Urban Community Studies Research Guide

An electrifying, dazzlingly written reckoning and an essential addition to the national conversation about race and class, Survival Math takes its name from the calculations award-winning author Mitchell S. Jackson made to survive the Portland, Oregon of his youth. This dynamic book explores gangs and guns, near-death experiences, sex work, masculinity, composite fathers, the concept of "hustle," and the destructive power of addiction--all framed within the story of Jackson, his family, and his community.

The first survey of the Pan-African movement this century, this book provides a history of the individuals and organisations that have sought the unity of all those of African origin as the basis for advancement and liberation. Initially an idea and movement that took root among the African Diaspora, in more recent times Pan-Africanism has been embodied in the African Union, the organisation of African states which includes the entire African Diaspora as its 'sixth region.'

In this wide-reaching and timely book, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie argues that public knowledge and understanding of black history, including its historical icons, has been shaped by institutions and individuals outside academic ivory towers. Drawing on a range of compelling examples, Dagbovie explores how, in the twenty-first century, African American history is regarded, depicted, and juggled by diverse and contesting interpreters--from museum curators to filmmakers, entertainers, politicians, journalists, and bloggers. Underscoring the ubiquitous nature of African-American history in contemporary American thought and culture, each chapter unpacks how black history has been represented and remembered primarily during the "Age of Obama," the so-called era of "post-racial" American society.

This compelling new book provides a deep examination of the experience of African American males in schools. Moving beyond basic culturally relevant instruction, A Walk in Their Kicks offers new understandings that will assist educators in developing instruction that respects these young men and fosters their participation and success. Through research data and conversations among teachers, readers will explore the impact that trauma has on the lives of African American students, examine how their own identities and perceptions of these students influence their text selections and instruction and identify the conditions that need to be present to engage African American male students in literacy.

For all the wrong reasons, a national spotlight is shining on Chicago. The city has become known for its violence, police abuse, parent and teacher unrest, population decline, and mounting municipal and pension debt. The underlying problem, contend Ed Bachrach and Austin Berg, is that deliberative democracy is dead in the city. Chicago is home to the last strongman political system in urban America. The mayor holds all the power, and any perceived checks on mayoral control are often proven illusory. Rash decisions have resulted in poor outcomes. The outrageous consequences of unchecked power are evident in government failures in elections, schools, fiscal discipline, corruption, public support for private enterprise, policing, and more.   Rather than simply lament the situation, criticize specific leaders, or justify an ideology, Bachrach and Berg compare the decisions about Chicago's governance and finances with choices made in fourteen other large U.S. cities. The problems that seem unique to Chicago have been encountered elsewhere, and Chicagoans, the authors posit, can learn from the successful solutions other cities have embraced.

In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood--a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confronting--or avoiding--each other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happened--stories of deindustrialization and street life; stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the poor. At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and reshaped over the past half-century by individual stories and larger waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban neighborhoods. Talking with current and former residents and looking carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change, Rotella explores the tension between residents' deep investment of feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors living there.

What do millennial rappers in the United States say in their music? This timely and compelling book answers this question by decoding the lyrics of over 700 songs from contemporary rap artists. Using innovative research techniques, Matthew Oware reveals how emcees perpetuate and challenge gendered and racialized constructions of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality. Male and female artists litter their rhymes with misogynistic and violent imagery. However, men also express a full range of emotions, from arrogance to vulnerability, conveying a more complex manhood than previously acknowledged. Women emphatically state their desires while embracing a more feminist approach. Even LGBTQ artists stake their claim and express their sexuality without fear. Finally, in the age of Black Lives Matter and the presidency of Donald J. Trump, emcees forcefully politicize their music. Although complicated and contradictory in many ways, rap remains a powerful medium for social commentary.

The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape is a collection of poems, rap lyrics, short stories, essays, interviews, and artwork about Chicago, the city that came to be known as "Chiraq" ("Chicago" + "Iraq"), and the people who live in its vibrant and occasionally violent neighborhoods. Tuned to the work of Chicago's youth, especially the emerging artists and activists surrounding Young Chicago Authors, this literary mixtape unpacks the meanings of "Chiraq" as both a vexed term and a space of possibility.

Amiri Baraka's writing career spans over nearly fifty years and has mostly focused on the subjects of Black Liberation and White Racism. Often recognized as a key founder of the Black Arts Movement, Amiri Baraka was a prolific writer and world-renowned poet. While this book provides its contributors a forum in which to examine his poetic and artistic aesthetics, Brilliant Flame! will more importantly bring to the forefront Baraka's reach as political activist, historian and cultural visionary.

In the United States, homeownership is synonymous with economic security and middle-class status. It has played this role in American life for almost a century, and as a result, homeownership's centrality to Americans' economic lives has come to seem natural and inevitable. But this state of affairs did not develop spontaneously or inexorably. On the contrary, it was the product of federal government policies, established during the 1930s and developed over the course of the twentieth century. At the Boundaries of Homeownership traces how the government's role in this became submerged from public view and how several groups who were locked out of homeownership came to recognize and reveal the role of the government. Through organizing and activism, these boundary groups transformed laws and private practices governing determinations of credit-worthiness. This book describes the important policy consequences of their achievements and the implications for how we understand American statebuilding.

In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America.

Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures--they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Ewing's take begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools--schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs--as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.

