For many of the 200,000 black soldiers sent to Europe with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, encounters with French civilians and colonial African troops led them to imagine a world beyond Jim Crow. They returned home to join activists working to make that world real. In narrating the efforts of African American soldiers and activists to gain full citizenship rights as recompense for military service, Adriane Lentz-Smith illuminates how World War I mobilized a generation. Black and white soldiers clashed as much with one another as they did with external enemies. Race wars within the military and riots across the United States demonstrated the lengths to which white Americans would go to protect a carefully constructed caste system. Inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric of self-determination but battered by the harsh realities of segregation, African Americans fought their own “war for democracy,” from the rebellions of black draftees in French and American ports to the mutiny of Army Regulars in Houston, and from the lonely stances of stubborn individuals to organized national campaigns. African Americans abroad and at home reworked notions of nation and belonging, empire and diaspora, manhood and citizenship. By war’s end, they ceased trying to earn equal rights and resolved to demand them. This beautifully written book reclaims World War I as a critical moment in the freedom struggle and places African Americans at the crossroads of social, military, and international history.

Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze describes the ideas that defined the movement and struggle to be free by Black people in the United States during their Modern Era. Using a historical perspective, this work engages the question of how the historical experience of oppression and the denial of humanity created space for the development of a certain consciousness. The existence and demonstration of agency within the ideas of the African diaspora and the creation of an intentional community with the aim of defining and attaining freedom are dissected in order to understand the Black community as a whole during the modern era. This book was nominated for ​the 2023 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in nonfiction.

"A dazzling array of essays that vastly expands our understanding of the role of the media and popular culture in the politics of race. From Andy Griffith to Amiri Baraka, from Leadbelly's blues to "Sweet Sweetback's Baaadassss Song," this is a brilliant and irreplaceable collection."--Timothy B. Tyson, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power Stimulating and insightful, these essays on the relationship among the media, popular culture, and the postwar African American freedom struggle offer new perspectives on the nature of the Civil Rights Movement and its legacies. At the same time, they suggest how much the struggle itself shaped important trends in American culture and mass media in the 1950s and 1960s. Bringing together a range of voices seldom heard together, this book challenges readers to reconsider the ways in which a simplistic "master narrative" of the Movement has come to dominate popular, and even some scholarly, understandings of the meaning of the freedom struggle. CONTENTS Introduction: Forgotten Wails and Master Narratives: Media, Culture, and Memories of the Modern African American Freedom Struggle, by Brian Ward 1. The Media and the Movement: Looking Back from the Southern Front, by Julian Bond 2. A Media-Made Movement? Black Violence and Nonviolence in the Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement, by Jenny Walker 3. Black-Oriented Radio and the Civil Rights Movement, by Stephen Walsh 4. Reclaiming the South: Civil Rights Films and the New Red Menace, by Allison Graham 5. Hip Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing in Pop Music Before Elvis, by David Chappell 6. "Climbing the Mountain Top": African American Blues and Gospel Songs from the Civil Rights Years, by Guido van Rijn 7. Free Jazz: Musical Style and Liberationist Ethic, 1956-1965, by Peter Townsend 8. Jazz and Soul, Race and Class, Cultural Nationalists and Black Panthers: A Black Power Debate Revisited, by Brian Ward 9. Villains, Demons, and Social Bandits: White Fear of the Black Cultural Revolution, by William L. Van Deburg 10. "Pimpin' Ain't Easy": Work, Play, and "Lifestylization" of the Black Pimp Figure in Early 1970s America, by Eithne Quinn 11. Mau-Mauing the Filmmakers: Should Black Power Take the Rap for Killing Nat Turner, the Movie? by Scot French 12. "The 1960s Echo On": Images of Martin Luther King Jr. as Deployed by White Writers of Contemporary Fiction, by Sharon Monteith 13. The Power of Martyrdom: The Incorporation of Martin Luther King and His Philosophy into African American Literature, by Trudier Harris Brian Ward, associate professor of American history at the University of Florida, is the author of Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations and coeditor of The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement.

In the early 1960s, thousands of Black activists used nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation at lunch counters, movie theaters, skating rinks, public pools, and churches across the United States, battling for, and winning, social change. Organizers against segregation had used litigation and protests for decades but not until the advent of nonviolence did they succeed in transforming ingrained patterns of white supremacy on a massive scale. In this book, Anthony C. Siracusa unearths the deeper lineage of anti-war pacifist activists and thinkers from the early twentieth century who developed nonviolence into a revolutionary force for Black liberation. Telling the story of how this powerful political philosophy came to occupy a central place in the Black freedom movement by 1960, Siracusa challenges the idea that nonviolent freedom practices faded with the rise of the Black Power movement. He asserts nonviolence's staying power, insisting that the indwelling commitment to struggle for freedom collectively in a spirit of nonviolence became, for many, a lifelong commitment. In the end, what was revolutionary about the nonviolent method was its ability to assert the basic humanity of Black Americans, to undermine racism's dehumanization, and to insist on the right to be.

A leading African American Communist, lawyer William L. Patterson (1891–1980) was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the defeat of Jim Crowby virtue of his leadership of the Scottsboro campaign in the 1930s. In this watershed biography, historian Gerald Horne shows how Patterson helped to advance African American equality by fostering and leveraging international support for the movement. Horne highlights key moments in Patterson's global activism: his early education in the Soviet Union, his involvement with the Scottsboro trials and other high-profile civil rights cases of the 1930s to 1950s, his 1951 "We Charge Genocide" petition to the United Nations, and his later work with prisons and the Black Panther Party. Through Patterson's story, Horne examines how the Cold War affected the freedom movement, with civil rights leadership sometimes disavowing African American leftists in exchange for concessions from the U.S. government. He also probes the complex and often contradictory relationship between the Communist Party and the African American community, including the impact of the FBI's infiltration of the Communist Party. Drawing from government and FBI documents, newspapers, periodicals, archival and manuscript collections, and personal papers, Horne documents Patterson's effectiveness at carrying the freedom struggle into the global arena and provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century struggles for racial justice.

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.