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Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legally sanctioned
segregation in American public schools, brought issues of racial
equality to the forefront of the nation's attention. Beyond its
repercussions for the educational system, the decision also
heralded broad changes to concepts of justice and national
identity. ""Brown v. Board"" and the Transformation of American
Culture examines the prominent cultural figures who taught the
country how to embrace new values and ideas of citizenship in the
aftermath of this groundbreaking decision. Through the lens of
three cultural ""first responders,"" Ben Keppel tracks the creation
of an American culture in which race, class, and ethnicity could
cease to imply an inferior form of citizenship. Psychiatrist and
social critic Robert Coles, in his Pulitzer Prize--winning studies
of children and schools in desegregating regions of the country,
helped citizens understand the value of the project of racial
equality in the lives of regular families, both white and black.
Comedian Bill Cosby leveraged his success with gentle,
family-centric humor to create televised spaces that challenged the
idea of whiteness as the cultural default. Public television
producer Joan Ganz Cooney designed programs like Sesame Street that
extended educational opportunities to impoverished children, while
offering a new vision of urban life in which diverse populations
coexisted in an atmosphere of harmony and mutual support. Together,
the work of these pioneering figures provided new codes of conduct
and guided America through the growing pains of becoming a truly
pluralistic nation. In this cultural history of the impact of Brown
v. Board, Keppel paints a vivid picture of a society at once eager
for and resistant to the changes ushered in by this pivotal
decision.
Thirty years after the greatest legislative triumphs of the civil
rights movement, overcoming racism remains what Martin Luther King,
Jr., once called America's unfinished "work of democracy." Why this
remains true is the subject of Ben Keppel's The Work of Democracy.
By carefully tracing the public lives of Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B.
Clark, and Lorraine Hansberry, Keppel illuminates how the
mainstream media selectively appropriated the most challenging
themes, ideas, and goals of the struggle for racial equality so
that difficult questions about the relationship between racism and
American democracy could be softened, if not entirely evaded.
Keppel traces the circumstances and cultural politics that
transformed each individual into a participant-symbol of the
postwar struggle for equality. Here we see how United Nations
ambassador Ralph Bunche, the first African American to receive the
Nobel Peace Prize, came to symbolize the American Dream while
Bunche's opposition to McCarthyism was ignored. The emergence of
psychologist and educator Kenneth B. Clark marked the ascendancy of
the child and the public school as the leading symbols of the civil
rights movement. Yet Keppel details how Clark's blueprint for
"community action" was thwarted by machine politics. Finally, the
author chronicles the process by which the "American Negro" became
an "African American" by considering the career of playwright
Lorraine Hansberry. Keppel reveals how both the journalistic and
the academic establishment rewrote the theme of her prizewinning
play A Raisin in the Sun to conform to certain well-worn cultural
conventions and the steps Hansberry took to reclaim the message of
her classic. The Work of Democracy uses biography in innovative
ways to reflect on how certain underlying cultural assumptions and
values of American culture simultaneously advanced and undermined
the postwar struggle for racial equality.
Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American
Thought in the Twentieth Century explores the development of
American social science by highlighting the contributions of those
scholars who were both students and objects of a segregated
society. The book asks how segregation has influenced, and
continues to influence, the development of American social thought
and social science scholarship. Jonathan Scott Holloway and Ben
Keppel present the work of thirty-one black social scientists whose
work was published between the rise of the Tuskegee model of higher
education and the end of the Black Power Era. Even though they had
to fashion their careers outside of their respective fields'
mainstream, the intellectuals featured here produced scholarship
that helped define the contours of the social sciences as they
evolved over the course of the twentieth century. Theirs was the
work of pioneers, now for the first time gathered in one anthology.
After a comprehensive introduction and survey of the selections to
follow, Holloway and Keppel present the founding parents of African
American social science, including excerpts from Alexander
Crummell, Anna Julia Cooper, and others. They then examine
contributions from the first real generation of professionally
trained black scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois. The interactions
between cultural production and social scientific knowledge are
examined through the work of various scholars, including Alain
Locke and Zora Neale Hurston. The volume then explores the
scholarship produced by the leading progressive social scientists
of the day on issues of race and class and examines social
scientific scholarship that put African American struggles in an
international context. The book concludes by presenting the
scholarship of, among others, Hylan Lewis, Joyce Ladner, and
William Julius Wilson, which most effectively highlights the
complex state of "raced" social science thought during the age of
desegregation in academia.
Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American
Thought in the Twentieth Century explores the development of
American social science by highlighting the contributions of those
scholars who were both students and objects of a segregated
society. The book asks how segregation has influenced, and
continues to influence, the development of American social thought
and social science scholarship. Jonathan Scott Holloway and Ben
Keppel present the work of thirty-one black social scientists whose
work was published between the rise of the Tuskegee model of higher
education and the end of the Black Power Era. Even though they had
to fashion their careers outside of their respective fields'
mainstream, the intellectuals featured here produced scholarship
that helped define the contours of the social sciences as they
evolved over the course of the twentieth century. Theirs was the
work of pioneers, now for the first time gathered in one anthology.
After a comprehensive introduction and survey of the selections to
follow, Holloway and Keppel present the founding parents of African
American social science, including excerpts from Alexander
Crummell, Anna Julia Cooper, and others. They then examine
contributions from the first real generation of professionally
trained black scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois. The interactions
between cultural production and social scientific knowledge are
examined through the work of various scholars, including Alain
Locke and Zora Neale Hurston. The volume then explores the
scholarship produced by the leading progressive social scientists
of the day on issues of race and class and examines social
scientific scholarship that put African American struggles in an
international context. The book concludes by presenting the
scholarship of, among others, Hylan Lewis, Joyce Ladner, and
William Julius Wilson, which most effectively highlights the
complex state of "raced" social science thought during the age of
desegregation in academia.
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