Perhaps more than any other American city, Chicago has been a center for the study of both urban history and economic inequity. Community Health Equity assembles a century of research to show the range of effects that Chicago's structural socioeconomic inequalities have had on patients and medical facilities alike. The work collected here makes clear that when a city is sharply divided by power, wealth, and race, the citizens who most need high-quality health care and social services have the greatest difficulty accessing them.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Chicago witnessed a remarkable flourishing of visual arts associated with the Black Arts Movement. From the painting of murals as a way to reclaim public space and the establishment of independent community art centers to the work of the AFRICOBRA collective and Black filmmakers, artists on Chicago's South and West Sides built a vision of art as service to the people. In Art for People's Sake Rebecca Zorach traces the little-told story of the visual arts of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, showing how artistic innovations responded to decades of racist urban planning that left Black neighborhoods sites of economic depression, infrastructural decay, and violence. Working with community leaders, children, activists, gang members, and everyday people, artists developed a way of using art to help empower and represent themselves.

North Lawndale, a neighborhood that lies in the shadows of Chicago's Loop, is surrounded by some of the city's finest medical facilities, Yet, it is one of the sickest, most medically underserved communities in the country. Mama Might Be Better Off Dead immerses readers in the lives of four generations of a poor, African-American family in the neighborhood, who are beset with the devastating illnesses that are all too common in America's inner-cities.

Evidence for the negative effects of segregation and concentrated poverty in America's cities now exists in abundance; poor and underrepresented communities in segregated urban housing markets suffer diminished outcomes in education, economic mobility, political participation, and physical and psychological health. Though many of the aggravating factors underlying this inequity have persisted or even grown worse in recent decades, the level of energy and attention devoted to them by local and national policymakers has ebbed significantly from the levels that inspired the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

The extraordinarily productive life of curator, artist, and activist Margaret Burroughs was largely rooted in her work to establish and sustain two significant institutions in Chicago: the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), founded in 1940, and the DuSable Museum of African American History, founded in her living room in 1961. As Mary Ann Cain's South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs reveals, the primary motivations for these efforts were love and hope. Burroughs was spurred by her love for Chicago's African American community--largely ill served by mainstream arts organizations--and by her hope that these new, black-run cultural centers would welcome many generations of aspiring artists and art lovers.

The abolition of slavery after the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked 'a new birth of freedom' in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African-Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a 'New Negro' to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to the United States.

For generations, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been essential institutions for the African American community. Their nurturing environments not only provided educational advancement but also catalyzed the Black freedom struggle, forever altering the political destiny of the United States. In this book, Jelani M. Favors offers a history of HBCUs from the 1837 founding of Cheyney State University to the present, told through the lens of how they fostered student activism.

This two-volume set integrates informative encyclopedia entries and essential primary documents to provide an illuminating overview of trends in gang membership and activity in America in the 21st century. * Comprises approximately 200 encyclopedia entries on gangs in the United States * Illustrates entries through 16 primary documents * Provides a chronology to help readers to contextualize developments related to gang activity * Includes a Guide to Related Topics to facilitate tangential discovery * Defines terms essential to understanding the subject matter of the text in a glossary

This book describes the contributions of twenty-two educators and events that have shaped the field of education, often receiving little to no public recognition, including: Edmonia Godelle Highgate, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Selena Sloan Butler, Alonzo Aristotle Crim, Sabbath Schools, and African American Boarding Schools. These individuals and events have established and sustained education in communities across the United States. This book will help foster a renewed sense of importance both for those considering teaching and for teachers in classrooms across the country.

This book demonstrates the application of African Diaspora Literacy in K-12 schools and teacher education programs. The book represents a lovely compilation of application, theory, and research. The book explores how African Diaspora Literacy can be used to heal the endemic physical, symbolic, linguistic, curricula, pedagogical, and system violence that African American children and youth experience in schools and in society.

In The Struggle over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter, Amanda Nell Edgar and Andre E. Johnson examine the surprisingly complex relationship between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter as it unfolds on social media and in offline interpersonal relationships. Exploring cultural influences like family history, fear, religion, postracialism, and workplace pressure, Edgar and Johnson trace the meanings of these movements from the perspectives of ordinary participants. The Struggle over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter highlights the motivations for investing in social movements and countermovements to show how history, both remembered and misremembered, bubbles beneath the surface of online social justice campaigns. Through participation in these contemporary movements, online social media users enact continuations of American history through a lens of their own past experiences. This book ties together online and offline, national and local, and personal and political to understand one of the defining social justice struggles of our time.

Many Black, Latinx, multiracial and ethnically diverse, first-generation college students turned PhDs--tie their academic success, achievements, and ability to navigate the difficult terrain of higher education back to the critical experiences and lessons learned in their home lives and through their cultural backgrounds. For them, culture matters. This book offers an opportunity for an anti-deficit and positive examination of (Black, Latinx, and multiracial) culture and its role in creating educational efficacy among academics of color. Through personal narrative, educational and learning theory, creative writing/poetry, this hybrid text examines the cultural path to the doctorate. Transformative practice should be guided by an understanding of how an appreciation of a faculty member's cultural, life, and social experiences can be used to establish a healthy environment that will better appreciate, engage, and retain faculty of color. Along these lines, this text also considers how cultural, life and social experiences translate into pedagogy, mentorship and value as faculty of color.

This volume follows eleven Black male teachers from an urban, predominantly Black school district to reveal a complex set of identity politics and power dynamics that complicate these teachers' relationships with students and fellow educators. It provides new and important insights into what it means to be a Black male teacher and suggests strategies for school districts, teacher preparation programs, researchers and other stakeholders to rethink why and how we recruit and train Black male teachers for urban K-12 classrooms.

