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We have come to realize that the exclusion and marginalization of the blacks in the United States illustrates a dynamic wherein this same group of people simultaneously experience the opposite — a dominant order and a privileged community as demonstrated by political deprivation and dominance in popular culture. As it can be observed that there is an existing relationship among political events that involve African American elected officials, interest groups, protest organizations, mobilization, and religious media, the author attempts to look into the linkage of popular culture, specifically black popular culture, to both formal and informal politics. In this book, the author also looks into the implications of viewing culture as politics during the post-civil rights era.

This concluding chapter argues that Charleston's problem was a reflection of the great paradox that defined the post-civil rights era, the increasing opportunity and even affluence of middle-and upper-income African Americans juxtaposed with the persistent poverty of African Americans in urban and rural areas like Charleston and the South Carolina Lowcountry. Many Charlestonians—white and black, liberal and conservative, men and women—believed that the civil rights movement changed the city for the better, but they also agreed that the city did not change nearly enough. In the post-civil rights era, economic inequality grew more salient, buttressing stubbornly resilient institutional racism to block further change.

How have black political victories impacted patterns of urban black development? This chapter focuses on black political rhetoric and mobilization in post–civil rights Philadelphia, and in particular the rise to prominence of an urban black mayor—W. Wilson Goode. The chapter traces the racial geography of Philadelphia and the Black Seventh Ward as it developed in the years 1980–2000, in the wake of Wilson Goode's historic election as Philadelphia's first black mayor. In the post–civil rights context, the combined political efforts of various neighborhood councils and leaders made possible the preservation of the black cultural legacy of the Seventh Ward, especially around the South Street area. The political enfranchisement of black Philadelphians, represented by Goode's victory, was indicative of the changed relationship between urban blacks and the local power structure in the post–civil rights era, and the chapter shows how that affected contemporary and historic black neighborhoods.

This chapter analyzes the specific representation of Barack Obama as a fictional character in Alice Randall’s 2009 novel Rebel Yell. This chapter argues that Randall’s fictional representation of Obama as a post-racial figure or “unhyphenated man”—meaning that he is not burdened by double consciousness—embraces his election as a moment of transformative change. Randall’s novel utilizes Obama as an almost mythological character—he is, in fact, never named in the novel—to imagine a racial self-consciousness detached from structural legacies of slavery and Jim Crow segregation and absent, as well, from the proscriptive burdens of both the Civil Rights and post-civil rights eras. The chapter shows how Randall’s refusal of a racialized present echoes concepts such as post-Blackness and post-soul aesthetics.

This chapter offers an overview of youth-based activism. It pays attention to four theoretical concerns: the political status of black youth in the post-civil rights era, the significance of movement infrastructures that buttress youth-based activism, the impact of institutional leveraging on transformational movements, and how movement bridge-builders use creative organizing strategies, such as framing, indigenous resources, and positionality, to stimulate youth-based movements and expand the opportunity structure of youth activism. The organizing strategies utilized by youth-based activist groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) pushed them into becoming the “shock troops” of the Civil Rights movement. This analysis, however, discounts the multiple identities among young activists and varied interpretations of what exactly is a youth activist. The chapter explores how, despite being at the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement, young activists, including those in the same organization and from the same racial background, may be equally influenced by competing identities such as gender, region, and class.

This essay explores the ways in which African American authors of that era reclaim the slave past as a site of memory for a nation eager to forget. Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976), Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) are the chapter’s main focus. These works resist the tide of historical amnesia and “lost cause” mythology that would minimize or relegate the enslaved to mere props in the larger Civil War drama of rupture and reconciliation. By centering the stories of the enslaved as ancestral foundations of post-civil rights black life, these authors promote a model for historical memory and genealogy that elevates black resilience.

Published in 1975, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora emerged amid the onset of post-civil rights era politics of black respectability and neoliberal ideology and policies that rendered black communities and bodies paradoxically more “public” and “private.” This essay posits Jones’s novel as a corrective to these ideological and existential binds. Thinking through psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia, queer of color theories of identity formation, and the work of black feminist scholars, this essay explores how Jones draws on the blues aesthetic to fashion a novel that accounts for the process of racial subject formation at the intersections of buried social memory and ongoing practices of racialization and underscores the individualistic contours of racial identity without stabilizing hegemonic discourses of racial ideology.

This chapter documents the life and career of the Charleston politician Joseph P. Riley Jr.—also known as “Little Black Joe”—so-called by his fellow politicians because of his comparatively more liberal views on racism. Over time, Riley's commitment to affirmative action would reshape local government, bringing more minorities and women into executive and administrative positions than most had dared to dream in the civil rights era. This dedication to multiculturalism and affirmative action was sincere, but Riley was no civil rights activist. Moreover, his life and career suggest that the popular narrative of the Republican revolution conquering the American South in the post-civil rights era does not capture the whole story of the region's political trajectory. By exploring Riley's life, the chapter shows an alternative history of white southerners' evolution from the era of segregation and black political disfranchisement through the civil rights movement and beyond.

