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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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 builds a case for a more nuanced understanding of urban schools and populations, discussing changes in cities and metropolitan regions over the last two decades and the significance of these changes for scholars of urban education. First, it outlines how recent shifts in cities complicate conceptions of the “urban” generally found in the research literature and media. Exploring these changes in relation to education policy, it discusses integration, neoliberalism, and educational reform in a post–civil rights era. The chapter then brings these more macro-level realities to bear on the shifts occurring at Morningside Elementary, the research site. Using the demographic changes at Morningside as an example of changing urban spaces, this chapter highlights the need for understandings of “the urban” to include a focus on gentrification and the contours and consequences of middle-class parent engagement in city schools and neighborhoods.

This chapter outlines the paradox of the lessening of overt racial discrimination and the empirical realities of an increase in economic and social inequality. The chapter sketches out the beginnings of the conservative ascendancy that has dominated the presidency and politics since 1968.

This chapter describes the author’s return to the US after almost 3 years in Europe and continues to explore her blackness in the post-Civil Rights era of the early 70s (first in Boston and then in New York). Joining the Rod Rodgers Dance Company (RRDC) in NYC allows the author to become a part of developing concert dance among the major black dance companies who were second tier to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The author explores the vitality of professional NY dance and the experiences that dancing with RRDC provided, such as the Dancemobile in the 5 boroughs, the cultural integration of the Lincoln Center, and the opening of the dance season on Broadway. Additionally, she explores NY’s African dance companies and the growing need to make black dance relevant to black people in these shifting political times.

This book is primarily concerned with the politics ingrained within rap and hip-hop’s production, circulation, and consumption. There are four aspects to be examined: rap and hip-hop’s popularity, visibility, and speed; its use in addressing black politics; the political and economic context of the post-post-civil rights era; and the political nature of black popular culture in general. African-American scholar Adolph Reed argues that one of the reasons black politics has not modernized is because arguments about black culture are preferred over rational consideration of black political interests. The book then inquires about the nature of these politics, and under what circumstances black popular culture informs and sustains political movements.

This introductory chapter briefly analyzes the emergence of the term “post-racial,” paying special attention to the discussions of the meaning of race—particularly the meaning of black identity—which were widespread in the 1980s and 1990s. In the explosion of black media and celebrity culture of the 1980s and the culture wars, commentators from a wide variety of media, political, and scholarly venues pondered the meaning of blackness in the so-called “post-civil rights era.” In the explosion, various issues emerged regarding considerations of law, immigration, religion, education, and politics. Post-racial rhetoric however surged only recently when Barack Obama was elected as president. Across the nation, pundits and politicians, bloggers and celebrities made tentative and dismissive statements about the declining significance of race. But as the last few years have demonstrated, racism and racial inequalities persist and in some areas, such as wealth and health, have deepened.

This chapter opens with the CPAB asking to be a part of the investigation into the Dorner incident but being denied that ability given LAPD’s existing (internal) review structure. Using this scene, in the lobby of a local McDonald’s owned by a Black former LAPD administrator, the authors show how even the CPABs, meant to be platforms for the community to shape law enforcement policy, are alienated from the process altogether. The authors look back at community governance strategies since the civil rights era and show how community policing is just the latest formulation of these. They show that without attempts at formally aligning community groups, they devolve into conflict with one another seeking the little power available in police-civilian partnerships. The authors call for activist strategies for police reform, which ensure that community interests become institutional priorities.