This book critically examines the collection, interpretation, and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from an Afrocentric perspective. The necessity of interpretive Afrocentric research is relevant to position agency and to locate Africana studies in place, space, and time. This study will provide readers with a compilation of literary, historical, philosophical, and social science essays that describe and evaluate the Africana experience from a methodological perspective. Paradoxically, the collection presents measurable and qualitative research, in order to flush out a global Pan-Africanist consciousness.

They were best friends. They were collaborators, literary gadflies, and champions of the common people. They were the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston, the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Langston Hughes, the author of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Let America Be America Again," first met in 1925, at a great gathering of black and white literati, and they fascinated each other. They traveled together in Hurston's dilapidated car through the rural South collecting folklore, worked on the play Mule Bone, and wrote scores of loving letters. They even had the same patron: Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white woman who insisted on being called "Godmother."Paying them lavishly while trying to control their work, Mason may have been the spark for their bitter and passionate falling-out. Was the split inevitable when Hughes decided to be financially independent of his patron? Was Hurston jealous of the young woman employed as their typist? Or was the rupture over the authorship of Mule Bone? Yuval Taylor answers these questions while illuminating Hurston's and Hughes's lives, work, competitiveness, and ambition, uncovering little-known details.

Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, this book uncovers the historical trajectory of U.S. independent hip-hop in the post-golden era, seeking to understand its complex relationship to mainstream hip-hop culture and U.S. culture more generally.  Christopher Vito analyzes the lyrics of indie hip-hop albums from 2000-2013 to uncover the dominant ideologies of independent artists regarding race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and social change. These analyses inform interviews with members of the indie hip-hop community to explore the meanings that they associate with the culture today, how technological and media changes impact the boundaries between independent and major, and whether and how this shapes their engagement with oppositional consciousness. Ultimately, this book aims to understand the complex and contradictory cultural politics of independent hip-hop in the contemporary age.

The black ghetto is thought of as a place of urban decay and social disarray. Like the historical ghetto of Venice, it is perceived as a space of confinement, one imposed on black America by whites. It is the home of a marginalized underclass and a sign of the depth of American segregation. Yet while black urban neighborhoods have suffered from institutional racism and economic neglect, they have also been places of refuge and community. In A Haven and a Hell, Lance Freeman examines how the ghetto shaped black America and black America shaped the ghetto. Freeman traces the evolving role of predominantly black neighborhoods in northern cities from the late nineteenth century through the present day. At times, the ghetto promised the freedom to build black social institutions and political power. At others, it suppressed and further stigmatized African Americans. Freeman reveals the forces that caused the ghetto's role as haven or hell to wax and wane, spanning the Great Migration, mid-century opportunities, the eruptions of the sixties, the challenges of the seventies and eighties, and present-day issues of mass incarceration, the subprime crisis, and gentrification. Offering timely planning and policy recommendations based in this history, A Haven and a Hell provides a powerful new understanding of urban black communities at a time when the future of many inner-city neighborhoods appears uncertain.

With his colleagues at the People's Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-ups within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city's corrupt political machine. The Torture Machine takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark--and the historic, thirteen-years of litigation that followed--through the dogged pursuit of commander Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. Joining forces with community activists, torture survivors and their families, other lawyers, and local reporters, Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD officers and the City of Chicago.  As the struggle expanded beyond the torture scandal to the ultimately successful campaign to end the death penalty in Illinois, and obtained reparations for many of the torture survivors, it set human rights precedents that have since been adopted across the United States.

Cities is an impassioned and learned account full of fascinating details of daily life in ancient urban centers, using archaeological perspectives to show that the aspects of cities we find most irresistible (and the most annoying) have been with us since the very beginnings of urbanism itself. Smith also proves the rise of cities was hardly inevitable, yet it was crucial to the eventual global dominance of our species--and that cities are here to stay.

Chicago is home to more intact African American street murals from the 1970s and '80s than any other U.S. city. Among Chicago's greatest muralists is the legendary William "Bill" Walker (1927-2011), compared by art historians to Diego Rivera and called the most accomplished contemporary practitioner of the classical mural tradition. Though his art could not have been more public, Walker maintained a low profile during his working life and virtually withdrew from the public eye after his retirement in 1989. Author Jeff W. Huebner met Walker in 1990 and embarked on a series of insightful interviews that stretched over the next two decades. Those meetings and years of research form the basis of Walls of Prophecy and Protest, the story of Walker's remarkable life and the movement that he inspired. Featuring forty-three color images of Walker's work, most long since destroyed or painted over, this handsome edition reveals the artist who was the primary figure behind Chicago's famed Wall of Respect and who created numerous murals that depicted African American historical figures, protested social injustice, and promoted love, respect, racial unity, and community change.

The Huey P. Newton Reader combines now-classic texts from Newton's books, ranging in topic from the formation of the Black Panthers, African Americans and armed self-defense, Eldridge Cleaver's controversial expulsion from the Party, FBI infiltration of civil rights groups, the Vietnam War, and the burgeoning feminist movement. Editors Hilliard and Weise also include never-before-published writings from the Black Panther Party archives and Newton's private collection, including articles on President Nixon, prison martyr George Jackson, Pan-Africanism, affirmative action, and the author's only written account of his political exile in Cuba in the 1970s.

Everything Must Go is an illustrated collection of poems in the spirit of a graphic novel, a collaboration between poet Kevin Coval and illustrator Langston Allston. The book celebrates Chicago's Wicker Park in the late 1990's, Coval's home as a young artist, the ancestral neighborhood of his forebears, and a vibrant enclave populated by colorful characters. Allston's illustrations honor the neighborhood as it once was, before gentrification remade it. The book excavates and mourns that which has been lost in transition and serves as a template for understanding the process of displacement and reinvention currently reshaping American cities.

