Black History Month

A rejoicing and authoritative 400-year history of the centrality of Christian faith, the community of Black churches in the creation and the shaping of culture and community for Black Americans. Gates shows us the resilience and power of the institution, its' deep-rooted, wide legacy and indelible influence.

Chocolate Cities offers a refreshing and persuasive rendering of the United States—a “Black map” that more accurately reflects the lived experiences and the future of Black life in America. Drawing on film, fiction, music, and oral history, Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson trace the Black American experience of race, place, and liberation, mapping it from Emancipation to now.

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. 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.

In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of “sundown towns”—almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks could not live there—that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South. These towns used everything from legal formalities to violence to create homogenous Caucasian communities—and their existence has gone unexamined until now. For the first time, Loewen takes a long, hard look at the history, sociology, and continued existence of these towns, contributing an essential new chapter to the study of American race relations.

Drawing us back to testimonies of participants and contemporary witnesses of the era and synthesizing the perspectives of subsequent observers, Reidy reveals emancipation as a long, messy process, with contingencies that clustered around the categories of time, place, and person.

William B. Gravely presents the most comprehensive account of the Earle lynching ever written, exploring it from background to aftermath and from multiple perspectives. Among his sources are contemporary press accounts (there was no trial transcript), extensive interviews and archival documents, and the "Greenville notebook" kept by Rebecca West, the well-known British writer who covered the trial for the New Yorker magazine. Gravely meticulously re-creates the case's details, analyzing the flaws in the investigation and prosecution that led in part to the acquittals. Vivid portraits emerge of key figures in the story, including both Earle and Brown, Solicitor Robert T. Ashmore, Governor Strom Thurmond, and West, whose article "Opera in Greenville" is masterful journalism but marred by errors owing to her short stay in the area.

Long before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, the struggle to desegregate America's schools was a grassroots movement--and young women were its vanguard. In the 1940s parents and daughters began filing desegregation lawsuits, eventually forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take the issue to the Supreme Court. After Brown v. Board, girls also far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate all-white schools.

In Educating Harlem, a multi-disciplinary group of scholars document and analyze how Harlemites defined and pursued their educational ambitions in the face of political and economic challenges ranging from poverty and racism to government indifference. The contributors consider the individuals, organizations, and initiatives that fostered an educational vision for Harlem, from Harlem Renaissance figures who sought to reform the curriculum to efforts in the 1970s to develop and defend auxiliary aspects of schooling in the face of severe budget cuts.

Robert Cohen presents a thorough historical overview as well as an entrée to Zinn’s diary. One of the most extensive records of the political climate on a historically black college in 1960s America, Zinn’s diary offers an in-depth view. It is a fascinating historical document of the free speech, academic freedom, and student rights battles that rocked Spelman and led to Zinn’s dismissal from the college in 1963 for supporting the student movement.