New Books in African American Studies

Gene Slater's book Free to Discriminate: How the Nation's Realtors Created Housing Segregation and the Conservative Vision of American Freedom (Hayday Books, 2021) uncovers realtors' definitive role in segregating America and shaping modern conservative thought. Gene Slater follows this story from inside the realtor profession, drawing on many industry documents that have remained unexamined until...

In The Life and Times of Louis Lomax: The Art of Deliberate Disunity (Duke University Press, 2021), Thomas Aiello traces the complicated and fascinating life of a pioneering Black journalist and media personality. A witness to some of the most iconic moments of the 1960s, Lomax remains an important yet overlooked civil rights figure, who emerged as one of the most influential voices of the movemen...

Despite promises from politicians, nonprofits, and government agencies, Chicago's most disadvantaged neighborhoods remain plagued by poverty, failing schools, and gang activity. In Building a Better Chicago: Race and Community Resistance to Urban Redevelopment, Dr. Teresa Irene Gonzales shows us how, and why, these promises have gone unfulfilled, revealing tensions between neighborhood residents a...

From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel (LSU Press, 2020), Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with i...

Southern Food Historian Rebecca Sharpless discusses a new edition of Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking released in 2021 by University of South Carolina Press. Sharpless added a new critical introduction to the historic cookbook, first published in 1930 from a New York press as a collaboration between Blanche Rhett, Helen Woodward, and Lettie Gay. Woodward had married into a family with South...

Caseen Gaines' Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way (Sourcebooks, 2021) is a rollicking, entertaining, and fascinating cultural history of the 1921 Broadway musical Shuffle Along. Created by Black writers and composers and performed by an all-Black cast, Shuffle Along was one of the early cultural milestones of the Harlem Renaissance, not least because it launc...

Can new language reshape our understanding of the past and expand the possibilities of the future? The Crime Without a Name: Combatting Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America (Counterpoint, 2021) follows Pitner’s journey to identify and remedy the linguistic void in how we discuss race and culture in the United States. Ethnocide, first coined in 1944 by Jewish exile Raphael Lemkin (who al...

Ella L. J. Bell Smith and Stella M. Nkomo, Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity (Harvard Business Press, 2021) Ella Bell Smith is a professor of business administration at the Tuck School of Business. She’s also the founder and president of ASCENT: Leading Multicultural Women to the Top. Stella M. Nkomo is a professor in the Department of Human Resour...

What does it mean to be black and Buddhist, and what does that have to do with Life Wisdom? This episode of Life Wisdom features the dynamic work of Pamela Ayo Yetunde, Pastoral Counsellor, Co-Founder of Centre of the Heart, Buddhist Justice Reporter and co-editor of Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educa...

In Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics (U Chicago Press, 2020), LaFleur Stephens-Dougan argues that we focus on the use of negative racial appeals by the Republican Party, while ignoring the incentives that exist for some Democratic candidates to use race as much as, if not more than Republican candidates. The conventional wisdom is that a Democratic candidate would ne...

Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second Amendment has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--m...

Rice is a central ingredient to Southern foodways, and it is one of the most versatile grains served around the world. It could be prepared as a side dish, an entrée, and dessert; pair it with sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla for a sweet dish or add tomatoes, onions, and peas for a savory meal. In Rice: A Savor the South Cookbook (UNC Press, 2021), Michael Twitty explores the culinary history of rice...

In his new book, Watergate's Forgotten Hero: Frank Wills, Night-Watchman (McFarland & Co., 2021), Adam Henig sheds new light on a widely forgotten but vital actor in the Watergate saga: the twenty-four-year-old security guard was on duty at the Watergate Office Building when he detected a break-in. A high school dropout with only a few hours of formal guard training, Frank Wills alerted the police...

What was Harlem before its Renaissance, and how did it come to be? In Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia University Press, 2021), historian Kevin McGruder, Associate Professor at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, explores the life of the remarkable Philip Anthony Payton Jr., a real estate entrepreneur who bought building after building at the turn of the 20th century in the...

Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has written an intriguing new book on our understanding of American demographic data, and how we, as citizens, see each other as part of the fabric of the United States. The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream (Princeton UP, 2020) examines the lo...

Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During the Jim Crow Era (Nebraska, 2020) is about the places where the past and future meet. Throughout the early twentieth century, African Americans moved to California for jobs, for the beautiful weather and landscapes, and to start futures for themselves and their families. Like their white neighbors, they found sites of play and fun...

During the nadir of race relations in the United States South from 1877 to 1932, African Americans faced segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching. Among many forms of resistance, African Americans used their musical and theatrical talents to challenge white supremacy, attain economic opportunity, and transcend segregation. In Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932 (...

Ben Railton's book Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) is a cogently written history of the idea of American patriotism. Railton argues that there are four distinct forms of patriotism as practiced in the United States (U.S.) including (1) celebratory, or the communal expression of an idealized America, (2) mythic as based on national myths tha...

Today I talked to Kevin McGruder about his new book Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia UP, 2021) In a moment of hope, even faith, African-Americans inspired by Booker T. Washington believed at the start of the 21st century that prospering financially would lead them to fair and even-standing with their fellow white citizens in America. In that vein, Philip Payton launched the Afro...

Kwame Anthony Appiah is among the most respected philosophers and thinkers of his generation. In Kwame Anthony Appiah (Routledge, 2021), Christopher Lee introduces the reader not only to the contributions that Appiah has made to some central debates of our time, but also to the complex personal and intellectual history that shaped his ideas. Born in Ghana to an African father and a British mother,...

The realities of race that continue to plague the United States have direct ties to the anthropology. Anthropologists often imagine their discipline as inherently anti-racist and historically connected to social justice movements. But just how true is that? In Boasians at War: Anthropology, Race, and World War II (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) Anthony Hazard examines the work of Franz Boas, Ruth Bened...

Jeffrey Jenkins and Justin Peck’s new book Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918 (U Chicago Press, 2021) explores how Congressional Republicans enacted laws aimed at establishing an inclusive, multiracial democracy. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Congress crafted a civil rights agenda -- including laws, strict enforcement mechanisms, and Constitutional amendments that (for a...

Adam Lee Cilli's book Canaan, Dim and Far: Black Reformers and the Pursuit of Citizenship in Pittsburgh, 1915-1945 (U Georgia Press, 2021) is an assiduously researched book about the activism of African American reformers and migrants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1915 to 1945. Adam Cilli argues that Pittsburgh is central to the story of the Black freedom struggle in the North and the nation as...

No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (U Mississippi Press, 2020) is a history of the career of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915), specifically focusing on his work from 1896 to 1915. Drawing on the copious amount of material from Turner’s speeches, editorial, and open and private letters, Dr. Andre E. Johnson tells a story of how Turner provided rhe...

Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote that “the silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.” Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall’s Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Re...