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This chapter analyzes the racial politics of Mayor Harold Washington’s election, his education summit, and the supporters and critics of the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act. Harold Washington’s election as the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983 was heralded by many as the ultimate attainment of Black Power and the success of the local Black Freedom Movement. His electoral victory was grounded in years of grassroots struggle by Black organizers fighting for integration, community control, and Black empowerment. While historians have largely considered the 1980s as a product of the political triumph of conservatism and the “Reagan revolution,” in Chicago a Black-led, urban, antimachine, progressive coalitional politics led to Washington’s electoral victory. The disparate programmatic and ideological camps detailed in previous chapters (desegregation activists, community control organizers, founders of independent Black institutions, Black educators) staked claims in Mayor Washington and his political organization. The politics of Washington’s education reform summits, however, exposed the fractures within this political coalition. The interracial and intraracial struggles over school reform in Chicago during the 1980s reveal the tensions between a politics of racial representation and a politics of progressive transformation and prefigure the increased privatization of public education in the decades that followed.

The introduction outlines the focus, scope, and significance of the book, introducing the Black activists, educators, parents, and students who navigated, challenged, and contributed to the urban political and educational landscape from mid-twentieth century civil rights struggles through the recent corporate reorganization of the public sphere. Black women’s political and intellectual labor powered movements for racial justice and is centered in this discussion of Black politics, social movements, and education reform. The introduction explains how the book presents a different account of Black politics and urban communities in the period after the 1960s by challenging interpretations of urban decline and “urban crisis.” It also explains the historical and contemporary importance of education as a site of struggle that reveals the boundaries of U.S. democracy and changes in the relationship between citizens and the state. The introduction outlines how historical considerations of racial liberalism, the Great Migration, the New Deal, labor, Black protest, machine politics, deindustrialization, the politics of Black achievement, desegregation, self-determination, equity, and education reform inform subsequent chapters.

This chapter argues that the long tradition of neighborhood-based politics – and the race-conscious, pragmatic, liberal political culture black Chicagoans had created – had its best moment in the election of Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor. His electoral insurgency bridged divides in black Chicago with appeals to shared racial interests in the overthrow of the white Democratic machine’s “plantation politics.” After the election, Washington pivoted from black nationalist politics to the politics of progressive reform, seeking to use interracial political alliances and government power to foster democratic political power and fair play and equal opportunity for individuals seeking housing and economic opportunity. In particular, the chapter highlights how people who appeared in previous chapters helped develop a hybrid political vision of “equity planning” that aimed to link economic development to bringing jobs, housing, recreational spaces, and municipal services to working-class communities.

Chapter seven offers a contextual view into the opaque world of Brazilian and Salvadorian politics. It analyzes the rise of Black electoral power in Brazil and Salvador from the 1980s to the present and provides an in-depth examination of the rise of formal Black politics and the entry of Black political candidates into the local politics.

This chapter explores how the Muslim Third World influenced and informed Black radical politics and culture within the Muslim International. It examines how the anticolonial struggles in the Muslim Third World of Algeria and Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s not only shaped ideas about tactics and strategy, solidarity and political possibility, but they also informed ideas about film, literature, and cultural criticism within the Black Power imagination. By examining the influence of Frantz Fanon on the Algerian War of Independence and on the novel The Battle of Algiers, and Sam Greenlee and his novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door, this chapter explores how the national liberation struggles in Algeria and Iraq became the literal and ideological backdrop for the redefinition of Black cultural practice, aesthetic developments, thematic concerns, and political orientations during the Black Power era.

This introductory chapter discusses the ethnic diversity among Blacks. This diversity generates homogeneity in political attitudes and behaviors that are derived from a shared history and collective memory. For instance, despite of being minority, Black students in a university organize student groups around their ethnic identity—Duke Africa, Duke Ethiopian Student Association, Students of the Caribbean Association. Hence, the book argues that the boundaries of Black students and the contours of Black politics are (re)shaped by the increasing ethnic diversity among Black people in the United States. It addresses how African Americans and Black immigrants conceptualize who is Black.

