Books in the Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies series

As a border city Baltimore made an ideal arena to push for change during the civil rights movement. It was a city in which all forms of segregation and racism appeared vulnerable to attack by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's methods. If successful in Baltimore, the rest of the nation might follow with progressive and integrationist reforms. The Baltimore branch of the NAACP was one of the first chapters in the nation and was the largest branch in the nation by 1946. The branch undertook various forms of civil rights activity from 1914 through the 1940s that later were mainstays of the 1960s movement. Nonviolent protest, youth activism, economic boycotts, marches on state capitols, campaigns for voter registration, and pursuit of anti-lynching cases all had test runs. Remarkably, Baltimore's NAACP had the same branch president for thirty-five years starting in 1935, a woman, Lillie M. Jackson. Her work highlights gender issues and the social and political transitions among the changing civil rights groups. In Borders of Equality, Lee Sartain evaluates her leadership amid challenges from radicalized youth groups and the Black Power Movement. Baltimore was an urban industrial center that shared many characteristics with the North, and African Americans could vote there. The city absorbed a large number of black economic migrants from the South, and it exhibited racial patterns that made it more familiar to Southerners. It was one of the first places to begin desegregating its schools in September 1954 after the Brown decision, and one of the first to indicate to the nation that race was not simply a problem for the Deep South. Baltimore's history and geography make it a perfect case study to examine the NAACP and various phases of the civil rights struggle in the twentieth century

Daisy Bates (1914-1999) is renowned as the mentor of the Little Rock Nine, the first African Americans to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. For guiding the Nine through one of the most tumultuous civil rights crises of the 1950s, she was selected as Woman of the Year in Education by the Associated Press in 1957 and was the only woman invited to speak at the Lincoln Memorial ceremony in the March on Washington in 1963. But her importance as a historical figure has been overlooked by scholars of the civil rights movement. Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas chronicles her life and political advocacy before, during, and well after the Central High School crisis. An orphan from the Arkansas mill town of Huttig, she eventually rose to the zenith of civil rights action. In 1952, she was elected president of the NAACP in Arkansas and traveled the country speaking on political issues. During the 1960s, she worked as a field organizer for presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to get out the black vote. Even after a series of strokes, she continued to orchestrate self-help and economic initiatives in Arkansas. Using interviews, archival records, contemporary news-paper accounts, and other materials, author Grif Stockley reconstructs Bates's life and career, revealing her to be a complex, contrary leader of the civil rights movement. Ultimately, Daisy Bates paints a vivid portrait of an ardent, overlooked advocate of social justice.

Analyses riot iconography and its usefulness as a political strategy of protestation. Through a mixed-methods approach of literary close-reading, historical, and sociological analysis, Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani considers how BAM artist-writers challenge misconceptions regarding Black protest through experimental explorations in their writings.

Features the lyrics of fifteen slave songs and fifteen abolitionist songs, placing them in proper historical context and making them available again to the general public. These songs not only express outrage at slavery but call for militant resistance and destruction of the slave system.

Provides the first full-length study of John Edgar Wideman's entire oeuvre to date. Specifically, Tracie Church Guzzio examines the ways in which Wideman (b. 1941) engages with three crucial themes - history, myth, and trauma - throughout his career, showing how they intertwine.

A history of the alliance between black farmers, sharecroppers, and the People's Party

Examines the roots of Black political activism in the petition movement; Prince Hall and the creation of the first Black masonic lodges; the Black Baptist movement; writings; sermons; and the practices of festival days, through the story of a remarkable but largely unheralded woman and pioneering public intellectual.

Rediscovers the career of Black activist E. Azalia Hackley (1867-1922), a concert artist, nationally famous music teacher, and charismatic lecturer. Juanita Karpf reclaims Hackley's legacy and details the talent, energy, determination, and unprecedented worldview she brought to the cause of racial uplift.

A disproportionate number of male writers continue to be credited for constructing the iconic and ideological foundations for what would be perpetuated as the Black Art Movement. In this study, Carmen L. Phelps examines the work of several women artists working in Chicago, a key focal point for the energy and production of the movement.

