Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America's Racial Future
Manning Marable
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 046504395X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
contributions to the social, cultural, economic, and political life of both black America and the country as a whole. Richardson describes her project and other efforts as “preserving living history.” While these and other documentary efforts are indeed admirable and worthy of generous support, they separate history from theory and politics in certain respects. Richardson seeks to place the historical narrative of blacks in America into America’s mainstream narrative about itself. What must be
strata, his “Talented Tenth,” the language for the struggles of racial reform. Over time, Du Bois realized that racial justice in America would require profound structural change within the U.S. political economy; his “Talented Tenth” had not yet reached those conclusions about their own politics. From the original publication of Souls in 1903 until his resignation from the editorship of the NAACP’s magazine, the Crisis, in 1934, no one in America personified the struggle for racial justice more
expenses, tuition support, and debt forgiveness. The Ford Foundation, after years of neglect, “rediscovered” its long dormant interest in black studies and began investing millions of dollars into key programs at the University of Wisconsin, Cornell University, Harvard, and even City College of the City University of New York—once its controversial Afrocentric chair Leonard Jeffries was removed from his administrative post. The number of African Americans receiving professional degrees rose by
A. Jones to Mr. DeLoach, FBI Memorandum, October 9, 1962, in Anne Romaine Collection, Box 1, University of Tennessee Library Special Collection, Knoxville, Tennessee. Balk agreed “to treat the threat posed by the NOI in a realistic and accurate manner.” The FBI agent stipulated that any data provided to Haley and Balk would not be attributed” to the bureau. 151 “will the field be left to extremists?”: Alfred Balk and Alex Haley, “Black Merchants of Hate,” Saturday Evening Post, vol. 236, no. 3,
“authenticity” among their most celebrated and popular public figures. Several years ago in my Malcolm X seminar at Columbia, I asked the students about the critical differences between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. One black student quickly responded that “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. belongs to the world, but Malcolm X belongs to us.” Black consciousness was also formed in response to the omnipresent reality of racist violence that generations of African Americans experienced in