Black Evidence: A History and a Warning - REVIEW

by Candis Watts Smith

From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment.

In Black Evidence, political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament.

Through a curation of critical moments across four centuries, Smith invites us to review the evidence that has been obscured, distorted, and denied. She rigorously investigates the practices that turn Black witnesses into liars in the court room, Black patients into superbodies that don’t feel pain in health care settings, Black people into subhumans in scientific experiments, and Black children into superpredators. She reveals what happens when Black voices are subject to exclusion―their communities are terrorized, their memories are refuted, and their resistance is pathologized.

Written with compassion and tempered optimism, Black Evidence prescribes a cure and encourages readers to practice the skills needed to build a truly multiracial democracy: confront our past, acknowledge the damage of inequality in our present, and listen to the voices of those who experience the problems we wish to solve for an equitable future.

Candis Watts Smith is professor of political science at Duke University. She is the author or coauthor of dozens of articles and books, including Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter and Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in Americans Politics. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation. Smith is a cohost of the Democracy Works podcast, and her TEDx talk on myths about racism has been viewed over two million times. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

W.W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13: 978-1324036272

Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America - REVIEW

by Howard Bryant

A path-breaking work of biography of two American giants, Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson, whose lives would forever be altered by the Cold War, and would explosively intersect before its most notorious weapon, the House Un-American Activities Committee — from one of the best sports and culture writers working today.

Kings and Pawns is the untold story of sports and fame, Black America and the promise of integration through the Cold War lens of two transformative events. The first occurred July 18, 1949 in Washington, D.C., when a reluctant Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star who integrated the game and at the time was the most famous Black man in America, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee to discredit Paul Robeson, the legendary athlete, baritone, and actor — himself once the most famous Black man in America. The testimony would be a defining moment in Robinson’s life and contribute heavily to the destruction of Robeson’s iconic reputation in the eyes of America.

The second occurred June 12, 1956, in the midst of the last, demagogic roar of McCarthyism, when a battered, defiant Robeson – prohibited from leaving the United States – faced off in a final showdown with HUAC in the same setting Robinson appeared in seven years earlier. These two moments would epitomize the ongoing Black American conflict between patriotism and protest. On the cusp of a nascent civil rights movement, Robinson and Robeson would represent two poles of a people pitted against itself by forces that demanded loyalty without equality in return – one man testifying in conflicted service to and the other in ferocious critique of a country that would ultimately and decisively wound both.

In a time of great division, with America in the midst of a new era of retrenchment and Black athletes again chilled into silence advocating for civil rights, the story of these two titans reverberates today within and beyond Black America. From the revival of government overreach to curb civil liberties to the Cold War-era rhetoric of “the enemy within” levied against fellow citizens, Kings and Pawns is a story of a moment that remains hauntingly present.

Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including Rickey, The Heritage, Full Dissidence, and The Last Hero, a biography of Hank Aaron, which was named “One of the Ten Best Books of the Year” by Dwight Garner of The New York Times. Bryant served as guest editor of The Best American Sports Writing in 2017, and has been the sports correspondent for NPR’s Weekend Edition since 2006. He is a four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award, an Emmy Award winner, and is twice the winner of the Casey Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year. He lives in Western Massachusetts.

Mariner Books
ISBN-13: 978-0063308169

One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle over an American Ideal - REVIEW

by Nicholas Buccola

From the acclaimed author of The Fire Is Upon Us, the dramatic untold story of Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr.’s decade-long clash over the meaning of freedom—and how their conflicting visions still divide American politics

In the mid-1950s, Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the leaders of two diametrically opposed freedom movements that changed the course of American history—and still divide American politics. King mobilized civil rights activists under the banner of “freedom now,” insisting that true freedom would not be realized until all people—regardless of race—were empowered politically, economically, and socially. Goldwater rallied conservatives to the cause of “extremism in defense of liberty,” advocating radical individualism. In One Man’s Freedom, Nicholas Buccola tells the compelling story of Goldwater and King’s dramatic decade-long debate over the meaning of an all-important American ideal.