Between 1910 and 1920, the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) inaugurated a massive organizing drive in the city's meatpacking and steel industries. Although the CFL sought legitimately progressive goals, worked earnestly to organize an interracial union, and made major inroads among both black and white workers, their efforts resulted in a bitter defeat. David Bates provides a clear picture of how even the most progressive of intentions can be ground to a halt.   By organizing workers into neighborhood locals, which connected workplace struggles to ethnic and religious identities, the CFL facilitated a surge in the organization's membership, particularly among African American workers, and afforded the federation the opportunity to aggressively confront employers. The CFL's innovative structure, however, was ultimately its demise. Linking union locals to neighborhoods proved to be a form of de facto segregation. Over time union structures, rank-and-file conflicts, and employer resistance combined to turn the union's hopeful calls for solidarity into animosity and estrangement. Tensions were exacerbated by violent shop floor confrontations and exploded in the bloody 1919 Chicago Race Riot. By the early 1920s, the CFL had collapsed.   The Ordeal of the Jungle explores the choices of a variety of people while showing a complex, overarching interplay of black and white workers and their employers. In addition to analyzing union structures and on-the-ground relations between workers, Bates synthesizes and challenges previous scholarship on interracial organizing to explain the failure of progressive unionism in Chicago.  

In Black France / France Noire, scholars, activists, and novelists from France and the United States address the untenable paradox at the heart of French society. France's constitutional and legal discourses do not recognize race as a meaningful category. Yet the lived realities of race and racism are ever-present in the nation's supposedly race-blind society. The vaunted universalist principles of the French Republic are far from realized. Any claim of color-blindness is belied by experiences of anti-black racism, which render blackness a real and consequential historical, social, and political formation. Contributors to this collection of essays demonstrate that blackness in France is less an identity than a response to and rejection of anti-black racism. Black France / France Noire is a distinctive and important contribution to the increasingly public debates on diversity, race, racialization, and multicultural intolerance in French society and beyond. Contributors. Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, Allison Blakely, Jennifer Anne Boittin, Marcus Bruce, Fred Constant, Mamadou Diouf, Arlette Frund, Michel Giraud, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Trica Danielle Keaton, Jake Lamar, Patrick Lozès, Alain Mabanckou, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Tyler Stovall, Christiane Taubira, Dominic Thomas, Gary Wilder

At the conclusion of the twentieth century, the US economy was booming, but the gap between the rich and poor widened significantly in the 1990s, poverty rates among women and children skyrocketed, and there was an unprecedented rise in familial homelessness. Based on a four-year ethnographic study, Anne R. Roschelle examines how socially structured race, class, and gender inequality contributed to the rise in family homelessness and the devastating consequences for parents and their children. Struggling in the Land of Plenty analyzes the appalling conditions under which homeless women and children live, the violence endemic to their lives, the role of the welfare state in perpetrating poverty, and their never-ending struggle for survival.

The essential guide to understanding how racism works and how racial inequality shapes black lives, ultimately offering a road-map for resistance for racial justice advocates and antiracists When #BlackLivesMatter went viral in 2013, it shed a light on the urgent, daily struggles of black Americans to combat racial injustice. The message resonated with millions across the country. Yet many of our political, social, and economic institutions are still embedded with racist policies and practices that devalue black lives. Stay Woke directly addresses these stark injustices and builds on the lessons of racial inequality and intersectionality the Black Lives Matter movement has challenged its fellow citizens to learn. In this essential primer, Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith inspire readers to address the pressing issues of racial inequality, and provide a basic toolkit that will equip readers to become knowledgeable participants in public debate, activism, and politics. This book offers a clear vision of a racially just society, and shows just how far we still need to go to achieve this reality. From activists to students to the average citizen, Stay Woke empowers all readers to work toward a better future for black Americans.

Few scholars have explored the collective experiences of women living in the inner city and the innovative strategies they develop to navigate daily life in this setting. The Grind illustrates the lived experiences of poor African American women and the creative strategies they develop to manage these events and survive in a community commonly exposed to violence.   Alexis S. McCurn draws on nearly two years of naturalistic field research among adolescents and adults in Oakland, California to provide an ethnographic account of how black women accomplish the routine tasks necessary for basic survival in poor inner-city neighborhoods and how the intersections of race, gender, and class shape how black women interact with others in public. This book makes the case that the daily consequences of racialized poverty in the lives of African Americans cannot be fully understood without accounting for the personal and collective experiences of poor black women. 

"A perfect time to look at the ethos of black hair in America -- and the perfect person to do it is Tanisha Ford" --Changing America "Everyone from the shopaholic to the clearance rack queen will see themselves in [Ford's] pages." --Essence "Takes you not only into the closet, but the inner sanctum of an ordinary extraordinary Black girl who discovered herself through clothes." --Michaela Angela Davis, Image Activist and Writer "[A] delightful style story." --The Philadelphia Inquirer From sneakers to leather jackets, a bold, witty, and deeply personal dive into Black America's closet In this highly engaging book, fashionista and pop culture expert Tanisha C. Ford investigates Afros and dashikis, go-go boots and hotpants of the sixties, hip hop's baggy jeans and bamboo earrings, and the #BlackLivesMatter-inspired hoodies of today. The history of these garments is deeply intertwined with Ford's story as a black girl coming of age in a Midwestern rust belt city. She experimented with the Jheri curl; discovered how wearing the wrong color tennis shoes at the roller rink during the drug and gang wars of the 1980s could get you beaten; and rocked oversized, brightly colored jeans and Timberlands at an elite boarding school where the white upper crust wore conservative wool shift dresses. Dressed in Dreams is a story of desire, access, conformity, and black innovation that explains things like the importance of knockoff culture; the role of "ghetto fabulous" full-length furs and colorful leather in the 1990s; how black girls make magic out of a dollar store t-shirt, rhinestones, and airbrushed paint; and black parents' emphasis on dressing nice. Ford talks about the pain of seeing black style appropriated by the mainstream fashion industry and fashion's power, especially in middle America. In this richly evocative narrative, she shares her lifelong fashion revolution--from figuring out her own personal style to discovering what makes Midwestern fashion a real thing too.

This publication presents Betye Saar's sketchbooks--which she has kept during her entire career--for the first time and offers insights into the artist's creative process. A child of the Great Depression and one of the only African American students in her UCLA art program, Betye Saar has, over the course of more than six decades, made work that exposes stereotypes and injustices based on race and gender. From early prints and watercolors to Joseph Cornell-inspired assemblages and full-scale sculptural tableaux, her work has inspired generations of artists. This ingeniously designed publication plays off the format of Saar's original sketchbooks. Made throughout her extraordinary career, Saar's sketches are an integral part of her creative process and offer a greater understanding of the themes woven into her finished works, which are also featured in the book. Saar's sources and influences range from Simon Rodia's Watts Towers and Haitian Vodou fetishes to Australian Aboriginal paintings, Native American leatherwork, and African American history, literature, and music. An original, intimate, and valuable resource for Saar's many fans, this book will also educate future generations about Saar's significant contributions to American art. Published with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

William Still's meticulously recorded collection of narratives of escape--unlike traditional autobiographical slave narratives--chronicles a wide variety of stories, laying the tracks of the Underground Railroad through correspondences, legal documents, transcribed speech, reward advertisements, and biographical sketches. Together they form an unprecedented and essential archive chronicling the efforts for freedom of escaped slaves. The Underground Rail Road Records offers some of the best evidence we have of this extraordinarily covert resistance network, and narrates a series of chapters that, at their creative determination seem almost magical. The stories bear witness to the intense desire for freedom--and the powerful agency of the enslaved to acquire it. Their stories are moving and remarkable--like that of William Peel, who wrapped himself in straw to be shipped in a box that carried him north. Or Clarissa Davis, who hid in a coop for more than two months and was smuggled aboard a ship, dressed in male attire. Originally published in 1872, but never timelier, The Underground Railroad records affirm the powerful draw of freedom and the imaginative means people went to achieve it, and brings to life the human drama of women, men, and children taking the most dramatic risks imaginable to escape the horrors of bondage.

Emotionally raw and deeply reflective, Imani Perry issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving of humanity. She admits fear and frustration for her African American sons in a society that is increasingly racist and at times seems irredeemable. However, as a mother, feminist, writer, and intellectual, Perry offers an unfettered expression of love--finding beauty and possibility in life--and she exhorts her children and their peers to find the courage to chart their own paths and find steady footing and inspiration in Black tradition. Perry draws upon the ideas of figures such as James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ida B. Wells. She shares vulnerabilities and insight from her own life and from encounters in places as varied as the West Side of Chicago; Birmingham, Alabama; and New England prep schools. With original art for the cover by Ekua Holmes,Breatheoffers a broader meditation on race, gender, and the meaning of a life well lived and is also an unforgettable lesson in Black resistance and resilience.

At the same time that the Civil Rights Movement brought increasing opportunities for blacks, the United States liberalized its immigration policy. While the broadening of the United States's borders to non-European immigrants fits with a black political agenda of social justice, recent waves of immigration have presented a dilemma for blacks, prompting ambivalent or even negative attitudes toward migrants. What has an expanded immigration regime meant for how blacks express national attachment? In this book, Niambi Michele Carter argues that immigration, both historically and in the contemporary moment, has served as a reminder of the limited inclusion of African Americans in the body politic. As Carter contends, blacks use the issue of immigration as a way to understand the nature and meaning of their American citizenship-specifically the way that white supremacy structures and constrains not just their place in the American political landscape, but their political opinions as well. White supremacy gaslights black people, and others, into critiquing themselves and each other instead of white supremacy itself. But what may appear to be a conflict between blacks and other minorities is about self-preservation. Carter draws on original interview material and empirical data on African American political opinion to offer the first theory of black public opinion toward immigration.

NOMINATED FOR AN NAACP IMAGE AWARD * An inspiring collection of essays by black women writers, curated by the founder of the popular book club Well-Read Black Girl, on the importance of recognizing ourselves in literature. "Yes, Well-Read Black Girl is as good as it sounds. . . . [Glory Edim] gathers an all-star cast of contributors--among them Lynn Nottage, Jesmyn Ward, and Gabourey Sidibe."--O: The Oprah Magazine Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you? That feeling of belonging remains with readers the rest of their lives--but not everyone regularly sees themselves in the pages of a book. In this timely anthology, Glory Edim brings together original essays by some of our best black women writers to shine a light on how important it is that we all--regardless of gender, race, religion, or ability--have the opportunity to find ourselves in literature. Contributors include Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing), Lynn Nottage (Sweat), Jacqueline Woodson (Another Brooklyn), Gabourey Sidibe (This Is Just My Face), Morgan Jerkins (This Will Be My Undoing), Tayari Jones (An American Marriage), Rebecca Walker (Black, White and Jewish), and Barbara Smith (Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology) Whether it's learning about the complexities of femalehood from Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, finding a new type of love in The Color Purple, or using mythology to craft an alternative black future, the subjects of each essay remind us why we turn to books in times of both struggle and relaxation. As she has done with her book club-turned-online community Well-Read Black Girl, in this anthology Glory Edim has created a space in which black women's writing and knowledge and life experiences are lifted up, to be shared with all readers who value the power of a story to help us understand the world and ourselves. Praise for Well-Read Black Girl "Each essay can be read as a dispatch from the vast and wonderfully complex location that is black girlhood and womanhood. . . . They present literary encounters that may at times seem private and ordinary--hours spent in the children's section of a public library or in a college classroom--but are no less monumental in their impact."--The Washington Post "A wonderful collection of essays."--Essence

