African-American Studies remains one of the more controversial disciplines in the courses of academic pursuit today. In part, much of the controversy emanates from an inability of practitioners to agree upon any rigid definition of just what constitutes and just what is encompassed within the field. At least, there is some agreement that its achievement of institutional acceptance with separate programs, departments, and granting of advanced degrees warrants its treatment as a legitimate field of pursuit in and of itself--but indeed, this is where the agreement ends. On a range of topics, scholars in the field of African-American Studies hold decidedly different opinions. What ought we to include as African-American Studies? Is Afrocentricity a figment of the imagination or sound scientific enquiry? And what place if any does race and racism continue to play in the life changes of African-Americans? Bi-racialism, underclassness, intra-community crime and Afro-Jewish relations are also prominent subjects of consideration. In Leading Issues in African-American Studies, BaNikongo has brought together scholars from every associated field of African-American Studies and offers a range of perspective on a myriad of topics. The text presents differing viewpoints on political, social, economic, cultural and legal issues and succeeds in addressing every major contemporary area of debate in African-American academic circles.

Introduces key terms, interdisciplinary research, debates, and histories for African American Studies As the longest-standing interdisciplinary field, African American Studies has laid the foundation for critically analyzing issues of race, ethnicity, and culture within the academy and beyond. This volume assembles the keywords of this field for the first time, exploring not only the history of those categories but their continued relevance in the contemporary moment. Taking up a vast array of issues such as slavery, colonialism, prison expansion, sexuality, gender, feminism, war, and popular culture, Keywords for African American Studies showcases the startling breadth that characterizes the field. Featuring an august group of contributors across the social sciences and the humanities, the keywords assembled within the pages of this volume exemplify the depth and range of scholarly inquiry into Black life in the United States. Connecting lineages of Black knowledge production to contemporary considerations of race, gender, class, and sexuality, Keywords for African American Studies provides a model for how the scholarship of the field can meet the challenges of our social world.

Leading Issues in Black Political Economy brings together the foremost experts on issues ranging from employment, training, and education of African Americans. It also emphasizes macro-economic concerns of business development with special emphasis on long-term trends of black-owned businesses. The work emphasizes welfare considerations in an anti-welfare epoch, and the role of affirmative action now that it is under attack. Attention is given to the role of race in the continuing disparity of income distribution in American society. The highlights of Leading Issues include "An Employment and Business Strategy for the Next Century: A Comment," by Thomas D. Boston; "Long Term Trends and Prospects for Black-owned Business," by Andrew F. Brimmer; "Is the U.S. Small Business Administration a Racist Institution?" by Timothy Bates; "Worker Re-Training and Labor Market Outcomes: A New Focus for Labor Research," by James B. Stewart; "Race, Cognitive Skills, Psychological Capital, and Wages," by Arthur H. Goldsmith, William Darity, Jr., and Jonathan R. Veum; and "Reparations and Public Policy," by Richard F. America. The overall findings suggest that empirical wage equation specifications do matter. The role of psychological capital is critical in the marketplace. Race is indeed an important determinant of wages-especially when the influence of both cognitive skills and psychological capital are included in the wage equation. This volume will be of crucial interest to economists, political scientists, sociologists, and policy analysts studying African-American life. Thomas D. Boston is editor of the Review of Black Political Economy and professor of economics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the co-editor, with Catherine L. Ross, of The Inner City: Urban Poverty and Economic Development in the Next Century, also available from Transaction.

Winner, 2019 Anna Julia Cooper and C.L.R. James Award, given by the National Council for Black Studies Finalist, 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, given by the African American Intellectual History Society Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, given by the History of Education Society The inspiring story of the black students, faculty, and administrators who forever changed America’s leading educational institutions and paved the way for social justice and racial progress The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell—are American stalwarts that have profoundly influenced history and culture by producing the nation’s and the world’s leaders. The few black students who attended Ivy League schools in the decades following WWII not only went on to greatly influence black America and the nation in general, but unquestionably awakened these most traditional and selective of American spaces. In the twentieth century, black youth were in the vanguard of the black freedom movement and educational reform. Upending the Ivory Tower illuminates how the Black Power movement, which was borne out of an effort to edify the most disfranchised of the black masses, also took root in the hallowed halls of America’s most esteemed institutions of higher education. Between the close of WWII and 1975, the civil rights and Black Power movements transformed the demographics and operation of the Ivy League on and off campus. As desegregators and racial pioneers, black students, staff, and faculty used their status in the black intelligentsia to enhance their predominantly white institutions while advancing black freedom. Although they were often marginalized because of their race and class, the newcomers altered educational policies and inserted blackness into the curricula and culture of the unabashedly exclusive and starkly white schools. This book attempts to complete the narrative of higher education history, while adding a much needed nuance to the history of the Black Power movement. It tells the stories of those students, professors, staff, and administrators who pushed for change at the risk of losing what privilege they had. Putting their status, and sometimes even their lives, in jeopardy, black activists negotiated, protested, and demonstrated to create opportunities for the generations that followed. The enrichments these change agents made endure in the diversity initiatives and activism surrounding issues of race that exist in the modern Ivy League. Upending the Ivory Tower not only informs the civil rights and Black Power movements of the postwar era but also provides critical context for the Black Lives Matter movement that is growing in the streets and on campuses throughout the country today. As higher education continues to be a catalyst for change, there is no one better to inform today’s activists than those who transformed our country’s past and paved the way for its future.

This text introduces you to both primary sources -- straight from the frontlines of history -- and analytical essays, and is designed to encourage critical thinking about the history and culture of African Americans. The carefully selected readings give you many opportunities to evaluate primary sources, test the interpretations of distinguished historians, and draw your own conclusions.

African American Political Thought offers an unprecedented philosophical history of thinkers from the African American community and African diaspora who have addressed the central issues of political life: democracy, race, violence, liberation, solidarity, and mass political action. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner have brought together leading scholars to reflect on individual intellectuals from the past four centuries, developing their list with an expansive approach to political expression. The collected essays consider such figures as Martin Delany, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, whose works are addressed by scholars such as Farah Jasmin Griffin, Robert Gooding-Williams, Michael Dawson, Nick Bromell, Neil Roberts, and Lawrie Balfour. While African American political thought is inextricable from the historical movement of American political thought, this volume stresses the individuality of Black thinkers, the transnational and diasporic consciousness, and how individual speakers and writers draw on various traditions simultaneously to broaden our conception of African American political ideas. This landmark volume gives us the opportunity to tap into the myriad and nuanced political theories central to Black life. In doing so, African American Political Thought: A Collected History transforms how we understand the past and future of political thinking in the West.