Part dual biography, part history, One Man’s Freedom traces the actions and words of Goldwater and King over a crucial and eventful decade, from their dizzying rise through 1964, which ended with Goldwater’s landslide defeat in the presidential election and King’s Nobel Peace Prize. The book chronicles why Goldwater and King, who never met in person, came to view each other as perhaps the greatest threat to freedom in America. It explains how their ideas of freedom could be so vastly different, yet both so deeply rooted in American history and their times. And it shows how their disagreement continues to shape and explain politics today, when the bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats often come down to the question of what kind of freedom Americans want—the one defined by Goldwater or by King?

Nicholas Buccola is professor of government and the Jules L. Whitehill Professor of Humanism and Ethics at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton), which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass.

Princeton University Press
ISBN-13: 978-0691230306

Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights - REVIEW

by Dylan C. Penningroth 

A prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights Movement.

The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America’s legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn’t join in. For Black people, law was a hostile, fearsome power to be avoided whenever possible. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law. Soon, ordinary African Americans, awakened by Supreme Court victories and galvanized by racial justice activists, launched the civil rights movement.

In Before the Movement, acclaimed historian Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations (like churches and businesses and activist groups), and more. By exercising these “rights of everyday use,” Penningroth demonstrates, they made Black rights seem unremarkable. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itself―the laws all of us live under today.

Penningroth’s narrative, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of his own family. Challenging accepted understandings of Black history framed by relations with white people, he puts Black people at the center of the story―their loves and anger and loneliness, their efforts to stay afloat, their mistakes and embarrassments, their fights, their ideas, their hopes and disappointments, in all their messy humanness. Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life―a vision allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”

Dylan C. Penningroth is a professor of law and history at the University of California, Berkeley. A MacArthur Prize fellow and author of The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South, he lives in Kensington, California.

Dylan Penningroth is the winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, Winner of the Beveridge Award, American Historical Association, Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize, American Historical Association, Winner of the John Philip Reid Award, American Society for Legal History, Winner of the Order of the Coif Book Award, Winner of the Charles Sydnor Award, Southern Historical Association, Winner of the Scribes Book Award, Winner of the Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historian, Winner of the Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, Winner of the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History, Winner of the James Willard Hurst Prize, Finalist for the Cundill History Prize, Shortlisted for the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History, Shortlisted for the Mark Lynton History Prize, Columbia Journalism School, and Shortlisted for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Phi Beta Kappa.

Liveright
ISBN-13: 978-1324093107

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America - REVIEW

by Patrick Phillips

Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century, was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white “night riders” launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten.

National Book Award finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth’s tragic story in vivid detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and ’80s, Phillips sheds light on the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means by which locals kept Forsyth “all white” well into the 1990s. In precise, vivid prose, Blood at the Root delivers a "vital investigation of Forsyth’s history, and of the process by which racial injustice is perpetuated in America" (Congressman John Lewis).

Patrick Phillips is an award-winning poet, translator, and professor. A Guggenheim and NEA Fellow, his poetry collection, Elegy for a Broken Machine, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Phillips teaches at Stanford University.

W.W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13: 978-0393354737

Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation - REVIEW

by Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy, Craig Borowiak

Mapping the transformative effects of America’s urban solidarity economies.

Solidarity economies, characterized by diverse practices of cooperation and mutual support, have long played pivotal but largely invisible roles in fostering shared survival and envisioning alternatives to racial capitalism globally and in the United States. This book maps the thriving existence of these cooperative networks in three differently sized American cities, highlighting their commitment to cooperation, democracy, and inclusion and demonstrating the desire—and the pressing need—to establish alternative foundations for social and economic justice.

