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In 1926, Walter White, then assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, broke the story of an especially horrific triple lynching in Aiken, South Carolina. Aiken was White's forty-first lynching investigation in eight years. He returned to New York drained by the experience. The following year he took a leave of absence from the NAACP and, with help from a Guggenheim grant, spent a year in France writing Rope and Faggot. Ironically subtitled "e;A Biography of Judge Lynch,"e; Rope and Faggot is a compelling example of partisan scholarship and is based on White's first-hand investigations. It was published in 1929. The book met two important goals for White: it debunked the "e;big lie"e; that lynching punished black men for raping white women and protected the purity of "e;the flower of the white race,"e; and it provided White with an opportunity to deliver a penetrating critique of the southern culture that nourished this form of blood sport. White marshaled statistics demonstrating that accusations of rape or attempted rape accounted for less than 30 percent of the lynchings. Presenting evidence of white females of all classes crossing the color line for love-evidence that white supremacists themselves used to agitate whites to support anti-miscegenation laws-White insisted that most interracial unions were consensual and not forced. Despite the emphasis on sexual issues in instances of lynching, White also argued that the fury and sadism with which mobs attacked victims had more to do with keeping blacks in their place and with controlling the black labor force. Some of the strongest sections of the book deal with White's analysis of the economic and cultural foundations of lynching. Walter White's powerful study of a shameful practice in modern American history is back in print with a new introduction by Kenneth R. Janken.

Born in Trinidad in 1901, Oliver C. Cox immigrated to the US in 1919, establishing himself as a controversial sociologist. McAuley's approach to Cox's life and work is shaped by his belief that Cox's Caribbean upbringing and background gave him an unorthodox perspective on race and social change.

Explores the development of American social science by highlighting the contributions of those scholars who were both students and objects of a segregated society. This book asks how segregation has influenced, and continues to influence, the development of American social thought and social science scholarship.

Explores the development of American social science by highlighting the contributions of those scholars who were both students and objects of a segregated society. This book asks how segregation has influenced, and continues to influence, the development of American social thought and social science scholarship.

A reassessment of the ideas that Americans have had about race, this text draws on the perspectives of history, sociology, theology, American studies and ethnic studies to tell the history of the American system of racial domination and of 20th-century challenges to that racial hierarchy, from monoracial movements to the multiracial movement.

This reassessment of the ideas that Americans have had about race tells the history of the American system of racial domination and of twentieth-century challenges to that racial hierarchy, from monoracial movements to the multiracial movement.

Reprint of Bursting Bonds (1923), the second autobiography by William Pickens.

An anthology of non-fiction writings by Caribbean women, from the turn of the nineteenth century to 1980. It builds on existing bodies of knowledge and inquiry into women's lives and their contributions to the creation and development of Caribbean intellectual history. A resource for students and professors.

Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961) is just one of the many African American intellectuals whose work has been long excluded from the literary canon. In her time, Burroughs was a celebrated African American (or, in her era, a "e;race woman"e;) female activist, educator, and intellectual. This book represents a landmark contribution to the African American intellectual historical project by allowing readers to experience Burroughs in her own words. This anthology of her works written between 1900 and 1959 encapsulates Burroughs' work as a theologian, philosopher, activist, educator, intellectual, and evangelist, as well as the myriad of ways that her career resisted definition. Burroughs rubbed elbows with such African American historical icons as W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, and these interactions represent much of the existing, easily available literature on Burroughs' life. This book aims to spark a conversation surrounding Burroughs' life and work by making available her own tracts on God, sin, the intersections of church and society, black womanhood, education, and social justice. Moreover, the volume is an important piece of the growing movement toward excavating African American intellectual and philosophical thought and reformulating the literary canon to bring a diverse array of voices to the table.

