Books on Display
A Brick and a Bible: Black Women's Radical Activism in the Midwest during the Great Depression by
In this first study of Black radicalism in midwestern cities before the civil rights movement, Melissa Ford connects the activism of Black women who championed justice during the Great Depression to those involved in the Ferguson Uprising and the Black Lives Matter movement. A Brick and a Bible examines how African American working-class women, many of whom had just migrated to "the promised land" only to find hunger, cold, and unemployment, forged a region of revolutionary potential. A Brick and a Bible theorizes a tradition of Midwestern Black radicalism, a praxis-based ideology informed by but divergent from American Communism. Midwestern Black radicalism that contests that interlocking systems of oppression directly relates the distinct racial, political, geographic, economic, and gendered characteristics that make up the American heartland. This volume illustrates how, at the risk of their careers, their reputations, and even their lives, African American working-class women in the Midwest used their position to shape a unique form of social activism.
Call Number: E185.915.F67 2022
Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures by
Scholars have paid relatively little attention to the highbrow, middlebrow, and popular periodicals that African Americans read and discussed regularly during the Jim Crow era--publications such as the Chicago Defender, the Crisis, Ebony, and the Half-Century Magazine. Jim Crow Networks considers how these magazines and newspapers, and their authors, readers, advertisers, and editors worked as part of larger networks of activists and thinkers to advance racial uplift and resist racism during the first half of the twentieth century. As Eurie Dahn demonstrates, authors like James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, and Jean Toomer wrote in the context of interracial and black periodical networks, which shaped the literature they produced and their concerns about racial violence. This original study also explores the overlooked intersections between the black press and modernist and Harlem Renaissance texts, and highlights key sites where readers and writers worked toward bottom-up sociopolitical changes during a period of legalized segregation.
Call Number: PN4882.5.D35 2021
Lost in the Transit Desert: Race, Transit Access, and Suburban Form by
Increased redevelopment, the dismantling of public housing, and increasing housing costs are forcing a shift in migration of lower income and transit dependent populations to the suburbs. These suburbs are often missing basic transportation, and strategies to address this are lacking. This absence of public transit creates barriers to viable employment and accessibility to cultural networks, and plays a role in increasing social inequality. This book investigates how housing and transport policy have played their role in creating these "Transit Deserts," and what impact race has upon those likely to be affected. Diane Jones Allen uses research from New Orleans, Baltimore, and Chicago to explore the forces at work in these situations, as well as proposing potential solutions. Mapping, interviews, photographs, and narratives all come together to highlight the inequities and challenges in Transit Deserts, where a lack of access can make all journeys, such as to jobs, stores, or relatives, much more difficult. Alternatives to public transit abound, from traditional methods such as biking and carpooling to more culturally specific tactics, and are examined comprehensively. This is valuable reading for students and researchers interested in transport planning, urban planning, city infrastructure, and transport geography.
Call Number: HT123 .A45 2018
The Life and Death of Gus Reed: A Story of Race and Justice in Illinois during the Civil War and Reconstruction by
Gus Reed was a freed slave who traveled north as Sherman's March was sweeping through Georgia in 1864. His journey ended in Springfield, Illinois, a city undergoing fundamental changes as its white citizens struggled to understand the political, legal, and cultural consequences of emancipation and black citizenship. Reed became known as a petty thief, appearing time and again in the records of the state's courts and prisons. In late 1877, he burglarized the home of a well-known Springfield attorney--and brother of Abraham Lincoln's former law partner--a crime for which he was convicted and sentenced to the Illinois State Penitentiary. Reed died at the penitentiary in 1878, shackled to the door of his cell for days with a gag strapped in his mouth. An investigation established that two guards were responsible for the prisoner's death, but neither they nor the prison warden suffered any penalty. The guards were dismissed, the investigation was closed, and Reed was forgotten. Gus Reed's story connects the political and legal cultures of white supremacy, black migration and black communities, the Midwest's experience with the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the resurgence of nationwide opposition to African American civil rights in the late nineteenth century. These experiences shaped a nation with deep and unresolved misgivings about race, as well as distinctive and conflicting ideas about justice and how to achieve it.
