enslaved, built much of the wealth of the country, yet continue to be excluded from the same social, political, and economic rights of other Americans. To that end, Rev. Dr. Kevin W. Cosby lays out the first theology of the ADOS movement.

In this four-volume series, Hijacked!: How Dr. King's Dream Became a Nightmare, Clarence Washington, Sr. dissects Dr. Martin Luther King's dream and explores how our failure to adhere to its principles has allowed the dream to be hijacked and turned to a nightmare - and it’s time to wake up. In the first volume, the author clarifies the principles for social justice and freedom for all Americans that Dr. King delineated in his monumental speech. God gave Dr. Martin Luther King a road map for America to follow in his "I Have a Dream" speech and other orations and writings.

Making headlines when it was launched in 2015, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s undergraduate course “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism” has inspired students from all walks of life. In Beyoncé in Formation, Tinsley now takes her rich observations beyond the classroom, using the blockbuster album and video Lemonade as a soundtrack for vital new-millennium narratives.

In this classic account, historian Philip Foner traces the radical history of black workers’ contribution to the American labor movement.

Black Revolutionaries is an accessible yet rigorously argued history of the Black Panther Party (BPP), one of the emblematic organizations of the 1960s. Joe Street highlights the complexity of the BPP's history through three key themes: the BPP's intellectual history, its political and social activism, and the persecution its members endured. Together, these themes confirm the BPP's importance in understanding Black America's response to white oppression in the 1960s and 1970s.

For too long, the narratives surrounding Black communities in America have been dominated by deficit-based thinking, focusing on perceived weaknesses rather than the inherent strengths and resilience that have been fostered through generations of hardship. This book seeks to challenge that paradigm, offering a critical but constructive analysis of the socio-political and economic realities confronting Black Americans.

On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York, a young Black man named Robert Lewis was lynched by a violent mob. The twenty-eight-year-old victim had been accused of sexually assaulting Lena McMahon, the daughter of one of the town's well-liked Irish American families. The incident was infamous at once, for it was seen as a portent that lynching, a Southern scourge, was about to extend its tendrils northward. Philip Dray revisits this time and place to consider its significance and to show how justice cannot be achieved without an honest reckoning.