Collectively authored by four social scientists, Solidarity Cities analyzes the deeply entrenched racial and economic divides from which cooperative networks emerge as they work to provide unmet basic needs, including food security, affordable housing, access to fair credit, and employment opportunities. Examining entities such as community gardens, credit unions, cooperatives, and other forms of economic solidarity, the authors highlight how relatively small yet vital interventions into public life can expand into broader movements that help bolster the overall well-being of their surrounding communities.

Bringing together insights from geography, political economy, and political science with mapping and spatial analysis methodologies, surveys, and in-depth interviews, Solidarity Cities illuminates the extensive footprints of solidarity economies and the roles they play in communities. The authors show how these initiatives act as bulwarks against gentrification, exploitation, and economic exclusion, helping readers see them as part of the past, present, and future of more livable and just cities.

Maliha Safri is professor of economics at Drew University. Her writing has been published in Antipode, Signs, and Environmental Policy and Governance.

Marianna Pavlovskaya is professor of geography at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center. She is coeditor of Rethinking Neoliberalism: Resisting the Disciplinary Regime.

Stephen Healy is associate professor of geography at Western Sydney University and coauthor of Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities (Minnesota, 2013).

Craig Borowiak is professor of political science at Haverford College and author of Accountability and Democracy: The Pitfalls and Promise of Popular Control.

Univ Of Minnesota Press
ISBN-13 978-1517916022

Proverb Masters: Shaping the Civil Rights Movement - REVIEW

by Raymond Summerville

In Proverb Masters: Shaping the Civil Rights Movement, author Raymond Summerville explores how proverbs and proverbial language played a significant role in the long civil rights era. Proverbs have been used throughout history to share and disseminate brief, powerful statements of truth and philosophical insight. Oftentimes, these sayings have helped unite people in struggles for social justice, serving as rallying cries for just causes. During the civil rights era, proverbs allowed leaders to craft powerful and evocative messages. These statements needed to be made implicitly, as explicit messages were often met with retaliation and even violence.

Looking at the autobiographies, biographies, speeches, diaries, letters, and critical texts of Charles W. Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Bob Dylan, Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael, and Septima Clark, the volume analyzes how these figures employed proverbs in support of social justice causes and in civil rights struggles. Summerville argues that these individuals generated enough print material embedded with proverbs and proverbial language that they should be considered proverb masters. With chapters dedicated to each figure, Summerville reveals their adept uses of this powerful linguistic tool.

Raymond Summerville is professor of English at Fayetteville State University. He has published in Proverbium, the Journal of Folklore and Education, and other publications.

University Press of Mississippi
ISBN-13 978-1496852557

Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America - REVIEW

by James Allen

“Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe-don't want to believe-that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago. These photographs bear witness to . . . an American holocaust." –John Lewis, US Congressman

The Tuskegee Institute records the lynching of 3,436 Black Americans between 1882 and 1950. Many times, a photographer was present to capture these events. Without Sanctuary preserves these harrowing, death-marked depictions, saving them so that we may recognize the terrorism unleashed on America’s African American community. Editor James Allen, an American antique collector, includes nearly 100 images of lynchings in America from his own collection, including battleground cases such as the 1911 murders of Laura and Lawrence Nelson in Okemah, Oklahoma the lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1935, and the infamous 1915 execution of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia. These images are accompanied by Allen’s own notes, as well as texts from the late US congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis, the late slavery and Reconstruction historian Leon Litwack, and writer and theater critic Hilton Als, professor at University of California in Berkeley and Columbia University. Now in its 17th printing, Without Sanctuary remains a singular testament to the camera’s ability to make us remember what we often choose to forget.

James Allen (born 1954) is an American collector best known for his vast collection of photographs of lynchings in America. Some of his collected items are now located in the Smithsonian and the High Museum of Art.

Leon Litwack (1929–2021) was a professor of American History at the University of California in Berkeley from 1964 to 2007. He specialized in the Reconstruction Era and the aftermath of slavery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His 1979 book Been in the Storm So Long won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Francis Parkman Prize and the National Book Award.

