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This book explores the citizenship experienced by African-Americans in St. Louis County across the last century by examining patterns of municipal incorporation and annexation (much of it in service of racial segregation), the starkly uneven provision of local services (schools, water and sewers, public safety), local approaches to urban renewal (which pointedly “blighted” and relocated African-American neighborhoods), and the potent combination of racial transition, fiscal austerity, and predatory policing that led to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson in August 2014.

In 1983, black Chicagoans elected Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor. In the process, they overthrew the white Democratic machine and its regime of “plantation politics.” This book details the long-term development of black Chicago’s political culture, beginning in the 1930s, that both made a political insurrection possible in the right context, and informed Mayor Washington’s liberal, interracial, democratic vision of urban governance. Building upon recent studies of the “Long Civil Rights Movement,” which focus largely on a black radical tradition, this book recovers the history of a long tradition of black liberalism at the ground level. Men and women, largely unsung, made history by engaging with – rather than rejecting – the institutions and ambitions of urban life, and by connecting their individual aspirations to the collective interests of the race. They maintained popular critiques of overlapping systems of race, class, and gender inequality and developed local crucibles of black power that made pragmatic reform possible and set the stage for Washington’s victory and – in surprising ways – even the ascendance of Barack and Michelle Obama. The tragedies of incomplete and uneven racial progress are undeniable. Yet, in struggles for decent housing, good jobs, and political power over a half a century people worked to overcome racial segregation and inequality in everyday life. Consequently, this study shows that the image of the Second Great Migration as an inexorably tragic event is no longer tenable, while it also integrates the story of black urban politics into the deeply ambiguous history of American liberalism.

This book is about three generations of African American activists--the ministers, professionals, labor leaders, club women and striving entrepreneurs-- who engaged in political struggles, constituted themselves as political actors, and made race the central dividing line in urban politics. It is a history of Chicago politics during a period of rapid industrialization, mass immigration, and the rise of the political machine. It is the story of northern black activists who, in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, grew angry at Republicans and distrusted Democrats. They were a tiny but surprisingly influential force. While their southern counterparts built communities bounded by disfranchisement and racial terror, African Americans in northern cities sent representatives to state legislatures and county boards, won positions in municipal agencies, and gained influence in urban politics. Their agendas were guided by the dynamic social conditions of the industrializing north and the rapidly changing spatial organization of American cities. They were neither the bland voices of racial uplift nor pliant puppets of Republican machines. They were outspoken, exacting, and pragmatic politicians who aimed to use electoral politics as a tool in the struggle for racial equality. Their history highlights the revolutionary potential and the tragic limits of American democracy.

In 1991 in lower Manhattan, a team of construction workers made an astonishing discovery. Just two blocks from City Hall, under twenty feet of asphalt, concrete, and rubble, lay the remains of an eighteenth-century “Negro Burial Ground.” Closed in 1790 and covered over by roads and buildings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the site turned out to be the largest such find in North America, containing the remains of as many as 20,000 African Americans. The graves revealed to New Yorkers and the nation an aspect of American history long hidden: the vast number of enslaved blacks who labored to create our nation's largest city. This book lays bare this history of African Americans in New York City, starting with the arrival of the first slaves in 1626, moving through the turbulent years before emancipation in 1827, and culminating in one of the most terrifying displays of racism in U.S. history, the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Drawing on extensive travel accounts, autobiographies, newspapers, literature, and organizational records, the book extends beyond prior studies of racial discrimination by tracing the undeniable impact of African Americans on class, politics, and community formation and by offering vivid portraits of the lives and aspirations of countless black New Yorkers.

On Melbenan Drive just west of Atlanta, sunlight falls onto a long row of well-kept lawns. Two dozen homes line the street; behind them wooden decks and living-room windows open onto vast woodland properties. Residents returning from their jobs steer SUVs into long driveways and emerge from their automobiles. They walk to the front doors of their houses past sculptured bushes and flowers in bloom. For most people, this cozy image of suburbia does not immediately evoke images of African Americans. But as this work demonstrates, the suburbs have provided a home to black residents in increasing numbers for the past hundred years—in the last two decades alone, the numbers have nearly doubled to just under twelve million. This book begins a hundred years ago, painting an austere portrait of the conditions that early black residents found in isolated, poor suburbs. The author insists, however, that they moved there by choice, withstanding racism and poverty through efforts to shape the landscape to their own needs. Turning then to the 1950s, he illuminates key differences between black suburbanization in the North and South. The author considers how African Americans in the South bargained for separate areas where they could develop their own neighborhoods, while many of their northern counterparts transgressed racial boundaries, settling in historically white communities. Ultimately, he explores how the civil rights movement emboldened black families to purchase homes in the suburbs with increased vigor, and how the passage of civil rights legislation helped pave the way for today's black middle class.

