Freedom in White and Black


Book Description

A gripping true account of African slaves and white slavers whose fates are seemingly reversed, shedding fascinating light on the early development of the nations of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Australia, and on the role of former slaves in combatting the illegal trade.




Family of Freedom


Book Description

Barack Obama is the first African American President, but the history of African Americans in the White House long predates him. The building was built by slaves, and African Americans have worked in it ever since, from servants to advisors. In charting the history of African Americans in the White House, Kenneth T. Walsh illuminates the trajectory of racial progress in the US. He looks at Abraham Lincoln and his black seamstress and valet, debates between President Johnson and Martin Luther King over civil rights, and the role of black staff members under Nixon and Reagan. Family of Freedom gives a unique view of US history as seen through the experiences of African Americans in the White House.




White Freedom


Book Description

The racist legacy behind the Western idea of freedom The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of liberty, is also a nation built on African slavery, Native American genocide, and systematic racial discrimination. White Freedom traces the complex relationship between freedom and race from the eighteenth century to today, revealing how being free has meant being white. Tyler Stovall explores the intertwined histories of racism and freedom in France and the United States, the two leading nations that have claimed liberty as the heart of their national identities. He explores how French and American thinkers defined freedom in racial terms and conceived of liberty as an aspect and privilege of whiteness. He discusses how the Statue of Liberty—a gift from France to the United States and perhaps the most famous symbol of freedom on Earth—promised both freedom and whiteness to European immigrants. Taking readers from the Age of Revolution to today, Stovall challenges the notion that racism is somehow a paradox or contradiction within the democratic tradition, demonstrating how white identity is intrinsic to Western ideas about liberty. Throughout the history of modern Western liberal democracy, freedom has long been white freedom. A major work of scholarship that is certain to draw a wide readership and transform contemporary debates, White Freedom provides vital new perspectives on the inherent racism behind our most cherished beliefs about freedom, liberty, and human rights.




Freedom Farmers


Book Description

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.




Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace


Book Description

In Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace, Yasuhiro Katagiri offers the first scholarly work to illuminate an important but largely unstudied aspect of U.S. civil rights history -- the collaborative and mutually beneficial relationship between professional anti-Communists in the North and segregationist politicians in the South. In 1954, the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Soon after -- while the political demise of U.S. senator Joseph R. McCarthy unfolded -- northern anti-Communists looked to the South as a promising new territory in which they could expand their support base and continue their cause. Southern segregationists embraced the assistance, and the methods, of these Yankee collaborators, and utilized the "northern messiahs" in executing a massive resistance to the Supreme Court's desegregation decrees and the civil rights movement in general. Southern white leadership framed black southerners' crusades for social justice and human dignity as a foreign scheme directed by nefarious outside agitators, "race-mixers," and, worse, outright subversives and card-carrying Communists. Based on years of extensive archival research, Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace explains how a southern version of McCarthyism became part of the opposition to the civil rights movement in the South, an analysis that leads us to a deeper understanding and appreciation for what the freedom movement -- and those who struggled for equality -- fought to overcome.




More Than Freedom


Book Description

A major new account of the Northern movement to establish African Americans as full citizens before, during, and after the Civil War In More Than Freedom, award-winning historian Stephen Kantrowitz offers a bold rethinking of the Civil War era. Kantrowitz show how the fight to abolish slavery was always part of a much broader campaign by African Americans to claim full citizenship and to remake the white republic into a place where they could belong. More Than Freedom chronicles this epic struggle through the lives of black and white abolitionists in and around Boston, including Frederick Douglass, Senator Charles Sumner, and lesser known but equally important figures. Their bold actions helped bring about the Civil War, set the stage for Reconstruction, and left the nation forever altered.




