Righteous Propagation

Between 1877 and 1930--years rife with tensions over citizenship, suffrage, immigration, and "the Negro problem--African American activists promoted an array of strategies for progress and power built around "racial destiny," the idea that black Americans formed a collective whose future existence would be determined by the actions of its members. In Righteous Propagation, Michele Mitchell examines the reproductive implications of racial destiny, demonstrating how it forcefully linked particular visions of gender, conduct, and sexuality to collective well-being. Mitchell argues that while African Americans did not agree on specific ways to bolster their collective prospects, ideas about racial destiny and progress generally shifted from outward-looking remedies such as emigration to inward-focused debates about intraracial relationships, thereby politicizing the most private aspects of black life and spurring race activists to calcify gender roles, monitor intraracial sexual practices, and promote moral purity. Examining the ideas of well-known elite reformers such as Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. DuBois, as well as unknown members of the working and aspiring classes, such as James Dubose and Josie Briggs Hall, Mitchell reinterprets black protest and politics and recasts the way we think about black sexuality and progress after Reconstruction.

The rock and roll music that dominated airwaves across the country during the 1950s and early 1960s is often described as a triumph for integration. Black and white musicians alike, including Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis, scored hit records with young audiences from different racial groups, blending sonic traditions from R&B, country, and pop. This so-called "desegregation of the charts" seemed particularly resonant since major civil rights groups were waging major battles for desegregation in public places at the same time. And yet the centering of integration, as well as the supposition that democratic rights largely based in consumerism should be available to everyone regardless of race, has resulted in very distinct responses to both music and movement among Black and white listeners who grew up during this period. Rock and Roll, Desegregation Movements, and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era: An "Integrated Effort" traces these distinctions using archival research, musical performances, and original oral histories to determine the uncertain legacies of the civil rights movement and early rock and roll music in a supposedly post-civil rights era.

In The Emancipation Circuit Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.

In this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and the enduring partnership between racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals in the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined agrotopias—sustainable societies unaffected by the nation's agricultural and population crises—elsewhere. Though seemingly progressive, these agrotopian visions depicted selective breeding and racial "improvement" as the path to environmental stability. In this fascinating study, Goode uncovers an early sustainability rhetoric interested in shaping, just as much as sustaining, the American population. Showing how ideas about race and reproduction were central to early sustainability thinking, Goode unearths an alternative environmental archive that ranges from gothic novels to Black nationalist manifestos, from Waco, Texas, to the West Indies, from city tenements to White House kitchen gardens. Exposing the eugenic foundations of some of our most well-regarded environmental traditions, this book compels us to reexamine the benevolence of American environmental thought.

"How does it feel to be a problem?" asked W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). For Progressive Era thinkers across the color line, the "Negro problem" was inextricably linked to the concurrent "labor problem," occasioning debates regarding blacks' role in the nation's industrial past, present and future. With blacks freed from what some believed to be the protective embrace of slavery, many felt that the assumedly primitive Negro was doomed to expire in the face of unbridled industrial progress. Yet efforts to address the so-called Negro problem invariably led to questions regarding the relationship between race, industry, and labor. In consequence, a collection of thinkers across the natural and social sciences developed a new culture of racial management, linking race and labor to color and the body. Evolutionary theory and industrial management combined to link certain peoples to certain forms of work and reconfigured the story of races into one of development and decline, efficiency and inefficiency, and the thin line between civilization and savagery. Forging a Laboring Race charts the history of an idea-race management-building on recent work in African American, labor, and disability history to analyze how ideas of race, work, and the fit or unfit body informed the political economy of early twentieth-century industrial America. Forging a Laboring Race foregrounds the working black body as both a category of analysis and lived experience. It charts a corporeal map of African American proletarianization via the fields, factories, trenches, hospital, and universities of Progressive Era America.

This book examines the history of female adolescent sexuality in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the 1960s. The book analyzes both adult perceptions of female adolescent sexuality and the experiences of female adolescents themselves. It examines what girls knew (or thought they knew) about sex at different points in time, girls’ sexual experiences, girls' ideas about love and romance, female adolescent beauty culture, and the influence of popular culture on female adolescent sexuality. It also examines the ways in which adults responded to female adolescent sexuality and the efforts of adults to either control or encourage girls' interest in sexual topics, dating, girls’ participation in beauty culture, and their education on sexual topics. The book describes a trajectory along which female adolescents went from being perceived as inherently innocent and essentially asexual to being regarded (and feared) as primarily sexual in nature.

The masterful and poignant story of three African-American families who journeyed west after emancipation, by an award-winning scholar and descendant of the migrants Following the lead of her own ancestors, Kendra Field’s epic family history chronicles the westward migration of freedom’s first generation in the fifty years after emancipation. Drawing on decades of archival research and family lore within and beyond the United States, Field traces their journey out of the South to Indian Territory, where they participated in the development of black and black Indian towns and settlements. When statehood, oil speculation, and Jim Crow segregation imperiled their lives and livelihoods, these formerly enslaved men and women again chose emigration. Some migrants launched a powerful back-to-Africa movement, while others moved on to Canada and Mexico. Their lives and choices deepen and widen the roots of the Great Migration. Interweaving black, white, and Indian histories, Field’s beautifully wrought narrative explores how ideas about race and color powerfully shaped the pursuit of freedom.

Arguing that the accomplishments of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey and his followers have been marginalized in narratives of the black freedom struggle, this volume builds on decades of overlooked research to reveal the profound impact of Garvey’s post–World War I black nationalist philosophy around the globe and across the twentieth century. These essays point to the breadth of Garveyism’s spread and its reception in communities across the African diaspora, examining the influence of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Africa, Australia, North America, and the Caribbean. They highlight the underrecognized work of many Garveyite women and show how the UNIA played a key role in shaping labor unions, political organizations, churches, and schools. In addition, contributors describe the importance of grassroots efforts for expanding the global movement—the UNIA trained leaders to organize local centers of power, whose political activism outside the movement helped Garvey’s message escape its organizational bounds during the 1920s. They trace the imprint of the movement on long-term developments such as decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean, the pan-Aboriginal fight for land rights in Australia, the civil rights and Black Power movements in the United States, and the radical pan-African movement. Rejecting the idea that Garveyism was a brief and misguided phenomenon, this volume exposes its scope, significance, and endurance. Together, contributors assert that Garvey initiated the most important mass movement in the history of the African diaspora, and they urge readers to rethink the emergence of modern black politics with Garveyism at the center.