This important book takes the discussion of racial inequality in America beyond simplistic arguments of white racism and black victimization to a more complex conversation about the separate but unequal situation in many schools today. Amy Stuart Wells and Robert Crain investigate the St. Louis, Missouri, school desegregation plan, a unique agreement that since 1983 has given black inner-city students the right to choose to attend predominantly white suburban schools. After five years of research and hundreds of interviews with policymakers, administrators, teachers, students, and parents, Wells and Crain conclude that when school desegregation is examined from these many perspectives, more strengths than weaknesses emerge. They call for a reexamination of now-popular school choice policies across the country so that these policies may help to bring about more racial and social-class integration. Stepping over the Color Line intertwines data on student achievement and racial isolation with stories of the people who participated in the St. Louis program. The authors set these individuals within a broad historical and social context and demonstrate how important linkages between the past and present help explain why efforts to overcome racial inequality—in St. Louis and in the larger society—are so difficult. "The authors do a superb job of explaining how this innovative program came about, placing it in a broad context that takes it beyond its immediate and local implications. The book is at times heartbreaking and at times uplifting."—Richard Zweigenhaft, co-author of Blacks in the White Establishment? A Study of Race and Class in America

This important book takes the discussion of racial inequality in America beyond simplistic arguments of white racism and black victimization to a more complex conversation about the separate but unequal situation in many schools today. Amy Stuart Wells and Robert Crain investigate the St. Louis, Missouri, school desegregation plan, a unique agreement that since 1983 has given black inner-city students the right to choose to attend predominantly white suburban schools. After five years of research and hundreds of interviews with policymakers, administrators, teachers, students, and parents, Wells and Crain conclude that when school desegregation is examined from these many perspectives, more strengths than weaknesses emerge. They call for a reexamination of now-popular school choice policies across the country so that these policies may help to bring about more racial and social-class integration. Stepping over the Color Line intertwines data on student achievement and racial isolation with stories of the people who participated in the St. Louis program. The authors set these individuals within a broad historical and social context and demonstrate how important linkages between the past and present help explain why efforts to overcome racial inequality--in St. Louis and in the larger society--are so difficult. "The authors do a superb job of explaining how this innovative program came about, placing it in a broad context that takes it beyond its immediate and local implications. The book is at times heartbreaking and at times uplifting."--Richard Zweigenhaft, co-author of Blacks in the White Establishment? A Study of Race and Class in America

Until now, most works on the history of African Americans in advertising have focused on the depiction of blacks in advertisements. Madison Avenue and the Color Line breaks new ground by examining the history of black advertising agency employees and agency owners.

In this memoir, the author relates how her loving,maternal relationship opened her eyes to the harsh realities of the Americal racial divide.

“Heartbreaking and uplifting… a searing book about race and prejudice in America… brims with insights that only someone who has lived on both sides of the racial divide could gain.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “A triumph of storytelling as well as a triumph of spirit.”—Alex Kotlowitz, award-winning author of There Are No Children Here As a child in 1950s segregated Virginia, Gregory Howard Williams grew up believing he was white. But when the family business failed and his parents’ marriage fell apart, Williams discovered that his dark-skinned father, who had been passing as Italian-American, was half black. The family split up, and Greg, his younger brother, and their father moved to Muncie, Indiana, where the young boys learned the truth about their heritage. Overnight, Greg Williams became black. In this extraordinary and powerful memoir, Williams recounts his remarkable journey along the color line and illuminates the contrasts between the black and white worlds: one of privilege, opportunity and comfort, the other of deprivation, repression, and struggle. He tells of the hostility and prejudice he encountered all too often, from both blacks and whites, and the surprising moments of encouragement and acceptance he found from each. Life on the Color Line is a uniquely important book. It is a wonderfully inspiring testament of purpose, perseverance, and human triumph. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

The interconnected constructions of race and sexuality at the turn of the century.

Early essays from the sociologist, displaying the beginnings of his views on politics, society, and Black Americans’ status in the United States. This volume assembles essential essays?some published only posthumously, others obscure, another only recently translated?by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1894 to early 1906. They show the first formulations of some of his most famous ideas, namely, “the veil,” “double-consciousness,” and the “problem of the color line.” Moreover, the deep historical sense of the formation of the modern world that informs Du Bois’s thought and gave rise to his understanding of “the problem of the color line” is on display here. Indeed, the essays constitute an essential companion to Du Bois’s 1903 masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk. The collection is based on two editorial principles: presenting the essays in their entirety and in strict chronological order. Copious annotation affords both student and mature scholar an unprecedented grasp of the range and depth of Du Bois’s everyday intellectual and scholarly reference. These essays commence at the moment of Du Bois’s return to the United States from two years of graduate-level study in Europe at the University of Berlin. At their center is the moment of Du Bois’s first full, self-reflexive formulation of a sense of vocation: as a student and scholar in the pursuit of the human sciences (in their still-nascent disciplinary organization?that is, the institutionalization of a generalized “sociology” or general “ethnology”), as they could be brought to bear on the study of the situation of the so-called Negro question in the United States in all of its multiply refracting dimensions. They close with Du Bois’s realization that the commitments orienting his work and intellectual practice demanded that he move beyond the institutional frames for the practice of the human sciences. The ideas developed in these early essays remained the fundamental matrix for the ongoing development of Du Bois’s thought. The essays gathered here will therefore serve as the essential reference for those seeking to understand the most profound registers of this major American thinker. “A seminal contribution to the history of modern thought. Compiled and edited by the world’s preeminent scholar of early Du Boisian thought, these texts represent his most generative period, when Du Bois engaged every discipline, helped construct modern social science, employed critical inquiry as a weapon of antiracism and political liberation, and always set his sites on the entire world. We know this not by the essays alone, but by Nahum Dimitri Chandler’s brilliant, original, and quite riveting introduction. If you are coming to Du Bois for the first time of the 500th time, this book is a must-read.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Examining the significant influence of the Soviet Union on the work of four major African American authors—and on twentieth-century American debates about race—Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain remaps black modernism, revealing the importance of the Soviet experience in the formation of a black transnationalism. Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson each lived or traveled extensively in the Soviet Union between the 1920s and the 1960s, and each reflected on Communism and Soviet life in works that have been largely unavailable, overlooked, or understudied. Kate A. Baldwin takes up these writings, as well as considerable material from Soviet sources—including articles in Pravda and Ogonek, political cartoons, Russian translations of unpublished manuscripts now lost, and mistranslations of major texts—to consider how these writers influenced and were influenced by both Soviet and American culture. Her work demonstrates how the construction of a new Soviet citizen attracted African Americans to the Soviet Union, where they could explore a national identity putatively free of class, gender, and racial biases. While Hughes and McKay later renounced their affiliations with the Soviet Union, Baldwin shows how, in different ways, both Hughes and McKay, as well as Du Bois and Robeson, used their encounters with the U. S. S. R. and Soviet models to rethink the exclusionary practices of citizenship and national belonging in the United States, and to move toward an internationalism that was a dynamic mix of antiracism, anticolonialism, social democracy, and international socialism. Recovering what Baldwin terms the "Soviet archive of Black America," this book forces a rereading of some of the most important African American writers and of the transnational circuits of black modernism.