Born in 1893, Emmanuel Taylor Gordon (1893-1971) became an internationally famous singer in the 1920s at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Despite his fame, Taylor Gordon has been all but forgotten. Michael Johnson illuminates Gordon's personal history and his cultural importance to the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.

Post-Blackness. Post-Soul. Post-Black Art. New Blackness. Cameron Leader-Picone suggests that this proliferation of terms, along with the renewed focus on questioning the relationship between individual black artists and the larger black community, indicates the arrival of novel forms of black identity and black art.

A critical biography of the novelist and champion for mental health issues

Based on extensive archival research, The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Timo Muller uses sonnets to open up fresh perspectives on African American literary history, and examines the inventive strategies African American poets devised to occupy and reshape a form overwhelmingly associated with Europe.

A classic ethnographic study of rural children, their community, and their school

The personal account of a community and a lawyer united to battle one of the most recalcitrant bastions of resistance to civil rights

Offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for both an in-depth analysis of individual texts and a discussion of material often left out or under-represented in studies focused only on traditional literary material.

This is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques whiteness as social construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing approach to these texts, Veronica T. Watson identifies this body of literature as an African American intellectual and literary tradition that she names "the literature of white estrangement".

Examines the historical and political context of acclaimed African American actor Paul Robeson's three portrayals of Shakespeare's Othello in the United Kingdom and the United States. All three of the productions, when considered together, provide an intriguing glimpse into Robeson's artistry as well as his political activism.

Through an examination of various couples who were forced to live in slavery, Rebecca J. Fraser argues that slaves found ways to conduct successful courting relationships. In its focus on the processes of courtship among the enslaved, this study offers further insight into the meanings that structured intimate lives.

Using the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass, as well as the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, Ronda C. Henry Anthony examines how women's bodies are used in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power.

Recovers the work of early African American authors and editors such as Elisha Weaver who have been left off maps drawn by historians and literary critics. Individual chapters restore to consideration black literary locations in antebellum St. Louis, antebellum Indiana, Reconstruction-era San Francisco, and several sites tied to the Philadelphia-based Recorder during and after the Civil War.

Raymond Pace Alexander was a prominent black attorney in Philadelphia and a distinguished member of the National Bar Association. Yet his legacy to the civil rights struggle has received little national recognition. Alexander was a major contributor to the northern civil rights struggle and was committed to improving the status of black lawyers. This volume examines his life and work.

Describes how the social and political movements that grew out of the Depression facilitated the left turn of several African American artists and writers. The formation of a black cultural front is examined by looking at the works of poet Langston Hughes, novelist Chester Himes, and cartoonist Ollie Harrington.

The Second Great Migration, the movement of African Americans between the South and the North that began in the early 1940s and tapered off in the late 1960s, transformed America. Over seven years, Lisa Krissoff Boehm gathered oral histories with women migrants and their children. In extended excerpts from the oral histories, this book offers a unique window into African American women's history.

Examines popular culture's reliance on long-standing stereotypes of black men as animalistic, hypersexual, dangerous criminals, whose bodies, dress, actions, attitudes, and language both repel and attract white audiences.

Before the innovative work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied, and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, these folklorists worked within but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream institutions. They often called into question the meaning of the very folklore projects in which they were engaged. Shirley Moody-Turner analyzes this output, along with the contributions of a disparate group of African American authors and scholars. She explores how black authors and folklorists were active participants-rather than passive observers-in conversations about the politics of representing black folklore. Examining literary texts, folklore documents, cultural performances, legal discourse, and political rhetoric, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation demonstrates how folklore studies became a battleground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century. The study is framed by two questions of historical and continuing import. What role have representations of black folklore played in constructing racial identity? And, how have those ideas impacted the way African Americans think about and creatively engage black traditions? Moody-Turner renders established historical facts in a new light and context, taking figures we thought we knew-such as Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, and Paul Laurence Dunbar-and recasting their place in African American intellectual and cultural history.

The first book-length study of Frank Yerby's life and work. The collection explores a myriad of topics, including his connections to the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances; readership and reception; representations of masculinity and patriotism; film adaptations; and engagement with race, identity, and religion.