Illinois Press Book Blog

Authors of two recent University of Illinois Press books are featured this week on the History News Network.

Open Wound author William McKee Evans on race in the United States:

Scholars who locate the origins of the American racial system in a permanent color psychology of whites are not only mistaken about how the system began, but they also underestimate the significance of the changes that have taken place. There have been three great movements to reform the American racial system. Each arose out of a national crisis. The first was during the War for Independence, when American slavery became a threat to the struggle for American freedom. The unraveling of slavery in the North began. The second came during the “irrepressible conflict” over slavery, culminating in the Civil War and Reconstruction. It ended slavery but left African Americans half free. The latest reform movement occurred during the Cold War when a Jim Crow nation set out to “lead the free world,” which was then seething with revolution and colonial revolt by people of color. The civil rights movement seized the moment and struck down the nation’s racial laws and provided new opportunities for many African Americans.

Harlem vs. Columbia University author Stefan Bradley on learning lessons from the past:

When time and space collide, the result is history.  As Columbia University met with the tumultuous 1960s, it found itself next to an increasingly militant black community in Harlem that had grown to resent the elite Ivy League institution.  Taking advantage of the urban renewal movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Columbia attempted to keep the neighborhoods that surround it in check by purchasing land and buildings.  While expanding, Columbia eliminated housing for poor, black, and Puerto Rican people.  Although these residents were rankled, many felt as though they could not resist the desires of the second largest land holder in the city.  That was, at least, until time and space caught up with Columbia.

David Beito, co author of the new book Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power, was interviewed by Scott Horton for Harper’s online.

Q. “You call Howard a ‘maverick,’ and his politics do seem all over the place. He launches his political career working on the California gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair, a self-described socialist, then he turns to a posture of constructive engagement as a Democrat, after which he becomes an Eisenhower Republican, and runs as a Republican nominee for Congress in 1958, getting trounced in a bad year for Republicans. Did he have a consistent political philosophy, or was he more of a political opportunist?”

A. “One reason why Howard qualifies as a maverick was that he never thought in terms of rigid ideologies. Unlike some black leaders of the period, he was generally suspicious of utopian or leftist schemes and put his trust in self-help, the work ethic, and entrepreneurship. In this respect, his support of the socialist Sinclair was an exception. Even then, his stated justification had less do with Sinclair’s socialism and more to do with, in Howard’s words, Sinclair’s promise to give blacks a ‘fair shake.’ Personal opportunism was probably a factor. Sinclair noticed and appreciated Howard’s talents and wanted to entrust him with an important role in a potentially winning campaign.”

David Beito, co-author of the new book Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power, was interviewed by John J. Miller for National Review Online.

JOHN J. MILLER: Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard was a black Republican civil-rights leader — was he also in any meaningful sense a conservative?

DAVID T. BEITO: Howard was highly pragmatic but he clearly had many conservative beliefs. While he was not afraid to confront segregation head-on, he rejected socialism, communism, and governmental utopian schemes.

CNN reports that a memorial bust of Sojourner Truth was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol today making Truth the first African-American woman to be so honored. To learn more about her life and times, check out Margaret Washington’s new biography Sojourner Truth’s America.

No single individual brought down the South’s Jim Crow regime, but there were a few dozen who played essential parts. Black Maverick convincingly elevates Howard to that rank. . . One of the book’s most significant achievements is to highlight the indispensable role that black entrepreneurs and professionals played in the crucial early phase of the modern civil rights struggle.

Fortunately, several online audio and video clips are now available which reveal Howard’s compelling oratory. Particularly effective is this audio clip of Howard’s speech (courtesy of Schomburg Center of The New York Public Library) to a mass civil rights rally in Madison Square Garden in 1956. The person who introduces him is none other than A. Philip Randolph, the head of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

And, here is a moving clip (Courtesy of Pacifica Radio Archives) of Howard’s eulogy at Medgar Evers’s memorial service in 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi.

Finally, a video clip (courtesy of MacDonald and Associates) of an interview from 1956.

The April 2009 issue of Reason magazine contains a favorable review of the new book Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power.

[A] captivating and vividly detailed new biography. . . . With Black Maverick, T.R.M. Howard’s achievements have finally received the attention they deserve.

On inauguration day, Aretha Franklin gave President Barack Obama a collection of her dad’s sermons, along with a biography of her late father. Is it possible that she gifted Obama a University of Illinois Press book? If so, then she definitely gets our R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

Anténor Firmin (1850-1911) was a Haitian scholar whose De l’égalité des Races Humaines (Anthropologie Positive) in 1885 (Paris) was a response to European racialist and racist thought in the nineteenth century. The book was discovered in my anthropology of race and racism class, was recovered, and translated by Asselin Charles and introduced by us for the first time in English as The Equality of the Human Races (2000). In 2002 the University of Illinois Press published a paperback edition.

