"Wilder explores cultural expression with and through African societies in New York City. . . . He follows them from their origin, through their heyday, to their decline as capitalist culture overwhelmed the voluntary tradition."
--"Book News"

"In the historiography on blacks in the colonial and antebellum periods, Craig Steven Wilder's "In the Company of Black Men" stands out as one of the finest works of scholarship in the last decade."--"Journal of American Ethnic History

From the subaltern assemblies of the enslaved in colonial New York City to the benevolent New York African Society of the early national era to the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood in twentieth century Harlem, voluntary associations have been a fixture of African-American communities.

In the Company of Black Men examines New York City over three centuries to show that enslaved Africans provided the institutional foundation upon which African-American religious, political, and social culture could flourish. Arguing that the universality of the voluntary tradition in African-American communities has its basis in collectivism--a behavioral and rhetorical tendency to privilege the group over the individual--it explores the institutions that arose as enslaved Africans exploited the potential for group action and mass resistance.

Craig Steven Wilder's research is particularly exciting in its assertion that Africans entered the Americas equipped with intellectual traditions and sociological models that facilitated a communitarian response to oppression. Presenting a dramatic shift from previous work which has viewed African-American male associations as derivative and imitative of white malecounterparts, In the Company of Black Men provides a ground-breaking template for investigating antebellum black institutions.

As the Preface states, this book is a result of a research project for the History Department of the University of the West Indies. It is a work which sought to examine the way in which the slave policy of the British government was implemented in a new slave colony. Faced with recalcitrance on the part of the older West Indian colonies, the Colonial Office did not accord Trinidad an independent legislature because it felt it could more easily implement its slave policy. Trinidad proved to be no more compliant than the other colonies, and logistically was not easy to supervise. No study has previously been done of the slave process in Trinidad. A statistical analysis of the registration was undertaken by A. Meredith John in 1988. The present study is important because it has focussed on an area that needed to be examined, and one which illustrates that one cannot generalise on the West Indies. It shows how easily a policy can fail, if administrators are not in sync - as those in London were not during this seminal period. The baneful effects of the British experiments extended to persons like the free coloured and black people, who were on the periphery of the system, but who were materially affected by it. This book is significant because it fills a gap in knowledge about an important aspect of the island's history. It also affords an opportunity to look at the attempt to make changes in a society that, for the most part, was not English. As such it stands as a warning of the need to understand the cultures of those for whom systems are devised before they are imposed.

The triple crown of Oscars awarded to Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, and Sidney Poitier on a single evening in 2002 seemed to mark a turning point for African Americans in cinema. Certainly it was hyped as such by the media, eager to overlook the nuances of this sudden embrace. In this new study, author David Leonard uses this event as a jumping-off point from which to discuss the current state of African-American cinema and the various genres that currently compose it. Looking at such recent films as Love and Basketball, Antwone Fisher, Training Day, and the two Barbershop films--all of which were directed by black artists, and most of which starred and were written by blacks as well--Leonard examines the issues of representation and opportunity in contemporary cinema. In many cases, these films-which walk a line between confronting racial stereotypes and trafficking in them-made a great deal of money while hardly playing to white audiences at all. By examining the ways in which they address the American Dream, racial progress, racial difference, blackness, whiteness, class, capitalism and a host of other issues, Leonard shows that while certainly there are differences between the grotesque images of years past and those that define today's era, the consistency of images across genre and time reflects the lasting power of racism, as well as the black community's response to it.

Analysing the transformation in beliefs and practices relating to black beauty in the 1960s and pre-Civil Rights Movement and later black beauty pageants, Ain't I A Beauty Queen? goes into beauty parlours, late-night political meetings, and college campus organisations to study how black women were symbols and participants in the reshaping of black racial identity.

Racial and gender inequities persist among college students, despite ongoing efforts to combat them. Students of color face alienation, stereotyping, low expectations, and lingering racism even as they actively engage in the academic and social worlds of college life. "The Unchosen Me" examines the experiences of African American collegiate women and the identity-related pressures they encounter both on and off campus.

Rachelle Winkle-Wagner finds that the predominantly white college environment often denies African American students the chance to determine their own sense of self. Even the very programs and policies developed to promote racial equality may effectively impose "unchosen" identities on underrepresented students. She offers clear evidence of this interactive process, showing how race, gender, and identity are created through interactions among one's self, others, and society.

At the heart of this book are the voices of women who struggle to define and maintain their identities during college. In a unique series of focus groups called "sister circles," these women could speak freely and openly about the pressures and tensions they faced in school. "The Unchosen Me" is a rich examination of the underrepresented student experience, offering a new approach to studying identity, race, and gender in higher education.

