More than the story of one man's case, this book tells the story of entire generations of people marked as "mixed race" in America amid slavery and its aftermath, and being officially denied their multicultural identity and personal rights as a result. Contrary to popular misconceptions, Plessy v. Ferguson was not a simple case of black vs. white separation, but rather a challenging and complex protest for U.S. law to fully accept mixed ancestry and multiculturalism. This book focuses on the long struggle for individual identity and multicultural recognition amid the dehumanizing and depersonalizing forces of American Negro slavery-and the Anglo-American white supremacy that drove it. The book takes students and general readers through the extended gestation period that gave birth to one of the most oft-mentioned but widely misunderstood landmark law will cases in U.S. history. It provides a chronology, brief biographies of key figures, primary documents, an annotated bibliography, and an index all of which provide easy reading and quick reference. Modern readers will find the direct connections between Plessy's story and contemporary racial currents in America intriguing.

The essays gathered in this volume deal with representations of blackness and the performance of black identities in various historically determined societal contexts of the Americas, Benin, and Spain. The book is grounded on the premise that representations constitute, in part, the world in which we live. An important aspect of the struggles of dominated people consists in more or less overtly challenging, manipulating, combatting, negating, and sometimes inverting representations of themselves reproduced in the dominant discourse of their national society. The contributors approach various forms of blackness within the fluctuation of political, economic, and social processes embedded in particular time/space contexts, which are constituted within local, regional, national, and transnational dimensions. Identities, whatever they may be, cannot be defined once and for all in fixed or essentialist terms as if they were unchanging or frozen in time and space. If, as this book proposes, identities are fluid, it is because they are constantly enacted and reenacted, performed anew within specific situations, and within changing socioeconomic and political contexts that provide sites for their negotiations and renegotiations, definitions and redefinitions. Thus, the book approaches black identities as performances.

Historical accounts of racial discrimination in transportation have focused until now on trains, buses, and streetcars and their respective depots, terminals, stops, and other public accommodations. It is essential to add airplanes and airports to this narrative, says Anke Ortlepp. Air travel stands at the center of the twentieth century's transportation revolution, and airports embodied the rapidly mobilizing, increasingly prosperous, and cosmopolitan character of the postwar United States. When segregationists inscribed local definitions of whiteness and blackness onto sites of interstate and even international transit, they not only brought the incongruities of racial separation into sharp relief but also obligated the federal government to intervene. Ortlepp looks at African American passengers; civil rights organizations; the federal government and judiciary; and airport planners, architects, and managers as actors in shaping aviation's legal, cultural, and built environments. She relates the struggles of black travelers-to enjoy the same freedoms on the airport grounds that they enjoyed in the aircraft cabin-in the context of larger shifts in the postwar social, economic, and political order. Jim Crow terminals, Ortlepp shows us, were both spatial expressions of sweeping change and sites of confrontation over the re-negotiation of racial identities. Hence, this new study situates itself in the scholarly debate over the multifaceted entanglements of "race" and "space."

The story of white flight and the neglect of black urban neighborhoods has been well told by urban historians in recent decades. Yet much of this scholarship has downplayed black agency and tended to portray African Americans as victims of structural forces beyond their control. In this history of Cleveland's black middle class, Todd Michney uncovers the creative ways that a nascent community established footholds in areas outside the overcrowded, inner-city neighborhoods to which most African Americans were consigned. In asserting their right to these outer-city spaces, African Americans appealed to city officials, allied with politically progressive whites, and relied upon both black and white developers and real estate agents to expand these ""surrogate suburbs"" and maintain their livability until the bona fide suburbs became more accessible. By tracking the trajectories of those who, in spite of racism, were able to succeed, Michney offers a valuable counterweight to histories that have focused on racial conflict and black poverty and tells the neglected story of the black middle class in America's cities prior to the 1960s.

In this widely acclaimed bestseller, the author of Small Victories tackles another explosive issue, this time race in America, by taking an in-depth look at the pastor of a thriving black church in one of New York's most desperate slums.

The lives of African American gay men have greatly gone unnoticed in the American consciousness. Despite the fact that Black gay men have made great contributions to our global society. For example, James Baldwin served as a literature giant. Bayard Rustin was one of the key organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. Alphonso David is the first person of color to lead the HRC (Human Rights Campaign). The purpose of this book is to discuss the narratives of Black gay men. There is no doubt that American history has done a nonexistent job of portraying the lives of these Black gay men. Most of these lives have been relegated to the background of society. This book purposes to change that narrative by having 10 to 12 gentlemen discuss their background and how it brought them to where they are in life now. The goal of this book is to also discuss the victory for each of the authors.