In his chapter “The Role of the Black Race in the History of Civilization”  he writes the following after an admiring bow acknowledging the American abolitionist, Wendell Phillips’ praise and analysis of Haiti’s defeat of the slave system and its influence on the abolition of slavery in the US. 

Appearances to the contrary, this big country is destined to strike the first blow against the theory of the inequality of the human races. Indeed, at this very moment, Blacks in the great federal republic have begun to play a prominent role in the politics of the various states of the American union. It seems quite possible that, in less than a century from now, a Black man might be called to head the government of Washington and manage the affairs of the most progressive country on earth, a country which will inevitably become, thanks to its agricultural and industrial production, the richest and most  powerful in the world. These are not utopian musings. We only have to consider  the increasing participation of Blacks in American society to cast aside our skepticism. Besides, we must remember that slavery in the United States was abolished only twenty years ago.

Firmin dedicated his book both to Haiti, and to the Black race. He wrote in the dedication his hope that the book “may inspire in all of the children of the Black race around the world the love of progress, justice, and liberty. In dedicating this book to Haiti I bear them all in mind, both the downtrodden of today and the giants of tomorrow.” It seems he had in mind a man whose reality today would have been difficult to conjure in 1885, but there is no doubt that he would recognize President Barack Hussein Obama as one of the “giants of tomorrow.”

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Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban is a professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College. She wrote the introduction to The Equality of the Human Races by Antenor Firmin, translated by Asselin Charles (University of Illinois Press, 2002).

An interview with Corey D. B. Walker, assistant professor in the department of Africana Studies at Brown University and author of the new book A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America.

by Scott Poulson-Bryant

What inspired you to write A Noble Fight:  African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America?

I wrote A Noble Fight to challenge the uncritical, and often unqualified, praise of voluntary associations and other civil society groups in our public conversations about the challenges confronting the present condition of democracy in America.  So often these conversations perpetuate the myths of American democracy while papering over the deep fractures and cleavages that continue to arrest the development of a robust democratic society.

According to your book, Freemasonry is a good metaphor for understanding American democracy.  How so?

Early in A Noble Fight, I write that Freemasonry is democracy in full conceptual and symbolic regalia because its language of universality, equality, and morality echoes so much of the political language of modern democratic theory.  Of course, it also embodies so many of the contingencies and contradictions that characterize the politics and the idea of the political in the modern world.

How important is ritual in the African American culture?

Just as it is for all cultures, ritual is very important in African American culture.  A Noble Fight charts how the rituals of democracy are not only reinforced by the very mundane acts of the everyday, but also how African Americans have challenged and developed alternative meanings of these rituals by drawing from the deep theoretical and material wells of Freemasonry in promoting new conceptualizations of the meaning of democracy in the America.

Is it hard to balance writing with teaching?

I find that writing and teaching critically inform one another.  The key question is the arbitrary deadlines imposed on the two that sometimes have them working against one another. 

Has being at Brown influenced your writing/researching work?

I am glad to be at Brown and to be a member of a premier department of extraordinary intellectuals.  To engage in the conversations, debates, and probing inquiries that are so much a part of the everyday culture of Churchill House is a gift that continues to critically inform my work as a scholar and, most importantly, a teacher.  In many ways, this department has been very influential on A Noble Fight.

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Scott Poulson-Bryant, an adjunct professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, was a founding editor of VIBE Magazine. His books include HUNG: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men In America and The VIPs, a novel scheduled for release in 2009.

(Thank you to Scott Poulson-Bryant and Brown University.–Ed.)

Yesterday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution featured a Q&A with Stephane Dunn, author of “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films.

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Q: One of the most impressive aspects of the book is how it challenges what feels like a reflexive love of blaxploitation — especially among white male hipsters, who often overlook the sexist aspects of the genre.

A: Oh yeah, for me it’s a critical mad love that I have — appreciate the political and cultural significance given the moment they came out of and what they meant to tons of black moviegoers hungry for empowered, cool heroes and reflections of black culture on the big screen, but deal with the racist and sexist subtexts that shaped the imagery and the themes, too. Though lots of folks, including some actors and players from that film genre, understandably reject that term “blaxploitation,” it is apt if we use it to signify … [the] disturbing politics in the mix — the cheapening of the Black Power political dynamism, pornographic treatment of women, and so on.