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This book discusses the central role that race played in Mississippi's gradual transition from a Democratic stronghold to a solidly Republican state. Prior to 1965, the state had almost no black political participation, but, in just over twenty years, it had hundreds of black elected officials. The growth of black political power was contested by white politicians in both parties, who alternated between resistance to and solicitation of black voters. These mechanisms of resistance included numerous vote-dilution schemes to weaken black voting strength and defeat black candidates. Eventually, the Democratic Party achieved integration, but white Democrats still held the real power in the party. The price of this integration was the increasing defection of white voters to the Republicans, who abandoned interracial efforts in favor of racial conservatism and indifference to black concerns. Unlike recent studies arguing that class, economics, or other nonracial issues played a role in southern political realignment, this study reinforces the fact that race was at the heart of the “Great White Switch” of Mississippi to the GOP in the 1980s.

This is a collection of recent scholarship on the aftermath of US slave emancipation, with a range of contributions from leading scholars in the field (Foner, Holt, Fitzgerald), up-and-coming historians with a reputation in the study of Reconstruction (O'Donovan, Baker, Kelly, Downs), and other promising junior and mid-level scholars (Illingworth, Mathisen, Bryant, Rhyne) whose essays here speak to some of the key issues in Reconstruction historiography. Aside from Holt's opening piece and the afterword by Foner, the essays were selected from more than 75 papers presented at two conferences organized by the After Slavery Project (www.afterslavery.com), a transatlantic research collaboration directed by Brian Kelly from Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. The selection was based on three main criteria: the essays had to concern the former Confederate states during the period following slave emancipation; they had to be based on original research; and in the judgment of the editors, the essays had to make a substantial contribution to Reconstruction historiography. We sought essays that concerned the role of labor in Reconstruction but did not confine ourselves to these. The result is a collection that covers a geographically diverse area of the former slave states, grappling with problems central to Reconstruction scholarship in the aftermath of Foner's important synthesis.

During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, thousands of people were incarcerated in southern jails as a result of their involvement with the civil rights movement. This book follows those activists inside the jail cell to explore the trials and tribulations of life as a civil rights prisoner. It highlights the conditions inside southern jails, activists’ interactions with “ordinary” prisoners, and the importance of race and gender in shaping the prisoners’ treatment. It also reveals how, beyond the jail cell, the movement sought to counter such repression via an ideology that embraced imprisonment as a mark of honor and a statement of resistance, while also seeking to fill the jails and thereby place financial pressure upon local government; this was encapsulated in the term “jail-no-bail.” Organizations and individuals regularly testified to the importance of incarceration as a form of induction into the movement. However, after 1963, as activists faced increasingly serious charges and served longer sentences, many struggled to maintain their commitment to the philosophy behind jail-no-bail. Beneath movement rhetoric, activists found that the earlier exuberance for jail sentences did not fit with the conditions under which they worked. Ain’t Scared of Your Jail concludes by examining the shift toward black power in the post-1965 era and demonstrates how activists, now freed from an earlier focus upon integration and respectability, began to challenge mainstream definitions of criminality to claim that black prisoners were not so much criminals as victims of a racist social structure.

Conventional history narratives tell us that in the early years of the Republic, the United States fought three wars against the Seminole Indians and two against the Creeks. However, this book argues that we would do better to view these events as moments of heightened military aggression punctuating a much longer period of conflict in the Gulf Coast region. Featuring chapters on topics ranging from international diplomacy to Seminole military strategy, the volume urges us to reconsider the reasons for and impact of early U.S. territorial expansion. It highlights the actions and motivations of Indians and African Americans during the period and establishes the groundwork for research that is more balanced and looks beyond the hopes and dreams of whites.

This book provides detailed history and technical design information on every type of small rescue craft ever used by the United States Life-Saving Service and United States Coast Guard, from the early 1800s to the current day. By looking at these vessels, many of which featured innovative designs, the chapters shed light on the brave men and women who served in USLSS and USCG stations, saving innumerable lives. In the book rare photographs and drawings of each type of boat are enhanced by detailed design histories, specifications, and station assignments for each craft. The book includes motorized, wind-powered, and human-powered vessels.