Hilton Als (born 1960) is a writer and theater critic. He holds professorial positions at the University of California in Berkeley and Columbia University, and serves as a staff writer and theater critic for the New Yorker. In 2017 he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Als has also curated several group art exhibitions including Forces in Nature at Victoria Miro Gallery and Alice Neel: Uptown at David Zwirner Gallery.

John Lewis (1940–2020) became involved in the Civil Rights movement when he was still a teenager. He was introduced to both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., and participated in the 1960 Nashville sit-ins as well as the 1961 Freedom Rides. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963 to 1966, he was one of the “Big Six” civil rights leaders who coordinated the March on Washington. He represented Georgia’s 5th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 until his death in 2020.

Twin Palms Publishers
Fifteenth Edition, 2021 (November 1, 1999)
2021 edition includes foreword by John Lewis
ISBN-13 978-0944092699

Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight - REVIEW

by Richard Frishman and B. Brian Foster

From award-winning photojournalist Richard Frishman comes a collection of photographs documenting America’s history of segregation, slavery, and institutional racism hidden in plain sight, accompanied by hard-hitting personal essays from University of Virginia professor of sociology and Black culture B. Brian Foster and with a foreword by National Book Award winner Imani Perry.

Beginning in 2018, Richard Frishman embarked on a 35,000-mile journey, crossing the United States several times, traveling from his home state of Washington to Maine, from Mississippi to Michigan, and everywhere in between. Frishman was driven by a deep concern for capturing traces of the nation’s history of segregation, slavery, and institutional racism embedded in everyday American architecture. Frishman spent the next five years capturing photographs of structures like the New Orleans Slave Exchange, old “colored entrances” at movie theaters in Seattle and Texas, formerly segregated beaches in Los Angeles, and the former site of New York City’s slave market.

As Frishman was traveling the country, his collaborator, noted sociologist Dr. B. Brian Foster, was writing about economic development, Black community life, and the blues in his home state of Mississippi. Foster adds to this collection seven essays of stirring prose and intimate storytelling. Whether reflecting on his relationship to his grandmother and her archive of family photos or chronicling his experiences working as a professor at the University of Mississippi and the University of Virginia, Foster adds layers of emotional resonance and sharp insight to the photographic collection with his essays, speaking to the shared memories, living histories, rippling beauty, and ongoing struggles of Black life in the United States.

Within this immersive collection, readers will witness and learn of histories startling, stirring, and thought-provoking: Histories of white supremacist violence and systemic racism. Histories of segregated bathrooms, beaches, churches, dining areas, doors, hospitals, hotels, waiting rooms, and water. Histories of Black aliveness and aspiration. Histories of Black migration, Black entrepreneurship, Black protest and organizing, Black singing and dancing, and Black placemaking.

This remarkable book brings home a powerful truth: these ghosts of segregation haunt us because they are very much alive. It also reveals how our surroundings bear witness to history, reminding us where we have been, where we are now, and crucially asking, Where do we go from here?

Celadon Books
ISBN-13 978-1250831682

King: A Life - REVIEW

by Jonathan Eig 

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.-and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father-as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.

Jonathan Eig is the author of six books, including four New York Times best sellers. His most recent book is King: A Life, which the Times called a "the definitive biography" of Martin Luther King Jr. and a book "worthy of its subject." Prior to that, Eig wrote Ali: A Life, which has been hailed as one of the best sports biographies of all time. Ali: A Life, won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award and was a finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize. Eig served as a senior consulting producer for the PBS series Muhammad Ali. His first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, won the Casey Award. His books have been listed among the best of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Chicago with his wife and children.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN-13 978-0374279295

The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America - REVIEW

by Carol Anderson

From the New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, an unflinching, critical new look at the Second Amendment-and how it has been engineered to deny the rights of African Americans since its inception.