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line. Du Bois's prophetic statement, made at the beginning of the century, is as true today at the dawn of the 21st century. Presenting fresh, contemporary perspectives on a centuries-old problem, the contributors to this volume, including top scholars in sociology and political science, show that race-politics remains a part of the new millennium despite past efforts to erase discriminatory practices. From an initial reconsideration of the DuBois-Washington debate to Derrick Bell's essay on the pitfalls of doing good, the book illustrates that the debate about race remains a firm part of our social fabric, begging for a solution to change old and new feelings about race in the United States.

Grappling with enduring issues of race and identifying new racial realities, the volume examines the white backlash to affirmative action, the organizational structure of affirmative action, the impact of social networks on occupational mobility, upward mobility and minority neighborhoods, and inner-city entrepreneurship. America's changing configuration to a multi-ethnic, multi-racial population is considered in a chapter speculating on the impact for African Americans. In conclusion, the book suggests ways to take positive action.

Reed argues that DuBois is not best seen as the "premier black intellectual", but rather as a member of a cohort that included other progressive and radical American voices, black and white, including those of Walter Lippman, Randolph Bourne, and Herbert Crowley. On a more abstract level, Reed argues that the best way to analyse Afro-American thought is to place it within the intellectual currents of American history, rather than isolate it from those currents.

A unique reference work providing information and resources on the main issues concerning the education of African Americans over the past two decades. From 1954 to the present, from preschool programs like Headstart to historically black colleges and universities, African American Education: A Reference Handbook explores the black educational experience. Statistical analysis and anecdotal evidence, along with interviews with leading black educators, help readers understand the African American perspective on such controversial issues as testing, curriculum choice, institutional approaches, affirmative action, and the effects of desegregation. Readers will also discover how the striking incompatibility between early informal education experiences and later formal education results in a dichotomy that sets African Americans apart from other groups. A detailed chronology charting benchmarks in African American education from 1619-2000 Discussions of relevant constitutional amendments, laws, and court decisions

The book Going back to Gettysburg will be bought like hot cakes in intellectual circles in both America and India because it is a light presentation of the uniqueness of the American Civil War (1861-1965) in which 6,00,000 American soldiers, mostly White, laid down their lives to secure the release of four million Black slaves in America. It has no parallel in the history and mythology of the world. It is the only war where combatants fought over the Rights of other oppressed beings and is one of the starting point of the Human Rights movements in the world. This book shows quoting authorities like a secret note from the U.S. Ambassy to the American State department leaked by Wikileaks and numerous reports in American and British Press of how the middle class has enriched itself. The author has given numerous shady deals of his own. Besides, the book contains his own studies of middle class corruption which no newspaper would publish because they are themselves huge beneficiaries of the general loot. The book the contrasts between the Indian habit of quietly submitting to injustice and the Western habit of staging street demonstrations on public issues.

Black Genders and Sexualities provides a survey of new work by scholars who grapple with the ways gender and sexuality constellate with race. Cutting across the humanities and social sciences, and situated in sites across the black diaspora, the works collectively challenge notions that we are living in a post-racial age and instead argue for the specificity of black cultural experiences as shaped by gender and sex. The volume underscores the ways an array of violence impacts and shapes black life, while also testifying to the resiliency, creativity, and vitality of black people.

Because the Holocaust, at its core, was an extreme expression of a devastating racism, the author contends it has special significance for African Americans. Locke, a university professor, clergyman, and African American, reflects on the common experiences of African American and Jewish people as minorities and on the great tragedy that each community has experienced in its history--slavery and the Holocaust. Without attempting to equate the experiences of African Americans to the experiences of European Jews during the Holocaust, the author does show how aspects of the Holocaust, its impact on the Jewish community worldwide, and the long-lasting consequences relate to slavery, the civil rights movement, and the current status of African Americans.

Written from a Christian perspective, this book argues that the implications of the Holocaust touch all people, and that it is a major mistake to view the Holocaust as an exclusively Jewish event. Instead, the author asks whether it is possible for both African Americans and Jewish Americans to learn from the experience of the other regarding the common threat that minority people confront in Western societies. Locke focuses on the themes of parochialism and patriotism and reexamines the role of the Christian churches during the Holocaust in an effort to challenge some of the prevailing views in Holocaust studies.

