By the mid-sixties, Leonard Bernstein was engaging with the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War resistance. Bernstein took part in greeting Martin Luther King in the Selma Alabama fifty-four mile march to gain voting rights. He campaigned for war resistor Eugene McCarthy in the election of 1968. In 1970, Bernstein’s and his wife Felicia’s fundraising support for the Black Panthers Legal Defense brought him under public attack organized by the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover. In 1971, Bernstein’s support for war resistor Daniel Berrigan, and his seeking the latter’s help in writing the libretto for Mass, brought him again under attack by Hoover, this time with the connivance of President Nixon, who had missed the inaugural performance of Mass for fear that Bernstein would publicly humiliate him. Nixon now placed Bernstein on his infamous ‘Enemies List’, but Bernstein was saved from victimization by Hoover’s death and Nixon’s forced resignation due to the Watergate scandal.

Political activists during the Northern Ireland Troubles employed racialized rhetoric, comparing the plight of Catholics to that of African Americans. This strategy aimed to frame the conflict for global audiences, establish transnational networks, and gain local support by invoking solidarity with the Black struggle. Some radicals within the movement even embraced the ideology of the Black Panthers and advocated for a similar Catholic Power movement. In contrast, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) took a different approach, using racialized language to portray their conflict with Britain as an anti-colonial struggle and aligning themselves with Africa. However, this Third Worldism approach inadvertently reinforced colonial power dynamics through their choice of rhetoric. Loyalists, on the other hand, openly acknowledged their perceived privileges as white individuals. For instance, when soldiers opened fire on Protestant rioters, loyalists reminded officers of their shared racial identity by stating, we are not wogs. This chapter argues that activists on both sides of the conflict employed racialized language in complex, contradictory, and ambiguous ways. They strategically utilized racial rhetoric for political gain, even in situations unrelated to the start of the Troubles.

Bonds’s setting of the Du Bois Credo continues and extends the series of musical appeals for racial justice that had led to The Montgomery Variations, just as the revised version of Credo published at the head of his first autobiography, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, in 1920 extends the ideas that had led to the original 1904 version of Du Bois’s text. This chapter frames both the Du Bois Credo and Bonds’s musical setting thereof as articulations of the themes and issues of the works’ respective biographical contexts and, taken together, a dyadic lens into their creators’ perspectives on the societal upheavals of the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. Then, after demonstrating why, and how, the Credo was effectively silenced during Margaret Bonds’s lifetime despite its obvious importance, timeliness, and musical genius – including conversation with the publisher who insisted that the work could not be published unless its text were altered – the chapter closes by exploring the work’s first posthumous performances and documenting the ringing endorsement of Shirley Graham Du Bois, widow of the poet, for this “work of art that is eternal.”

The Great Migration, which began in the late nineteenth century and witnessed the movement of more than six million Black folk from the agrarian US South to the urban North between 1919 and 1970, and the flourishing of “Black Renaissances” in Harlem, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other Northern urban centers were the essential soil in which are rooted not only the two works that are the subject of this book, but also the lives and careers of Margaret Bonds, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. This chapter explores the roles of those two large societal seizings of freedom for the poor and oppressed as the context for Margaret Bonds’s career and the source of her career-long commitment to using her art to uplift what she in 1942 called “our oppressed Race” and work for global equality.

Margaret Bonds conceived The Montgomery Variations during a thirteen-state Southern tour in the spring of 1963 – a tour that took her not only to Montgomery, Alabama (a fiercely contested battleground in the ongoing Civil Rights Movement), but also to Birmingham in the same state – the latter at the beginning of Dr. Martin Luther King’s difficult Birmingham campaign. Of her experiences there was born a programmatic composition that used the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” as the basis of a symphonic variation set that drew on models including J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Death and Transfiguration to trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement from the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) through the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church bombing (Birmingham, 1963), with a radiant “Benediction” evidently born in the wake of the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. This chapter situates The Montgomery Variations in the personal, professional, and societal developments traced in Chapter 1 and analyzes the music and program to explore how Bonds used it to advance her activist agenda.

This chapter explores how the African American novel imagined a better world, experimented with form, and reflected the artistic and cultural sophistication of Black people in the twentieth century. It argues that understanding the twentieth-century African American novel in the context of various overlapping liberation movements helps us organize our thinking about the ways in which writers used long fiction to explore the social, political, ideological, and historical realities that informed the time period in which they were writing. Focusing on African American fiction produced within and around several Black liberation movements and historical interregnums – i.e., Post-Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement (BAM), and the post-BAM Toni Morrison era – the chapter examines the nuances and complexities of novelists who used the novel as form to reflect and inspire shared visions of a liberated future.

Structural racism requires racialized economic agents. Racial identities are a strategically determined social norm, designed for governing differential access to resources, especially wealth, power, and information, as well as protection from other-group antagonism. When applied to the labor market, the differential power of racial groups means that racial identity is a sorting mechanism, such that persons of otherwise equal productive capacity will have racially differential access to employment, compensation, promotion, training, and the probability of layoff according to the manager–worker identity match. Racial identity norms evolve from social interactions between and among persons of alternative ancestral groups. Within these interactions persons select strategies that strengthen or weaken racial identity norms. These social interactions increase the productivity of persons if they are mutually altruistic. Mutually antagonistic social interactions reduce each person’s productivity. Racialization is an ongoing process of social and economic evolution. Self-identification and labeling conventions are social norms that emerge to distinguish social groups. Both actual and perceived skin shade and other physical differences are imprecise and subjective.

