African American Studies

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume VI
The Struggle to Pass the 1960 Civil Rights Act, 1959–1960
By Clarence Mitchell Jr.
· Edited by Denton L. Watson

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 attempted to rectify loopholes in the 1957 Civil Rights Act that had enabled southern states to continue disenfranchising Black voters and, in Texas, Mexican Americans. The legislation called for federal inspection of voter registration polls and introduced penalties for obstructing a person from registering to vote.

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume V
The Struggle to Pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act, 1955–1958
By Clarence Mitchell Jr.
· Edited by Denton L. Watson

The 1957 Civil Rights Act was the first successful lobbying campaign by an organization dedicated to that purpose since Reconstruction. Building on the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the law marked a turning point for the legislative branch in the struggle to accord Black citizens full equality under the Constitution.

Raggin’ On
The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson’s House and Journals
Edited by Carole M. Genshaft
· Foreword by Nannette V. Maciejunes

Through this catalog, readers will experience Aminah Robinson’s amazing house, her art, and her profuse journals. In them, as was so often the case, she succinctly defined the importance of art in general and of her relationship with the Columbus Museum of Art.

In the Balance of Power
Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States
By Omar H. Ali
· Foreword by Eric Foner
· Afterword by Jacqueline Salit

A revised and expanded edition of Ali’s important history of how African Americans have created independent and third-party movements to expand democracy.

Lyrical Liberators
The American Antislavery Movement in Verse, 1831–1865
Edited by Monica Pelaez

Before Black Lives Matter and Hamilton, there were abolitionist poets. In Lyrical Liberators, Monica Pelaez draws on unprecedented archival research to recover, collect, and annotate works by critically acclaimed writers, commercially successful scribes, and minority voices including those of African Americans and women.

Driven toward Madness
The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio
By Nikki M. Taylor

Margaret Garner was a runaway slave who, when confronted with capture, slit the throat of her toddler daughter rather than have her face a life in slavery. Driven toward Madness probes slavery’s legacy of violence and trauma to capture her circumstances and her transformation from a murdering mother to an icon of tragedy and resistance.

Keeping Heart
A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine
By Otis Trotter
· Introduction by Joe William Trotter Jr.

Organized around the life histories, medical struggles, and recollections of Otis Trotter and his thirteen siblings, Keeping Heart is a personal account of an African American family’s journey north during the second Great Migration.

Keep On Fighting
The Life and Civil Rights Legacy of Marian A. Spencer
By Dorothy H. Christenson
· Introduction by Mary E. Frederickson

Dot Christenson records the life story of remarkable leader, Marian Alexander Spencer, who joined the NAACP at thirteen and grew up to achieve a number of civic leadership firsts and a legacy of lasting civil rights victories.

American Pogrom
The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics
By Charles L. Lumpkins

On July 2 and 3, 1917, a mob of white men and women looted and torched the homes and businesses of African Americans in the small industrial city of East St. Louis, Illinois. When the terror ended, the attackers had destroyed property worth millions of dollars, razed several neighborhoods, injured hundreds, and forced at least seven thousand black townspeople to seek refuge across the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Life and Death of Gus Reed
A Story of Race and Justice in Illinois during the Civil War and Reconstruction
By Thomas Bahde

Gus Reed was a freed slave who traveled north as Sherman’s March was sweeping through Georgia in 1864. His journey ended in Springfield, Illinois, a city undergoing fundamental changes as its white citizens struggled to understand the political, legal, and cultural consequences of emancipation and black citizenship. Reed became known as a petty thief, appearing time and again in the records of the state’s courts and prisons.

Soulful Bobcats
Experiences of African American Students at Ohio University, 1950–1960
By Carl H. Walker and Betty Hollow
· Foreword by Roderick J. McDavis

During the 1950s, a group of ambitious young African Americans enrolled at Ohio University, a predominantly white school in Athens, Ohio. Years later, eighteen of them decided to share their stories, recalling the joys and challenges of living on a white campus before the civil rights era.

Immigration, Diversity, and Broadcasting in the United States 1990—2001
By Vibert C. Cambridge

The last decade of the twentieth century brought a maturing of the new racial and ethnic communities in the United States and the emergence of diversity and multiculturalism as dominant fields of discourse in legal, educational, and cultural contexts.

Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College
A Documentary History
By Roland M. Baumann

A richly illustrated volume presenting a comprehensive history of the education of African American students at Oberlin College.

Barack Obama and African Diasporas
Dialogues and Dissensions
By Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

An active blogger on The Zeleza Post, from which these essays are drawn, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza provides a genuinely critical engagement with Africa’s multiple worlds. With a blend of erudition and lively style, Zeleza writes about the role ofAfrica and Africans in the world and the interaction of the world with Africa.In the title essay, Zeleza analyzes the significance of the election of a member of the African diaspora to the presidency of the United States.

The Americans Are Coming!
Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa
By Robert Trent Vinson

For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and “American Negroes“—a group that included African Americans and black West Indians—established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements.