32 Books Published by University of Illinois Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States by Leslie M. Alexander Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States

by Leslie M. Alexander
University of Illinois Press (Dec 27, 2022)
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The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander’s study reveals the untold story of how free and enslaved Black people in the United States defended the young Caribbean nation from forces intent on maintaining slavery and white supremacy. Concentrating on Haiti’s place in the history of Black internationalism, Alexander illuminates the ways Haitian independence influenced Black thought and action in the United States. As she shows, Haiti embodied what whites feared most: Black revolution and Black victory. Thus inspired, Black activists in the United States embraced a common identity with Haiti’s people, forging the idea of a united struggle that merged the destinies of Haiti with their own striving for freedom.

A bold exploration of Black internationalism’s origins, Fear of a Black Republic links the Haitian revolution to the global Black pursuit of liberation, justice, and social equality.


Click for more detail about Knowing Him by Heart: African Americans on Abraham Lincoln by Fred Lee Hord Knowing Him by Heart: African Americans on Abraham Lincoln

by Fred Lee Hord
University of Illinois Press (Dec 20, 2022)
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Though not blind to Abraham Lincoln’s imperfections, Black Americans long ago laid a heartfelt claim to his legacy. At the same time, they have consciously reshaped the sixteenth president’s image for their own social and political ends. Frederick Hord and Matthew D. Norman’s anthology explores the complex nature of views on Lincoln through the writings and thought of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, Gwendolyn Brooks, Barbara Jeanne Fields, Barack Obama, and dozens of others. The selections move from speeches to letters to book excerpts, mapping the changing contours of the bond—emotional and intellectual—between Lincoln and Black Americans over the span of one hundred and fifty years.

A comprehensive and valuable reader, Knowing Him by Heart examines Lincoln’s still-evolving place in Black American thought.


Click for more detail about The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora

by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
University of Illinois Press (Oct 12, 2021)
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Includes 25 Black & White Photographs

From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into the unexplored spaces of black women’s queer creative theorizing to learn its languages and read the textures of its forms. Moving beyond fixed notions, Sullivan points to a space of queer imagination where black women invent new languages, spaces, and genres to speak the many names of difference. Black women’s literary cultures have long theorized the complexities surrounding nation and class, the indeterminacy of gender and race, and the multiple meanings of sexuality. Yet their ideas and work remain obscure in the face of indifference from Western scholarship.

Innovative and timely, The Poetics of Difference illuminates understudied queer contours of black women’s writing.


Click for more detail about Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora by Myriam J. A. Chancy Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora

by Myriam J. A. Chancy
University of Illinois Press (Mar 01, 2020)
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In Autochthonomies, Myriam J. A. Chancy engages readers in an interpretive journey. She lays out a radical new process that invites readers to see creations by artists of African descent as legible within the context of African diasporic historical and cultural debates. By invoking a transnational African/diasporic lens and negotiating it through a lakou or ”yard space,” we can see such identities transfigured, recognized, and exchanged. Chancy demonstrates how the process can examine the salient features of texts and art that underscore African/diasporic sensibilities and render them legible. What emerges is a potential for richer readings of African diasporic works that also ruptures the Manichean binary dynamics that have dominated previous interpretations of the material. The result: an enriching interpretive mode focused on the transnational connections between subjects of African descent as the central pole for reader investigation.

A bold challenge to established scholarship, Autochthonomies ranges from Africa to Europe and the Americas to provide powerful new tools for charting the transnational interactions between African cultural producers and sites.


Click for more detail about Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America by E. James West Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America

by E. James West
University of Illinois Press (Feb 24, 2020)
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From its launch in 1945, Ebony magazine was politically and socially influential. However, the magazine also played an important role in educating millions of African Americans about their past. Guided by the pen of Lerone Bennett Jr., the magazine’s senior editor and in-house historian, Ebony became a key voice in the popular black history revival that flourished after World War II. Its content helped push representations of the African American past from the margins to the center of the nation’s cultural and political imagination.E. James West’s fresh and fascinating exploration of Ebony’s political, social, and historical content illuminates the intellectual role of the iconic magazine and its contribution to African American scholarship. He also uncovers a paradox. Though Ebony provided Bennett with space to promote a militant reading of black history and protest, the magazine’s status as a consumer publication helped to mediate its representation of African American identity in both past and present.Mixing biography, cultural history, and popular memory, West restores Ebony and Bennett to their rightful place in African American intellectual, commercial, and political history.


Click for more detail about Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney Cooper Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women

by Brittney Cooper
University of Illinois Press (May 03, 2017)
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Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how—and who—produced racial knowledge.


Click for more detail about Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. by Treva B. Lindsey Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C.

by Treva B. Lindsey
University of Illinois Press (Mar 29, 2017)
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Home to established African American institutions and communities, Washington, D.C., offered women in the New Negro movement a unique setting for the fight against racial and gender oppression. Colored No More traces how African American women of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century made significant strides toward making the nation’s capital a more equal and dynamic urban center.

Treva B. Lindsey presents New Negro womanhood as a multidimensional space that included race women, blues women, mothers, white collar professionals, beauticians, fortune tellers, sex workers, same-gender couples, artists, activists, and innovators. Drawing from these differing but interconnected African American women’s spaces, Lindsey excavates a multifaceted urban and cultural history of struggle toward a vision of equality that could emerge and sustain itself. Upward mobility to equal citizenship for African American women encompassed challenging racial, gender, class, and sexuality status quos. Lindsey maps the intersection of these challenges and their place at the core of New Negro womanhood.


Click for more detail about Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom (New Black Studies Series) by Sonja D Williams Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom (New Black Studies Series)

by Sonja D Williams
University of Illinois Press (Aug 11, 2015)
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Posthumously inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2007, Richard Durham creatively chronicled and brought to life the significant events of his times. Durham’s trademark narrative style engaged listeners with fascinating characters, compelling details, and sharp images of pivotal moments in American and African American history and culture. In Word Warrior , award-winning radio producer Sonja D. Williams draws on archives and hard-to-access family records, as well as interviews with family and colleagues like Studs Terkel and Toni Morrison, to illuminate Durham’s astounding career. Durham paved the way for black journalists as a dramatist and a star investigative reporter and editor for the pioneering black newspapers the Chicago Defender and Muhammed Speaks . Talented and versatile, he also created the acclaimed radio series Destination Freedom and Here Comes Tomorrow and wrote for popular radio fare like The Lone Ranger . Incredibly, his energies extended still further—to community and labor organizing, advising Chicago mayoral hopeful Harold Washington, and mentoring generations of activists. Incisive and in-depth, Word Warrior tells the story of a tireless champion of African American freedom, equality, and justice during an epoch that forever changed a nation.


Click for more detail about Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian by Ethelene Whitmire Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian

by Ethelene Whitmire
University of Illinois Press (Aug 07, 2015)
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The first African American to head a branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL), Regina Andrews led an extraordinary life. Allied with W. E. B. Du Bois, Andrews fought for promotion and equal pay against entrenched sexism and racism and battled institutional restrictions confining African American librarians to only a few neighborhoods within New York City. Andrews also played a key role in the Harlem Renaissance, supporting writers and intellectuals with dedicated workspace at her 135th Street Branch Library. After hours she cohosted a legendary salon that drew the likes of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Her work as an actress and playwright helped establish the Harlem Experimental Theater, where she wrote plays about lynching, passing, and the Underground Railroad. Ethelene Whitmire’s new biography offers the first full-length study of Andrews’s activism and pioneering work with the NYPL. Whitmire’s portrait of her sustained efforts to break down barriers reveals Andrews’s legacy and places her within the NYPL’s larger history.


Click for more detail about Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian by Ethelene Whitmire Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian

by Ethelene Whitmire
University of Illinois Press (May 01, 2014)
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The first African American to head a branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL), Regina Andrews led an extraordinary life. Allied with W. E. B. Du Bois, she fought for promotion and equal pay against entrenched sexism and racism. Andrews also played a key role in the Harlem Renaissance, supporting writers and intellectuals with dedicated workspace at her 135th Street Branch Library. After hours she cohosted a legendary salon that drew the likes of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Her work as an actress and playwright helped established the Harlem Experimental Theater. Ethelene Whitmire’s new biography offers the first full-length portrait of Andrews’ activism, engagement with the arts of the Harlem Renaissance, and work with the NYPL.


Click for more detail about Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zone by Carole Boyce-Davies Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zone

by Carole Boyce-Davies
University of Illinois Press (Oct 31, 2013)
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Both a memoir and a scholarly study, this project explores the multivalent meanings of Caribbean space and community in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on experiential knowledge and theory, Boyce Davies has crafted this set of reflective essays to illuminate the dynamic and ever-changing complexity of Caribbean culture and to trace its migratory patterns in and between the Americas. In weaving the private spaces of the author’s individual story with public spaces of Caribbean culture, Boyce Davies crosses many cultural and disciplinary boundaries. Such movements are necessary to understand the interrelated dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality embedded in Caribbean spaces, and also many Caribbean people’s traumatic and transformative stories of displacement, migration, and exile. From there, she dwells on the way her knowledge has informed her political vision as it links to broader, black diaspora matters including the 1960s civil rights movement, the environmental catastrophes of Haiti, the failure of the New Orleans levies, technologies such as the iPhone and GPS, and how all these things are understood and informed by a Caribbean logic. Family narratives, local knowledge, poems, literary analyses, descriptions of artwork, and accounts of spiritual practices are cohesively used to sustain a comprehensive theoretical analysis fostered by the author’s extensive fieldwork and research. Ultimately, Boyce Davies reestablishes the link between theory and practice and intellectual work and activism which, the author argues, marked the beginning of Black Studies itself.


Click for more detail about Black Revolutionary: William Patterson & the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle by Gerald Horne Black Revolutionary: William Patterson & the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle

by Gerald Horne
University of Illinois Press (Sep 26, 2013)
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A leading African American Communist, lawyer William L. Patterson (1891–1980) was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the defeat of Jim Crowby virtue of his leadership of the Scottsboro campaign in the 1930s. In this watershed biography, historian Gerald Horne shows how Patterson helped to advance African American equality by fostering and leveraging international support for the movement. Horne highlights key moments in Patterson’s global activism: his early education in the Soviet Union, his involvement with the Scottsboro trials and other high-profile civil rights cases of the 1930s to 1950s, his 1951 "We Charge Genocide" petition to the United Nations, and his later work with prisons and the Black Panther Party. Through Patterson’s story, Horne examines how the Cold War affected the freedom movement, with civil rights leadership sometimes disavowing African American leftists in exchange for concessions from the U.S. government. He also probes the complex and often contradictory relationship between the Communist Party and the African American community, including the impact of the FBI’s infiltration of the Communist Party. Drawing from government and FBI documents, newspapers, periodicals, archival and manuscript collections, and personal papers, Horne documents Patterson’s effectiveness at carrying the freedom struggle into the global arena and provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century struggles for racial justice.


Click for more detail about The Black Chicago Renaissance (New Black Studies Series) by Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey Jr. The Black Chicago Renaissance (New Black Studies Series)

by Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey Jr.
University of Illinois Press (Jun 25, 2012)
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 Beginning in the 1930s, Black Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that lasted into the 1950s and rivaled the cultural outpouring in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The contributors to this volume analyze this prolific period of African American creativity in music, performance art, social science scholarship, and visual and literary artistic expression. Unlike Harlem, Chicago was an urban industrial center that gave a unique working class and internationalist perspective to the cultural work being done in Chicago. This collection’s various essays discuss the forces that distinguished the Black Chicago Renaissance from the Harlem Renaissance and placed the development of black culture in a national and international context. Among the topics discussed in this volume are Chicago writers Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, The Chicago Defender and Tivoli Theater, African American music and visual arts, and the American Negro Exposition of 1940. Contributors are Hilary Mac Austin, David T. Bailey, Murry N. DePillars, Samuel A. Floyd Jr., Erik S. Gellman, Jeffrey Helgeson, Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey Jr., Christopher Robert Reed, Elizabeth Schlabach, and Clovis E. Semmes.

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Click for more detail about Rebels and Runaways: Slave Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Florida by Larry Eugene Rivers Rebels and Runaways: Slave Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Florida

by Larry Eugene Rivers
University of Illinois Press (Jun 22, 2012)
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This gripping study examines slave resistance and protest in antebellum Florida and its local and national impact from 1821 to 1865. Using a variety of sources, Larry Eugene Rivers discusses Florida’s unique historical significance as a runaway slave haven dating back to the seventeenth century. In moving detail, Rivers illustrates what life was like for enslaved blacks whose families were pulled asunder as they relocated and how they fought back any way they could to control small parts of their own lives. Identifying slave rebellions such as the Stono, Louisiana, Denmark (Telemaque) Vesey, Gabriel, and the Nat Turner insurrections, Rivers argues persuasively that the size, scope, and intensity of black resistance in the Second Seminole War makes it the largest sustained slave insurrection in American history.


Click for more detail about African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861 by Leslie M. Alexander African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861

by Leslie M. Alexander
University of Illinois Press (Dec 21, 2011)
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During the early national and antebellum eras, black leaders in New York City confronted the tenuous nature of Northern emancipation. Despite the hope of freedom, black New Yorkers faced a series of sociopolitical issues including the persistence of Southern slavery, the threat of forced removal, racial violence, and the denial of American citizenship. Even efforts to create community space within the urban landscape, such as the African Burial Ground and Seneca Village, were eventually demolished to make way for the city’s rapid development. In this illuminating history, Leslie M. Alexander chronicles the growth and development of black activism in New York from the formation of the first black organization, the African Society, in 1784 to the eve of the Civil War in 1861. In this critical period, black activists sought to formulate an effective response to their unequal freedom. Examining black newspapers, speeches, and organizational records, this study documents the creation of mutual relief, religious, and political associations, which black men and women infused with African cultural traditions and values.

As Alexander reveals, conflicts over early black political strategy foreshadowed critical ideological struggles that would bedevil the black leadership for generations to come. Initially, black leaders advocated racial uplift through a sense of communalism and connection to their African heritage. Yet by the antebellum era, black activists struggled to reconcile their African identity with a growing desire to gain American citizenship. Ultimately, this battle resulted in competing agendas; while some leaders argued that the black community should dedicate themselves to moral improvement and American citizenship, others began to consider emigrating to Africa or Haiti. In the end, the black leadership resolved to assert an American identity and to expand their mission for full equality and citizenship in the United States. This decision marked a crucial turning point in black political strategy, for it signaled a new phase in the quest for racial advancement and fostered the creation of a nascent Black Nationalism.


Click for more detail about Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia by Daina Ramey Berry Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia

by Daina Ramey Berry
University of Illinois Press (Jun 28, 2010)
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"Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe" compares the work, family, and economic experiences of enslaved women and men in upcountry and lowcountry Georgia during the nineteenth century. Mining planters’ daybooks, plantation records, and a wealth of other sources, Daina Ramey Berry shows how slaves’ experiences on large plantations, which were essentially self-contained, closed communities, contrasted with those on small plantations, where planters’ interests in sharing their workforces allowed slaves more open, fluid communications. By inviting readers into slaves’ internal lives through her detailed examination of domestic violence, separation and sale, and forced breeding, Berry also reveals important new ways of understanding what it meant to be a female or male slave, as well as how public and private aspects of slave life influenced each other on the plantation


Click for more detail about Divas On Screen: Black Women In American Film by Mia Mask Divas On Screen: Black Women In American Film

by Mia Mask
University of Illinois Press (Jul 02, 2009)
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This insightful study places African American women’s stardom in historical and industrial contexts by examining the star personae of five African American women: Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Halle Berry. Interpreting each woman’s celebrity as predicated on a brand of charismatic authority, Mia Mask shows how these female stars have ultimately complicated the conventional discursive practices through which blackness and womanhood have been represented in commercial cinema, independent film, and network television.Mask examines the function of these stars in seminal yet underanalyzed films. She considers Dandridge’s status as a sexual commodity in films such as Tamango, revealing the contradictory discourses regarding race and sexuality in segregation-era American culture. Grier’s feminist-camp performances in sexploitation pictures Women in Cages and The Big Doll House and her subsequent blaxploitation vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown highlight a similar tension between representing African American women as both objectified stereotypes and powerful, self-defining icons. Mask reads Goldberg’s transforming habits in Sister Act and The Associate as representative of her unruly comedic routines, while Winfrey’s daily television performance as self-made, self-help guru echoes Horatio Alger narratives of success. Finally, Mask analyzes Berry’s meteoric success by acknowledging the ways in which Dandridge’s career made Berry’s possible.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Moses And The Monster And Miss Anne by Carole C. Marks Moses And The Monster And Miss Anne

by Carole C. Marks
University of Illinois Press (Jun 25, 2009)
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This engaging history presents the extraordinary lives of Patty Cannon, Anna Ella Carroll, and Harriet Tubman, three "dangerous" women who grew up in early nineteenth-century Maryland and were vigorously enmeshed in the social and political maelstrom of antebellum America. The "monstrous" Patty Cannon was a reputed thief, murderer, and leader of a ruthless gang who kidnapped free blacks and sold them back into slavery, whereas Miss Anna Ella Carroll, a relatively genteel unmarried slaveholder, foisted herself into state and national politics by exerting influence on legislators and conspiring with Governor Thomas Holliday Hicks to keep Maryland in the Union when many state legislators clamored to join the Confederacy. And, of course, Harriet Tubman—slave rescuer, abolitionist, and later women’s suffragist—was both hailed as "the Moses of her people" and hunted as an outlaw with a price on her head worth at least ten thousand dollars. Carole C. Marks gleans historical fact and sociological insight from the persistent myths and exaggerations that color the women’s legacies. Though they never actually met, and their backgrounds and beliefs differed drastically, these women’s lives converged through their active experiences of the conflict over slavery in Maryland and beyond, the uncertainties of economic transformation, the struggles in the legal foundation of slavery and, most of all, the growing dispute in gender relations in America.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power by David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power

by David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito
University of Illinois Press (Apr 08, 2009)
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In whatever role he chose—civil rights leader, wealthy entrepreneur, or unconventional surgeon—Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard (1908-76) was always close to controversy. One of the leading renaissance men of twentieth century black history, Howard successfully organized a grassroots boycott against Jim Crow in the 1950s. Well known for his benevolence, fun-loving lifestyle, and fabulous parties attended by such celebrities as Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson, he could also be difficult to work with when he let his boundless ego get the best of him. A trained medical doctor, he kept the secrets of the white elite, and although married to one woman for forty years, he had many personal peccadilloes. But T. R. M. Howard’s impressive accomplishments and abilities vastly outshone his personal flaws and foibles. He was a dynamic civil rights pioneer and promoter of self-help and business enterprise among blacks. With this remarkable biography, David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito secure Howard’s rightful place in African American history. Drawing from dozens of interviews with Howard’s friends and contemporaries, as well as FBI files, court documents, and private papers, the authors present a fittingly vibrant portrait of a complicated leader, iconoclastic businessman, and tireless activist.


Click for more detail about Black Moods: Collected Poems by Frank Marshall Davis Black Moods: Collected Poems

by Frank Marshall Davis
University of Illinois Press (Jun 01, 2007)
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Black Moods collects for the first time all of Frank Marshall Davis’s extant published poems as well as his previously unpublished work. From sharp-edged sketches of Southside Chicago’s urban landscape to the prismatic world that lay beneath Hawaii’s placid surface, Davis’s muscular poems blend social, cultural, and political concerns—always shaped by his promise to “try to be as direct as good blues.”

John Edgar Tidwell’s introduction examines both Davis’s poetry and his politics, presenting a subtle portrait of a complex writer devoted to exposing discriminatory practices and reaffirming the humanity of the common people.


Click for more detail about African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids by Randal Maurice Jelks African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids

by Randal Maurice Jelks
University of Illinois Press (Mar 01, 2006)
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African Americans in the Furniture City is unique not only in terms of its subject, but also for its framing of the African American struggle for survival, civil rights, and community inside a discussion of the larger white community. Examining the African-American community of Grand Rapids, Michigan between 1850 and 1954, Randal Maurice Jelks uncovers the ways in which its members faced urbanization, responded to structural racism, developed in terms of occupations, and shaped their communal identities.

Focusing on the intersection of African Americans’ nineteenth-century cultural values and the changing social and political conditions in the first half of the twentieth century, Jelks pays particularly close attention to the religious community’s influence during their struggle toward a respectable social identity and fair treatment under the law. He explores how these competing values defined the community’s politics as it struggled to expand its freedoms and change its status as a subjugated racial minority.