In The Second, historian and award-winning, bestselling author of White Rage Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.

From the seventeenth century, when it was encoded into law that the enslaved could not own, carry, or use a firearm whatsoever, until today, with measures to expand and curtail gun ownership aimed disproportionately at the African American population, the right to bear arms has been consistently used as a weapon to keep African Americans powerless--revealing that armed or unarmed, Blackness, it would seem, is the threat that must be neutralized and punished.

Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don’t), their life--as surely as Philando Castile’s, Tamir Rice’s, Alton Sterling’s--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second. Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson’s penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.

Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1635574258

The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire - REVIEW

by Kal Raustiala

A legendary diplomat, scholar, and civil rights leader, Ralph Bunche was one of the most prominent Black Americans of the twentieth century. The first African American to obtain a political science Ph.D. from Harvard and a celebrated diplomat at the United Nations, he was once so famous he handed out the Best Picture award at the Oscars. Yet today Ralph Bunche is largely forgotten.

In The Absolutely Indispensable Man, Kal Raustiala restores Bunche to his rightful place in history. He shows that Bunche was not only a singular figure in midcentury America; he was also one of the key architects of the postwar international order. Raustiala tells the story of Bunche's dramatic life, from his early years in prewar Los Angeles to UCLA, Harvard, the State Department, and the heights of global diplomacy at the United Nations. After narrowly avoiding assassination Bunche received the Nobel Peace Prize for his ground-breaking mediation of the first Arab-Israeli conflict, catapulting him to popular fame. A central player in some of the most dramatic crises of the Cold War, he pioneered conflict management and peacekeeping at the UN. But as Raustiala argues, his most enduring achievement was his work to dismantle European empire. Bunche perceptively saw colonialism as the central issue of the 20th century and decolonization as a project of global racial justice.

From marching with Martin Luther King to advising presidents and prime ministers, Ralph Bunche shaped our world in lasting ways. This definitive biography gives him his due. It also reminds us that postwar decolonization not only fundamentally transformed world politics, but also powerfully intersected with America's own civil rights struggle.

Oxford University Press
ISBN-13: 978-0197602232

Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity - REVIEW

by Donald Yacovone

A powerful exploration of the past and present arc of America’s white supremacy—from the country’s inception and Revolutionary years to its 19th century flashpoint of civil war; to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter.

Donald Yacovone shows us the clear and damning evidence of white supremacy’s deep-seated roots in our nation’s educational system through a fascinating, in-depth examination of America’s wide assortment of texts, from primary readers to college textbooks, from popular histories to the most influential academic scholarship. Sifting through a wealth of materials from the colonial era to today, Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which this ideology has infiltrated all aspects of American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity.

Yacovone lays out the arc of America’s white supremacy from the country’s inception and Revolutionary War years to its nineteenth-century flashpoint of civil war to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter. In a stunning reappraisal, the author argues that it is the North, not the South, that bears the greater responsibility for creating the dominant strain of race theory, which has been inculcated throughout the culture and in school textbooks that restricted and repressed African Americans and other minorities, even as Northerners blamed the South for its legacy of slavery, segregation, and racial injustice.

A major assessment of how we got to where we are today, of how white supremacy has suffused every area of American learning, from literature and science to religion, medicine, and law, and why this kind of thinking has so insidiously endured for more than three centuries.

Pantheon
ISBN-13 978-0593316634

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners - REVIEW

by Margaret A. Burnham

If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn’t lynching the law?

In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period and through to today.

Drawing on an extensive database, collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, she reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been heard.

