New Books In African American Studies

An unflinching examination of the trauma, violence, opportunism, and vision that combined to create the empire for slavery that was the Old South, Ed Baptist‘s new book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014) challenges popular conceptions of that region that imagine it as a land of proud men, genteel ladies, and an antiquated, inefficient system of labor. The slavery that Baptist uncovers is dynamic, relentless, brutal, and extremely profitable. Surviving it, he shows, was an impressive accomplishment all its own. And its role in driving the development of American capitalism in the formative years of the republic raises troubling questions about the legacy of slavery in contemporary times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On November 29, 1957, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holliday, Zoot Sims, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, and a multi-talented young R&B player who played jazz that night, Ray Charles, and others played a benefit concert for the Morningside Recreation Center at Carnegie Hall. Almost a half a century later, these recordings, intended to be played on radio Voice of America, were found in the Library of Congress. The aforementioned artists’ performances were never made available and yet, one set from that night was released, featuring a quartet with pianist Thelonious Monk, saxophonist John Coltrane with Shadow Wilson on drums and Abdul-Ahmed Malik on bass. That recording, on Blue Note records, released in 2005, was a critical and commercial sensation. Monk and Coltrane had played more than 100 shows together the previous five months at the Five Spot Club in New York City and, as Gabriel Solis writes in his thought-provoking multi-disciplinary analysis of their program, that Carnegie Hall concert was “a compendium of what

Bruce Ackerman is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. His book, We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013) fills out the constitutional history of America’s “Second Reconstruction” period and makes a powerful argument that traditional understandings of the constitutional canon must be expanded to accurately reflect the American lawmaking process. The official constitutional canon is composed of the 1787 Constitution and the formal amendments to this document. However, Ackerman argues that the Supreme Court should give more deference to an operational canon that includes the landmark statutes, which are the legacy of the civil rights revolution. Ackerman reveals that the leaders of the civil rights movement actively avoided altering the Constitution through an Article V amendment because this method had failed during the first Reconstruction period. Instead, he lays out how they relied on constitution-altering techniques established during the N

Slavery was pervasive in the Ancient World: you can find it in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In Late Antiquity , however, slavery went into decline. It survived and even flourished in the Byzantine Empire and Muslim lands, yet it all but disappeared in Medieval Western and Central Europe. Then, rather suddenly, slavery reappeared in the West, or rather in Western empires. By the early sixteenth century, Portuguese traders had laid the foundations of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They bought or captured slaves in West Africa and then transported and sold those slaves to plantation owners in European-controlled regions in the New World (especially Brazil, the Caribbean Basin, and Mexico). How, one might well ask, did the trans-Atlantic slave trade emerge so quickly, seemingly from nothing? In his fascinating book The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), historian Toby Green addresses this question. His answer is subtle and multi-

During his lifetime, Michael Jackson became a global icon. Michael Jackson was beloved by millions; his journey began as he became a boy star with The Jackson Five and it culminated with his being crowned the King of Pop, While some of the controversy of his later years along diminished his popularity, Jackson’s status as an icon of American music has never wavered. When he died, there was a tremendous outpouring of affection. In the new book, The Michael Jacksons (Little Moth Press, 2014) explores the world of Michael Jackson representers, especially since Jackson’s passing. A photographer and a cultural critic, Turner photographs and examines these Michael Jackson representers and tribute artists to help us better understand Michael Jackson and the world of impersonators. The book offers a fascinating look of an oft-neglected aspect of popular music and popular culture. Lorena Turner teaches in the Communications Department at California State Polytechnical University in Pomona. Turner is a former freelan

Sitting in my home office this morning, I’ve periodically looked up from my computer screen and out the window to see who the dog is barking at. Sometimes it’s a young mother pushing a stroller, sometimes an older man walking his dogs, occasionally a young woman jogging. Regardless of age, gender or agenda, all of the people I’ve seen have one thing in common. They are white. This is not unusual, of course. Blacks and whites throughout America live separate lives. They attend separate schools. They worship in separate sanctuaries. And, most obviously, they live in different neighborhoods. This remains true despite the dramatic migrations of the mid-Twentieth Century. The racial identity of specific neighborhoods changed. But the persistence of segregation even after the gradual dismantling of legal and extralegal barriers to black mobility and choice is striking. However, there are a few neighborhoods that chose strategically to invite certain black families to put down roots in their part of the city. This

