Sojourner Truth’s America by Margaret Washington
Winner of the inaugural 2010 OAH Darlene Clark Hine Award and co-winner of the 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award, this fascinating biography unravels Sojourner Truth’s world within the broader panorama of African American slavery and the nation’s most significant reform era. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here.

Freeing Charles: The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War by Scott Christianson
Freeing Charles recounts the life and epic rescue of captured fugitive slave Charles Nalle of Culpeper, Virginia, who was forcibly liberated by Harriet Tubman and others in Troy, New York, on April 27, 1860. Author Scott Christianson follows Nalle from his enslavement by the Hansborough family in Virginia through his escape by the Underground Railroad and his experiences in the North on the eve of the Civil War. Buy the Kindle version here.  Buy the Kobo version here.

A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights by Cornelius L. Bynum
A. Philip Randolph’s career as a trade unionist and civil rights activist fundamentally shaped the course of black protest in the mid-twentieth century. Examining Randolph’s work in lobbying for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatening to lead a march on Washington in 1941, and establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee, Cornelius L. Bynum shows that Randolph’s push for African American equality took place within a broader progressive program of industrial reform. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here.

Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 by Tim Brooks
This groundbreaking in-depth history of the involvement of African Americans in the early recording industry examines the first three decades of sound recording in the United States, charting the surprising roles black artists played in the period leading up to the Jazz Age and the remarkably wide range of black music and culture they preserved.  Lost Sounds won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, ARSC Award for Best Research in General History of Recorded Sound, and the Irving Lowens Award, given by the Society for American Music for the best work published (2004) in the field of American music. Buy the Kobo version here.

Using a variety of sources such as slaveholders’ wills and probate records, ledgers, account books, court records, oral histories, and numerous newspaper accounts, Dr. Rivers illuminates the historical significance of Florida as a runaway slave haven dating back to the seventeenth century and explains Florida’s unique history of slave resistance and protest.

The award will be presented at the annual FHS Meeting and Symposium, May 23-26.

Congratulations, Dr. Rivers!

“People with power have the means to mold the way a society views the world. They can establish their own outlook as orthodox or the mainstream view. They can make the views of their challengers heretical or even turn the opposition into solitary voices crying in the wilderness. They can establish the language of normal political discussion. The normal words and phrases used have inherent biases validating their position. Hegemony is complete when ordinary citizens do not perceive the limitations imposed by the belief system of their society, neither its assumptions, its restrictions on subject matter, nor the biases inherent in the words they use. Instead, one normally assumes that public discourse is framed by self-evident truths.

In the antebellum American republic, the people whom the abolitionists called the Slave Power established a hegemonic North-South consensus of racial ideas. The planters and their northern business partners, the commodity brokers and bankers, held this hegemonic ideological power. The commodities that slaves produced provided two-thirds of the nation’s exports, making planters the richest class in the country and their northern allies the second richest class. The defense of slavery was thus critical both to the prosperity of the planters and to the accumulation of capital in the North.

The Slave Power was most vulnerable in the North, where slavery had been abolished in the wake of the War for Independence. Slavery was serving less and less the self-interest of most Northerners, indeed of most Southerners as well. More and more, it was harming their interests. As the unavoidable tensions caused by slavery mounted, the Slave Power “played the race card,” in the latter-day phrase, with an intensity never seen before, saturating the nation, above all the North, with the message that blacks as slaves were happy and useful, but when free were lazy and dangerous. To convey this message they mobilized every vehicle of culture: the political rally, the newspaper, the church, the school, and most vividly the minstrel show. The formative American nation was thus thoroughly indoctrinated with an ideology of race.

The Republican revolution overthrew the Slave Power. But the Republicans did not complete their revolution in the South. During the struggles of Reconstruction, they repudiated their Radical contingent and finally came to terms with the former Confederates, leaving them in local control and allowing them to restore plantation production based on half-free labor. By the turn of the twentieth century, the new national corporate establishment, after defeating the challenges of the Farmers’ Alliance movement and the Knights of Labor, finally established a corporate hegemony that continued into the twenty-first century. Also by the turn of the twentieth century, the ex-Confederates had finally crushed all opposition and achieved a “solid South.” The age of segregation had begun.

Although the corporate elite in the North used free labor, they retained most of the racial ideology of the antebellum nation. They endorsed segregation in the South and tolerated its labor system, half free for blacks and little better for many whites. In the North, industrialists continued their “white only” hiring policy of the antebellum era. This policy helped keep black workers on the plantations and made possible a vigorous revival of southern commodity exports. Also, just as at the beginning of the racial system, planters in the West Indies had used a few less-debased whites to control many blacks, now industrialists used a few more-debased black strikebreakers to control many whites. The racial ideology of the antebellum regime was well suited to the needs of the new northern leaders. Indeed they built on it with so-called scientific racism.

