Black History Month: Library Resources

What was it like to grow up black and female in the segregated South? To answer this question, LaKisha Simmons blends social history and cultural studies, recreating children's streets and neighborhoods within Jim Crow New Orleans and offering a rare look into black girls' personal lives. Simmons makes use of oral histories, the black and white press, social workers' reports, police reports, girls' fiction writing, and photography to tell the stories of individual girls: some from poor, working-class families; some from middle-class, "respectable" families; and some caught in the Jim Crow judicial system. These voices come together to create a group biography of ordinary girls living in an extraordinary time, girls who did not intend to make history but whose stories transform our understanding of both segregation and childhood.

From the earliest days of Jim Crow, African Americans in New Orleans rallied around the belief that the new system of racially biased laws, designed to relegate them to second-class citizenship, was neither legitimate nor permanent. Drawing on shared memories of fluid race relations and post?Civil War political participation, they remained committed to a disciplined and sustained pursuit of equality. Defying Jim Crow tells the story of this community?s decades-long struggle against segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial violence. Amid mounting violence and increasing exclusion, black New Orleanians believed their best defense depended upon maintaining a close-knit and politically engaged community. Donald E. DeVore?s peerless research shows how African Americans sought to reverse the trends of oppression by prioritizing the kind of capacity building?investment in education, participation in national organizations, and a spirit of entrepreneurship in markets not dominated by white businessmen?that would ensure the community?s ability to keep fighting for their rights in the face of setbacks and hostility from the city?s white leaders. As some black activists worked to attain equity within the ?separate but equal? framework, they provided a firm foundation and crucial support for more overt challenges to the racist government structures. The result of over a decade?s research into the history of civil rights and community building in New Orleans, Defying Jim Crow provides a thorough and insightful analysis of race relations in one of America?s most diverse cities and offers a vital contribution to the complex history of the African American struggle for freedom.

In the eighteenth century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Fuentes takes us through the streets of Bridgetown with an enslaved runaway; inside a brothel run by a freed woman of color; in the midst of a white urban household in sexual chaos; to the gallows where enslaved people were executed; and within violent scenes of enslaved women's punishments. In the process, Fuentes interrogates the archive and its historical production to expose the ongoing effects of white colonial power that constrain what can be known about these women. Combining fragmentary sources with interdisciplinary methodologies that include black feminist theory and critical studies of history and slavery, Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how the construction of the archive marked enslaved women's bodies, in life and in death. By vividly recounting enslaved life through the experiences of individual women and illuminating their conditions of confinement through the legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, colonial authorities, and the archive, Fuentes challenges the way we write histories of vulnerable and often invisible subjects.

Many people characterize urban renewal projects and the power of eminent domain as two of the most widely despised and often racist tools for reshaping American cities in the postwar period. In A World More Concrete, N. D. B. Connolly uses the history of South Florida to unearth an older and far more complex story.  Connolly captures nearly eighty years of political and land transactions to reveal how real estate and redevelopment created and preserved metropolitan growth and racial peace under white supremacy.  Using a materialist approach, he offers a long view of capitalism and the color line, following much of the money that made land taking and Jim Crow segregation profitable and preferred  approaches to governing cities throughout the twentieth century. A World More Concrete argues that black and white landlords, entrepreneurs, and even liberal community leaders used tenements and repeated land dispossession to take advantage of the poor and generate remarkable wealth.  Through a political culture built on real estate, South Florida's landlords and homeowners advanced property rights and white property rights, especially, at the expense of more inclusive visions of equality. For black people and many of their white allies, uses of eminent domain helped to harden class and color lines.  Yet, for many reformers, confiscating certain kinds of real estate through eminent domain also promised to help improve housing conditions, to undermine the neighborhood influence of powerful slumlords, and to open new opportunities for suburban life for black Floridians. Concerned more with winners and losers than with heroes and villains, A World More Concrete offers a sober assessment of money and power in Jim Crow America.  It shows how negotiations between powerful real estate interests on both sides of the color line gave racial segregation a remarkable capacity to evolve, revealing property owners' power to reshape American cities in ways that can still be seen and felt today.