Drawing on research and interviews in an ongoing project on black professionals in the US and utilizing the postfigurative, cofigurative, and prefigurative models of anthropologist Margaret Mead, Benjamin has provided a neat structure to understand 20th-century US cultural values through the window of the African American community. Recommended for a variety of readers and students of the 20th century. --Choice Magazine

Three Generations at the Crossroads weaves a collective tapestry, linking personal biographies of individuals in different generations to the larger social forces acting on them. This second edition contains new chapters on politicians and artists, two groups that are symbolic...

Using in-depth interviews of high achieving African Americans who came of age prior to or before the Civil Rights movement and those who grew up in the post-Civil Rights era, this book documents that race still matters in the twenty-first century. The work details the lived experiences of African Americans and how they grapple daily with what W. E. Du Bois called the double consciousness, living within and between two worlds. A new chapter details how the post-Civil Rights generation interprets and navigates the racial terrain differently than the Civil Rights generation, which has implication for group identity and group mobility.

Drawing on a wealth of oral interviews, Conversations on Black Leadership uses the lives of prominent African Americans to trace the contours of Black leadership in America. Included here are fascinating accounts from a wide variety of figures such as John Lewis, Clarence Thomas, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka, and many more.

In this masterful work of family-focused sociology, Lois Benjamin considers the lives of Pennie and Roscoe James and their children, revealing how a large, close-knit African American family with humble origins in a small town of North Carolina is shaped by the contours of its religious and ethical value system. Despite the challenges of daily experiences, the James elders transmitted values to their children that provided them with the resources to thrive and the resilience to meet adversity. The James children recount their personal, unique perspectives on how faith, familial solidarity, and savvy entrepreneurship led to their continued generational success. Benjamin uses a blend of ethnographic and qualitative methods to place the James family's experiences in broader historical context. In doing so, she shows that the family's values of compassion, empathy, and communitarian and enterprising spirit offer hope in this polarized society.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether African American Studies is a discipline, or multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary field. Some scholars assert that African American Studies use a well-defined common approach in examining history, politics, and the family in the same way as scholars in the disciplines of economics, sociology, and political science. Other scholars consider African American Studies multidisciplinary, a field somewhat comparable to the field of education in which scholars employ a variety of disciplinary lenses-be they anthropological, psychological, historical, etc., --to study the African world experience. In this model the boundaries between traditional disciplines are accepted, and researches in African American Studies simply conduct discipline based an analysis of particular topics. Finally, another group of scholars insists that African American Studies is interdisciplinary, an enterprise that generates distinctive analyses by combining perspectives from d

Historically Black College Leadership & Social Transformation Little research has been conducted to identify aspects of effective social transformation leadership in American college and university leadership. The authors of this book argue that while much less has been done at predominantly White institutions to practically apply the processes of social transformation as a leadership model, HBCUs have historically relied upon strategies of social transformation as they sought to build and sustain the distinct mission of their institutions that enhance college access, inclusion, and choice. This publication is intended to serve as a departure from the examination of the typology of transformation leadership in the private sector and, instead, view this leadership model through the lens of higher education. The authors’ intent is to focus on institutional leadership at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and provide a deeper understanding of the Social Change Model and how it can be successfully situated as a conduit for realizing and sustaining the mission of Black colleges from perspectives of the past, present, and future.