The city of Iowa City’s website promotes its “small-town hospitality” and its focus on “culture.” But a closer look at Iowa City, home to 70,000 and the University of Iowa, reveals a community trying to redefine itself as urban African-Americans relocate to the area. This is the focus of Robert E. “Ted” Gutsche‘s book, A Transplanted Chicago: Race, Place and the Press in Iowa City (McFarland, 2014). In it, he takes on the “Southeast Side” and all its meanings. “Southeast Side” has become a coded term by local press to describe an area of Iowa City it associates with crime and unruliness, sometimes even using the term when the actual crime does not occur on the Southeast Side. “Home to a mixture of white townies and new, black arrivals from Chicago, St. Louis, and other metro regions in the Upper Midwest,” Gutsche writes, “the Southeast Side is known–mythically–as a bastion of affordable housing, black families, and stories of devious behavior.” Through original interviews and research, Gutsche, a former r

Ian Haney Lopez is the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford UP 2014). He is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the Executive Committee of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice. Lopez investigates the often hidden side of racism. He traces the political history of candidates for office using a set of coded phrases, allusions, and references to call attention to race, without ever uttering the word. In the post Brown v. Board era, Lopez argues, candidates learned a new language of strategic racism, substituting anti-government rhetoric for anti-black, anti-Latino, or anti-immigrant. In doing so, the dog whistle was heard as a much wider criticism of the social welfare state, and thus a direct attack not just on minorities, but on the middle class. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luke E. Harlow, Religion, Race and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) examines the role of religion, and more specifically, conservative evangelical Protestant theology, in the struggle over slavery and abolition in a crucial period of American history. The book makes an impressive case that we cannot really understand that struggle or the war that grew out of it without fully appreciating the political, cultural, and intellectual history of conservative evangelical theology. Harlow describes a profoundly religious period in American history, where people claimed religious motives for all kinds of political positions, in a slave-holding border state that remained part of the Union. Kentucky was home to a diverse theological climate that nonetheless seemed always to break toward finding a Biblical warrant for slavery. Politically, however, gradualist emancipationists and pro-slavery advocates were often far apart. When the Civil War came, thousands of black Kentuc

Lincoln was very clear–at least in public–that the Civil War was not fought over slavery: it was, he said, for the preservation of the Union first and foremost. So it’s not surprising that when the conflict started he had no firm plan to emancipate the slaves in the borderland or Southern states. He also knew that such a move might prove very unpopular in the North. So why did he issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863? There are many reasons. According to David Williams‘ fascinating new book I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era (Cambridge University Press, 2014), an important and neglected one has to do with African American self-emancipation. After the war began, masses of slaves began to leave the South and head for the Northern lines. The Union forces received them as “contraband” seized from the enemy during wartime. As such, their status was uncertain. Many wanted to fight or at least serve as auxiliaries in the Union armies like freemen, but they were

Recent controversies over integrating the military have focused on issues of gender and sexuality. In the 1940s and 50s, however, the issue was racial integration. As Christine Knauer shows in her new book Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and Civil Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), the persistence of soldiers and activists of color forced the Truman administration to bar discrimination in the military. Even then, however, it took continued agitation — and the military crisis of the early days of the Korean War — to force the army to allow black soldiers to fight alongside their white brothers-in-arms. Let Us Fight as Free Men illuminates how agitation for Civil Rights did not begin with the Brown decision in 1954 or the Montgomery Bus Boycott several years later, but was a long-term struggle with its roots in the Second World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In linguistics, we all happily and glibly affirm that there is no “better” or “worse” among languages (or dialects, or varieties), although we freely admit that people have irrational prejudices about them. But what do we do about those prejudices? And what do we think the speakers of low-status varieties of language should do to overcome them? Take the case of African American English. An influential approach, code-switching, advises teachers to help their AAE-speaking students to identify the systematic differences between their variety and the prestige variety (“Standard English”), and eventually to be able to switch effectively between both varieties according to the circumstances. However, although code-switching seems to promote communicative effectiveness, Vershawn Young and colleagues argue that that approach is inherently problematic. By effectively labelling AAE as inappropriate for public contexts, code-switching runs the risk of promoting and reinforcing society’s prejudices against the language