Black Freethinkers argues that, contrary to historical and popular depictions of African Americans as naturally religious, freethought has been central to black political and intellectual life from the nineteenth century to the present. Freethought encompasses many different schools of thought, including atheism, agnosticism, and nontraditional orientations such as deism and paganism.  Christopher Cameron suggests an alternative origin of nonbelief and religious skepticism in America, namely the brutality of the institution of slavery. He also traces the growth of atheism and agnosticism among African Americans in two major political and intellectual movements of the 1920s: the New Negro Renaissance and the growth of black socialism and communism. In a final chapter, he explores the critical importance of freethought among participants in the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s.  Examining a wealth of sources, including slave narratives, travel accounts, novels, poetry, memoirs, newspapers, and archival sources such as church records, sermons, and letters, the study follows the lives and contributions of well-known figures, including Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, as well as lesser-known thinkers such as Louise Thompson Patterson, Sarah Webster Fabio, and David Cincore. 

A "powerful and indispensable" look at the devastating consequences of environmental racism (Gerald Markowitz) -- and what we can do to remedy its toxic effects on marginalized communities. Did you know... Middle-class African American households with incomes between $50,000 and $60,000 live in neighborhoods that are more polluted than those of very poor white households with incomes below $10,000. When swallowed, a lead-paint chip no larger than a fingernail can send a toddler into a coma -- one-tenth of that amount will lower his IQ. Nearly two of every five African American homes in Baltimore are plagued by lead-based paint. Almost all of the 37,500 Baltimore children who suffered lead poisoning between 2003 and 2015 were African American. From injuries caused by lead poisoning to the devastating effects of atmospheric pollution, infectious disease, and industrial waste, Americans of color are harmed by environmental hazards in staggeringly disproportionate numbers. This systemic onslaught of toxic exposure and institutional negligence causes irreparable physical harm to millions of people across the country-cutting lives tragically short and needlessly burdening our health care system. But these deadly environments create another insidious and often overlooked consequence: robbing communities of color, and America as a whole, of intellectual power. The 1994 publication of The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of a renewed and heated debate. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray, arguing that IQ is a biased and flawed metric, but that it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. She takes apart the spurious notion of intelligence as an inherited trait, using copious data that instead point to a different cause of the reported African American-white IQ gap: environmental racism - a confluence of racism and other institutional factors that relegate marginalized communities to living and working near sites of toxic waste, pollution, and insufficient sanitation services. She investigates heavy metals, neurotoxins, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and even pathogens as chief agents influencing intelligence to explain why communities of color are disproportionately affected -- and what can be done to remedy this devastating problem. Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation, and inspire debate.

Urban populations are on the rise, fueling a welcome rejuvenation of U.S. cities, many of which have been decaying since the suburban boom of the mid-twentieth century. But such renewal has resulted in the displacement of original residents, who can no longer keep pace with rising rents. Gentrification is often blamed for contributing to the housing crisis, but what about the improvements it has brought to America's cities? The diverse perspectives in this volume explore the different effects of gentrification and imagine solutions for accommodating everyone in this changing urban landscape.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * From the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom. "This potent book about America's most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist."--San Francisco Chronicle NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD * NAMED ONE OF PASTE'S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time * NPR * The Washington Post * Chicago Tribune * Vanity Fair * Esquire * Good Housekeeping * Paste * Town & Country * The New York Public Library * Kirkus Reviews * Library Journal "Nearly every paragraph is laced through with dense, gorgeously evocative descriptions of a vanished world and steeped in its own vivid vocabulary."--Entertainment Weekly Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her--but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he's ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram's resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures. This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children--the violent and capricious separation of families--and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today's most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen. Praise for The Water Dancer "Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations--and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What's most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy."--Rolling Stone

This engrossing tale of gangs and organized criminality begins in the frontier saloons situated in the marshy flats of Chicago, the future world class city of Mid-continent. Gangland Chicago recounts the era of parlor gambling, commercialized vice districts continuing through the bloody Prohibition bootlegging wars; failed reform movements; the rise of post-World War II juvenile criminal gangs and the saga of the Blackstone Rangers in a chaotic, racially divided city., Gang violence and street crime is endemic in contemporary Chicago. There is much more to the saga of crime, politics, and armed violence than Al Capone and John Dillinger. Gangland Chicago explores the changing patterns of criminal behavior, politics, gangs, youth crime and the failures of reform in its historic totality. Richard Lindberg takes the reader on a journey through decades of a troubled past to delve deep into the evolution of street gangs and organized violence endemic in Chicago. Small ethnic gangs organized in ethnic slum districts of the city expanded into the well-known organized crime syndicates of Chicago's history. Gangland Chicago is full of stories of unchecked violence, lawlessness, and mayhem. Unlike other standard true crime accounts focused exclusively on the Prohibition era, this historical look-back probes the obscure and forgotten dark corners of city crime history. Lindberg details how both "organized" and "dis-organized" street gangs have paralyzed city neighborhoods and transformed the crimes of the Windy City from street thuggery and common ruffians protected and nurtured by politicians into a protected class is gripping. Gangland Chicago is a revealing look at the Chicago underworld of yesterday and today. This comprehensive volume is sure to entertain and inform any reader interested in the evolution of organized crime and gangs in America's most representative city of the American Heartland.