Click for more detail about Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance by Joyce Moore Turner Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance

by Joyce Moore Turner
University of Illinois Press (Oct 31, 2005)
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Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance is a study of the emergence of African American radicalism in Harlem, a crossroads of the African Diaspora in the early twentieth century. Turner reveals that the Harlem Renaissance was more than just an artistic fluorescence; it was also a political movement to counter racism and colonialism. To explore the roots of the Caribbean emigres’ radical ideology and the strategies used to extend agitation from Harlem to national and international platforms, the study draws on the papers and writings of Hermina Huiswoud, Cyril Briggs, the Reverend E. Ethelred Brown, Langston Hughes, and Richard B. Moore, as well as from interviews and biographies of related contemporary figures. It also incorporates census records, FBI files, and hundreds of documents from the recently opened Russian Archive. Through a focus on Otto Huiswood, the sole African American charter member of the Communist Party, and his wife, Hermina, Turner exposes the complex developments within the socialist and communist parties on the question of race. reveal the breadth, depth, and nearly global reach of the Afro-Caribbean activists’ activities. Joyce Moore Turner is the co-editor of Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem: Collected Writings 1920-1972. W. Burghardt Turner is emeritus professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Franklin W. Knight is Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.


Click for more detail about Controlling the Silver (Illinois Poetry Series) by Lorna Goodison Controlling the Silver (Illinois Poetry Series)

by Lorna Goodison
University of Illinois Press (Oct 13, 2004)
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Poet Lorna Goodison has written a new collection of elegies and praise songs which explore the close link between history and genealogy in the Caribbean experience. Her subjects range from the economic genius of market women to the complex beauty of the natural world.


Click for more detail about Complete Poems by Claude McKay Complete Poems

by Claude McKay
University of Illinois Press (Jan 29, 2004)
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Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred published here for the first time, this collection showcases the range and dynamism of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet whose life and poetry were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest. His first poems were composed in rural Jamaican dialect and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. McKay migrated to New York, reinvigorating the standard English sonnet and helping to spark the Harlem Renaissance with poems such as "If We Must Die."Coming under scrutiny for his Bolshevist views, McKay left America in 1922 and spent twelve years traveling the world. When he returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin’s Soviet Union, his pristine "Violent Sonnets" gave way to confessional lyrics strongly informed by his newfound Catholicism. McKay eludes easy definition, which is why this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William Maxwell, is at once necessary and rewarding. Here the reader can trace the complex, transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.

If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!  

If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!  


Click for more detail about The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections from the Daybooks, 1922-1930 by Carl Van Vechten The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections from the Daybooks, 1922-1930

by Carl Van Vechten
University of Illinois Press (Sep 03, 2003)
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This generous, representative sampling from the daybooks of Carl Van Vechten, one of the most significant figures of the Harlem Renaissance, is a rich resource and major reference tool for reconstructing the culture of 1920s New York, the social milieu during Prohibition, and more. Bruce Kellner has provided copious, informative notes identifying central figures and clarifying details. Between 1922 and 1930, Van Vechten kept a daily record of his activities. Not exactly diaries, but more than appointment books, the daybooks record his daily comings and goings, as well as the alliances, drinking habits, feuds, and affairs of a wide number of luminaries of the period. They catalog tales of bootlegging, literary teas, shifting cliques of artists and writers, cabaret slumming, sexual and social peccadilloes, and a seemingly endless sequence of parties.


Click for more detail about Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power by Leonard N. Moore Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power

by Leonard N. Moore
University of Illinois Press (Jul 22, 2003)
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As the first elected black mayor of a major U.S. city, Cleveland’s Carl B. Stokes embodied the transformation of the civil rights movement from a vehicle of protest to one of black political power.

In this wide-ranging political biography, Leonard N. Moore examines the convictions and alliances that brought Stokes to power. Impelled by the problems plaguing Cleveland’s ghettos in the decades following World War II, Stokes and other Clevelanders questioned how the sit-ins and marches of the civil rights movement could correct the exclusionary zoning practices, police brutality, substandard housing, and de facto school segregation that African Americans in the country’s northern urban centers viewed as evidence of their oppression. As civil unrest in the country’s ghettos turned to violence in the 1960s, Cleveland was one of the first cities to heed the call of Malcolm X’s infamous "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech. Understanding the importance of controlling the city’s political system, Cleveland’s blacks utilized their substantial voting base to put Stokes in office in 1967. Stokes was committed to showing the country that an African American could be an effective political leader. He employed an ambitious and radically progressive agenda to clean up Cleveland’s ghettos, reform law enforcement, move public housing to middle-class neighborhoods, and jump-start black economic power. Hindered by resistance from the black middle class and the Cleveland City Council, spurned by the media and fellow politicians who deemed him a black nationalist, and unable to prove that black leadership could thwart black unrest, Stokes finished his four years in office with many of his legislative goals unfulfilled.