How did jazz take shape? Why does jazz have so many styles? Why do jazz songs get longer as the twentieth century proceeds? Marc Myers, in his fascinating book Why Jazz Happened (University of California Press, 2014) examines the social and economic forces affected the growth of jazz between 1942 and 1972. Myers considers how the American Federation of Musicians ban on recording in 1942 changes the terrain for jazz musicians. He looks to how the G.I. Bill and suburbanization bring a new adult sophistication to the music. Myers also explores how changes in recording technology allow jazz artists a greater range of expression and permits the recording of longer songs and extended soloing. The book culminates with considering how jazz musicians responded to the challenge offered by rock music. Marc Myers is a writer for The Wall Street Journal and founder of the blog, JazzWax.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arica Coleman did not start out to write a legal history of “the one-drop rule,” but as she began exploring the relationship between African American and Native peoples of Virginia, she unraveled the story of how the law created a racial divide that the Civil Rights movement has never eroded. Virginia’s miscegenation laws, from the law of hypo-descent to the Racial Integrity Act, are burned into the hearts and culture of Virginians, white, black and Indian. That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia (Indiana University Press, 2014)  demonstrates how people continue to insist on racial discrimination and racial purity even though the legal barriers have been lifted and the biological imperatives of “blood purity” have been discredited. Dr. Coleman traces the origins the one-drop rule–that one African American ancestor made a person “colored”–from the days of slavery to the present. She shows how Indians came to disavow their African Amer

Each year, following the end of the NFL season, there is a blizzard of activity as teams with disappointing records fire their head coaches and look for the new leader who will turn things around. This year, seven teams fired their coaches and spent the next weeks searching for a replacement among the pool of qualified candidates. The league office imposes one rule on these searches: teams must interview at least one minority candidate for the head coaching position. Established in 2003 by owners of NFL teams, the Rooney Rule was intended to give African American coaches a shot at top coaching positions, at a time when a majority of the league’s players were black but only two of the 32 teams had a black coach. More than a decade later, the effectiveness of the rule is still subject of debate. Yes, two of seven teams hired new black coaches this year. But the total number of black coaches in the league is only four, down from a high of seven in 2011. And a look at fan sites shows that prejudice still rears it

Musician James Brown is famous for his civil rights slogan, “Say it loud; I’m Black and I’m proud,” illustrating the argument that Kevin Quashie makes in his new book The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2012)–that public expressiveness has become the dominant trope for thinking through and even theorizing blackness. As a result, public expressivity (think powerful oratory at mass demonstrations or spirited polemics, such as David Walker’s Appeal) is linked to resistance. In fact, contemporary activist-scholars, such as Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, have called on others, particularly whites, to engage in this kind of public expressiveness associated with blacks. One of Jones’ 6 Rules for Allies, encourages others “to be loud and crazy so black folk don’t have to” (see http://vimeo.com/78945479). Jones is asking for allegiances that allow black folk time and space for quiet. Although what Jones advocates it still a necessity, Quashie presents a history and present

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I really didn’t know anything about the “Civil Rights Movement.” I knew who Martin Luther King was, and that he had been assassinated by white racists (I knew quite a few of those). But to me all that was old history. The issue of the day–at least as it concerned African Americans–was something called the “Black Power Movement.” Of Rosa Parks, the Freedom Riders, and the Little Rock Nine I knew nothing. At the forefront of my mind were Stokley Carmichael, Huey Newton, and Bobby Seale. I followed the exploits of the Black Panthers. I read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. I really understood none of it. I was a suburban white kid in the Midwest. The world these angry men described was foreign to me, but nonetheless fascinating. At what point did the Civil Rights Movement become the the Black Power Movement?  Aram Goudsouzian tries to answer this question in his terrific, readable book Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear (Farrar, S

Alex Haley’s 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family still stands as a memorable epic journey into the history of African Americans during the enslavement period and after. The 1977 televised miniseries was a must-watch event of the day, and it remains an important production in television history. However, a little more than a decade after his success, Haley was in trouble. His wealth had dwindled and he had strained relationships with other writers. What happened? Adam Henig tells us in his new book Alex Haley’s Roots: An Author’s Odyssey (2014). Listen to this lively interview with the author. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do black mayors face a different governing challenge than other mayors? Ravi K. Perry explores this question in his Black Mayors, White Majorities: The Balancing Act of Racial Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Perry is assistant professor of political science at Mississippi State University. Using the cities of Toledo and Dayton, Ohio as his starting point, Perry’s book investigates the ways black mayors govern in majority white cities. He compares how Jack Ford, mayor of Toledo from 2002-2006, and Rhine McLin, mayor of Dayton from 2002-2010, use targeted universalism to balance the need to represent black and white constituents. This balancing act is a tenuous one for black mayors with such high expectations and often limited authority to deliver the range of needs of the community. Perry’s research ranges from historical analysis of election results and rhetorical analysis of speeches to deliver a thoughtful look at two interesting political figures and an understudied area of political scienc

Cindy Hooper is a veteran of various local, state, and national political campaigns. She is the founder of a national organization for African American women that is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Hooper is also a member of the American Political Science Association. Her new book, Conflict: African American Women and the New Dilemma of Race and Gender Politics (Praeger Press, 2012), draws on all of her experiences. Please listen to our lively exchange.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices