The story of black emancipation is one of the most dramatic themes of American history, covering racism, murder, poverty and extreme heroism. Figures such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King are the demigods of the freedom movements, both film and household figures. This major text explores the African-American experience of the twentieth century with particular reference to six outstanding race leaders. Their philosophies and strategies for racial advancement are compared and set against the historical framework and constraints within which they functioned. The book also examines the 'grass roots' of black protest movements in America, paying particular attention to the major civil rights organizations as well as black separatist groups such as the Nation of Islam.

Introduction and Overview; Victoria Earle Matthews: Residence and Reform; African Americans and Social Work in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1900-1930; Birdye Henrietta Haynes: A Pioneer Settlement House Worker; Margaret Murray Washington: Organizer of Rural African American Women; Marcus Garvey and Community Development via the UNIA; Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Uncompromising Style; Lawrence A. Oxley: Defining State Public Welfare among African Americans; George Edmund Haynes and Elizabeth Ross Haynes: Empowerment Practice among African American Social Welfare Pioneers; Janie Porter Barrett and the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls: Community Response to the Needs of African American Children ; Eugene Kinckle Jones: A Statesman for the Times; Mary Church Terrell and Her Mission: Giving Decades of Quiet Service; Thyra J. Edwards: Internationalist Social Worker; Sarah Collins Fernandis and Her Hidden Work; E. Franklin Frazier and Social Work: Unity and Conflict; Historic Development of African American Child Welfare Services; Traditional Helping Roles of Older African American Woman: The Concept of Self-Help.

A critical examination of these important figures, combined with a useful general survey of modern black American history.

How can African American church leaders maximize their leadership potential? What are current models for effective leadership in the African American Christian community? This book answers those questions and more with up-to-date research and current best practices regarding leadership principles and strategies. African American church communities and those who interact with and work with these communities will find this book particularly useful. ParkerBooks are written to equip and encourage African American ministry leaders.

A theoretical examination of the concepts of the citizen, citizenship, and leadership, A Crisis of Leadership and the Role of Citizens in Black America: Leaders of the New School proposes to develop a prototype or model of effective Black leadership. Furthermore, it examines “citizenship habits” of the Black community based on their economic standing, educational attainment, participation in the criminal justice system, and health and family structure. It tracks data in these four categories from 1970 to today, measuring effective leadership by the improvement or decline in the majority of African Americans standing in these four categories. This book concludes that African Americans have negative perceptions of themselves as U.S. citizens, which thus produce “bad citizenship habits.” Additionally, ineffective Black leaders since the Civil Rights era have been unwilling to demonstrate the purpose and significance of service, particularly to the poor and disadvantaged members of the Black community. Contemporary Black leaders (post–Civil Rights Era) have focused primarily on self-promotion, careerism, and middle-class interests. A new type of leader is needed, one that stresses unity and reinforces commitment to the group as a whole by establishing new institutions that introduce community-building.

After four centuries of bondage, the nineteenth century marked the long-awaited release of millions of black slaves. Subsequently, these former slaves attempted to reconstruct the basis of American democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the greatest intellectual leaders in United States history, evaluates the twenty years of fateful history that followed the Civil War, with special reference to the efforts and experiences of African Americans. Du Bois’s words best indicate the broader parameters of his work: "the attitude of any person toward this book will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race. If he believes that the Negro in America and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings, then he will read this story and judge it by the facts adduced." The plight of the white working class throughout the world is directly traceable to American slavery, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, Du Bois argues. Moreover, the resulting color caste was adopted, forwarded, and approved by white labor, and resulted in the subordination of colored labor throughout the world. As a result, the majority of the world’s laborers became part of a system of industry that destroyed democracy and led to World War I and the Great Depression. This book tells that story.

This comprehensive study of African American politics since the civil rights era concludes that the black movement has been co-opted, marginalized, and almost wholly incorporated into mainstream institutions.

In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.

Black Women in Leadership: Their Historical and Contemporary Contributions explores the leadership experiences of Black women within macro level (such as education, industry, and social services) and micro level (such as family and individual churches) contexts. The interdisciplinary work examines leadership practices, highlighting the historical and current triumphs and barriers of Black women in these roles. Black Women in Leadership further offers success strategies underlying Black women's leadership. With few exceptions (namely, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Dorothy Height, Daisy Bates, and Angela Davis), the accomplishments of Black female leaders have historically been ignored, minimized, or primarily linked to those of prominent Black men. Black Women in Leadership centers upon elucidating factors motivating Black women to create their own identities and become leaders in their own right.

Amidst the violent racism prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century, African American cultural elites, struggling to articulate a positive black identity, developed a middle-class ideology of racial uplift. Insisting that they were truly representative of the race's potential, black elites espoused an ethos of self-help and service to the black masses and distinguished themselves from the black majority as agents of civilization; hence the phrase 'uplifting the race.' A central assumption of racial uplift ideology was that African Americans' material and moral progress would diminish white racism. But Kevin Gaines argues that, in its emphasis on class distinctions and patriarchal authority, racial uplift ideology was tied to pejorative notions of racial pathology and thus was limited as a force against white prejudice. Drawing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Hubert H. Harrison, and others, Gaines focuses on the intersections between race and gender in both racial uplift ideology and black nationalist thought, showing that the meaning of uplift was intensely contested even among those who shared its aims. Ultimately, elite conceptions of the ideology retreated from more democratic visions of uplift as social advancement, leaving a legacy that narrows our conceptions of rights, citizenship, and social justice.