Books
John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson: The Blues Harmonica of Chicago's Bronzeville by
John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson was one of the most popular blues harmonica players and singers from the late 1930s through the 1940s. Recording for the Bluebird Records and RCA Victor labels, Sonny Boy shaped Chicago's music scene with an innovative style that gave structure and speed to blues harmonica performance. His recording in 1937 of "Good Morning, School Girl," followed by others made him a hit with Southern black audiences who had migrated north. Unfortunately, his popularity and recording career ended on June 1, 1948, when he was robbed and murdered in Chicago, Illinois. In 1980, he was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame. Mitsutoshi Inaba offers the first full-length biography of this key figure in the evolution of the Chicago blues. Taking readers through Sonny Boy's career, Inaba illustrates how Sonny Boy lived through the lineage of blues harmonica performance, drawing on established traditions and setting out a blueprint for the growing electric blues scene. Interviews with Sonny Boy's family members and his last harmonica student provide new insights into the character of the man as well as the techniques of the musician. John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson: The Blues Harmonica of Chicago's Bronzeville provides fans and musicians alike an invaluable exploration of the life and legacy of one the Chicago blues' founding figures.
Call Number: ML419.W53 I53 2016
The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstituion of Higher Education, 1965-1972 by
This book provides the first national study of this intense and challenging struggle which disrupted and refashioned institutions in almost every state. It also illuminates the context for one of the most transformative educational movements in American history through a history of black higher education and black student activism before 1965.
Call Number: LC2781 .R65 2012
Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now by
Exposes and explores the prevalence of racist restaurant branding in the United States. Aunt Jemima is the face of pancake mix. Uncle Ben sells rice. Chef Rastus shills for Cream of Wheat. Stereotyped Black faces and bodies have long promoted retail food products that are household names. Much less visible to the public are the numerous restaurants that deploy unapologetically racist logos, themes, and architecture. These marketing concepts, which center nostalgia for a racist past and commemoration of our racist present, reveal the deeply entrenched American investment in anti-blackness. Drawing on wide-ranging sources from the late 1800s to the present, Burgers in Blackface gives a powerful account, and rebuke, of historical and contemporary racism in restaurant branding. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead.
Call Number: GN273 .K83 2019
The Multiracial Promise: Harold Washington's Chicago and the Democratic Struggle in Reagan's America by
In April 1983, a dynamic, multiracial political coalition did the unthinkable, electing Harold Washington as the first Black mayor of Chicago. Washington's victory was unlikely not just because America's second city was one of the nation's most racially balkanized but also because it came at a time when Ronald Reagan and other political conservatives seemed resurgent. Washington's initial win and reelection in 1987 established the charismatic politician as a folk hero. It also bolstered hope among Democrats that the party could win elections by pulling together multiracial urban voters around progressive causes. Yet what could be called the Washington era revealed clear limits to electoral politics and racial coalition building when decoupled from neighborhood-based movement organizing. Drawing on a rich array of archives and oral history interviews, Gordon K. Mantler offers a bold reexamination of the Harold Washington movement and moment. Taking readers into Chicago's street-level politics and the often tense relationships among communities and their organizers, Mantler shows how white supremacy, deindustrialization, dysfunction, and voters' own contradictory expectations stubbornly impeded many of Washington's proposed reforms. Ultimately, Washington's historic victory and the thwarted ambitions of his administration provide a cautionary tale about the peril of placing too much weight on electoral politics above other forms of civic action--a lesson today's activists would do well to heed.
Call Number: F548.54.W36M36 2023
This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration by Call Number: HV8745.N48 2023
About the Authors
Mitsutoshi Inaba (2011 BMRC Fellow)
Mitsutoshi Inaba is a Professor of Japanese Language and Music at Fisk University. He holds a doctorate in musicology and ethnomusicology from the University of Oregon.
Ibram X. Kendi (2011 BMRC Fellow)
Ibram Xolani Kendi is an American author, professor, anti-racist activist, and historian of race and discriminatory policy in the U.S. He currently serves as Howard University's Director of the Institute for Advanced Study.
Naa Oyo A. Kwate (2016 BMRC Fellow)
Naa Oyo A. Kwate is an Associate Professor, jointly appointed in the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. A psychology by training, she has wide ranging interests in racial inequality and African American health. Her research has centered primarily on the ways in which urban built environments reflect racial inequalities in the United States, and how racism directly and indirectly affects African American health.
Danielle Legros Georges (2013 BMRC Fellow)
Danielle Legros Georges is a Haitian-born American poet, essayist, and academic. She is a Professor of Creative Writing in the Lesley University MFA Program in Creative Writing.
Gordon K. Mantler (2016 BMRC Fellow)
Gordon K. Mantler is Associate Professor of Writing and History and executive director of the University Writing Program at George Washington University.
Melanie Newport (2016 BMRC Fellow)
Melanie D. Newport is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. Melanie's research focuses on the policies and institutions of urban criminal justice systems in the United States since the 1950s.
Sarah Potter (2009 BMRC Fellow)
Sarah Potter is a historian of gender, sexuality, and family in the 20th century United States. She has taught at th eUniversity of Memphis since 2008 and received a PhD in History from the University of Chicago in 2008.
Ian Rocksborough-Smith (2012 BMRC Fellow)
Ian Smith teaches U.S. History at the University of the Fraser Valley. His research interests include the study of late 19th and 20th century United States, public history, social movements, and histories of race, labor, religion, and empire in the Atlantic world.
