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Americans live in a culture resistant to much talk about the evils in their past; they prefer to think about the future. But like the descendants of victims of evil in Germany and South Africa, some living Americans are not about to forget the evil past. Prominent among them are African Americans. This chapter explores the stubborn persistence of racism in America, the work of a growing number of citizens to remember the pains of racism past and present, and to express that memory in public ways. Local illustrations of public repentance include Richmond, Virginia; Rosewood, Florida; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Salem, Oregon; and Selma, Alabama. After a “tour” of high school history books of 1960-2000, the chapter ends with some summary answers to the question, “Can the past be repaired?” as well as arguments for and against reparations for slavery.

For more than twenty years, West African Muslims from the Muridiyya order, a Sufi brotherhood based in Senegal, have organized the annual Cheikh Amadou Bamba Day parade in New York City. It is a religious procession that allows them to redefine their African identities, cope with the stigma of Blackness, and counteract accusations of Islamic terrorism. But the march is not merely an event for members, because its banners often challenge common notions of Black history, and African American paraders follow a slightly different course. This chapter explores the way Murids, followers of Muridiyya, and other West African Muslims such as the Malinke and the Fulani create religious activities, networks, stores, and institutions that transform Harlem into a sacred city. It is a sacred space, however, that includes the long-standing Nation of Islam and other African American Muslim orientations.

What role does “Black history” play in community development? This chapter discusses how Black and Asian minority ethnic (BAME) communities have been excluded from contributing to national and local histories, depriving them of resources that would enable them to develop different futures in the context of a British historical narrative dominated by whiteness. It focuses on the intersection of history and community development and how community-based organisations have worked in collaboration with the University of Huddersfield (in West Yorkshire in the north of England). The chapter suggests that there are advantages in the co-production of historical knowledge, one of which is that a collaborative approach enables greater inclusion and diversity of views, especially as there is a lack of ethnic diversity amongst academic staff at British universities.

Woodson was not the first black historian, but his research and advocacy were transformational in bringing about recognition of black history and including it within the American way of life. After his death, knowledge of Woodson’s partnership with the press was lost, but black history became so popular (and commercial) that the week he founded to commemorate black contributions in history now takes a month. Mainstream media have taken ownership of Black History Week/Black History Month, amid claims it has been commercialized.

This chapter connects newspaper history and Woodson's partnership with the black press, including his merger of the Black History Movement with interests of the black newspapers. They were suitable allies during the period of this study, 1915 to 1950, because of their support for education, civil rights and other issues and the impact of the Great Migration of blacks to urban areas. The migration, especially in northern cities, increased the size of black newspaper markets and made them a mass medium.

Continuing a television studies analysis of Perry, Artel Great argues in Chapter Eight that from both a critical and an industrial perspective, the sitcom Tyler Perry’s House of Payne(TBS, 2006-2012) represents acomplex but no less problematic contribution to the history of Black televisual authorship. Precisely because there has been a pronounced dearth of Black representation on television, Great demonstrates that the politics of thirst best characterize how Black audiences engage the few existing images of televisual blackness. Despite several unprecedented industrial achievements (such as surpassing The Jeffersons[CBS, 1975-1985] as the longest running Black sitcom), when considered within the context of the history and formal structure of the Black sitcom, House of Payne digresses as itrejuvenates the narrative conventions and visual cues of uncritical Black minstrelsy. Rife with missed opportunities for teaching complex lessons about Black subjectivity, esteem, and interiority, Perry’s sitcom succeeded, then, mostly because of the continued omission of blackness on television.

This chapter covers the revival of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” within the context of the rise of the Black Power movement and the attendant institutional life. It reads Black Power in terms of both the failed promises of civil rights, and the idea of return and recovery of Black traditions.

The authors of this chapter, a Black Deaf scholar immigrant from South Africa and a Black Deaf academic from the South Side of Chicago, highlight the limited scholarly exploration of Black Deaf lives within the context of the Deaf community. They present what they could extract from existing literature on Black Deaf historical perspectives, the influence of Black American Sign Language, and what it means to be Black and Deaf. In addition, considering the scarcity of research on non-White Deaf communities, they contribute their personal experiences to highlight the transnational identity issues of Black Deaf immigrants and the identity issues of Black Deaf individuals within the context of the United States. This chapter provides a thought-provoking treatise on what it means to be Black and Deaf with unique backgrounds in the United States.

