Books in the Justice, Power and Politics series

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centres the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state.

To many, asylums are a relic of a bygone era. State governments took steps between 1950 and 1990 to minimize the involuntary confinement of people in psychiatric hospitals, and many mental health facilities closed down. Yet, as Anne Parsons reveals, the asylum did not die during deinstitutionalization. Instead, it returned in the modern prison industrial complex.

Using Alan Berkman's unfinished prison memoir, FBI records, letters, and hundreds of interviews, Susan Reverby sheds fascinating light on questions of political violence and revolutionary zeal in her account of Berkman's extraordinary transformation from doctor to co-conspirator for justice.

A history of environmental racism and inequality. Linking the history of racial capitalism, environmental history, and social movement history, Toxic Debt lucidly narrates the story of debt, environmental disaster, and resistance in Detroit.

Unearths the deeper lineage of anti-war pacifist activists and thinkers from the early twentieth century who developed nonviolence into a revolutionary force for Black liberation. In telling this story, Anthony Siracusa challenges the idea that nonviolent freedom practices faded with the rise of the Black Power movement.

In 1945, El Centro, California became home to the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp. The Shadow of El Centro tells the story of how that camp evolved into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service Processing Center of the 2000s and became a national model for detaining migrants.

In this first narrative history of one of the longest boycott campaigns in US history, Allyson Brantley draws from a broad archive as well as oral history interviews with long-time boycotters to offer a compelling, grassroots view of anti-corporate organising and unlikely coalitions.

Offers the first history of African American AIDS activism in all of its depth and breadth. Dan Royles introduces a diverse constellation of activists who pursued a wide array of grassroots approaches to slow the epidemic's spread and address its impacts.

Expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance.

In the Jim Crow South, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and, later, Vietnamese and Indian Americans faced obstacles similar to those experienced by African Americans in their fight for civil and human rights. This book tells the story of their resistance and documents how Asian American political actors and civil rights activists challenged existing definitions of rights and justice in the South.

For over a century, generations of Black New Yorkers have fought to gain access to and equal opportunity within the FDNY. Tracing this struggle for jobs and justice from 1914 to the present, David Goldberg details the ways each generation of firefighters confronted overt and institutionalized racism.

Highlighting the integral, often-overlooked contributions of women, people of colour, young workers, and southerners, Lane Windham reveals how in the 1970s workers combined old working-class tools - like unions and labour law - with legislative gains from the civil and women's rights movements to help shore up their prospects.

Bringing together histories of the carceral and welfare states, as well as the civil rights and Black Power movements, Lauren Pearlman narrates the struggle for self-determination in America's capital.

James and Grace Lee Boggs were two largely unsung but critically important figures in the black freedom struggle. Stephen Ward details both the personal and the political dimensions of the Boggses' lives, highlighting the vital contributions these two figures made to black activist thinking. Ward's book restores the Boggses to their rightful place in postwar American history.

In this account of black protest, Nicholas Grant examines how African Americans engaged with, supported, and were inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement. Bringing black activism into conversation with the foreign policy of both the US and South African governments, this study questions the dominant perception that US-centered anticommunism decimated black international activism.

"Portions of the text were previously published as 'The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Cuts Cordwood: Exploring Black Women's Lives and Labor in Georgia's Convict Camps, 1865-1917, ' Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 8, no. 3 (Fall 2011)"--Title page verso.

In this groundbreaking book, Dan Berger offers a bold reconsideration of twentieth century black activism, the prison system, and the origins of mass incarceration. Showing that the prison was a central focus of the black radical imagination from the 1950s to the 1980s, Berger traces the dynamic and dramatic history of this political struggle.

Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City

Traces how public racial violence, segregation in housing and leisure, and criminal stigmatization in popular culture and media fostered a sense of distress, isolation, and nihilism that made crime and violence seem like viable recourses in the face of white supremacy.

In this history of Chicago from 1919 to the rise and fall of Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s, Simon Balto narrates the evolution of racially repressive policing in black neighbourhoods as well as how black citizen-activists challenged that repression.

The first book to tell the full history of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) and the New Afrikan Independence Movement. Edward Onaci shows how New Afrikans remade their lifestyles to create a self-consciously revolutionary culture, and argues that the RNA's tactics and ideology were essential to the evolution of Black political struggles.

Narrates the dynamic history of policing, anti-police abuse movements, race, and politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Using the explosion of two large-scale uprisings in Los Angeles as bookends, Felker-Kantor highlights the racism at the heart of the city's expansive police power through a range of previously unused and rare archival sources.

Using dozens of new oral histories and archives, Lana Dee Povitz demonstrates how grassroots activism continued to thrive, even as it was transformed by unrelenting erosion of America's already fragile social safety net in the late twentieth century.

Tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models, and black teachers' challenges to the teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century.

In documenting how blackness became a marker of criminality that overrode the potential protections the status of "child" could have bestowed, Tera Eva Agyepong shows the entanglements between race and the state's transition to a more punitive form of juvenile justice. This important study expands the narrative of racialized criminalization in America.