This chapter explores the dilemmas faced by southern lawmen in communities like Charleston, in order to understand better the ways the civil rights movement succeeded and failed in altering power relations in the South. It focuses in particular on the story of Reuben Greenberg, the first black and first Jewish police chief in Charleston's history. As the Charleston police chief for nearly a quarter of a century, Greenberg came to embody both the promise and the problems of policing the South in the post-civil rights era. Greenberg's professionalism and racial identity shielded him from the kinds of allegations that had historically plagued southern lawmen, but he worked in a political environment in which coded rhetoric linked “law and order” with control and containment of minority communities.

The introduction recounts Rodney King’s experience of police brutality, the trial of four police offers involved, and how the verdict triggered the multiracial violence that erupted in the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest. It explores the ways in which various publics have explained and remembered the riots reveals American expectations of how civil society and the state, civility and democracy, should prevent such crises. The chapter foregrounds the intersection of the post-civil rights and post-cold war eras in explaining strategies of comparative racialization and civil racism that emerged in response to the incident.

This essay examines representations of slavery produced during the peak of the Black Power movement, across a range of fields, including historiography, psychology, political analysis, theater, fiction, popular film, and literary and cultural criticism. Focusing on a cohesive body of work informed by the Black Arts Movement (by writers such as Amiri Baraka, Ronald Fair, Blyden Jackson, John Oliver Killens, Loften Mitchell, Joseph Walker, and John A. Williams) that is largely missing from the canon of post-civil rights literature about slavery, the essay argues that the formal innovations of these literary texts, such as speculative devices of temporal simultaneity and depersonalized modes of characterization, were directly sparked by Black Power discourses of psychological, political, and historical transformation.

This chapter argues that it is historically significant that droves of whites are willing to embrace a black presidential candidate. Indeed, forty years ago, it would have been impossible for a black politician to become a viable presidential contender as the United States entered the racially turbulent summer of 1967 and the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner disturbed conventional racial norms by portraying a black doctor (played by Sidney Poitier) dating a white woman (Joanna Drayton). Nothing black candidates could have done or said would have prevented them from being excluded on the basis of the color of their skin. The fact that this is no longer true is a sign of some (admittedly slow) racial progress more than fifty years after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But this chapter maintains that there are various reasons not to become overly excited about Obama’s cross-racial appeal from a racial justice perspective.

This chapter introduces readers to the general contours of Indian nurse immigration as well as the long histories connecting Indian nursing labor and U.S. imperial interests on the subcontinent and within the confines of its own national boundaries. By doing so, it complicates transnational or nation-state bound frameworks for analyzing this immigration pattern. At the same time, it highlights the tension between productive and reproductive labor as these play out amongst women workers performing a historically gendered form of "woman's work." The chapter also specifically complicates the ways in which readers can think of Cold War Indian labor immigration to the United States as indicative of either a "postcolonial" or "post-civil rights" historical turn. Finally, this piece introduces readers to Reddy's interdisciplinary methods and source materials.

This chapter explains how the anti-migrant bloc congealed in the aftermath of 9/11 and how it sought to expand the police power of the homeland security state in the 109th Congress. Through the use of critical discourse analysis, it shows how the Republican-dominated House of Representatives of the 109th Congress sought to expand the repressive capabilities of the state by passing the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act (HR 4437), the most repressive immigration legislation considered in a hundred years. The anti-migrant bloc did this by contextualizing the debate over the bill through the discourse of the “war on terror” and by exploiting historical stereotypes that associate immigrants and Mexicans in particular, with crime. The chapter illustrates how the leadership of the Democratic Party, as well as immigration reformers in civil society, adopted many of the policy proposals and the discourse of their Republican counterparts in the House floor debate over HR 4437 despite their opposition to the bill.

This introductory chapter briefly explores the pivotal role of young blacks in social movements and political discourse, and looks at how this role diminished in the post-civil rights movement period. Youth-based activism has been central to black political historiography in the past century. Several youth groups such as the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were at the forefront of youth activism during the earlier half of the twentieth century. But by the mid-1970s the militant phase of the civil rights, black power, and New Left movements was virtually over and transformational movements—high-risk, geographically diffuse movements—declined toward the end of the twentieth century. The demobilization of these movements was due to political repression, movement fatigue, party realignment, and the triumph of the conservative agenda in the last three decades of the century.

The chapter is anchored in a survey of African American-owned small presses, literary journals, and magazines to demonstrate how the Black Arts Movement’s editors negotiated readerly taste and institutional politics to bring Black Arts to the masses. I consider, for example, Dudley Randall at Detroit’s Broadside Press, Naomi Long Madgett at Lotus Press (also Detroit), and Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) at Chicago’s Third World Press alongside Hoyt Fuller’s work for periodicals in Chicago (Negro Digest/Black World), and Nommo, the small literary journal of the Organization of Black American Culture. The chapter also reveals how post-civil rights black literary publics formed and considers how, for example, the establishment of Howard University Press in 1974 extended the black intellectual tradition’s effort to recover a “usable past.”