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This chapter explores the ways that black elites engaged with U.S. foreign policy toward Africa between 1816 and 1900. During this time, the federal government frequently promoted policies that encouraged black emigration to Liberia. Moreover, the black elite rejected any association with the African continent and worked hard to block policies that sought to stimulate the growth of Liberia. There are, however, several notable cases in which the black elite broke from this pattern and worked to assist the development of Liberia. The conventional wisdom is that the black elite's commitments to a transnational sense of community trumped their concerns about their black U.S. citizenship status. But the archival materials show that members of the black elite entered the foreign policymaking arena in support of Liberia only when they calculated that doing so would shift the national discourse about the capacity of the black race for U.S. citizenship.

This chapter explores the class conflict that occurred between national black elites and a coalition of local black civic, neighborhood, and business leaders over slum clearance and urban redevelopment in Chicago. Black institutional elites’ vision of racial democracy was racial equality, which means that racial democratization of housing markets would take place by first preserving black middle-class housing in desirable locations within the community. Black policy elites envisioned achieving racial democratization by pressuring the government to institute antidiscriminatory policies that would enable housing mobility for those blacks who had the income, culture, and motivation to locate and settle outside of the ghetto. The chapter then highlights the inability of the opposition’s racial view to adequately account for the class injuries suffered by working-class black tenants in land clearance. It also articulates the national black elites’ critique of the opposition and examines their case for supporting slum clearance. It pays particular attention to how the difficulty of most displaced working class was conceptualized within the racial democratic remedies that each faction proposed against the Negro clearance, which they saw as a racial threat.

This chapter examines the makeup of the black real estate industry and its political agenda, along with that of black federal housing officials, of private enterprise as the legitimate provider of housing for U.S. citizens. It details how the positions of black real estate and financial firms on housing policy after 1940, both in Chicago and nationally, facilitated their participation in the real estate business, and examines whether this participation was guided by racial democratic goals. The focus on government recognition privileged the role of black housing officials in an emerging black housing policy network, which included black civil rights leaders and black real estate elites.

This chapter provides an account of the efforts of black civic and business elites to lead the redevelopment of black middle-class neighborhoods in order to combat the city’s land-clearance onslaught, and also to serve as a model community for the rest of Bronzeville, Chicago. It discusses the black institutional elites’ promotion of self-help rehabilitation schemes to avoid the demolition of another black neighborhood where middle-class blacks owned homes and rental property. It also shows the black elites’ interest in using new federal, state, and municipal laws to direct conservation efforts in their neighborhoods. Whether black elites wanted to control redevelopment on the Mid-South Side or to safeguard their effluent enclaves in Hyde Park and Kenwood, their housing interests trumped those of working-class blacks.

This chapter focuses on black policy elites’ efforts to reform the relocation policy that forced both black property owners and tenants to look for housing in racial dual housing market, which is a racially segmented market that provides very different opportunities for blacks and whites. The difficulty of the displaced blacks, ineligible for public housing, encouraged black policy elites to concentrate on the accessibility of private housing markets. The chapter then examines the extent to which blacks were displaced by land clearance and the flawed relocation practices of the Chicago Land Clearance Commission, exploring the protests of black civic elites such as the professionals who worked for the Chicago’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as well as those of black policy elites who worked for national civil rights organizations and federal housing agencies.

Black elites reaffirmed the primacy of race by advocating the use of race-neutral occupancy standards, which favored those blacks who had the income and class culture to reside in integrated middle-class neighborhoods, against race-restrictive covenants. They argued that an open housing market would serve most black housing needs by eliminating race as an allocational principle. Their willingness to substitute class restrictions for racial ones brought about the dominance of racial democracy. Black civic elites defended the anticovenant campaign by pointing out the benefits that the reform would bring to working-class blacks.

This chapter turns to the activities of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) between 1935 and 1955. It challenges assumptions made by popular scholarship regarding the actions and motivations of the NAACP during this period, arguing that the NAACP always saw its anticolonial agitation as an extension of its politics on the home front. More importantly, the NAACP was able to use their anticommunist frame as a political means to push the Truman and John F. Kennedy administrations on the issue of colonialism in Africa. There is, in fact, evidence that bureaucrats within the Kennedy administration invited these groups into the policy formulation process to gain a greater degree of autonomy within the executive branch. This finding provides a strong challenge to the view that bureaucrats within the national security state have viewed black elite activism on behalf of Africa with antipathy.