This chapter provides a framework for this edited volume about how Barack Obama’s presidential legacy has, and has not, shaped African American politics—after Obama. Its co-editors—Todd Shaw, Robert Brown, and Joseph McCormick—posit that President Obama, a pragmatist who struggled to avoid the perceived pitfalls of race, operated within a conservative American racial order. The race and racism of this order convinced various Black constituencies to embrace an “inverted linked fate,” whereby they perceived their collective well-being based on the perceived political well-being of Obama. In return, no matter Obama’s cultural and symbolic ties to the Black community, he and his administration confronted an “inclusionary dilemma,” whereby the Black-led coalition that gave Obama electoral victories were, at times, underserved by the political and juridical limitations of his policy agenda or policy successes. The authors then give an overview of the rest of the volume.

The conclusion brings the case of the Wilmington Ten from the overturning of their convictions into the twenty-first century when they received pardons of innocence in 2012. Returning to the reality that the state of North Carolina ruined lives in order to forestall inevitable change and combat radicalism, the conclusion briefly examines what happened to the individual members of the Wilmington Ten. It also reappraises the movement to free them in light of recent scholarship on the trajectory of African American politics and black radicalism. Since this century began, North Carolina has pulsed with struggle over the types of issues that characterized the conflicts of the 1970s. Public schools have re-segregated, and state government’s support for quality education for all has been hijacked by a mania for charter, religious, and for-profit schools. Fighters for criminal justice reform have brought to light many other cases of wrongful conviction. Police misconduct, including instances of corrupt investigations, brutality and death under at best questionable circumstances, bubbles to the surface, as in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere. This and more has brought forth in North Carolina collective efforts to find solutions, including the broad-based Moral Monday movement, which has been emulated across the South.

This chapter charts the growth of the Vulcan Society in both numbers and stature during the postwar era. Led by Wesley Williams’ protégé, Robert Lowery, this second generation of Black firefighters rapidly expanded the organization’s size, civic engagement, public profile, and influence within the FDNY and Democratic politics by the early 1960s.

This chapter explores the role of Memphis Sound as a both a symbol and an instrument of the Black Power Movement. It highlights Stax Records, who, under the leadership of Al Bell, amplified the musical “blackness” of its recordings. The studio used nationalist rhetoric in its advertisements and public statements, and allied with African American political organizations in order to force the issue of racial disparity. This unfortunately angered some of the label's white staff members and challenged Stax's image as a site of integration. However, the studio never abandoned the integrationist discourse of the Memphis Sound, nor did they stop using white musicians. The chapter mentions the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, an all-white band, whose career serves as an illustration of how the story of Stax records in these years reveals the multifaceted role of Black Power politics in soul music, the country-soul triangle, and the U.S. recording industry.

When Lord Kitchener proclaimed, “London is the place for me” as he exited the SS Empire Windrush, he did so at a critical juncture in the global and diasporic history of race politics in Britain and the African Diaspora. This introduction reimagines the landing of the Windrush as a historical guidepost linking the political experiences of people of African descent in the Empire and those within the confines of the imperial metropolis. The introduction outlines elements of the broader historical context shaping histories of Afro-Caribbean migration to Britain and the attendant questions about race, citizenship, and Black Britishness that these movements prompted during the postwar era. This book argues that Black Britons actively shaped debates about race and citizenship in Britain. Moreover, it situates postwar race politics in Britain within a larger transnational historiography about Black political activity and struggles for citizenship within the African Diaspora in the twentieth century.

Using the Urban and Economic Mobility initiative undertaken by President Obama, I explore how and if race-gender is recognized in the framing of urban policy during the Obama administration. There is a distinctive race-gender dimension to urban policy. In urban areas, data suggests that poverty is both raced and gendered. The purpose of this chapter is to engage in an analysis of the relationship between race-gender and space in relation to urban policy-making. This analysis specifically looks at how Black women are treated in the urban policy-making process of the Obama administration. However, it also serves as an analysis into how Black women are understood in Black politics more specifically as it grapples with the larger question of how ideologies of gender, which often engage a rather masculinist approach, influence the quest for freedom and equality. An analysis of the Obama administration is somewhat of a proxy for an analysis of how gender, particularly Black womanhood, is treated in Black politics. As I argue, the ideologies of gender that influence urban policy, resulting in the invisibility of Black womanhood, are also prevalent in Black politics. What should Black politics look like beyond Obama?

