In August, 1933, dozens of people gathered amid seven large, canvas tents in a field near Amenia, in upstate New York. Joel Spingarn, president of the board of the NAACP, had called a conference to revitalize the flagging civil rights organization. In Amenia, such old lions as the 65 year-old W.E.B. DuBois would mingle with "the coming leaders of Negro thought." It was a fascinating encounter that would transform the civil rights movement. With elegant writing and piercing insight, historian Eben Miller narrates how this little-known conference brought together a remarkable young group of African American activists, capturing through the lives of five extraordinary participants--youth activist Juanita Jackson, diplomat Ralph Bunche, economist Abram Harris, lawyer Louis Redding, and Harlem organizer Moran Weston--how this generation shaped the ongoing movement for civil rights during the Depression, World War II, and beyond. Miller describes how Jackson, Bunche, Harris, and the others felt that, amidst the global crisis of the 1930s, it was urgent to move beyond the NAACP's legal and political focus to build an economic movement that reached across the racial divide to challenge the capitalist system that had collapsed so devastatingly. They advocated alliances with labor groups, agitated for equal education, and campaigned for anti-lynching legislation and open access to the ballot and employment--spreading their influential ideas through their writings and by mass organizing in African American communities across the country, North and South. In their arguments and individual awakenings, they formed a key bridge between the turn-of-the-century Talented Tenth and the postwar civil rights generation, broadening and advancing the fight for racial equality through the darkest economic times the country has ever faced. In Born along the Color Line, Miller vividly captures the emergence of a forgotten generation of African American leaders, a generation that made Brown v. Board of Education and all that followed from it possible. It is an illuminating portrait of the "long civil rights movement," not the movement that began in the 1950s, but the one that took on new life at Amenia in 1933

When Judge Ernest N. "Dutch" Modal was elected "the first black mayor" of this South Coast city November 13,1977, political observers all around the country sat up to take notice. New Orleans is the nation's fourth blackest city (relative to percent of total population), and the largest and most powerful city in the third blackest state in the country. When he took over the reins of the nation's second largest port — the Southern terminus of the mid continent grain export/oil import traffic carried by the Mississippi River — Dutch Morial became perhaps the country's most powerful elected black official. The true significance of Morial's November victory can really be understood only in the context of the history of Afro-American involvement in the city's political and cultural life. African slaves were first imported into the state of Louisiana, then a French colony, after Indian slavery was abolished in 1719. By 1724, colonial administrators had finished compiling the Code Noir, a document outlining the mutual rights and obligations of Louisiana's masters and slaves. By Bill Rushton's first book, on the French speaking Cajuns of South Louisiana, will be issued this fall by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. comparison to conditions in Anglo- American colonial areas, the results of the Code Noir were relatively progressive. All slaves were required to be baptized in the Catholic Church, establishing common cultural ties between blacks and whites in Louisiana that were closer than those anywhere else in the South — ties that were preserved through the Civil War until separate, black Catholic parishes began to be formed with the consent of the Archbishop of New Orleans in 1897. Colonial-era slaves were permitted to retain a good many of their own cultural traditions as well, and in New Orleans they were allowed Sunday afternoons off to gather in what was then called Congo Square to dance the bamboula to their own music, forming a unique milieu which helps explain why jazz originated here rather than in, say, Savannah or Charleston.

As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), it is important to consider the historical struggles that led to this groundbreaking decision. Four years earlier in Texas, the Sweatt v. Painter decision allowed

Through a reexamination of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, Blair Kelley exposes the fullness of African American efforts to resist the passage of segregation laws dividing trains and streetcars by race in the early Jim Crow era. Right to Ride<