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A History of Blacks in Kentucky: From Slavery to Segregation, 1760-1891
A History of Blacks in Kentucky traces the role of blacks from the early exploration and settlement of Kentucky to 1891, when African Americans gained freedom only to be faced with a segregated society. Making extensive use of numerous primary sources such as slave diaries, Freedmen’s Bureau records, church minutes, and collections of personal papers, the book tells the stories of individuals, their triumphs and tragedies, and their accomplishments in the face of adversity.
Marion B. Lucas, professor of history at Western Kentucky University, is the author of Sherman and the Burning of Columbia.
"A panoramic view of the black ...Read More
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Light In The Darkness: African Americans and the YMCA, 1852-1946
From the time of its emergence in the United States in 1852, the Young Men's Christian Association excluded blacks from membership in white branches but encouraged them to form their own associations and to join the Christian brotherhood on "separate but equal" terms. Nina Mjagkij's book, the first comprehensive study of African Americans in the YMCA, is a compelling account of hope and success in the face of adversity.
African American men, faced with emasculation through lynchings, disenfranchisement, race riots, and Jim Crow laws, hoped that separate YMCAs would provide the opportunity to exercise their manhood and joined in large ...Read More
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Multicolored Memories of a Black Southern Girl
A telling memoir by an exciting new voice, Multicolored Memories of a Black Southern Girl explores journalist Kitty Oliver’s coming of age as she makes the crossing from an all-black to a predominantly white world.
Born and raised in an all-black area of Jacksonville, Florida, Oliver was one of the first African American freshmen to enter the University of Florida. Though she chronicles the strains of her transition from Jim Crow to desegregation, this book is much more than a memoir of the turbulent sixties. It is an upbeat journal of self-discovery in the aftermath of that decade, a look ...Read More
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Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa
Black on Black provides the first comprehensive analysis of the modern African American literary response to Africa, from W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk to Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Combining cutting-edge theory, extensive historical and archival research, and close readings of individual texts, Gruesser reveals the diversity of the African American response to Countee Cullen's question, "What is Africa to Me?"
John Gruesser uses the concept of Ethiopianism--the biblically inspired belief that black Americans would someday lead Africans and people of the diaspora to a bright future--to provide a framework for his study. Originating in the eighteenth ...Read More
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UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission
Though many scholars will acknowledge the Anglo-Saxon character of black American nationalism, few have dealt with the imperialistic ramifications of this connection. Now, Nigerian-born scholar Tunde Adeleke reexamines nineteenth-century black American nationalism, finding not only that it embodied the racist and paternalistic values of Euro-American culture but also that nationalism played an active role in justifying Europe's intrusion into Africa.
Adeleke looks at the life and work of Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, and Harry McNeal Turner, demonstrating that as supporters of the mission civilisatrice ("civilizing mission") these men helped lay the foundation for the colonization of Africa. By exposing the ...Read More
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Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young Jr.
Winner of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists Outstanding Book Award During the turbulent 1960s, civil rights leader Whitney M. Young Jr. devised a new and effective strategy to achieve equality for African Americans. Young blended interracial mediation with direct protest, demonstrating that these methods pursued together were the best tactics for achieving social, economic, and political change. Militant Mediator is a powerful reassessment of this key and controversial figure in the civil rights movement. It is the first biography to explore in depth the influence Young's father, a civil rights leader in Kentucky, had on his son. Dickerson ...Read More
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River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley
Since the nineteenth century, the Ohio River has represented a great divide for African Americans. It provided a passage to freedom along the underground railroad, and during the industrial age, it was a boundary between the Jim Crow South and the urban North. The Ohio became known as the “River Jordan,” symbolizing the path to the promised land. In the urban centers of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Evansville, blacks faced racial hostility from outside their immediate neighborhoods as well as class, color, and cultural fragmentation among themselves. Yet despite these pressures, African Americans were able to create vibrant new communities ...Read More
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Passing for Black: The Life and Careers of Mae Street Kidd
In 1976, Kentucky state legislator Mae Street Kidd successfully sponsored a resolution ratifying the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It was fitting that a black woman should initiate the state’s formal repudiation of slavery; that it was Mrs. Kidd was all the more appropriate. Born in Millersburg, Kentucky, in 1904 to a black mother and a white father, Kidd grew up to be a striking woman with fair skin and light hair. Sometimes accused of trying to pass for white in a segregated society, Kidd felt that she was doing the opposite—choosing to assert her black ...Read More
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The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland
A stereotypical image of manumission is that of a benign plantation owner freeing his slaves on his deathbed. But as Stephen Whitman demonstrates, the truth was far more complex, especially in border states where manumission was much more common.
Whitman analyzes the economic and social history of Baltimore to show how the vigorous growth of the city required the exploitation of rural slaves. To prevent them from escaping and to spur higher production, owners entered into arrangements with their slaves, promising eventual freedom in return for many years' hard work. The Price of Freedom reveals how blacks played a critical ...Read More
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A Black Educator in the Segregated South: Kentucky's Rufus B. Atwood
Black college presidents in the era of segregation walked a tightrope. They were expected to educate black youth without sufficient state and federal funding. Yet in the African American community they were supposed to represent power and influence and to be outspoken advocates of civil rights, despite the continual risk of offending the white politicians on whom they were dependent for funding. The dilemmas they faced in balancing these conflicting demands have never been fully examined. Gerald Smith's study of the long-time president of Kentucky State College helps fill that void.
From 1929 to 1962, Rufus Ballard Atwood served as ...Read More
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