The racial system showed increasing instability as the nation moved toward globalism. World War I opened industrial jobs in the North to black workers for the first time, giving rise to a process of black urbanization and the appearance of the more assertive “new Negro.” The racial system became more unstable with the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s, which created the first important split in the American elite since the Civil War. In response to the Great Depression, one faction, the New Dealers, favored economic and social programs. They began a reform movement. In the New Deal movement, African Americans came together with such other previously marginalized groups as the “new immigrants” and organized labor. Civil rights once again became a political issue.

After World War II, American leaders positioned themselves as the leaders of the “free world.” At the same time, through the Atlantic Pact, they gave military support to the European powers that were trying to suppress the freedom movements in their colonies. The struggle of the “free world” against the “Communist slave world” precipitated the Cold War ideological crisis of the racial system. The black freedom movement saw its moment and seized it. The movement brought down the “white only” signs, opened the polling booth to black Southerners, and restored vitality to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. By the late 1960s, more than half of African Americans had escaped from the bottom layer of society that they had occupied for three hundred years.
The black freedom movement came to grief when it moved from abolishing the legal disabilities that African Americans suffered to addressing their disproportionate poverty. Civil rights made slight demands on the nation’s resources and enhanced its political image. But programs to provide jobs and to combat poverty required resources the nation’s leaders wanted to use for their increasingly costly military ventures. Indeed social programs already in place were eroded ever more as the “welfare state” was displaced by the “national security state.” In the backlash against social programs, new racial stereotypes appeared, Sambo the servant being replaced by Willie Horton the criminal and by the “gangsta rappers.” The plight of the black poor and other poor people worsened with the “information revolution,” which privileged a quality education out of the reach of most people and facilitated the outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries.

The nation’s growing gap between rich and poor signals a new crisis in which, for the first time in three hundred years, the line of class is more sharply drawn than the line of race. Historically, African Americans, however, as the last hired and first fired, have been the “miners’ canary,” the harbingers of coming trouble. In the misery, chaos, and high incarceration rates suffered by African Americans of the inner city, one may see some of what lies ahead for the rest of American society.”

Order Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America in hardcover, or for your Kindle, or on Google Play (currently being offered at HALF PRICE on both platforms).

As we approach another history-making election, I thought I would share this “Interpretive Overview” by the author, which appears before the Preface in the book. The second half of the essay will be posted tomorrow.

Order Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America in hardcover, or for your Kindle, or on Google Play (currently HALF PRICE on both platforms).

“In 1776, the Continental Congress launched a new nation, but a nation with an open wound. From the outset the nation had a system of mutually reinforcing ideas, practices, and institutions that disadvantage people of color. Over the centuries the racial system has changed. Old ideas and practices have given way to new ones, and white behavior and attitudes toward black people have changed in important ways. Yet the system has continued from slavery to segregation to resegregation in jobless ghettos. So, while many black Americans have escaped from a three-hundred-year-old mudsill stratum of American society and recently some have indeed risen to positions of influence, the imprint of slavery on the nation is still visible.

Through decades of American history, African Americans remained virtually invisible to whites. From the beginning, however, whenever the nation has faced a crisis, the same question has emerged: What about the blacks? In recent times, during World War II, the Cold War, and the so-called war on terror, as the nation has competed for the leadership of a largely nonwhite world, blacks have been by no means invisible to scholars. Nothing has more occupied scholars than particular components of the nation’s racial history. Many excellent studies have illuminated particular aspects of this history: works on slavery, peonage, segregation, constitutional rights, white racial attitudes, the black freedom movement, the causes of black unemployment, among other important aspects. What is needed now is a long view of how American racial institutions and ideas began and how and why, over time, they have changed.

Certain studies have approached the centuries-old persistence of the white-over-black shape of American society, finding causes in “human nature.” Such early twentieth-century historians as U. B. Phillips thought that the lowly jobs held by African Americans could be explained by their limited mental capacity. In the 1950s and 60s, however, when blacks took to the streets, the theory of their inferiority fell into disfavor. But then a prominent school of white historians, stressing psychology and culture, held that the problem lay not with the nature of blacks but with the nature of whites. Whites’ prejudice derived, not from the way they treated blacks, but from the way they perceived them. These scholars thought that black had always been a color that whites associated with disagreeable things and that this limited their ability to fully accept black people. Two narratives but one conclusion: the status quo. Because of either the nature of blacks or the nature of whites, American society was likely to remain racially stratified.

Yet, in other times and places black people and white people have not always interacted as they have in the United States. The first task of the present study is, therefore, to demonstrate that the attitude of American whites toward Africans derived, not from their unchanging reactions to color, but from a new type of slavery that appeared in the new Atlantic World of the 1500s. It differed from the then traditional Old World slavery in two ways: slaves produced commodities for the market, and slaves were taken almost exclusively from sub-Saharan Africa. Now a master was motivated by profit. A slave was recognized by color. This appearance of market-driven, color-defined slavery, and a legacy of anti-African lore that came with the Atlantic slave trade, were the beginnings of what came to be called “American racism.” If one can establish that this self-reinforcing system of ideas and practices had a beginning, one can also venture the prediction that it will have an end.