Despite the extensive scholarship on Max Weber (1864-1920) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), very little of it examines the contact between the two founding figures of Western sociology. Drawing on their correspondence from 1904 to 1906, and comparing the sociological work that they produced during this period and afterward, The Spirit vs. the Souls: Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Politics of Scholarship examines for the first time the ideas that Weber and Du Bois shared on topics such as sociological investigation, race, empire, unfree labor, capitalism, and socialism. What emerges from this examination is that their ideas on these matters clashed far more than they converged, contrary to the tone of their letters and to the interpretations of the few scholars who have commented on the correspondence between Weber and Du Bois.Christopher McAuley provides close readings of key texts by the two scholars, including Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, to demonstrate their different views on a number of issues, including the economic benefits of unfree labor in capitalism. The book addresses the distinctly different treatment of the two figures's political sympathies in past scholarship, especially that which discredits some of Du Bois's openly antiracist academic work while failing to consider the markedly imperialist-serving content of some of Weber's. McAuley argues for the acknowledgment and demarginalization of Du Bois's contributions to the scholarly world that academics have generally accorded to Weber. This book will interest students and scholars of black studies, history, and sociology for whom Du Bois and Weber are central figures.

Walls: Essays, 1985-1990, Kenneth McClane's first book of autobiographical essays (originally published in 1991), is closely related to his second collection, Color, published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2009. Walls is a powerful and deeply moving meditation on relationships. It begins with an essay on the death of McClane's brother, Paul, which "e;changed everything. Time, my work, everything found a new calculus."e; His brother's life and death are present in some way in all the essays that follow "e;A Death in the Family,"e; as McClane tells us about giving a poetry reading in a maximum-security prison; his experience of being one of the first two African American students to attend America's oldest private school; teaching creative writing; his sister, Adrienne; a divestment protest at Cornell; and his encounters with James Baldwin. McClane has written a new preface to this paperback edition of Walls. "e;Walls reminds us of the differences that set us apart, dividing our world into good kids and troublemakers, winners and losers, the beautiful and the damned. The anodyne for exile in these essays is McClane's common but by no means commonplace lexicon, at once evocative and spare, that leads us to painful but honest connection and the luminous possibility of empathy."e; --William L. Andrews, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "e;Kenneth McClane's Walls is a collection of exquisitely crafted autobiographical essays that rivals the most profound nonfictional writings of James Baldwin in its skillful investigation of the hidden recesses of the always-throbbing black American soul. Indeed, Walls is a beautifully calibrated exploration of the challenges faced by a courageously self-aware--and refreshingly self-revealing--black intellectual whose journey to and in the American mainstream is both menacing and exhilarating."e; --Michael Awkward, University of Michigan

Published in 1944, What the Negro Wants was a direct and emphatic call for the end of segregation and racial discrimination that set the agenda for the civil rights movement to come.With essays by fourteen prominent African American intellectuals, including Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Mary McLeod Bethune, A. Philip Randolph, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Roy Wilkins, What the Negro Wants explores the policies and practices that could be employed to achieve equal rights and opportunities for Black Americans, rejecting calls to reform the old system of segregation and instead arguing for the construction of a new system of equality. Stirring intense controversy at the time of publication, the book serves as a unique window into the history of the civil rights movement and offers startling comparisons to today's continuing fight against racism and inequality.Originally gathered together by distinguished Howard University historian Rayford W. Logan in 1944, our 2001 edition of the book includes Rayford Logan's introduction to the 1969 reprint, a new introduction by Kenneth Janken, and an updated bibliography.

In 1991, acclaimed poet Kenneth A. McClane published Walls: Essays, 1985-1990, a volume of essays dealing with life in Harlem, the death of his alcoholic brother, and the complexities of being black and middle-class in America. Now, in Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History, McClane contributes further to his self-described "e;autobiographical sojourn"e; with a second collection of interconnected essays. In McClane's words, "e;All concern race, although they, like the human spirit, wildly sweep and yaw."e; A timely installment in our national narrative, Color is a chronicle of the black middle class, a group rarely written about with sensitivity and charity. In evocative, trenchant, and poetic prose, McClane employs the art of the memoirist to explore the political and the personal. He details the poignant narrative of racial progress as witnessed by his family during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. We learn of his parents' difficult upbringing in Boston, where they confronted much racism; of the struggles they and McClane encountered as they became the first blacks to enter previously all-white institutions, including the oldest independent school in the United States; and of the part his parents played in the civil rights movement, working with Dr. King and others. The book ends with a tender account of his parents in the throes of Alzheimer's disease, which claimed both their lives.