Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007 provides a comprehensive history of the more than 120 African Americans who have served in the United States Congress from 1870 through 2007. Individual profiles are introduced by contextual essays that explain major events in congressional and U.S. history. Illustrated with many portraits, photographs, and charts. House Document 108-224. 3d edition. Edited by Matthew Wasniewski. Paperback edition. Questions that are answered include: How many African Americans have served in the U.S. Congress? How did Reconstruction, the Great Migration, and the post-World War II civil rights movement affect black Members of Congress? Who was the first African American to chair a congressional committee? Read about: Pioneers who overcame racial barriers, such as Oscar De Priest of Illinois, the first African American elected to Congress in the 20th century, and Shirley Chisholm of New York, the first black CongresswomanMasters of institutional politics, such as Augustus "Gus" Hawkins of California, Louis Stokes of Ohio, and Julian Dixon of CaliforniaNotables such as Civil War hero Robert Smalls of South Carolina, civil rights champion Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of New York, and constitutional scholar Barbara Jordan of TexasAnd many more. Black Americans in Congress also includes: Pictures-including rarely seen historical images-of each African American who has served in CongressBibliographies and references to manuscript collections for each MemberStatistical graphs and chartsA comprehensive index Other related products: African Americans resources collection can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/african-americans Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774-2005 can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/052-071-01418-7 Women in Congress, 1917-2006 --Hardcover format can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/052-070-07480-9 United States Congressional Serial Set, Serial No. 14903, House Document No. 223, Women in Congress, 1917-2006 is available here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/552-108-00040-0 Hispanic Americans in Congress, 1822-2012 --Print Hardcover format can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/052-071-01563-9 --Print Paperback format can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/052-071-01567-1 --ePub format available for Free download is available here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/052-300-00008-8 --MOBI format is available for Free download here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/052-300-00010-0

Presented here in an enlarged edition, Black Faces, Black Interests presents persuasive evidence that challenges the notion that only African Americans can represent black interests effectively in Congress. This pivotal work argues for black and white representatives to form coalitions to better serve their constituents.

The central domestic issue in the United States over the long history of this nation has been the place of the people of color in American society. One aspect of this debate is how African-Americans are represented in Congress. Kenny J. Whitby examines congressional responsiveness to black interests by focusing on the representational link between African-American constituents and the policymaking behavior of members of the United States House of Representatives. The book uses the topics of voting rights, civil rights, and race- based redistricting to examine how members of Congress respond to the interests of black voters. Whitby's analysis weighs the relative effect of district characteristics such as partisanship, regional location, degree of urbanization and the size of the black constituency on the voting behavior of House members over time. Whitby explores how black interests are represented in formal, descriptive, symbolic, and substantive terms. He shows the political tradeoffs involved in redistricting to increase the number of African-Americans in Congress. The book is the most comprehensive analysis of black politics in the congressional context ever published. It will appeal to political scientists, sociologists, historians, and psychologists concerned with minority politics, legislative politics, and the psychological, political, and sociological effects of increasing minority membership in Congress on the perception of government held by African Americans. Kenny J. Whitby is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of South Carolina.

The symbolic importance of Barack Obama's election is without question. But beyond symbolism, does the election of African-American politicians matter? Grose argues that it does and presents a unified theory of representation. Electing African-American legislators yields more federal dollars and congressional attention directed toward African-American voters. However, race and affirmative action gerrymandering have no impact on public policy passed in Congress. Grose is the first to examine a natural experiment and exceptional moment in history in which black legislators – especially in the U.S. South – represented districts with a majority of white constituents. This is the first systematic examination of the effect of a legislator's race above and beyond the effect of constituency racial characteristics. Grose offers policy prescriptions, including the suggestion that voting rights advocates, the courts, and redistricters draw 'black decisive districts', electorally competitive districts that are likely to elect African Americans.

Here, Katherine Tate examines the significance of race in the U.S. system of representative democracy for African Americans. Presenting important new findings, she offers the first empirical study to take up the question of representation from both sides of the constituent-representative relationship. The first half of the book examines whether black members of the U.S. House legislate and represent their constituents differently than white members do. Representation is broadly conceptualized to include not only legislators' roll call voting behavior and bill sponsorship, but also the symbolic acts in which they engage. The second half looks at the issue of representation from the perspective of ordinary African Americans based on a landmark national survey. Tate's findings are mixed. But, in the main, legislators' race does shape how they represent their constituents and how constituents evaluate them. African Americans view black representatives more positively than they do white representatives, even those who belong to their own political party. Black legislators, however, are just as likely as white representatives to sponsor and gain passage of bills in the House. Tate also concludes that black House members are more liberal as a group than are their black constituents, but that there is considerable divergence in the quality and type of representation they provide. The findings reported here will generate controversy in the fields of politics, law, and race, particularly as debate commences over renewing the Voting Rights Act, which is set to expire in 2007.

From popular TV correspondent and writer Rocca comes a charmingly irreverent and rigorously researched book that celebrates the dead people who made life worth living.

From the Reconstruction of the 1870s to the Presidential politics of the 1980s, Representative Clay looks at African-American politicians and chronicles the founding of the Congressional Black Caucus, its high points and its low moments. b/w photographic insert.

Born a slave in 1850s South Carolina and elected to Congress in the 1890s, George W. Murray appeared to be the antithesis of the African American male in the Jim Crow South and served as a beacon for African Americans who saw their hopes crushed in the aftermath of the Civil War. Early in the twentieth century, however, tragically defeated by corrupt Reconstruction politics and white supremacist attitudes he could not escape, Murray was driven from office and from the state. Drawing on extensive research to reconstruct Murray’s life story, Marszalek defines an age and its people through the compelling battle of one man and shows how and why the nation’s efforts to reconstruct the South into a biracial democracy failed. Murray’s career, which spanned a quarter of a century, included two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and leadership of South Carolina’s Republican party. He was an investor as well as a landed property owner who sold tracts to poor blacks in order for them to qualify to vote. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, with his party in shambles, he found himself on trial for alleged forgery in a land deal with two of his black land purchasers. Murray was found guilty, and the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the verdict. Sentenced to hard labor on a chain gang, he escaped to Chicago where he spent the rest of his life in obscurity.

During the Great Depression, black intellectuals, labor organizers, and artists formed the National Negro Congress (NNC) to demand a "second emancipation" in America. Over the next decade, the NNC and its offshoot, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, sought to coordinate and catalyze local antiracist activism into a national movement to undermine the Jim Crow system of racial and economic exploitation. In this pioneering study, Erik S. Gellman shows how the NNC agitated for the first-class citizenship of African Americans and all members of the working class, establishing civil rights as necessary for reinvigorating American democracy. Much more than just a precursor to the 1960s civil rights movement, this activism created the most militant interracial freedom movement since Reconstruction, one that sought to empower the American labor movement to make demands on industrialists, white supremacists, and the state as never before. By focusing on the complex alliances between unions, civic groups, and the Communist Party in five geographic regions, Gellman explains how the NNC and its allies developed and implemented creative grassroots strategies to weaken Jim Crow, if not deal it the "death blow" they sought.