In this volume, we have presented a conceptual framework that argues the American constitutional order has entailed various racial orders that advanced either more racially exclusive or more racially inclusive policy agendas. The American presidency has been a central actor in these orders. One key conclusion we reach based on the analyses of our contributors is that the historic presidency of Barack Obama attempted to advance the policy interests of various African American communities across several dimensions—e.g., voting rights, criminal justice reform, healthcare, and housing. And while African American communities may have had what we call an “inverted linked fate” with Obama (or linked their sense of well-being with Obama’s perceived political well-being), Obama’s personal linked fate with African American communities—i.e., Black women, Black LGBTQ persons, faith-based communities, etc.—did not overcome what we call the “inclusionary dilemma.” Despite African American voters being critical to Obama’s electoral victories, the aforementioned orders imposed constraints upon the Obama policy agenda and fueled the president’s reluctance to press more left-of-center policy prescriptions that would be of greater benefit to Black communities. We end by considering the Obama administration’s shortfalls relative to a new, progressive Black politics during the Trump administration.

This chapter examines Black political mobilization in the wake of the murder of Kelso Cochrane in May 1959. It pays close attention to the activities of grassroots organizations such as the Inter-Racial Friendship Coordinating Council (IRFCC) and the Committee of African Organisations (CAO) as they lobbied the state for justice for Kelso Cochrane, adequate police protection for Black British citizens, and anti-discrimination legislation. This chapter examines the Black body-politics campaign that Black activists organized in an effort to generate a public mourning for Kelso Cochrane that could be leveraged to draw widespread attention to anti-Black violence and the second-class citizenship experienced by Black Britons. Kelso Cochrane’s death provided a critical moment of organizing that demonstrates how Black Britons articulated the meaning of citizenship and subsequently the ways in which race precluded them from enjoying its entitlements.

This chapter examines black women’s participation in BDSM and how these performances illustrate a complex and contradictory brokering of pain, pleasure, and power for the black female performer. I reveal BDSM as a critical site for reconsidering the entanglement of black female sexuality and violence. Within BDSM, violence becomes both a mode of pleasure and a vehicle for accessing and contesting power. The chapter begins with a brief section that frames black women practitioners of BDSM in the context of still very vigorous feminist debates surrounding sexuality, violence, and BDSM. Here, I stage the unique theoretical and practical challenges of the unspeakable pleasures aroused in racial submission and domination that BDSM presents to black women specifically. I examine race play as a particularly problematic yet powerful BDSM practice for black women, one that unveils the contradictory dynamics of racialized pleasure and power via the eroticization of racism and racial-sexual alterity. In particular, I argue that race play unsettles the dichotomies of transgression/compliance, subversion/reproduction, mind/body, and fantasy/reality that buttress BDSM. This chapter unveils performances of black female sexual domination and submission in BDSM as critical modes for and of black women’s pleasure, power, and agency.

This chapter examines the Obama presidency, the politics of race and health care, and the role that African Americans played in shaping the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We argue that race—and specifically the elimination of racial and health disparities—was very much part of the ACA’s development. From the perspective of Black lawmakers health equity and patient protection advocates, who worked hand-in-glove with the Obama administration, the ACA was not race-neutral or indifferent to Blacks and the working poor. The law had special significance for African Americans despite Obama publicly discussing its impact in deracialized terms. Daniel Dawes, a leading advocate for health equity and author of the groundbreaking book 150 Years of Obamacare, called the ACA the “most comprehensive minority health law” and the “most inclusive [health] law” in the history of the United States. He identified sixty-two provisions that “directly address inequities in health care” that are embedded in the ACA.” This chapter thus argues that Obama’s ACA was substantively accountable to the coalition of Black lawmakers and activists—what we refer to as a policy ecosystem—who were purposeful about incorporating provisions in the bill designed to reduce racial disparities and income-based inequities in health care.