One of the Vera Institute of Justice's Best Criminal Justice Books of 2019 America's high incarceration rates are a well-known facet of contemporary political conversations. Mentioned far less often is what happens to the nearly 700,000 former prisoners who rejoin society each year. On the Outside examines the lives of twenty-two people--varied in race and gender but united by their time in the criminal justice system--as they pass out of the prison gates and back into the world. The book takes a clear-eyed look at the challenges faced by formerly incarcerated citizens as they try to find work, housing, and stable communities. Standing alongside these individual portraits is a quantitative study conducted by the authors that followed every state prisoner in Michigan who was released on parole in 2003 (roughly 11,000 individuals) for the next seven years, providing a comprehensive view of their postprison neighborhoods, families, employment, and contact with the parole system. On the Outside delivers a powerful combination of hard data and personal narrative that shows why our country continues to struggle with the social and economic reintegration of the formerly incarcerated. For further information, including an instructor guide and slide deck, please visit: http://ontheoutsidebook.us/home/instructors

Trauma has unfortunately become an all-too familiar occurrence in the lives of children, with a majority of youth experiencing a traumatic event before the age of 18. With the rise of school shootings and recent March for Our Lives, this timely book will address intervention strategies for social workers and counselors to combat this negative phenomenon. Urban Youth Trauma focuses on urban violence and guns, while due attention is also paid to other forms of trauma in order to ground violence-related trauma within the constellation of multiple forms of trauma. Violence, and more specifically that related to guns, is very much associated with urban centers and youth of color. Divided into three parts, this volume traces the roots of urban youth trauma. Parts I and II provide context and foundation for the problem and intervention strategies. Part III takes the reader through a variety of intervention strategies directly related to the community's assets. The strength of Urban Youth Trauma's lies in its focus on the community itself as the key to survival, resilience, and change.

Both significant and timely, Blackhood Against the Police Power addresses the punishment of "race" and the disavowal of sexual violence central to the contemporary "post-racial" culture of politics. Here the author asserts that the post-racial presents an antiblack animus that should be read as desiring the end of blackness and the black liberation movement's singular ethical claims. The book redefines policing as a sociohistorical process of implementing antiblackness and, in so doing, redefines racism as an act of sexual violence that produces the punishment of race. It smartly critiques the way leading antiracist discourse is frequently complicit with antiblackness and recalls the original 1960s conception of black studies as a corrective to the deficiencies in today's critical discourse on race and sex. The book explores these lines of inquiry to pinpoint how the history of racial slavery wraps itself in a new discourse of disavowal. In this way, Blackhood Against the Police Power responds to a range of texts, policies, practices, and representations complicit with the police power--from the Fourth Amendment and the movements to curtail stop-and-frisk policing and mass incarceration to popular culture treatments of blackness to the leading academic discourses on race and sex politics.

Based on original research,Compliments of Chicagohoodzanalyzes the unique visual language and graphics of Chicago's gangs, drawing upon decades of inter- views, documentation, and collecting of memorabilia, and featuring commentary from gang members and Chicago artists.The practice of creating and distributing gang business ("compliment") cards was popular in Chicago for over fifty years. These displayed the organization and branch, its active and fallen members, and rivalries. This book tells the stories behind the names, bringing the reader closer to the individuals who created, owned, and added their personal touches to the card as it passed from hand to hand.James "Jinx" O'Connor's photographic documentation of gang graffiti and members captures a lost era of large-scale color promotional murals and an extraordinary style distinct within street art. The book also explores other forms of representation including varsity-style sweaters, patches, and drawings.Through these images,Chicagohoodz traces the development and consolidation of the neighborhood street organization from doo-wop to hip-hop, from greasers to gangster rap, from dances, bands, and softball teams to racketeering, narcotics trafficking, and domestic terror.

In the bestselling tradition of The Notorious RBG comes a lively, informative, and illustrated tribute to one of the most exceptional women in American history--Harriet Tubman--a heroine whose fearlessness and activism still resonates today. Harriet Tubman is best known as one of the most famous conductors on the Underground Railroad. As a leading abolitionist, her bravery and selflessness has inspired generations in the continuing struggle for civil rights. Now, National Book Award nominee Erica Armstrong Dunbar presents a fresh take on this American icon blending traditional biography, illustrations, photos, and engaging sidebars that illuminate the life of Tubman as never before. Not only did Tubman help liberate hundreds of slaves, she was the first woman to lead an armed expedition during the Civil War, worked as a spy for the Union Army, was a fierce suffragist, and was an advocate for the aged. She Came to Slay reveals the many complexities and varied accomplishments of one of our nation's true heroes and offers an accessible and modern interpretation of Tubman's life that is both informative and engaging. Filled with rare outtakes of commentary, an expansive timeline of Tubman's life, photos (both new and those in public domain), commissioned illustrations, and sections including "Harriet By the Numbers" (number of times she went back down south, approximately how many people she rescued, the bounty on her head) and "Harriet's Homies" (those who supported her over the years), She Came to Slay is a stunning and powerful mix of pop culture and scholarship and proves that Harriet Tubman is well deserving of her permanent place in our nation's history.

Teacher Preparation at the Intersection of Race and Poverty in Today's Schools introduces the reader to a collection of thoughtful works by authors that represent current thinking about teacher preparation. Importantly, the book is divided into two primary sections, the first being four chapters that offer understanding of the depth and breadth of the intersection of race and poverty as it relates to teaching and teacher preparation. The second section presents Dialogues of Teacher Education focused on "Meeting the Challenge of Race and Poverty in Our Schools: The Role of Teacher Education" with eight contributing authors who reflect on and give voice to meeting the challenge. Finally, two book reviews are presented that align with the concern for preparing teachers to enter schools at the intersection of race and poverty on a daily basis.