American historians tend to believe that labor activism was moribund in the years between the First World War and the New Deal. The book challenges this perspective in this examination of the railroad unions of the time, arguing that not only were they active, but that they made a big difference in American Labor practices by helping to set legal precedents. The book explains how efforts by the Plumb Plan League and the Railroad Labor Executive Association created the Railroad Labor Act, its amendments, and the Railroad Retirement Act. These laws became models for the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act. Unfortunately, the significant contributions of the railroad laws are, more often than not, overlooked when the NLRA or Social Security are discussed. Offering a new perspective on labor unions in the 1920s, the book describes how the railroad unions created a model for union activism that workers' organizations followed for the next two decades.

This volume showcases, but also interrogates, the value of Atlantic World approaches to the histories and cultures of the American South. Challenging the traditional chronological focus of most Atlantic history on the Early Modern period, the volume ranges from colonial times to the modern era, while thematically it embraces a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to topics such as economics, migration, religion, revolution, law, slavery, race relations, emancipation, gender, literature, performance, visual culture, memoir, ethnography, empires, nations, and historiography. Geographically, the chapters focus mainly on the southern region of the North American continent and the lands in and around the Atlantic Ocean-although the physical location of a putative “Atlantic World” and, for that matter, of something we can call an “American South” are among the definitional issues with which the volume wrestles. Ultimately, the value of any grand concept such as Atlantic History, or Atlantic Studies, or the Black Atlantic depends on its capacity to explain past or present social realities. The cumulative effect of the mix of case studies and state-of-the-field essays gathered in this volume is to affirm that there is much to be learned about both the American South and the Atlantic World by considering them together and from diverse disciplinary perspectives. In so doing, the volume makes a valuable contribution to the fields of American, southern, and Atlantic Studies.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a number of states had bureaus whose responsibility was to help immigrants assimilate into American society. Often described negatively as efforts to force foreigners into appropriate molds, this book demonstrates that these programs—including adult education, environmental improvement, labor market regulations, and conflict resolutions—were typically implemented by groups sympathetic to immigrants and their cultures. The book offers a comparative history of social welfare policies developed in four distinct regions with diverse immigrant populations: New York, California, Massachusetts, and Illinois. By focusing on state actions versus national agencies and organizations, and by examining rural and western approaches in addition to urban and eastern ones, the author broadens the historical literature associated with Americanization. She also reveals how these programs, and the theories of citizenship and national identity used to justify their underlying policies, were really attempts by middle-class progressives to get new citizens to adopt Anglo-American, middle-class values and lifestyles.

Established by the American Colonization Society in the early nineteenth century as a settlement for free people of color, the West African colony of Liberia is usually seen as an endpoint in the journeys of those who traveled there. In Atlantic Passages, Robert Murray reveals that many Liberian settlers did not remain in Africa but returned repeatedly to the United States, and he explores the ways this movement shaped the construction of race in the Atlantic world. Tracing the transatlantic crossings of Americo-Liberians between 1820 and 1857, in addition to delving into their experiences on both sides of the ocean, Murray discusses how the African neighbors and inhabitants of Liberia recognized significant cultural differences in the newly arrived African Americans and racially categorized them as “whites.” He examines the implications of being perceived as simultaneously white and black, arguing that these settlers acquired an exotic, foreign identity that escaped associations with primitivism and enabled them to claim previously inaccessible privileges and honors in America. Highlighting examples of the ways in which blackness and whiteness have always been contested ideas, as well as how understandings of race can be shaped by geography and cartography, Murray offers many insights into what it meant to be black and white in the space between Africa and America.

The purpose of this manuscript is threefold. First, it will serve as a cultural biography of Dr. James Edward Shepard and the National Religious Training Institute and Chautauqua for the Negro Race and later the North Carolina College for Negroes (which became North Carolina Central University). Second, it will argue that black college presidents of the early twentieth century such as Shepard were more than academic leaders; they were race leaders. Shepard’s role at the NRTIC/NCC was to develop a race through this institution. Lastly, this study argues that Shepard, like most black college presidents, did not focus primarily on the difference between liberal arts and vocational education. Rather, he considered the most practical ways to uplift his race. Therefore, this study will be more than a biography of an influential African American, but an analytical study of a black leader during the age of Jim Crow in the South.

Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule focuses on America's most-forgotten farmers: black families that cast their lot on their own land and depended on their own labor in a nation that doubted their right to control either. Rural African Americans have long been perceived as dependent tenants, sharecroppers, and agricultural laborers. This collection of essays indicates that one in four black farm families overcame numerous obstacles by 1920 to own farm land. It does this without diminishing the serious nature of the opposition that limited their right to property and independent decision making. These essays indicate that black farmers who became farm owners and landowners should not be dismissed as anomalous economic success stories. Instead, they should be evaluated within the context of a larger social historical milieu. White landowners attempted to protect white's privileged status within the American agrarian ideal that linked landownership to morality and full citizenship. Black farm families had to overcome this philosophical barrier and additional obstacles posed by racism and sexism, the crop lien system of labor, debt, and unstable markets. Additional factors such as geographic isolation, limited crop and stock choices, mechanization, personal relationships, and kinship networks all affected black farm families in numerous and inconsistent ways. Beyond Forty Acres encourages readers to re-conceptualize small farms not as failure when compared to large-scale production agriculture but as an alternative approach specific to a time and place.

Black Art in Brazil explores the work of five artists from different regions of Brazil—Abdias do Nascimento, Ronaldo Rego, Eustáquio Neves, Ayrson Heráclito, and Rosana Paulino—against the wider backdrop of socio—historical and political developments taking place at the national and popular levels in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book traces the history of national and international interest in black art in Brazil, changes in the related terminology, and development of the discourse. Excerpts from interviews with artists and curators illustrate how different individuals understand and relate to the increasingly popular label “Afro—Brazilian art.” The publication also expands upon current scholarship by introducing its readers to a variety of paintings, prints, photographs, installations, sculptures, and performance pieces produced outside the Afro—Brazilian religious communities for secular audiences. The book’s in-depth analysis of different works demonstrates how some Brazilian art conveys “blackness” through visual vocabulary and how the markers of black art and culture have continued to diversify. In comparing modern (post-1920) and contemporary (post-1985) production, the book reveals that as the discourse on race, ethnicity, and black art began to change in the 1970s, so too did artists shift the creative focus from exploring their African cultural heritage to producing work that confronts current race—related social challenges in Brazil.

Historical treatments of race during the early 20th century have generally focused on black women's activism. Leading books about the disenfranchisement era hint that black men withdrew from positions of community leadership until later in the century. This book argues that middle-class black men in North Carolina in fact actively responded to new manifestations of racism. Focusing on the localized, grassroots work of black men during this period, the author offers new insights about rarely scrutinized interracial dynamics as well as the interactions between men and women in the black community. Informed by feminist analysis, she uses gender as the lens through which to view cooperation, tension, and negotiation between the sexes and among African American men during an era of heightened race oppression. Her work promotes improved understanding of the construct of gender during these years, and expands the vocabulary of black manhood beyond the “great man ideology” which has obfuscated alternate, localized meanings of politics, manhood, and leadership.

In the tumultuous year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, 29-year-old Pete O’Neal became inspired by reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and founded the Kansas City branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP). The same year, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the BPP was the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” This book is the gripping story of O’Neal, one of the influential members of the movement, who now lives in Africa—unable to return to the United States but refusing to renounce his past. Arrested in 1969 and convicted for transporting a shotgun across state lines, O’Neal was free on bail pending his appeal when Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the BPP, was assassinated by the police. O’Neal and his wife fled the U.S. for Algiers. Eventually they settled in Tanzania, where they continue the social justice work of the Panthers through community and agricultural programs and host study-abroad programs for American students. Paul Magnarella—a veteran of the United Nations Criminal Tribunals and O’Neal’s attorney during his appeals process from 1997–2001—describes his unsuccessful attempts to overturn what he argues was a wrongful conviction. He lucidly reviews the evidence of judicial errors, the prosecution’s use of a paid informant as a witness, perjury by both the prosecution’s key witness and a federal agent, as well as other constitutional violations. He demonstrates how O’Neal was denied justice during the height of the COINTELPRO assault on black activists in the U.S.

Atlanta stands out among southern cities for many reasons, not least of which is the role African Americans have played in local politics. This book studies black politics in the city. From Reconstruction to recent times, the middle-class black leadership in Atlanta, while often subordinating class and gender differences to forge a continuous campaign for equality, successfully maintained its mantle of racial leadership for more than a century through a deft combination of racial advocacy and collaboration with local white business and political elites. The book provides an analysis of how one of the most important southern cities managed, adapted, and coped with the struggle for racial justice, examining both traditional electoral politics as well as the roles of non-elected individuals influential in the community. Highlighting the terms of Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young, the city's first two black mayors, the book concludes by raising important questions about the success of black political power and whether it has translated into measurable economic power for the African American community.

