A Black Gambler S World Of Liquor Vice And Presidential Politics

"As Mouser shows, Scott spent his life figuring out--and satisfying--men's interests with liquor, gambling, and women, and . . . [he] refused to be complicit in backing politicians who took him and the broader base of first-generation black voters for dupes. . . . Scott saw the political game for what it was: a game of power."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

In 1969, nineteen-year-old Robert Hunt was found dead in the Cairo, Illinois, police station. The white authorities ruled the death a suicide, but many members of the African American community believed that Hunt had been murdered -- a sentiment that sparked rebellions and protests across the city. Cairo suddenly emerged as an important battleground for black survival in America and became a focus for many civil rights groups, including the NAACP. The United Front, a black power organization founded and led by Reverend Charles Koen, also mobilized -- thanks in large part to the support of local Christian congregations. In this vital reassessment of the impact of religion on the black power movement , Kerry Pimblott presents a nuanced discussion of the ways in which black churches supported and shaped the United Front. She deftly challenges conventional narratives of the de-Christianization of the movement, revealing that Cairoites embraced both old-time religion and revolutionary thought. Not only did the faithful fund the mass direct-action strategies of the United Front, but activists also engaged the literature on black theology, invited theologians to speak at their rallies, and sent potential leaders to train at seminaries. Pimblott also investigates the impact of female leaders on the organization and their influence on young activists, offering new perspectives on the hypermasculine image of black power. Based on extensive primary research, this groundbreaking book contributes to and complicates the history of the black freedom struggle in America. It not only adds a new element to the study of African American religion but also illuminates the relationship between black churches and black politics during this tumultuous era.

As early-twentieth-century Chicago swelled with an influx of at least 250,000 new black urban migrants, the city became a center of consumer capitalism, flourishing with professional sports, beauty shops, film production companies, recording studios, and other black cultural and communal institutions. Davarian Baldwin argues that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism. Pushing the traditional boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance to new frontiers, Baldwin identifies a fresh model of urban culture rich with politics, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship. Baldwin explores an abundant archive of cultural formations where an array of white observers, black cultural producers, critics, activists, reformers, and black migrant consumers converged in what he terms a "marketplace intellectual life." Here the thoughts and lives of Madam C. J. Walker, Oscar Micheaux, Andrew "Rube" Foster, Elder Lucy Smith, Jack Johnson, and Thomas Dorsey emerge as individual expressions of a much wider spectrum of black political and intellectual possibilities. By placing consumer-based amusements alongside the more formal arenas of church and academe, Baldwin suggests important new directions for both the historical study and the constructive future of ideas and politics in American life.

"In the mid-eighteenth century, the Ottawa chief Pontiac (often spelled Ponteach at the time) led an intertribal confederacy in resisting British power in the Great Lakes region, an event immortalized in the play Ponteach, or the Savages of America. This play, written by infamous frontier soldier Robert Rogers, is one of the earliest theatrical renderings of the region, depicting its hero in a way that called into question eighteenth-century constructions of Indigenous Americans. Sämi Ludwig contends that Ponteach's literary and artistic merits are worthy of further exploration. He investigates the questions of authorship and analyzes the play's content, embracing its many contradictions as enriching windows into the era. In this way, he suggests using Ponteach as a tool to better understand British imperialism in North America and the emerging theatrical forms developing in the Young Republic"--

First published in 1975, this collection of essays expands upon the themes and ideas developed in the editors’ previous work, the visionary and groundbreaking text: The New Criminology. Directed at orthodox criminology, this is a partisan work written by a group of criminologists committed to a social transformation: a transformation to a society that does not criminalize deviance. Included are American contributions, particularly from the School of Criminology at Berkeley, represented by Hermann and Julia Schwendinger and Tony Platt, together with essays by Richard Quinney and William Chambliss. From Britain, Geoff Pearson considers deviancy theory as ‘misfit sociology’ and Paul Hirst attacks deviancy theory from an Althusserian Marxist position. The editors contribute a detailed introductory essay extending the position developed in The New Criminology, and two other pieces which attempt to continue the task of translating criminology from its traditional correctionalist stance to a commitment to socialist diversity and a crime-free set of social arrangements.