Thinking Race clarifies the relationship between biology and race, showing how racism can result from a misguided blending of biology with social construction. Using arresting examples, Richard Goldsby and Mary Catherine Bateson aim to help readers accept the reality of human difference while understanding human unity. Controversial issues of race and IQ, race and athletic ability, and perceptions of race and beauty are examined, as are those of affirmative action and reparations for slavery. The authors also explore how income inequality, healthcare disparities, unequal access to education, an unfair justice system, and mass incarceration all call for constructive social policies that remodel American society in ways that will build a better, more resilient, and happier society. The goal is a society in which equal civil rights are clearly derived from the recognition of equal human rights, and equal opportunity provides the pathway to equitable results.

In The Chosen Ones, sociologist and feminist scholar Nikki Jones shares the compelling story of a group of Black men living in San Francisco's historically Black neighborhood, the Fillmore. Against all odds, these men work to atone for past crimes by reaching out to other Black men, young and old, with the hope of guiding them toward a better life. Yet despite their genuine efforts, they struggle to find a new place in their old neighborhood. With a poignant yet hopeful voice, Jones illustrates how neighborhood politics, everyday interactions with the police, and conservative Black gender ideologies shape the men's ability to make good and forgive themselves--and how the double-edged sword of community shapes the work of redemption.

From a Harvard scholar and former Obama official, a powerful proposal for curtailing violent crime in America Urban violence is one of the most divisive and allegedly intractable issues of our time. But as Harvard scholar Thomas Abt shows in Bleeding Out, we actually possess all the tools necessary to stem violence in our cities. Coupling the latest social science with firsthand experience as a crime-fighter, Abt proposes a relentless focus on violence itself -- not drugs, gangs, or guns. Because violence is "sticky," clustering among small groups of people and places, it can be predicted and prevented using a series of smart-on-crime strategies that do not require new laws or big budgets. Bringing these strategies together, Abt offers a concrete, cost-effective plan to reduce homicides by over 50 percent in eight years, saving more than 12,000 lives nationally. Violence acts as a linchpin for urban poverty, so curbing such crime can unlock the untapped potential of our cities' most disadvantaged communities and help us to bridge the nation's larger economic and social divides. Urgent yet hopeful, Bleeding Out offers practical solutions to the national emergency of urban violence -- and challenges readers to demand action.

Every weekday, the wildly popular Tom Joyner Morning Show reaches more than eight million radio listeners. The show offers broadly progressive political talk, adult-oriented soul music, humor, advice, and celebrity gossip for largely older, largely working-class black audience. But it's not just an old-school show: it's an activist political forum and a key site reflecting on popular aesthetics. It focuses on issues affecting African Americans today, from the denigration of hard-working single mothers, to employment discrimination and sexual abuse, to the racism and violence endemic to the U.S. criminal justice system, to international tragedies. In Black Radio/Black Resistance, author Micaela di Leonardo dives deep into the Tom Joyner Morning Show's 25 year history inside larger U.S. broadcast history. From its rise in the Clinton era and its responses to key events--9/11, Hurricane Katrina, President Obama's elections and presidency, police murders of unarmed black Americans and the rise of Black Lives Matter, and Donald Trump's ascendancy-it has broadcast the varied, defiant, and darkly comic voices of its anchors, guests, and audience members. di Leonardo also investigates the new synergistic set of cross-medium ties and political connections that have affected print, broadcast, and online reporting and commentary in antiracist directions. This new multiracial progressive public sphere has extraordinary potential for shaping America's future. Thus Black Radio/Black Resistance does far more than simply shed light on a major counterpublic institution unjustly ignored for reasons of color, class, generation, and medium. It demonstrates an alternative understanding of the shifting black public sphere in the digital age. Like the show itself, Black Radio/Black Resistance is politically progressive, music-drenched, and blisteringly funny.

When a dissident from the Martian-conquered future, Erik Killraven, threatens to overthrow Wakanda, the disgraced prince must wager what little is left of his soul to save his people! And for years, the Maroons have lain dormant, planning the next stage of their rebellion. At last, it is time to strike - with a treasure hunt for unstable Vibranium! And with the Black Panther once again in their ranks, they're certain of victory. But what will victory cost? When the chips are down, will the Maroons rise to heroism, or are they doomed by the trauma of their past? Collecting: Black Panther (2018) 7-12

Robertson and Chaney examine how the early antecedents of police brutality like plantation overseers, the lynching of African American males, early race riots, the Rodney King incident, and the Los Angeles Rampart Scandal have directly impacted the current relationship between communities of color and police. Using a phenomenological framework, they analyze how African American college students perceive police to determine how race, gender, and education create different realities among a demographic. Based on their qualitative and quantitative findings, Robertson and Chaney offer recommended policies and strategies for police and communities to improve relationships and perceptions between the two.

This enlightening and reflective guide studies the psychological impact of racism and discrimination and offers steps to improve wellbeing. It includes definitions of race, racism and other commonly used terms, such as microaggressions. Each chapter of the book focusses on one category of wellbeing - self-acceptance, personal growth, purpose in life, positive relations with others, environmental mastery, autonomy - and includes case examples, spaces for reflection, and exercises. For use as a tool within counselling, as well as a self-help tool by individuals, each category provides a framework for thinking about how to manage everyday racism and thrive.