The black Britons Robert Wedderburn and William Davidson played a prominent role in London ultra-radicalism. Davidson was executed for his part in the Cato Street Conspiracy, and Wedderburn encouraged violent resistance to tyranny and slavery. This chapter unearths important new biographical information about these two men, and applies this to the development of their political ideas.

This chapter focuses on the New York City Teachers Union's (TU) campaigns to eliminate racist and bigoted textbooks from classrooms, hire more black teachers, and promote Black History Month. By the end of 1950 the TU was in the worst position in its forty-four-year history. Because of the Timone Resolution, it could no longer operate as a collective bargaining agency for New York City public school teachers; it could not represent faculty in grievances or hold meetings in the public school buildings. Moreover, the New York City Board of Education's purge of TU members was ongoing. Despite its inability to represent teachers officially, the TU did not fold in 1950. Its story after 1950 throws into question the argument that popular front unionism in New York City was eradicated during the civil rights struggles of the cold war period. This chapter examines how the TU remade itself into a leading voice in New York City's civil rights movement by challenging the New York City Board of Education's discriminatory policies.

Much of the scholarship on the work and legacy of activist Fannie Lou Hamer concentrates on her tireless efforts for civil/human rights and African American representation and access to electoral politics. This chapter brings to light an important project she started in 1969, Freedom Farms Cooperative in Sunflower County, MS. An agricultural cooperative built on 680-acres, Freedom Farm included a pig bank, Head Start program, community gardens, commercial kitchen, a garment factory, sewing cooperative, tool bank, and low-income, affordable housing as strategies to support the needs of African Americans who were fired and evicted for exercising the right to vote. Freedom Farm offered these sharecroppers and tenant farmers educational and re-training opportunities including health care and disaster relief for those who wanted to stay in the Mississippi Delta. Using a historical method to analyze extensive archival records, this chapter offers an analysis of Freedom Farm and illuminates valuable lessons on agriculture as resistance, and alternative strategies of rebuilding and investing in sustainable com- munities. Using the principles of collective and shared ownership, Freedom Farm and the work of Ms. Hamer, offer us important and valuable lessons on rebuilding our communities and investing in sustainable cities around food production.

The Race Today Collective occupied a unique position on the British left during the 1980s. Inspired by the example of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the thought of radicals such as CLR James and Walter Rodney, and drawing activists from radical organisations such as the Black Panthers and the Black Unity and Freedom Party, the Race Today Collective became the most influential black rights group in Britain in the 1980s. Centred around a magazine, Darcus Howe and the Collective organised some of the most important grassroots campaigns of the decade, bringing black power to housing, industry, policing and the arts. This chapter considers the group’s emergence in the 1970s, the intellectual foundations on which the Collective was built, its distinctive approach to campaigning, its relationship to various ‘white left’ groups, and the different aspects of its work during the 1980s.

This chapter charts the relationship between two prolific African American essayists, June Jordan and Alice Walker. Unlike Ellison and Baldwin, who were contemporaries but not allies, Jordan and Walker corresponded with one another, lectured together, and commented on each other’s works. It is argued that Walker and Jordan’s essays record their lifelong quest for redemptive art and politics. This project is marked by a desire for a freer, more hopeful future that comes to terms with a painful, oppressive past. As both essayists came to political consciousness during the civil rights movement, they utilized the rhetoric of rights to redefine ideas of national belonging. In doing so, they expanded the scope of the essay to includeissues of gender and sexuality. Through analyzing their essays, this chapter illustrates how Jordan and Walker in distinct, yet complementary ways, shape the art of the essay.

The conclusion begins by examining the public honors that Davis received late in his career and after he passed away. Notable among these were his election to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as the first scholar from the field of education, and his placement on a stamp by the United States Postal Service for Black History Month in 1994. The public response to Davis revealed the contradictions of a society that could simultaneously become more open racially and yet still fail to address the persistent race and class inequalities that Davis spent his life enumerating. Right up to the very end, in fact, Davis was writing and speaking out. Only a few months before he died, he published Leadership, Love, and Aggression (1983), which included psycho-biographies of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Jr. Davis’s work makes clear that the only way to truly honor him is to try to live up to his ideas by working towards a more democratic and egalitarian society. The conclusion ends with a discussion of Davis’s present significance not only for the historiography, but also for understanding the world today.