This concluding chapter evaluates the contributions of the strategic behavior model of black elite activism in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. As this book illustrates, black leaders often take policy positions that stand in opposition to the goals that the governments of their ancestral homeland pursue in U.S. foreign policy. The chapter argues that the two-level games metaphor at the heart of the strategic behavior model sheds light on the behavior of the black elite in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena because it is clear that black leaders jealously guard their interests and those of their constituents in the domestic arena. This model, in addition, has broad applicability to other racial and ethnic groups. Finally, the chapter shows how this alternative theory also helps to resolve recent intellectual debates about the impact of transnationalism on U.S. foreign policy and the quality of black representation in U.S. politics.

This chapter focuses on Church’s early years by providing an overview of Robert Church Sr. and Anna Church. In particular, it discusses the strategies the black elite used to nurture a new class of leaders during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This chapter discusses Church’s educational background, his initial dealings with his father’s Solvent Saving’s Bank, and his early interest in pursuing a career in politics. Church’s early life serves as a window into the history of the era’s black entrepreneurs, black leadership, and black businesses, all considered against the legacy of slavery.

This chapter examines Fannie Barrier Williams' move to Jim Crow South in the late nineteenth century and how she was exposed to the complexity of segregation there. Barrier left Brockport in 1875 to teach in the black school system in a South confronted with Reconstruction and marked by stark contrasts with other regions of the country. She first went to Hannibal, Missouri, and then to Washington, D.C., where she lived from 1877 to 1887 and where the largest and most cohesive group of black elites resided. This chapter first considers Barrier's time in Hannibal, where she witnessed deep racial fissures and intolerance, before turning to her migration to Washington, where she embarked on a teaching career and met her future husband S. Laing Williams. It then discusses Barrier's personal views about interracial marriage as well as the association that she had with less affluent blacks or with the racism they faced in their daily lives. It also explores how a raced identity forced Barrier to face a collective racial experience.

This chapter examines Fannie Barrier Williams' move to Chicago with her husband S. Laing Williams and how she built a strong local coalition that eased her entry into the segregated world of the white female club movement. It first considers how the Williams couple's introduction to Chicago's black community allowed Fannie secure a place in the privileged and cultured circle of black midwestern aristocracy. It then discusses Barrier Williams' meeting with Mary Jones, who together with her late husband John Jones advocated for black rights that benefited late-nineteenth-century migrants like Barrier Williams. It also eplores Barrier Williams' transition into the culture of the new generation of elite blacks, who faced far less racism than the so-called old guard had, and her involvement with the Prudence Crandall Literary Club and the Illinois Woman's Alliance. Finally, it describes the interracial cooperation that was displayed with the creation of the Provident Hospital and reflected the progressive nature of the Midwest.

This chapter examines the local historical context of the Black Chicago Renaissance. It discusses the existence of a layered class structure within the black community, and underscores the importance and the complicated tradition of support of the arts by elite black and later members of the black entrepreneurial and professional middle class. Black patronage, for both aesthetic and exploitative reasons, served an important function in providing space for creative expression and the means for its distribution and commoditization. Furthermore, the chapter is a response to the claims made by social scientists Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier. In 1923, Johnson declared that Chicago's intellectual life had numerous excuses for not existing. In 1929, Fraser echoed Johnson's assertion, insisting that Chicago had no intelligentsia.

This chapter covers Peter Clark’s life from birth through the end of his first stage of political consciousness and activism. Set against the backdrop of the uniquely oppressive racial and social conditions in Cincinnati, this chapter sets the stage for Clark’s eventual rise to local and state prominence. While this book is a political and intellectual biography, personal relationships forged in his youth played a crucial role in raising his consciousness and molding him into the leader he would become.

This chapter situates the black intellectual Horace Cayton into the vibrant community of Chicago's South Side during the Depression and World War II era. It details the research projects undertaken by Cayton in Chicago, including his labor scholarship and journalism, Cayton-Warner and WPA projects, and ultimately his crowning achievement: the coauthored 1945 Black Metropolis. In charting this flurry of activity, the chapter shows how Cayton never felt satisfied with his position in the black elite and the Chicago School of Sociology. To broaden his activities among working people and artists, Cayton managed the Parkway Community House that he fashioned into a central hub for the black arts movement. The programs, protest meetings, and cultural events at the Parkway House reflected the personality of Cayton, who crossed boundaries of class, race, and respectability.

This chapter provides the theoretical and methodological framework for the book. We show how Black women’s appearance is not just a personal decision—it also has political implications. The chapter argues for the importance of contextualizing Black women’s bodies as part of their political experiences, and it provides a broad overview of the book.

This chapter examines Barack Obama's race-neutral approach to governing and policymaking—as well as black voters' and black elites' refusal to pressure him to address community interests—and its political consequences for African Americans. It also discusses the marginalization of blacks' community interests in relation to the Obama administration's focus on other constituencies such as the LGBT community on the Left and the Tea Party on the Right. Finally, the chapter looks at universalism as a color-blind approach to politics and public policy as well as the symbolic aspects of representation within the context of black politics.