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This chapter notes that the riot of 1919 was a sign that Chicago had a special problem. One of the most violent and prolonged in the history of the country, it became the object of an official investigation by a newly organized Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which issued a very long and carefully researched and documented report, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Riot. The 1919 riot may be seen as signaling the start of two trends in racial conflict that would intensify in the ensuing decades. The first was a new militancy on the part of the black community to resist the typical white-on-black violence. The second, paradoxically, was the increased “ingathering” of blacks within a more fully segregated ghetto, as white violence drove scattered black residents from other areas of the city in which they already lived.

This chapter examines the role of neighborhoods in the structure and functioning of networks. It also aims to classify communities as lost, saved, or liberated based on the structure and function of networks and the extent to which these networks are geographically bounded. It considers two very different communities: gay and lesbian communities in cities and inner-city African-American communities. Men and women living in urban communities today normally have ties within their neighborhoods and across the city. Networks are both local and nonlocal. In this way, gay men and lesbians and African Americans are much like other urban dwellers. Both groups, however, invest a great deal in nurturing local relationships and sharing a common space, perhaps more so than many other urban groups.

This chapter presents Tallahassee, Florida community members' description of how incarceration has affected their lives, their families and their communities. These community members are from Frenchtown and South City, which are predominantly African-American communities and have the highest incarceration rates among communities in Tallahassee. The analysis of the experiences of these two communities shows both positive and negative consequences for neighborhoods' life and that the net result of imprisonment policy has not been solely positive.

This chapter examines the devastating impact of neoliberal education reform experimentation in African American and Latinx communities in Denver. It explores how school reform, as a racial project and a settler colonialist project, operates as a lived experience for Black and Latinx low-income residents. It also details the ways these communities mobilize to fight neoliberal school reform. This chapter gives special attention to school choice, new discipline policies, and duplicitous reformer engagement as the most significant dimensions of neoliberal education reform that impact these community members and inspire their resistance. It discusses how their fight for comprehensive neighborhood schools stands as the antidote to the community fragmentation and gentrification that school reform facilitates. This chapter highlights three community organizations that rise up to take back neighborhood schools and fight dispossession. These non-institutionalized organizations—which operate without clear meeting spaces or 501(c) 3 status—engineer new modes of information sharing, attempt to take back community institutions beyond the school, and organize to harness the power of the vote. This chapter evaluates their non-institutionalized resistance within the larger context of gentrification and in a city in which media outlets, foundations, and other local institutions overwhelmingly align with the corporate reform movement.

This chapter narrates how black playwrights in the 1920s inherited the history of tensions between theater and church, as well as the bridges opened to theater by progressive congregations. However, the scripts they wrote reflected a range of social forces, including the changing class dynamics within the broader African American community; and nothing influenced these dynamics as profoundly as the Great Migration. The massive flow of southern blacks into northern cities permanently altered the course of both artistic and religious life among African Americans. Making sense of how religion was portrayed in early twentieth-century African American theater thus requires familiarity with the class relations affecting the lives of black playwrights, the state of theatrical development within the African American community, and the important religious movements during this era.

This chapter examines the role of of cultural exchange in the evolution of old time dancing and the creation of a new style in dance in the coal town of Dante in Russell County, Virginia. It begins with a historical background on the Cumberland Plateau and the town of Dante as well as the community's transition from farming to coal mining. It then discusses the impact of social and economic factors, including the interaction among local residents, African American southerners, and European immigrants, on Dante's dance traditions. It also looks at the exchange of dance ideas that took place in venues like Mr. Perry's Sweet Shop, along with the ways that dancing forged connections among African American communities in the coalfields. Finally, it explores changes in the old time dancing in Dante, citing the role played by the values embedded in the movement of the old and new dances and to people's beliefs about community, change, and the individual's relationship to it.

Largely due to the importation of molasses from the West Indies, used locally in the production of refined sugar at the J. B. Brown Sugar Company, and rum, a small but significant black labor force emerged on the Portland waterfront in the early nineteenth century. This workforce was challenged and eventually replaced by the newly arriving Irish by mid-century, and their small neighborhood at the base of Munjoy Hill around the Abyssinian Church (1828) was further decimated by the sinking of the steamship Portland in 1898, with the loss of many of its citizens employed on the steamer. Comparisons are made with similar African American communities in other major cities, primarily Boston. By 1864 a Longshoremen's Benevolent Association, mostly Irish, had been formed in Portland.

This chapter explains that, more than for any other immigrant group in greater Miami, the future life chances of the children of Anglophone Caribbean immigrants will probably be shaped by race rather than ethnicity. It explains that although about half the group strongly asserts a nation-of-origin identity, the fact that racial identity is stronger among the second generation than the 1.5 generation and the group's keen perception of itself as the victim of discrimination, combined with the lack of a distinctly West Indian residential or economic enclave, points to a growing, if predictably ambivalent, identification with the broader African American community. The chapter notes that for many second-generation West Indians, residential racial segregation remains an important obstacle not just to better housing, but also to access to public services, quality education, and perhaps even equal treatment from the police. It is possible that second-generation West Indian youth will be reluctant to take the jobs which the less well off of their parents now hold.