Focusing on Stokes and Cleveland, but attending to themes that affected many urban centers after the second great migration of African Americans to the North, Moore balances Stokes’s failures and successes to provide a thorough and engaging portrait of his life and his pioneering contributions to a distinct African American political culture that continues to shape American life.


Click for more detail about The Militant South, 1800-1861 by John Hope Franklin The Militant South, 1800-1861

by John Hope Franklin
University of Illinois Press (Mar 12, 2002)
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Identifies the factors and causes of the South’s festering propensity for aggression that contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. This title asserts that the South was dominated by militant white men who resorted to violence in the face of social, personal, or political conflict. It details the consequences of antebellum aggression.


Click for more detail about Turn Thanks: POEMS by Lorna Goodison Turn Thanks: POEMS

by Lorna Goodison
University of Illinois Press (Apr 01, 1999)
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The lyric energy, compassion, humor, and tenderness that characterize Lorna Goodison’s work are once again in evidence in "Turn Thanks", her seventh collection. Here the Jamaican poet turns to acknowledge her own ancestors and those of her craft: mother and father, aunts and uncles, Africa, William Wordsworth, Vincent Van Gogh, the Wild Woman. "Whether you will receive this letter or not I cannot tell," she writes, "Still, I intend to send it …".


Click for more detail about Mandy Oxendine by Victor Séjour Mandy Oxendine

by Victor Séjour
University of Illinois Press (Sep 01, 1997)
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In a novel rejected by a major publisher in the late nineteenth century as too shocking for its time, Charles W. Chesnutt challenges the notion that race, class, education, and gender must define where one’s "rightful" place in society should be. Both a romance and a mystery, Mandy Oxendine tells the compelling story of two fair-skinned, racially mixed lovers who choose to live on opposite sides of the color line; Tom Lowrey remains in the black community, and Mandy Oxendine chooses to pass for white. An alluring young woman, Mandy also is courted by an unscrupulous white landowner who is killed while sexually assaulting her. Critics have tended to characterize Chesnutt as being of the "Uncle Tom" school of African-American writers. Publication of Mandy Oxendine, set aside by the author and left untranscribed in an archive for years, may do much to revise that interpretation.


Click for more detail about Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston by Deborah G. Plant Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston

by Deborah G. Plant
University of Illinois Press (Oct 01, 1995)
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In a ground-breaking study of Zora Neale Hurston, Deborah Plant takes issue with current notions of Hurston as a feminist and earlier impressions of her as an intellectual lightweight who disregarded serious issues of race in American culture. Instead, Plant calls Hurston a "writer of resistance" who challenged the politics of domination both in her life and in her work.
One of the great geniuses of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston stands out as a strong voice for African American women. Her anthropological inquiries as well as her evocative prose provide today’s readers with a rich history of African American folk culture - a folk culture through which Hurston expressed her personal and political strategy of resistance and self-empowerment.
Through readings of Hurston’s fiction and autobiographical writings, Plant offers one of the first book-length discussions of Hurston’s personal philosophy of individualism and self-reliance. From a discussion of Hurston’s preacher father and influential mother, whose guiding philosophy is reflected in the title of this book, to the influence of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Plant puts into perspective the driving forces behind Hurston’s powerful prose.


Click for more detail about Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62 by Langston Hughes Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62

by Langston Hughes
University of Illinois Press (Jul 01, 1995)
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Langston Hughes is well known as a poet, playwright, novelist, social activist, communist sympathizer, and brilliant member of the Harlem Renaissance. He has been referred to as the "Dean of Black Letters" and the "poet low-rate of Harlem."
But it was as a columnist for the famous African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender that Hughes chronicled the hopes and despair of his people. For twenty years, he wrote forcefully about international race relations, Jim Crow, the South, white supremacy, imperialism and fascism, segregation in the armed forces, the Soviet Union and communism, and African-American art and culture. None of the racial hypocrisies of American life escaped his searing, ironic prose.
This is the first collection of Hughes’s nonfiction journalistic writings. For readers new to Hughes, it is an excellent introduction; for those familiar with him, it gives new insights into his poems and fiction.


Click for more detail about To Us, All Flowers Are Roses: POEMS (Illinois Poetry) by Lorna Goodison To Us, All Flowers Are Roses: POEMS (Illinois Poetry)

by Lorna Goodison
University of Illinois Press (Jun 01, 1995)
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