E. James West (2013, 2015, 2017 BMRC Fellow)
E. James West is a lecturer in modern U.S. History at the University of York. West's research focuses on the Black Press and African American urban history. More broadly, he is interested in race, rights, and media across the Black diaspora.
Mabel O. Wilson (2010 BMRC Fellow)
Mabel O. Wilson is an American architect, designer, and scholar. She is the founder of Studio& and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.
Christina Zanfagna (2011 BMRC Fellow)
Christina Zanfagna is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Ethnic Studies at Santa Clara University. She specializes in Afro-diasporic music cultures and Black American music, especially hip hop.
Books
Everybody Else: Adoption and the Politics of Domestic Diversity in Postwar America by
In the popular imagination, the twenty years after World War II are associated with simpler, happier, more family-focused living. We think of stereotypical baby boom families like the Cleavers-white, suburban, and well on their way to middle-class affluence. For these couples and their children, a happy, stable family life provided an antidote to the anxieties and uncertainties of the emerging nuclear age. But not everyone looked or lived like the Cleavers. For those who could not have children, or have as many children as they wanted, the postwar baby boom proved a source of social stigma and personal pain. Further, in 1950 roughly one in three Americans made below middle-class incomes, and over fifteen million lived under Jim Crow segregation. For these individuals, home life was not an oasis but a challenge, intimately connected to the era's many political and social upheavals. Everybody Else provides a comparative analysis of diverse postwar families and examines the lives and case records of men and women who applied to adopt or provide pre-adoptive foster care in the 1940s and 1950s. It considers an array of individuals-both black and white, middle and working class-who found themselves on the margins of a social world that privileged family membership. These couples wanted adoptive and foster children in order to achieve a sense of personal mission and meaning, as well as a deeper feeling of belonging to their communities. But their quest for parenthood also highlighted the many inequities of that era. These individuals' experiences seeking children reveal that the baby boom family was about much more than "togetherness" or a quiet house in the suburbs; it also shaped people's ideas about the promises and perils of getting ahead in postwar America.
Call Number: HV875.55 .P684 2014
Black Public History in Chicago: Civil Rights Activism from World War II into the Cold War by
In civil-rights-era Chicago, a dedicated group of black activists, educators, and organizations employed black public history as more than cultural activism. Their work and vision energized a movement that promoted political progress in the crucial time between World War II and the onset of the Cold War. Ian Rocksborough-Smith's meticulous research and adept storytelling provide the first in-depth look at how these committed individuals leveraged Chicago's black public history. Their goal: to engage with the struggle for racial equality. Rocksborough-Smith shows teachers working to advance curriculum reform in public schools, while well-known activists Margaret and Charles Burroughs pushed for greater recognition of black history by founding the DuSable Museum of African American History. Organizations like the Afro-American Heritage Association, meanwhile, used black public history work to connect radical politics and nationalism. Together, these people and their projects advanced important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labor that paralleled the shifting terrain of mid-twentieth-century civil rights.
Call Number: F548.9.N3 R63 2018
Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr by
From its launch in 1945, Ebony magazine was politically and socially influential. However, the magazine also played an important role in educating millions of African Americans about their past. Guided by the pen of Lerone Bennett Jr., the magazine's senior editor and in-house historian, Ebony became a key voice in the popular black history revival that flourished after World War II. Its content helped push representations of the African American past from the margins to the center of the nation's cultural and political imagination. E. James West's fresh and fascinating exploration of Ebony's political, social, and historical content illuminates the intellectual role of the iconic magazine and its contribution to African American scholarship. He also uncovers a paradox. Though Ebony provided Bennett with space to promote a militant reading of black history and protest, the magazine's status as a consumer publication helped to mediate its representation of African American identity in both past and present. Mixing biography, cultural history, and popular memory, West restores Ebony and Bennett to their rightful place in African American intellectual, commercial, and political history.
Call Number: PN4900.E34 W47 2020
Negro Building: Black Americans in the world of fairs and museums by
Negro Building traces the evolution of Black public history from the Civil War through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Mabel O. Wilson gives voice to the figures who conceived the curatorial content: Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Horace Cayton, and Margaret Burroughs. Originally published in 2012, the book reveals why the Black cities of Chicago and Detroit became the sites of major Black historical museums rather than the nation's capital, which would eventually become home for the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016.
Call Number: E185.53.A1 W55 2012
Holy Hip Hop in the City of Angels by
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was home to numerous radical social and environmental eruptions. In the face of several major earthquakes and floods, riots and economic insecurity, police brutality and mass incarceration, some young black Angelenos turned to holy hip hop--a movement merging Christianity and hip hop culture--to "save" themselves and the city. Converting street corners to open-air churches and gangsta rap beats into anthems of praise, holy hip hoppers used gospel rap to navigate complicated social and spiritual realities and to transform the Southland's fractured terrains into musical Zions. Armed with beats, rhymes, and bibles, they journeyed through black Lutheran congregations, prison ministries, African churches, reggae dancehalls, hip hop clubs, Nation of Islam meetings, and Black Lives Matter marches. Zanfagna's fascinating ethnography provides a contemporary and unique view of black LA, offering a much-needed perspective on how music and religion intertwine in people's everyday experiences.
Call Number: ML3921.8.R36 Z36 2017
