
African American Studies is a cornerstone of the University of Illinois Press. While we honor Black history all year, this month we’re celebrating with some of our favorite and forthcoming Black history publications.

The Keloids We Heal: Trauma, Spirituality, and Black Modernity in Literature
Sarah Soanirina Ohmer
The corporeal and spiritual healing in literature by women of colors can be seen to redefine modern thought and printed text. Sarah Soanirina Ohmer traces the impact of colonization and enslavement on Black women and Black women’s contributions to colonial, nineteenth, and twentieth century literature in the US, Brazil, and West Indies. Her analysis unlocks the literature’s power to heal through gut-wrenching descriptions of wounds and thrilling passages of hope and liberation.

Don Zminda
On May 1, 1951, Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso took the field for the Chicago White Sox and broke the color line for Chicago major league baseball. Ernie Banks integrated the Chicago Cubs two years later. The future Hall of Famers began their Chicago baseball careers against the backdrop of a 1951 race riot in suburban Cicero, where a white mob abetted by local police attacked a building that had rented to Black tenants.

Women, Gender, and Families of Color
In this comparative reading of Doris McMillon’s Mixed Blessing and Ika Hügel-Marshall’s Invisible Woman, Donaldson examine the ways that the authors use the autobiographical form to engage notions of black girlhood in both Germany and the United States. By focusing on their fractured family relationships—and their desire for a return to family, race, and nation—the authors reveal the ways in which national and transnational discourses demarcate the boundaries of racial and national belonging.

South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene
Samantha Ege
Between the world wars, Chicago Race women nurtured a local yet widely resonant Black classical music community entwined with Black civic life. Samantha Ege tells the stories of the Black women whose acumen and energy transformed Chicago’s South Side into a wellspring of music making.

The National Alliance of Black Feminists: A History
Ileana Nachescu
Founded in 1975, the non-partisan National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) played a critical role in the Black women’s liberation movement and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. The Chicago-based organization’s Black humanist feminism powered a singular dedication to building coalitions while influencing its historic set of comprehensive political, economic, and cultural demands.

The Constellations Project: Early Black Lives at Yale is an initiative of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Building on decades of past scholarship, community memory, and an eclectic mix of archival and print sources, the library is working to research and uplift the stories of the Black students who attended the university before 1940. Bringing their stories to wider audiences will enable additional research into their lives and networks, while changing and enriching our understanding of Yale as an institution.

Schooling the Nation: The Success of the Canterbury Academy for Black Women
Jennifer Rycenga
Founded in 1833 by white teacher Prudence Crandall, Canterbury Academy educated more than two dozen Black women during its eighteen-month existence. Racism in eastern Connecticut forced the teen students to walk a gauntlet of taunts, threats, and legal action to pursue their studies, but the school of higher learning flourished until a vigilante attack destroyed the Academy.

A Blueprint for Worker Solidarity: Class Politics and Community in Wisconsin
Naomi R Williams
Like many Midwestern factory towns, deindustrialization damaged Racine in the 1970s and 1980s. But the Wisconsin city differed from others like it in one important way: workers maintained their homegrown working-class economy and political culture. Even as labor declined across the country, Racine’s workers successfully fought for fair housing and education, held politicians accountable, and allied with racial and gender justice organizations.

Journal of Aesthetic Education
“Signifying the Sound: Criteria for Black Art Movements” by Corey Reed
Black art movements are complex movements that blend social, political, and aesthetic criteria. In this article, Reed lists seven conditions that they take to be jointly sufficient for a Black art movement to be signified as such.

Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line
Rachel Carrico
On many Sundays, Black New Orleanians dance through city streets in Second Lines. These processions invite would-be spectators to join in, grooving to an ambulatory brass band for several hours. Though an increasingly popular attraction for tourists, parading provides the second liners themselves with a potent public expression of Black resistance.

The Resounding Revolution: Freedom Song after 1968
Stephen Stacks
Far from being bounded by the timeframe of the 1960s, freedom song continues to evolve as a tool both of historical memory and of present activism. Stephen Stacks looks at how post-1968 freedom song helps us negotiate our present relationship to the era while at the same time sustaining the contemporary struggle inspired by it.

Two of the most prominent African American editors of their respective eras, Frederick Douglass and Pauline Hopkins exerted unimaginable political and cultural influence. The example of their recirculation of Sarah Piatt’s “The Black Princess” affirms the power of the Black press, especially in relation to nineteenth-century debates about slavery’s continued impact on the nation and African Americans’ ongoing struggle for equality.

Edited by Layli Maparyan
Womanism Rising concludes Layli Maparyan’s three-book exploration of womanist studies. The collection showcases new work by emerging womanist authors who expand the womanist idea while extending womanism to new sites, new problems, and new audiences.

Black Women Legacies: Public History Sites Seen and Unseen
Alexandria Russell
From Black clubwomen to members of preservation organizations, African American women have made commemoration a central part of Black life and culture. Alexandria Russell illuminates the process of memorialization while placing African American women at the center of memorials they brought into being and others constructed in their honor. Their often undocumented and unheralded work reveals the importance of the memorializers and public memory crafters in establishing a culture of recognition.

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
Black Americans were present at the Columbian Exposition, despite the fact that many historical textbooks and surveys today claim that they were not, even twenty-four years after Christopher Reed’s landmark 2000 monograph, All the World Is Here! This article expands on Reed’s work by showing how “Afro-Americans” at the first Chicago world’s fair articulated a thorough critique of racism rooted in the reigning stagist civizationism of their time and viewed African colonization and evangelism as tools of civilizational uplift.