Black Boston

Between the Revolution and the Civil War, non-slave black Americans existed in the no-man’s land between slavery and freedom. The two generations defined by these two titanic struggles for national survival saw black Bostonians struggle to make real the quintessential values of individual freedom and equality promised by the Revolution. Levesque’s richly detailed study fills a significant void in our understanding of the formative years of black life in urban America. Black culture Levesque argues was both more and less than separation and integration. Poised between an occasionally benevolent, sometimes hostile, frequently indifferent white world and their own community, black Americans were, in effect, suspended between two cultures.

In many histories of Boston, African Americans have remained almost invisible. Partly as a result, when the 1972 crisis over school desegregation and busing erupted, many observers professed shock at the overt racism on display in the "cradle of liberty." Yet the city has long been divided over matters of race, and it was also home to a far older Black organizing tradition than many realize. A community of Black activists had fought segregated education since the origins of public schooling and racial inequality since the end of northern slavery. Before Busing tells the story of the men and women who struggled and demonstrated to make school desegregation a reality in Boston. It reveals the legal efforts and battles over tactics that played out locally and influenced the national Black freedom struggle. And the book gives credit to the Black organizers, parents, and children who fought long and hard battles for justice that have been left out of the standard narratives of the civil rights movement. What emerges is a clear picture of the long and hard-fought campaigns to break the back of Jim Crow education in the North and make Boston into a better, more democratic city—a fight that continues to this day.

This is the third volume in Judson L. Jeffries’s long-range effort to paint a more complete portrait of the most widely known organization to emerge from the 1960s Black Power Movement. Like its predecessors (Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party [2007] and On the Ground: The Black Panther Party in Communities across America [2010]), this volume looks at Black Panther Party (BPP) activity in sites outside Oakland, the most studied BPP locale and the one long associated with oversimplified and underdeveloped narratives about, and distorted images of, the organization. The cities covered in this volume are Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, and Washington, D.C. The contributors examine official BPP branches and chapters as well as offices of the National Committee to Combat Fascism that evolved into full-fledged BPP chapters and branches. They have mined BPP archives and interviewed members to convey the daily ups-and-downs related to BPP’s social-justice activities and to reveal the diversity of rank-and-file BPP members’ personal backgrounds and the legal, political, and social skills, or baggage, that they brought to the BPP. The BPP reportedly had a presence in some forty places across the country. During this time, no other Black Power Movement organization fed as many children, provided healthcare to as many residents, educated as many adults, assisted as many senior citizens, and clothed as many people. In point of fact, no other organization of the Black Power era had as great an impact on American lives as did the BPP. Nonetheless, when Jeffries undertook this project, chapter-level scholarly investigations of the BPP were few and far between. This third book, The Black Panther Party in a City Near You, raises the number of BPP branches that Jeffries and his contributors have examined to seventeen. Contributors: Curtis Austin, Judson L. Jeffries, Charles E. Jones, Ava Kinsey, Duncan MacLaury, Sarah Nicklas, John Preusser.

The remarkable relationship among the six conspirators who aided John Brown in his famed 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry is dramatically exposed in this volume. Why did these six abolitionists, who were nominally pacifist, decide to subsidize an act of black violence? Jeffery Rossbach rejects the commonly held belief that Brown dominated them with his charismatic personality. Here he delves into the backgrounds and beliefs of the members of the Secret Six during their three-year involvement with the plan and gives us, for the first time, a revealing picture of the group's character. Rossbach identifies the set of racial and political assumptions at the core of the Committee's rationale. He demonstrates how the conspirators, particularly Parker and Higginson, fused their ideas about political violence with those of the Journalist James Redpath and some free black leaders in the north. Essentially, the Six believed that the condition of slavery had rendered the black man docile, pliant, and prone to collective behavior. If slaves rallied to Brown's insurrectionary banner, they reasoned, their violent acts would have a cathartic effect on the Afro-American character and social outlook. The conspirators felt that just as the willingness to fight for freedom formed the basis of the Anglo-American character, so a violent uprising to free slaves and kill white oppressors must serve as the black man's first step toward the assimilation of a new and more individualistic value system. That system would more closely match the one held by the democratic, industrial North. Surpassing previous studies by both conservative and revisionist historians, Rossbach shows how the secret committee's relationship with Brown was based upon their common social assumptions and personal aspirations. He suggests that they shared a system of beliefs that was emerging among urban professionals of the new industrial North. His work provides a fuller dimension to this key episode in American history.

Encyclopedia of Women and American Politics, Third Edition contains all the material a reader needs to understand the role of women throughout America's political history. This informative A-to-Z volume contains hundreds of entries covering the people, events, and terms involved in the history of women and politics. Entries include: Abortion Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez The birth control movement Black Lives Matter Hillary Rodham Clinton Deb Haaland Domestic violence Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) Glass ceiling League of Women Voters #MeToo movement Michelle Obama Sonia Sotomayor Elizabeth Warren and many more.

In late nineteenth-century Boston, battles over black party loyalty were fights over the place of African Americans in the post–Civil War nation. In his fresh in-depth study of black partisanship and politics, Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood demonstrates that party politics became the terrain upon which black Bostonians tested the promise of equality in America's democracy. Most African Americans remained loyal Republicans, but Race Over Party highlights the actions and aspirations of a cadre of those who argued that the GOP took black votes for granted and offered little meaningful reward for black support. These activists branded themselves "independents," forging new alliances and advocating support of whichever candidate would support black freedom regardless of party. By the end of the century, however, it became clear that partisan politics offered little hope for the protection of black rights and lives in the face of white supremacy and racial violence. Even so, Bergeson-Lockwood shows how black Bostonians' faith in self-reliance, political autonomy, and dedicated organizing inspired future generations of activists who would carry these legacies into the foundation of the twentieth-century civil rights movement.