The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami


Book Description

Offering new insights into Florida's position within the cultural legacy of the South, The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami explores the long fight for civil rights in one of the country's most popular tourist destinations. Chanelle N. Rose examines how the sustained tourism and rapid demographic changes that characterized Miami for much of the twentieth century undermined constructions of blackness and whiteness that remained more firmly entrenched in other parts of the South. The convergence of cultural practices in Miami from the American South and North, the Caribbean, and Latin America created a border community that never fit comfortably within the paradigm of the Deep South experience. As white civic elites scrambled to secure the city's burgeoning reputation as the "Gateway to the Americas," an influx of Spanish-speaking migrants and tourists had a transformative effect on conventional notions of blackness. Business owners and city boosters resisted arbitrary racial distinctions and even permitted dark-skinned Latinos access to public accommodations that were otherwise off limits to nonwhites in the South. At the same time, civil-rights activists waged a fierce battle against the antiblack discrimination and violence that lay beneath the public image of Miami as a place relatively tolerant of racial diversity. In its exploration of regional distinctions, transnational forces, and the effect of both on the civil rights battle, The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami complicates the black/white binary and offers a new way of understanding the complexity of racial traditions and white supremacy in southern metropolises like Miami.




Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery


Book Description

Prior to the abolition of slavery, thousands of African-descended people in the Americas lived in freedom. Their efforts to navigate daily life and negotiate the boundaries of racial difference challenged the foundations of white authority--and linked the Americas together. In Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery John Garrison Marks examines how these individuals built lives in freedom for themselves and their families in two of the Atlantic World's most important urban centers: Cartagena, along the Caribbean coast of modern-day Colombia, and Charleston, in the lowcountry of North America's Atlantic coast. Marks reveals how skills, knowledge, reputation, and personal relationships helped free people of color improve their fortunes and achieve social distinction in ways that undermined whites' claims to racial superiority. Built upon research conducted on three continents, this book takes a comparative approach to understanding the contours of black freedom in the Americas. It reveals in new detail the creative and persistent attempts of free black people to improve their lives and that of their families. It examines how various paths to freedom, responses to the Haitian Revolution, opportunities to engage in skilled labor, involvement with social institutions, and the role of the church all helped shape the lived experience of free people of color in the Atlantic World. As free people of color worked to improve their individual circumstances, staking claims to rights, privileges, and distinctions not typically afforded to those of African descent, they engaged with white elites and state authorities in ways that challenged prevailing racial attitudes. While whites across the Americas shared common doubts about the ability of African-descended people to survive in freedom or contribute meaningfully to society, free black people in Cartagena, Charleston, and beyond conducted themselves in ways that exposed cracks in the foundations of American racial hierarchies. Their actions represented early contributions to the long fight for recognition, civil rights, and racial justice that continues today.




Freedom's Coming


Book Description

In a sweeping analysis of religion in the post-Civil War and twentieth-century South, Freedom's Coming puts race and culture at the center, describing southern Protestant cultures as both priestly and prophetic: as southern formal theology sanctified dominant political and social hierarchies, evangelical belief and practice subtly undermined them. The seeds of subversion, Paul Harvey argues, were embedded in the passionate individualism, exuberant expressive forms, and profound faith of believers in the region. Harvey explains how black and white religious folk within and outside of mainstream religious groups formed a southern "evangelical counterculture" of Christian interracialism that challenged the theologically grounded racism pervasive among white southerners and ultimately helped to end Jim Crow in the South. Moving from the folk theology of segregation to the women who organized the Montgomery bus boycott, from the hymn-inspired freedom songs of the 1960s to the influence of black Pentecostal preachers on Elvis Presley, Harvey deploys cultural history in fresh and innovative ways and fills a decades-old need for a comprehensive history of Protestant religion and its relationship to the central question of race in the South for the postbellum and twentieth-century period.




Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace


Book Description

In Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace, Yasuhiro Katagiri offers the first scholarly work to illuminate an important but largely unstudied aspect of U.S. civil rights history -- the collaborative and mutually beneficial relationship between professional anti-Communists in the North and segregationist politicians in the South. In 1954, the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Soon after -- while the political demise of U.S. senator Joseph R. McCarthy unfolded -- northern anti-Communists looked to the South as a promising new territory in which they could expand their support base and continue their cause. Southern segregationists embraced the assistance, and the methods, of these Yankee collaborators, and utilized the "northern messiahs" in executing a massive resistance to the Supreme Court's desegregation decrees and the civil rights movement in general. Southern white leadership framed black southerners' crusades for social justice and human dignity as a foreign scheme directed by nefarious outside agitators, "race-mixers," and, worse, outright subversives and card-carrying Communists. Based on years of extensive archival research, Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace explains how a southern version of McCarthyism became part of the opposition to the civil rights movement in the South, an analysis that leads us to a deeper understanding and appreciation for what the freedom movement -- and those who struggled for equality -- fought to overcome.