The contributions to "Critical Voices of Black Liberation in the Americas" originated from the 1999 CAAR Conference in Munster and from conferences held in the US in 2000 and 2001. More than half of the eleven essays consider black performances on stage, in sound, and on film; the remaining essays explore slavery, African American literature, and nineteenth-century black educators. These exciting essays creatively examine artistic and/or political articulation of black liberation as the construction of a new critical and signifyin(g) voice. This liberated and critical voice asserts itself as much as a communal expression of black subjectivities as it is an articulation of the black self.

African Americans' long campaign for ""the right to fight"" forced Harry Truman to issue his 1948 executive order calling for equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. In War! What Is It Good For?, Kimberley Phillips examines how blacks' participation in the nation's wars after Truman's order and their protracted struggles for equal citizenship galvanised a vibrant antiwar activism that reshaped their struggles for freedom. Using an array of sources--from newspapers and government documents to literature, music, and film--and tracing the period from World War II to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Phillips considers how federal policies that desegregated the military also maintained racial, gender, and economic inequalities. Since 1945, the nation's need for military labour, blacks' unequal access to employment, and discriminatory draft policies have forced black men into the military at disproportionate rates. While mainstream civil rights leaders considered the integration of the military to be a civil rights success, many black soldiers, veterans, and antiwar activists perceived war as inimical to their struggles for economic and racial justice and sought to reshape the civil rights movement into an antiwar black freedom movement. Since the Vietnam War, Phillips argues, many African Americans have questioned linking militarism and war to their concepts of citizenship, equality, and freedom.

Langston Hughes called it "a great dark tide from the South": the unprecedented influx of blacks into Cleveland that gave the city the nickname "Alabama North." This remarkable study reveals the breadth of working-class black experiences and activities in Cleveland and the extent to which these were shaped by traditions and values brought from the South.

Kimberley Phillips shows how migrants established complex networks of kin and Mends and infused the city with a highly visible southern African-American culture. She examines the wide variety of organizations black working-class migrants created and demonstrates how they prepared the way for new forms of individual and collective activism in workplaces and the city.

Giving special consideration to the employment patterns and experiences of working-class black women in Cleveland, AlabamaNorth reveals how migrants' expressions of tradition and community gave them a new consciousness of themselves as organized workers in the urban North and created the underpinning for new forms of black labor activism.

This book examines the century-long migration of African Americans who moved within the South after the Civil War and then left to settle permanently in other regions, irrevocably altering the political, social, and cultural history of the United States; and considers these movements within the broader historical, political, and cultural context of the African Diaspora. Daily Life during African American Migrations focuses attention to the everyday social, cultural, and political lives of migrants in the United States as they established communities far away from their former homes. This book examines blacks' labor and urban experiences, social and political activism, and cultural and communal identities, while also considering the specificity of African Americans' migration as part of their long struggle for freedom and equality. The author merges information from black migration studies, which focus on the internal movement of African American people in the United States, with African Diaspora studies, which consider peoples of African descent who have settled far from their native homes-either voluntarily or through duress-to document how these immigrants and their children create new communities while maintaining cultural connections with Africa. The stories of the nine million African Americans who collectively left the South between 1865 and 1965-and the millions more who left the Caribbean and Africa-not only document this long history of migration, but also present compelling human drama. Photographs, illustrations, and a map accompany the text A chronology of major events in black migration A bibliography identifies letters, interviews, and autobiographies as source material