Call Number: F549.S7B34 2014
Friends Disappear: The Battle for Racial Equality in Evanston by
Mary Barr thinks a lot about the old photograph hanging on her refrigerator door. In it, she and a dozen or so of her friends from the Chicago suburb of Evanston sit on a porch. It's 1974, the summer after they graduated from Nichols Middle School, and what strikes her immediately--aside from the Soul Train-era clothes--is the diversity of the group: boys and girls, black and white, in the variety of poses you'd expect from a bunch of friends on the verge of high school. But the photo also speaks to the history of Evanston, to integration, and to the ways that those in the picture experienced and remembered growing up in a place that many at that time considered to be a racial utopia. In Friends Disappear Barr goes back to her old neighborhood and pieces together a history of Evanston with a particular emphasis on its neighborhoods, its schools, and its work life. She finds that there is a detrimental myth of integration surrounding Evanston despite bountiful evidence of actual segregation, both in the archives and from the life stories of her subjects. Curiously, the city's own desegregation plan is partly to blame. The initiative called for the redistribution of students from an all-black elementary school to institutions situated in white neighborhoods. That, however, required busing, and between the tensions it generated and obvious markers of class difference, the racial divide, far from being closed, was widened. Friends Disappear highlights how racial divides limited the life chances of blacks while providing opportunities for whites, and offers an insider's perspective on the social practices that doled out benefits and penalties based on race--despite attempts to integrate.
Call Number: F549.E8B295 2014
Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Artists, Writers, and Intellectuals, 1893-1930 by
The Black Chicago Renaissance emerged from a foundational stage that stretched from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition to the start of the Great Depression. During this time, African American innovators working across the landscape of the arts set the stage for an intellectual flowering that redefined black cultural life. Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed have brought together essays that explore the intersections in the backgrounds, education, professional affiliations, and public lives and achievements of black writers, journalists, visual artists, dance instructors, and other creators working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Organized chronologically, the chapters unearth transformative forces that supported the emergence of individuals and social networks dedicated to work in arts and letters. The result is an illuminating scholarly collaboration that remaps African American intellectual and cultural geography and reframes the concept of urban black renaissance. Contributors: Richard A. Courage, Mary Jo Deegan, Brenda Ellis Fredericks, James C. Hall, Bonnie Claudia Harrison, Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey Jr., Amy M. Mooney, Christopher Robert Reed, Clovis E. Semmes, Margaret Rose Vendryes, and Richard Yarborough
Call Number: NX512.3.A35 (ebook)
The Muse in Bronzeville by
The Muse in Bronzeville, a dynamic reappraisal of a neglected period in African American cultural history, is the first comprehensive critical study of the creative awakening that occurred on Chicago's South Side from the early 1930s to the cold war. Coming of age during the hard Depression years and in the wake of the Great Migration, this generation of Black creative artists produced works of literature, music, and visual art fully comparable in distinction and scope to the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance. This highly informative and accessible work, enhanced with reproductions of paintings of the same period, examines Black Chicago's "Renaissance" through richly anecdotal profiles of such figures as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Charles White, Gordon Parks, Horace Cayton, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, and Katherine Dunham. Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage make a powerful case for moving Chicago's Bronzeville, long overshadowed by New York's Harlem, from a peripheral to a central position within African American and American studies.
Call Number: PS285.C47 B66 2011
About the Authors
Diane Jones Allen (2015 BMRC Fellow)
Diane Jones Allen is currently Principal Landscape Architect with DesignJones LLC, New Orleans, USA. Her research and practice is guided by environmental justice, and sustainability in African-American landscapes. She was previously a tenured Professor in Landscape Architecture at the School of Architecture and Planning, Morgan State University, Baltimore, USA.
Thomas Bahde (2010 BMRC Fellow)
Thomas Bahde is a historian of the 19th-century United States, specializing in race, slavery and antislavery, and emancipation from the 1820s through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Bahde is also interested in comparative slavery and varieties of bound labor in the Atlantic World. He currently teaches in the Honors College at Oregon State University.