The literary history of the St. Claude corridor, an historically hardscrabble, working-class neighborhood downriver from the French Quarter, reflects its distance from the relatively elite and glamorous Quarter. After sketching the history of the built environment and its major cultural and political flashpoints, from Fats Domino and Ruby Bridges to the Black Panthers and Hurricane Katrina, the chapter considers first the major writing to have originated in the Lower 9th Ward (Marcus B. Christian, Kalamu Ya Salaam), then the Desire neighborhood (Cheekie Nero, Jed Horne), St. Roch (Alice Dunbar-Nelson), and Bywater (Tennessee Williams, Nelson Algren, Seth Morgan, Valerie Martin). Much of this writing can be read through the motif of children, particularly faith in their innocence as a key to a more prosperous future.

The 1980s was a decade in which African American literary production was starting to get the long overdue attention it deserved, but also a decade in which African American artists were emboldened to explore new territory, mainstream recognition be damned.The juxtaposition of James Baldwin’s funeral in 1987 and Trey Ellis’s essay “The New Black Aesthetic” in 1989 represent not a mere passing of the torch from the old guard to the avant-garde.Rather, the old guard was flourishing, and younger artists were also getting attention on new frontiers.In an unprecedented way, the 1980s marked an era when Black writers were sought out and recognized, to the point that their work dominated the critical conversation.This was especially true of Black women writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Rita Dove who enjoyed a readership unlike anything they had ever seen before.

Shows how the Museum of the Bible produces a bible resistant to moral critique, particularly when it comes to racism, slavery, and civil rights in US history. Argues that the museum’s exhibits engage in selective history-telling and other techniques to protect the Bible from complicity in societal harms and to frame the Christian Bible as in indispensable ally for progress. The museum’s bible participates in the constructions of Christian cultural heritage narratives and Christian nationalism in the United States.

The category of Civil War literature is not bounded by historical designation or lived experience; instead, this genre encompasses a broad range of reflections and reconstructions concerning the legacy imparted by the war. Beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, contemporary evaluations of the civil rights movement mobilize competing logics of Civil War memory. These versions of Civil War memory take shape in both personal and political registers, the subjective nature of which simultaneously confounds and perpetually renews understandings of the past. Three developments occurred in the 1950s and 1960s that brought such contradictory remembrance to light: the desegregation of public schools via Brown v. Board of Education, the commemoration of the Civil War’s centennial anniversary, and the deaths of the last remaining Civil War veterans. This final event characterizes the relevant work produced in both the civil rights movement and our contemporary moment, as writers continuously work to preserve, alter, or resist their ancestors’ history in ways informed by the interests and conflicts of the present.

This chapter traces the influence of paperback books on American literary subcultures after World War II. Cheap, handy, and accessible for most readers, the mass-market paperback format at once democratized the culture of letters and exploited stereotypes for profit. When it came to race relations, paperbacks’ capacity for disrepute collided with African Americans’ struggle for civil rights in a subgenre called “black sleaze.” In the 1940s and 1950s, books that tackled racial violence were repackaged with prurient covers that emphasized the taboo of interracial sex. This set the stage for the 1960s, when direct-to-paperback books bracketed social upheaval in the real world for sexual hedonism in fantasy. White readers’ problematic consumption of black sleaze was epitomized by the release of Iceberg Slim’s autobiographical novel Pimp in 1967 by the white-owned, tabloid-oriented Holloway House. However, after seeing the racial composition of its readership change in the 1970s, Holloway House sidelined sleaze for black pulp fiction formula stories by black authors for black readers. The switch may have appeared to vanquish sleaze, but elements of it remained embedded in this masculinist subgenre of books, which went on to inspire key figures in rap and hip-hop culture.

This chapter examines the period between the publication of Invisible Man and the early 1970s (roughly the period defined by the Civil Rights movement) when Ralph Ellison crafted his strategy for how he would define and occupy the public role he found himself and his work suddenly placed. While Ellison is sometimes seen as being politically distant, particularly relative to the Civil Rights movement, the chapter argues that the counter-narrative that Ellison constructed and maintained was that it was his art itself that defined a political stance rather than the other way around. For Ellison, politics discouraged the production of true art rather than stimulated it. During the Civil Rights years, Ellison employed this thinking to move away from focusing on the unique historical experiences of African Americans to a broader emphasis on cultural hybridity.

Norman’s chapter excavates a missing element in studies of the civil rights autobiography tradition: narratives by children who did not tell their own story, but who nevertheless were central to the movement and in many cases helped shape it. These include Melba Patillo Beals, one of the Littlerock Nine and author of Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High. Norman argues that, adorned with diverse artifacts of Black print culture, Beals’s autobiography invites the reader into a journey of becoming a face of everyday Black heroism amid pervasive and fierce white commitments to segregation. Just as important as Beals’s life narrative are those of everyday living during a period of massive social change, including Rosemary Bray’s Unafraid of the Dark: A Memoir, which details a childhood shaped by poverty, Catholicism, the welfare state, and a freedom movement providing new language, models, and hopes for a nation’s citizens. Norman’s chapter ultimately traces African American autobiography by children of the movement from Amira Baraka’s daughter Lisa to Paul Coates’s son Ta-Nehisi.

This article examines how 1960s activist theater inspired a movement of cultural activism across the U.S. South and beyond. It looks at how some activists during the civil rights movement used creative mediums such as performance, radio, music, craft-making, photography, film, and literature to engage with their local communities. It argues that their efforts were related, but alternative to the conventional voter registration and sit-in protests. Rather, the process of making art opened ways to enact participatory democracy in the spirit of activist Ella Baker and others who emphasized that change should come from below. In doing so, people across the South involved in the civil rights movement could tell stories of the freedom struggle in their own words and images. The article starts with the Free Southern Theater in Mississippi and branches out to show how performance practices influenced other modes of creative activist production, including craft-making cooperatives, film, and works of literature from authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Cade Bambara, who used their platform to tell the story of grassroots activists and ordinary people creating together as a path to social change.