W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13 978-0393867855

Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas - REVIEW

by Terry Anne Scott

In Lynching and Leisure, Terry Anne Scott examines how white Texans transformed lynching from a largely clandestine strategy of extralegal punishment into a form of racialized recreation in which crowd involvement was integral to the mode and methods of the violence. Scott powerfully documents how lynchings came to function not only as tools for debasing the status of Black people but also as highly anticipated occasions for entertainment, making memories with friends and neighbors, and reifying whiteness. In focusing on the sense of pleasure and normality that prevailed among the white spectatorship, this comprehensive study of Texas lynchings sheds new light on the practice understood as one of the chief strategies of racial domination in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South.

Terry Anne Scott is associate professor of American history and chair of the History Department at Hood College. She is the editor of Seattle Sports: Play, Identity, and Pursuit in the Emerald City.

Winner, 2022 Ottis Lock Endowment “Best Book” Award from the East Texas Historical Association

University of Arkansas Press
ISBN-13 978-1682262184

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume V: The Struggle to Pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act, 1955–1958 - REVIEW

Edited by Denton L. Watson

Volume V of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. records the successful effort to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act: the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875.

Prior to the US Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the NAACP had faced an impenetrable wall of opposition from southerners in Congress. Basing their assertions on the court’s 1896 “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, legislators from the South maintained that their Jim Crow system was nondiscriminatory and thus constitutional. In their view, further civil rights laws were unnecessary. In ruling that legally mandated segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, the Brown decision demolished the southerners’ argument. Mitchell then launched the decisive stage of the struggle to pass modern civil rights laws.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was the first comprehensive lobbying campaign by an organization dedicated to that purpose since Reconstruction. Coming on the heels of the Brown decision, the 1957 law was a turning point in the struggle to accord Black citizens full equality under the Constitution. The act’s passage, however, was nearly derailed in the Senate by southern opposition and Senator Strom Thurmond’s record-setting filibuster, which lasted more than twenty-four hours. Congress later weakened several provisions of the act but—crucially—it broke a psychological barrier to the legislative enactment of such measures.

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. is a detailed record of the NAACP leader’s success in bringing the legislative branch together with the judicial and executive branches to provide civil rights protections during the twentieth century.

Ohio University Press
ISBN-13 978-0821424599

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume VI: The Struggle to Pass the 1960 Civil Rights Act, 1959–1960 - REVIEW

Edited by Denton L. Watson

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 aimed to close loopholes in its 1957 predecessor that had allowed continued voter disenfranchisement for African Americans and for Mexicans in Texas.

In early 1959, the newly seated Eighty-Sixth Congress had four major civil rights bills under consideration. Eventually consolidated into the 1960 Civil Rights Act, their purpose was to correct the weaknesses in the 1957 law. Mitchell’s papers from 1959 to 1960 show the extent to which congressional resistance to the passage of meaningful civil rights laws contributed to the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and to subsequent demonstrations. The papers reveal how the repercussions of these events affected the NAACP’s work in Washington and how, despite their dislike of demonstrations, NAACP officials used them to intensify the civil rights struggle.

Among the act’s seven titles were provisions authorizing federal inspection of local voter registration rolls and penalties for anyone attempting to interfere with voters on the basis of race or color. The law extended the powers of the US Commission on Civil Rights and broadened the legal definition of the verb to vote to encompass all elements of the process: registering, casting a ballot, and properly counting that ballot. Ultimately, Mitchell considered the 1960 act unsuccessful because Congress had failed to include key amendments that would have further strengthened the 1957 act. In the House, representatives used parliamentary tactics to stall employment protections, school desegregation, poll-tax elimination, and other meaningful civil rights reforms. The fight would continue.

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. series is a detailed record of the NAACP leader’s success in bringing the legislative branch together with the judicial and executive branches to provide civil rights protections during the twentieth century.

Ohio University Press
ISBN-13 978-0821424605

Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground - REVIEW

During the height of the Cold War, passionate idealists across the US and Africa came together to fight for Black self-determination and the antiracist remaking of society. Beginning with the 1957 Ghanaian independence celebration, the optimism and challenges of African independence leaders were publicized to African Americans through community-based newspapers and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Inspired by African independence―and frustrated with the slow pace of civil rights reforms in the US―a new generation of Black Power activists embarked on nonviolent direct action campaigns and built alternative institutions designed as spaces of freedom from racial subjugation.