This book provides a regional and comparative analysis of the origins, development, and legacies of the Black Power movement in the Caribbean in the turbulent decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Black Power in the Caribbean highlights the unique local origins and causes of Black Power mobilization in the Caribbean and its relationship to Black Power in the United States, ultimately setting the historical roots and modern legacies of the movement in a wider international context. Providing a broad regional coverage, the studies in the book range from as far north as Jamaica, Bermuda and the Guyanas to as far south as Trinidad and Tobago and Curaçao. Exploring what Black Power meant in the majority black and multi-ethnic states of the Caribbean, the book demonstrates that the Caribbean has much to add to our understanding of Black Power in the global context.

This book chronicles the stories of African American women who struggled for and won access to formal education, beginning in 1850, when Lucy Stanton, a student at Oberlin College, earned the first college diploma conferred on an African American woman. In the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a critical increase in black women's educational attainment mirrored unprecedented national growth in American education. The author reveals how black women demanded space as students and asserted their voices as educators — despite such barriers as violence, discrimination, and oppressive campus policies — contributing in significant ways to higher education in the United States. She argues that their experiences, ideas, and practices can inspire contemporary educators to create an intellectual democracy in which all people have a voice. Profiles include Anna Julia Cooper, who was born enslaved yet ultimately earned a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne, and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College. Exposing the hypocrisy in American assertions of democracy and discrediting European notions of intellectual superiority, Cooper argued that all human beings had a right to grow. Bethune believed that education is the right of all citizens in a democracy. Both women's philosophies raised questions of how human and civil rights are intertwined with educational access, scholarly research, pedagogy, and community service. This history of black women traces quantitative research, explores black women's collegiate memories, and identifies significant geographic patterns in America's institutional development.

This collection of original essays extends the concept of boderlands—as both a process and place—to geographic places and topics not usually considered in this realm. This includes African slavery, missionaries, the Ohio Valley, and other non-Spanish regions. Positioning these regions and topics as comparable to other early North American crossroads and meeting places highlights how the mingling of people and cultures shaped North America’s history before 1850. Equally important, it helps illuminate scholars’s growing focus on the process of borderland formation across a variety of North American regions. Collectively, the essays in this volume reveal how the field is currently unfolding and urge scholars to abandon the geographic determinism of the first definition. The southwestern United States-Mexico border remains an ideal locale to employ the concept as a metaphor and as an intellectual tool, but this volume reveals the merits of employing borderlands to create more nuanced narratives of the intersection of people and ideas in the Ohio Valley and elsewhere in early North America.

High-profile rivalries between black male leaders in the early twentieth century have contributed to the view that integrationism and black nationalism were diametrically opposed philosophies shaped primarily by men. Ideas of authenticity and respectability were central to the construction of black identities within black cultural and political resistance movements of the early twentieth century. Unfortunately both concepts have also been used to demonize black middle-class women whose endeavors towards racial uplift are too frequently dismissed as assimilationist and whose class status has apparently disqualified them from performing “authentic” blackness and exhibiting race pride. This book challenges these conceptualizations in an examination of prominent black women leaders' political thought and cultural production in the years between the founding of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and the National Council of Negro Women in 1935. Through an analysis of black women's political activism, entrepreneurship and literary endeavor, the book argues that black women made significant contributions toward the development of a black feminist tradition which enabled them to challenge the apparent dichotomy between Black Nationalism and integrationism. By exploring the connections between women like the pioneering black hairdresser Madam C. J. Walker and her daughter, A'Lelia, as well as clubwoman Mary McLeod Bethune and United Negro Improvement Association activist Amy Jacques Garvey, the book also makes a contribution to the field of women's history by positioning black women at the forefront of both intellectual and practical endeavors in the struggle for black autonomy.

In the 1990s, churches across the south-eastern United States were targeted and set ablaze. These arsonists predominately targeted African American congregations and captured the attention of the media nationwide. Using oral histories, newspaper accounts, and governmental reports, this book gives a chronological account of the series of church fires. The book considers the various forces at work, including government responses, civil rights groups, religious forces, and media coverage, in providing an analysis of the events and their fallout. Arguing that these church fires symbolize the breakdown of communal bonds in the nation, the text appeals for the revitalization of united Americans and the return to a sense of community.