Acts of suicide by enslaved people carried significant cultural, legal, and political implications in the emerging slave societies of British America and, later, the United States. This study a wide range of evidence from ship logs and surgeon's journals, legal and legislative records, newspapers, periodicals, novels, and plays, abolitionist print and slave narratives in order to consider the intimate circumstances, cultural meanings, and political consequences of enslaved peoples' acts of self-destruction in the context of early American slavery. Suicide reflected the struggles between enslaved men and women and their traders and owners; self-destruction by enslaved people was an ongoing aspect of the culture of colonization that shaped understandings of race and gender in early America. In literary and popular culture, representations of slave suicide were vehicles for considering the character of enslaved people and reflecting on the imperial and national implications of Anglo-American slavery. Acts of suicide by slaves also highlighted tensions in understandings of property and personhood that were fundamental to the legalities and commerce of slavery. Whether or not they intended it, slaves' self-inflicted deaths shaped criticisms of slavery: when the earliest abolitionist literature emerged in the late eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic, it used occasions and images of slave suicide to denounce the institution. In short, suicide was central to the history and culture of slavery and anti-slavery efforts in early British America and, later, the United States.

While white residents of antebellum Boston and New Haven forcefully opposed the education of black residents, their counterparts in slaveholding Baltimore did little to resist the establishment of African American schools. This book argues that such discrepancies suggest that white opposition to black education was not a foregone conclusion. Through the comparative lenses of these three cities, the book shows why opposition erupted where it did across the United States during the same period that gave rise to public education. As common schooling emerged in the 1830s, providing white children of all classes and ethnicities with the opportunity to become full-fledged citizens, it redefined citizenship as synonymous with whiteness. This link between school and American identity, the book insists, increased white hostility to black education at the same time that it spurred African Americans to demand public schooling as a means of securing status as full and equal members of society. Shedding new light on the efforts of black Americans to learn independently in the face of white attempts to withhold opportunity, this book narrates a previously untold chapter in the thorny history of America's educational inequality.

In 1956 Harry Belafonte’s Calypso became the first LP to sell more than a million copies. For a few fleeting months, calypso music was the top-selling genre in the US—it even threatened to supplant rock and roll. Stolen Time provides a vivid cultural history of this moment and outlines a new framework—black fad performance—for understanding race, performance, and mass culture in the twentieth century United States. Vogel situates the calypso craze within a cycle of cultural appropriation, including the ragtime craze of 1890s and the Negro vogue of the 1920s, that encapsulates the culture of the Jim Crow era. He follows the fad as it moves defiantly away from any attempt at authenticity and shamelessly embraces calypso kitsch. Although white calypso performers were indeed complicit in a kind of imperialist theft of Trinidadian music and dance, Vogel argues, black calypso craze performers enacted a different, and subtly subversive, kind of theft. They appropriated not Caribbean culture itself, but the US version of it—and in so doing, they mocked American notions of racial authenticity. From musical recordings, nightclub acts, and television broadcasts to Broadway musicals, film, and modern dance, he shows how performers seized the ephemeral opportunities of the fad to comment on black cultural history and even question the meaning of race itself.

What accounts for the persistence of the figure of the black criminal in popular culture created by African Americans? Unearthing the history of art that has often seemed at odds with the politics of civil rights and racial advancement, this book explores the rationale behind this tradition of criminal self-representation from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary gangsta culture. The author takes a broad view, examining the way the criminal appears within and moves among literary, musical, and visual arts. He traces the legacy of badness in Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes' detective fiction and in Claude McKay, Julian Mayfield, and Donald Goines' urban experience writing, and also examines criminals in popular songs ranging from Peetie Wheatstraw's gangster blues to gangsta rap. Turning to the screen, the underworld films of Oscar Micheaux and Ralph Cooper, the 1970s blaxploitation cycle, and the 1990s hood movie come under the author's microscope as well. Ultimately, the book concludes that this tradition has been a misunderstood aspect of African American civic life and that, rather than undermining black culture, it forms a rich and enduring response to being outcast in America.

A World More Concrete argues that Americans, immigrants, and even indigenous people, between the 1890s and the 1960s, made tremendous investments in racial apartheid, largely in an effort to govern growing cities and to unleash the value of land as real estate. Through a focus on South Florida, the book illustrates how entrepreneurs used land and debates over property rights to negotiate the workings of Jim Crow segregation. Over the course of several decades, property ownership became an important feature in the development of cities and suburbs, in the articulation of civil rights reform, and in the general inefficacy of civil rights activism on matters of residential segregation and black poverty. A World More Concrete contends, in fact, that as a result of the privileged legal and social position granted to property ownership in the United States, Jim Crow’s culture became America’s culture – politically, economically, and at the level of the built environment.