Featuring interviews with activists, extensive archival research, and media analysis, Robin Hayes reveals how Black Power and African independence activists created a diaspora underground, characterized by collaboration and reciprocal empowerment. Together, they redefined racial discrimination as an international human rights issue requiring education, sustained collective action, and global solidarity―laying the groundwork for future transnational racial justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter.

Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground
by Robin J. Hayes

University of Washington Press
ISBN: 978-0295749075

Tacit Racism - REVIEW

 
Every time we interact with another human being, we unconsciously draw on a set of expectations to guide us through the encounter. What many of us in the United States-especially White people-do not recognize is that centuries of institutional racism have inescapably molded those expectations into taken-for-granted practices that reproduce the biases in our society. These practices can shape everything from how we greet our neighbors to whether we take a second look at a resume. That is tacit racism, and it is one of the most pernicious threats to our nation.

In Tacit Racism, Anne Warfield Rawls and Waverly Duck draw on real-world examples to illustrate the many ways in which racism is coded into the everyday social expectations of Americans, in what they call Interaction Orders of Race. They argue that these interactions can produce racial inequality, whether the people involved are aware of it or not, and that by overlooking tacit racism in favor of the fiction of a “color-blind” nation, we are harming not only our society’s most disadvantaged-but endangering society itself. Ultimately, by exposing this legacy of racism in ordinary social interactions, Rawls and Duck hope to stop us from merely pretending we are a democratic society and show us how we can truly become one.

Anne Warfield Rawls is professor of sociology at Bentley University, research professor of socio-informatics at the University of Siegen, German, and senior fellow with the Yale Urban Ethnography Project. She is the author of Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim’s “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life” and the editor of Harold Garfinkle’s work Towards a Sociological Theory of Information; Seeing Sociologically; and Parsons’ Primer.

Waverly Duck is associate professor of sociology and director of urban studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Tacit Racism
The University of Chicago Press, 289 pages.
ISBN: 978-0-226-70369-5

Race to the Bottom - How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics - REVIEW

Race to the Bottom by LaFleur Stephen-Dougan

   African American voters are a key demographic to the modern Democratic base, and conventional wisdom has it that there is political cost to racialized “dog whistles,” especially for Democratic candidates. However, politicians from both parties and from all racial backgrounds continually appeal to negative racial attitudes for political gain.

   Challenging what we think we know about race and politics, LaFleur Stephen-Dougan argues that candidates across the racial and political spectrum engage in “racial distancing,” or using negative racial appeals to communicate to racially moderate and conservative whites – the overwhelming majority of white – that they will not disrupt the racial status quo.  Race to the Bottom closely examines empirical data on racialized partisan stereotypes to show that engaging in racial distancing through political platforms that do not address the needs of nonwhite communities and charged rhetoric that targets African Americans, immigrants, and others can be politically advantageous. Radicalized communication persists as a well-worn campaign strategy because it has real electoral value for both white and black politicians seeking to broaden their coalitions. Stephen-Dougan reveals that claims of racial progress have been overstated as out politicians are incentivized to employ racial prejudices at the expense of the most marginalized in our society.

   “Stephen-Dougan lays out a novel theoretical framework for understanding how candidates and politicians might strategically use racial messaging to gain the support of white voters. Departing from earlier research on racial priming, which examined the use of racial messaging primarily by white Republican candidates, Stephen-Dougan argues that the electoral incentives that exist for candidates to engage in racially inflammatory messaging are so great that even candidates of color running in these districts often find racially derogatory campaign appeals effective. This title makes an important contribution to the study of American political behavior and race and ethnic politics.” Ismail K. White, Duke University

LaFleur

   Stephen-Dougan is assistant professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.