Mary Barr (2012 BMRC Fellow)
Mary Barr teaches at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. She received her Ph.D. in African American Studies and Sociology from Yale University. In 2020 Barr was one of three Kentuckians to receive a book grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She used the award to research and write her second book. The project examines the history of residential segregation and the struggle for open housing in suburbs north of Chicago from 1959-1968.
Linda Chavers (2013 BMRC Fellow)
Linda Chavers obtained her doctorate in African American Literature from Harvard University and is a graduate of The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. She is Assistant Dean of Harvard College and Lecturer in African American Literature at Harvard University.
Richard Courage (2009 BMRC Fellow)
Richard A. Courage is a Professor of English at Westchester Community College and also Distinguished Teaching Professor of the State University of New York. He has published reviews and articles on African American narrative and visual arts, new media, and the teaching of writing in various scholarly collections and journals. His research on the cultural history of Black Chicago has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and the Vivian G. Harsh Society.
Spencer Dew (2011 BMRC Fellow)
Spencer Dew is the Associate Teaching Professor & Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Ohio State University. Dew’s work explores ways contemporary religion imagines and engages race, state power, and law. He is interested in religious movements that are popularly misrepresented, even criminalized, both in order to offer a corrective to such misunderstandings and out of a sense that subaltern social locations lead to insightful theorizing from members of these movements.
Jacob Dorman (2010 BMRC Fellow)
Since 2018 Jacob S. Dorman, Ph.D. has been Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno, and also teaches in the university’s Core Humanities Program; before that he was a tenured professor at the University of Kansas.
Jonathan Fenderson (2012 BMRC Fellow)
Jonathan Fenderson is an Assistant Professor in African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, which he first joined as a postdoctoral fellow in 2011. He earned his PhD in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts. His research and teaching interests emanate from three themes: intellectual history, social movements, and transnational links between Africa and the Diaspora.
Kim Gallon (2015 BMRC Fellow)
Kim Gallon is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her work investigates the cultural dimensions of the Black Press in the early twentieth century.
Ayesha Hardison (2009 BMRC Fellow)
Ayesha K. Hardison is an associate Professor at the University of Kansas. Her research interests include twentieth-century and twenty-first-century African American literature, Black women’s writing, African American literary and cultural history, contemporary film and media, and popular culture studies. Her work explores questions of race, gender, genre, social politics, and historical memory.
Books on Display
The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali by
"Citizenship is salvation," preached Noble Drew Ali, leader of the Moorish Science Temple of America in the early twentieth century. Ali's message was an aspirational call for black Americans to undertake a struggle for recognition from the state, one that would both ensure protection for all Americans through rights guaranteed by the law and correct the unjust implementation of law that prevailed in the racially segregated United States. Ali and his followers took on this mission of citizenship as a religious calling, working to carve out a place for themselves in American democracy and to bring about a society that lived up to what they considered the sacred purpose of the law. In The Aliites, Spencer Dew traces the history and impact of Ali's radical fusion of law and faith. Dew uncovers the influence of Ali's teachings, including the many movements they inspired. As Dew shows, Ali's teachings demonstrate an implicit yet critical component of the American approach to law: that it should express our highest ideals for society, even if it is rarely perfect in practice. Examining this robustly creative yet largely overlooked lineage of African American religious thought, Dew provides a window onto religion, race, citizenship, and law in America.