This Book is about universal human consciousness, supernatural creativity, and spirituality - illustrated with the African. During public lectures in summer of 2008 in the USA, issues emerged that Africans south of the Sahara and their descendants (among other races of the western hemisphere) have lost control of existence and destiny, . Some philosophers claim that Blacks are congenitally stupid; scientists hypothesize that the causes are in their genes. Since some colored persons evidently are achievers, the author (The Oboiro) propounds that the true causes of apparent differences are ingredients in potions regularly consumed during initiation, worship, and funeral rituals. Solution is to "TAKE OVER CONTROL" (without physical violence). From whom? Read the Book.

African American fugitive slave narratives are receiving growing amounts of attention for their literary and historical value. This book examines the techniques the slave narrative writers used to authorize and rhetorically create themselves in their writings. By examining such issues as voice and identity formation, the volume demonstrates how identity may be seen as a cultural fabrication. Former slave narrators used a series of masking and doubling techniques to address their experiences as African Americans. This book crosses the boundaries between literary criticism and historical study by examining the tensions between generic conventions and the impulses that created and reinforced them. The introduction and opening chapter offer clear and accessible discussions of the social, political, cultural, and literary conditions influencing the slave narrative genre. Subsequent chapters are built on this theoretical framework and present close analytical readings of The Confessions of Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass's Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, by William and Ellen Craft. The volume probingly traces the relationship between rhetorical self-creation and social ideology to show how that relationship was mediated within the fugitive slave narrative genre.

All but ignored, the Black police officer went unseen in a history that has been lost, stolen, and disguised by generations of segregation and discriminatory practices within the New York City Police Department, and city Government. For more than a century, Black police officers walked a lonely beat, and very little was written about their struggled for equality and recognition since the first Black officer entered the Police Department in 1891. The Book the Black Shields, written by an African American Police Detective, is a powerful pictorial history and narrative of the Black police experience that documents the successes and accomplishments shaped by an interconnected series of sociological, political and legal events that continue to take place today.

Carmen Kynard locates literacy in the twenty-first century at the onset of new thematic and disciplinary imperatives brought into effect by Black Freedom Movements. Kynard argues that we must begin to see how a series of vernacular insurrections protests and new ideologies developed in relation to the work of Black Freedom Movements have shaped our imaginations, practices, and research of how literacy works in our lives and schools.
Utilizing many styles and registers, the book borrows from educational history, critical race theory, first-year writing studies, Africana studies, African American cultural theory, cultural materialism, narrative inquiry, and basic writing scholarship. Connections between social justice, language rights, and new literacies are uncovered from the vantage point of a multiracial, multiethnic Civil Rights Movement."

In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism, Robinson argues, must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on western continents, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this. To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by Blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century Black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright. This revised and updated third edition includes a new preface by Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, and a new foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley. Not for Sale in the UK or Commonwealth

Six decades before Rosa Parks boarded her fateful bus, another traveller in the Deep South tried to strike a blow against racial discrimination-but ultimately fell short of that goal, leading to the Supreme Court's landmark 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Now Williamjames Hull Hoffer vividly details the origins, litigation, opinions, and aftermath of this notorious case. In response to the passage of the Louisiana Separate Car Act of 1890, which prescribed "equal but separate accommodations" on public transportation, a group called the Committee of Citizens decided to challenge its constitutionality. At a preselected time and place, Homer Plessy, on behalf of the committee, boarded a train car set aside for whites, announced his non-white racial identity, and was immediately arrested. The legal deliberations that followed eventually led to the Court's 7-1 decision in Plessy, which upheld both the Louisiana statute and the state's police powers. It also helped create a Jim Crow system that would last deep into the twentieth century, until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and other cases helped overturn it. Hoffer's readable study synthesises past work on this landmark case, while also shedding new light on its proceedings and often-neglected historical contexts. From the streets of New Orleans' Faubourg Treme district to the justices' chambers at the Supreme Court, he breathes new life into the opposing forces, dissecting their arguments to clarify one of the most important, controversial, and socially revealing cases in American law. He particularly focuses on Justice Henry Billings Brown's ruling that the statute's "equal, but separate" condition was a sufficient constitutional standard for equality, and on Justice John Marshall Harlan's classic dissent, in which he stated, "Our Constitution is colour-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its citizens." Hoffer's compelling reconstruction illuminates the controversies and impact of Plessy v. Ferguson for a new generation of students and other interested readers. It also pays tribute to a group of little known heroes from the Deep South who failed to hold back the tide of racial segregation but nevertheless laid the groundwork for a less divided America. This book is part of the Landmark Law Cases and American Society series.