Those who locate the origins of the American racial system either in the nature of blacks or in the nature of whites are not only mistaken about how it began, but they also underestimate the significance of the changes that have taken place. Important changes occurred at three historical moments when the racial system entered a crisis phase. The first was during the War for Independence, when American slavery became a threat to the struggle for American freedom. The second phase of crisis came during the “irrepressible conflict” over slavery, culminating in the Civil War and Reconstruction. The latest crisis 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. Each of these crises opened a window of opportunity for idealists who challenged the defenders of the racial status quo. Each of the ensuing conflicts resulted in a compromise that changed the way whites treated blacks, but fell far short of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of human equality.

But how is one to explain why change has taken place only at discrete historical moments? Why the relatively changeless behavior and ideas of whites during the long decades between these crisis phases? To ask such questions is to probe the secrets of power. An important part of this study is an effort to illuminate these periods of near stability by the theory of “hegemony,” or the idea that a governing class achieves firm control, or “legitimacy,” by popularizing a consensus ideology, which advances its own agenda. These beliefs are accepted as self-evident by common citizens, even though they may actually conflict with their own self-interest.” Continues Friday.

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Mitchell posits that lynching violence was a reaction to black success.

“[Mitchell] shows how performing lynching plays in community spaces allowed African Americans to actualize the various subjectivities . . . that lynchings sought to expunge. This book is required reading for understanding the ways in which narrative and performance have been central to challenging white oppression as well as (re)imagining black identity in America. Highly recommended.”–Choice

“An emphatic push to change how we understand, write about, and teach the phenomenon of lynching.”–H-SHGAPE

Koritha Mitchell is an associate professor of English at The Ohio State University, and is an active blogger and public speaker. Her work was highlighted last month on The Ohio State University English Department’s blog. Congratulations, Professor Mitchell!

From Part Three:
One of the surprising discoveries you made was that while the networks did cover aspects of the March on Washington “live,” they cut away from what we now see as the key moments in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. What do you think motivated that decision?

All three networks carried significant amounts of live coverage of the March on Washington which occurred, by the way, on a Wednesday.  Nowadays it’s no spectacular feat to get masses of people to Washington for a march, but they always happen on the weekend.  Try to get a quarter of a million people to the national Mall on a weekday! (more)

We will be at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) meeting from September 26-30, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We will have authors signing books all afternoon Friday, September 28 at our booths, #19 & 20.

1:00–2:00  Jacqueline McLeod, Daughter of the Empire State: The Life of Judge Jane Bolin

2:00–3:00  Julie Gallagher, Black Women and Politics in New York City

3:00–4:00  Felix Armfield, Eugene Kinckle Jones: The National Urban League and Black Social Work, 1910-1940

4:00–5:00  Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey Jr., eds., The Black Chicago Renaissance

Stop by and say, “Hello!”

And as we mentioned earlier in this blog, we will be at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass Week, which runs from September 24-30, 2012, in Nashville, Tennessee. Celebrate Josh Graves’ 85th Birthday with Fred Bartenstein, editor of Bluegrass Bluesman, Thursday, September at 1:00 pm, University of Illinois Press Booth, #223.

“Musician and folklorist Stephen Wade dissects and celebrates the vast diversity
of American culture in The Beautiful Music All Around Us, his book drawn from
the Library of Congress’ vast holdings of field recordings made from 1934 to 1942. . . .
These stories and the recordings — capturing the voices of everyday people, not
pop stars — simply crackle.”

Chicago Tribune: “Unlike the Harlem Renaissance, from about 1919 to the mid-1930s, the Chicago movement didn’t have as its face such well-known intellectuals as W.E.B. Du Bois. Chicago artists didn’t have relatively large numbers of wealthy white patrons who helped to support their art. In addition, Chicago, unlike New York, wasn’t the publishing mecca of the country, so artists and their work weren’t as readily introduced to a national audience.

But Chicago was a mecca in other ways.”

Women, Gender, and Families of Color is edited by Jennifer Hamer of the University of Kansas.

The inaugural issue, due out in early 2013, is a collection of articles that explore various elements of Black senior women’s sexuality, including body image; sexual and reproductive health; and the politics of race, class, gender, age, and sexual orientation on Black sexuality. It is guest-edited by Bette Dickerson, Associate Professor of Sociology at American University and past president of the Association of Black Sociologists, and Nicole Rousseau, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Kent State University and award-winning author of Black Woman’s Burden; Commodifying Black Reproduction (Palgrave Macmillan)

Visit the journal page for information about submitting and/or subscribing.

Read the full press release.