Call Number: BP232.D49 2019
The Princess and the Prophet: the Secret History of Magic, Race, and Moorish Muslims in America by
The just-discovered story of how two enigmatic circus performers and the cultural ferment of the Gilded Age sparked the Black Muslim movement in America Delving into new archives and uncovering fascinating biographical narratives, secret rituals, and hidden identities, historian Jacob Dorman explains why thousands of Americans were enthralled by the Islamic Orient, and why some came to see Islam as a global antiracist movement uniquely suited to people of African descent in an era of European imperialism, Jim Crow segregation, and officially sanctioned racism. The Princess and the Prophet tells the story of the Black Broadway performer who, among the world of Arabian acrobats and equestrians, Muslim fakirs, and Wild West shows, discovered in Islam a greater measure of freedom and dignity, and a rebuttal to the racism and parochialism of white America. Overturning the received wisdom that the prophet was born on the East Coast, Dorman has discovered that Noble Drew Ali was born Walter Brister in Kentucky. With the help of his wife, a former lion tamer and "Hindoo" magician herself, Brister renamed himself Prophet Noble Drew Ali and founded the predecessor of the Nation of Islam, the Moorish Science Temple of America, in the 1920s. With an array of profitable businesses, the "Moors" built a nationwide following of thousands of dues-paying members, swung Chicago elections, and embedded themselves in Chicago's dominant Republican political machine at the height of Prohibition racketeering, only to see their sect descend into infighting in 1929 that likely claimed the prophet's life. This fascinating untold story reveals that cultures grow as much from imagination as inheritance, and that breaking down the artificial silos around various racial and religious cultures helps to understand not only America's hidden past but also its polycultural present.
Call Number: BP221 .D67 2020 (ebook)ISBN: 9780807067260
Last Project Standing by
In 1995 a half-vacant public housing project on Chicago's Near West Side fell to the wrecking ball. The demolition and reconstruction of the Henry Horner housing complex ushered in the most ambitious urban housing experiment of its kind: smaller, mixed-income, and partially privatized developments that, the thinking went, would mitigate the insecurity, isolation, and underemployment that plagued Chicago's infamously troubled public housing projects. Focusing on Horner's redevelopment, Catherine Fennell asks how Chicago's endeavor transformed everyday built environments into laboratories for teaching urbanites about the rights and obligations of belonging to a city and a nation that seemed incapable of taking care of its most destitute citizens. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic and archival research, she shows how collisions with everything from haywire heating systems and decaying buildings to silent neighbors became an education in the possibilities, but also the limits, of collective care, concern, and protection in the aftermath of welfare failure. As she documents how the materiality of both the unsuccessful older projects and the recently emerging housing fosters feelings of belonging and loss, her work engages larger debates in critical anthropology and poverty studies--and opens a vital new perspective on the politics of space, race, and development in urban America.
Call Number: HD7288.78.U52C434 2015
Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s by
As both an activist and the dynamic editor of Negro Digest, Hoyt W. Fuller stood at the nexus of the Black Arts Movement and the broader black cultural politics of his time. Jonathan Fenderson uses historical snapshots of Fuller's life and achievements to rethink the period and establish Fuller's important role in laying the foundation for the movement. In telling Fuller's story, Fenderson provides provocative new insights into the movement's international dimensions, the ways the movement took shape at the local level, the impact of race and other factors, and the challenges--corporate, political, and personal--that Fuller and others faced in trying to build black institutions. An innovative study that approaches the movement from a historical perspective, Building the Black Arts Movement is a much-needed reassessment of the trajectory of African American culture over two explosive decades.
Call Number: E185.97.F87 F46 2019
Writing Through Jane Crow by
In Writing through Jane Crow, Ayesha Hardison examines African American literature and its representation of black women during the pivotal but frequently overlooked decades of the 1940s and 1950s. At the height of Jim Crow racial segregation--a time of transition between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement and between World War II and the modern civil rights movement--black writers also addressed the effects of "Jane Crow," the interconnected racial, gender, and sexual oppression that black women experienced. Hardison maps the contours of this literary moment with the understudied works of well-known writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Richard Wright as well as the writings of neglected figures like Curtis Lucas, Pauli Murray, and Era Bell Thompson. By shifting her focus from the canonical works of male writers who dominated the period, the author recovers the work of black women writers. Hardison shows how their texts anticipated the renaissance of black women's writing in later decades and initiates new conversations on the representation of women in texts by black male writers. She draws on a rich collection of memoirs, music, etiquette guides, and comics to further reveal the texture and tensions of the era.
Call Number: PS153.N5 H2234 2014