This chapter presents the editorial, “ The Color Line,” where the young Fortune responded forcefully to the New York Sun's critical comments about the way in which the African American community separated themselves from the white community or drew the color line. In his response, Fortune demonstrated his call for racial unity and race consciousness. He called on the community to continue to draw the line and be proud of their black skin. They were acting out of their own interest, he explained, similar to the Irish and German immigrants. Moreover, he argued, the color line in the South and increasingly in the North was drawn by the white community, not the black.

This chapter examines the 1965 Watts uprising in Los Angeles, California and the cultural resurgence of the African American community. It explains that the Watts uprising was part of a national phenomenon between 1964 and 1968 and it far exceeded the boundaries of that community, ultimately consuming much of South Central Los Angeles. It also discusses how Watts served as the hub of a grassroots arts movement that spread throughout the African American community, in many ways exemplifying ideas about the role of art and artists in the community that had been germinating in the Underground Musicians Association (UGMA).

This chapter discusses the work of the French historian and thinker Jacques Rancière in order to build a framework for political thought that relies on active equality rather than passive equality. Rancière reworks the presupposition, and in reworking it, changes its inflection from passive to active. For him, passive equality is not politics; it is policing. Rancière's use of the term police is not exactly the same as Michel Foucault's. Rancière rightly distinguishes between democratic action and the consequences of that action. He often privileges the linguistic character of the intellect when addressing the equality of intelligence. He also offers the equality of intelligence not as a conclusion to an argument, but rather as a starting point for politics. The concept of equality serves as a transhistorical concept in Rancière's work. The African American community of Clemson was unable to operate on the presupposition of equality.

This chapter presents the editorials, “John Brown” and “Nat. Turner”, Fortune's side of a debate with Frederick Douglass Jr. over the need for African Americans to erect a monument in honor of John Brown. While Fortune saw the necessity of honoring Brown, he did not see the need of the African American community to give their pennies to perpetuate the memory of the Sage of Osawatomie. Instead, evoking a sense of race pride, Fortune called on the community to honor Nat Turner, a forerunner of Brown and “a black hero.” Fortune questions why every time the community “move[s] that somebody's memory be perpetuated, that somebody's memory is always a white man's.” It was such demonstrations of “the absence of race pride and race unity,” argued Fortune, “which makes the white man despise black men all the world over.”

This chapter focuses on the expansion of the African American community in Los Angeles, California and during the 1960s and the formation of the Underground Musicians Association (UGMA). It discusses the Supreme Court's decision to strike down racially restrictive housing covenants and the decision of Samuel R. Browne to leave the jazz music field. It also highlights the role of Horace Tapscott and Leila Marian “Linda” in the formation of the UGMA.

This chapter first charts the complex dynamics that have pushed students from school and pulled them toward the criminal justice system, setting up the terms of a black prison diaspora that are maintained throughout the book. It then argues that harsh school disciplinary policies, emerging from the punishing culture of the War on Crime era, curtail youth academic achievement and accelerate incarceration risk in the African American community. It describes how the concentrated effect of punishment has a destabilizing effect on the African American community and the American democratic project as a whole, while benefiting larger social, political, and economic strategies in a neoliberal and postindustrial context.

Tells the story of growth on Charlotte's west side from the 1920s through the 1950s, a time when the city's African American population was not only growing but also shifting from the center city to the new neighborhoods being built on the west side of time. Describes the multi-class community fashioned by west side residents in the 1920s and 1930s. Explores the school culture that developed by the highly qualified staff at West Charlotte High School, which opened in 1938, and which became a key focus of community activities and aspirations. Covers early civil rights activities, reactions to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board decision and examines the dilemma faced by African American education advocates: whether to focus on integration, or on securing more resources for all-black schools.

This introductory chapter argues that both Haitian and African American leaders actively promoted Haiti as a quintessentially black nation. Haitian leaders did so by codifying the concept in the nation's constitution and also by other words and deeds. At independence, Haiti identified itself by color, declaring in Article 14 of its constitution, “Haitians henceforth will be known by the generic name of blacks.” All inhabitants, regardless of skin color, would be considered “black,” suggesting an open and inclusive black identity. The constitution also outlawed all white landownership, indicating a color consciousness and a desire to keep whites from the island. Around the same time, members of the African American community began looking to the Caribbean island and embracing color as an identifier. This choice, just as in Haiti, was a strategy to unify against white oppression and racism.

Chapter 8 continues the ethnographic case study to focus on the meanings of and motivations for basketball-based risk prevention programs from the point of view of program participants and members of the African-American community more generally. One of its central findings is that the young men of color who participate in these leagues have little interest in the social interventionist goals of most program funders and administrators; rather, they are involved for purposes of health, fitness, recreation, and leisure. Community members see midnight basketball as a symbol of more proactive, community-based approaches to crime prevention and public safety. The chapter highlights the features of the urban landscape that help explain these attitudes and draws out the larger implications for race, sport, and public policy in the neoliberal era.