Sundiata Cha-Jua

Oppression and exploitation are man-made by minority interests to the disadvantage of majority interests. What then must the oppressed and exploited majority do to turn things in their favor ...Goto the masses of the oppressed and exploited peoples of our land. Work among them; work with them to prepare the way for a take-over of power. Govan Mbeki, Learning from Robben Island: The Prison Writings of Govan Mbeki, 1991, 66.

In Atlanta, Georgia, on 23 September 2015, scores of friends, students, scholars, and colleagues convened a plenary session at the Centennial Anniversary of the Association for the Study of African American History (ASALH) to honor “The Scholarship, Activism, and Institutional Work of V. P. Franklin.” The inspiration for the session was Franklin’s recent retirement as Distinguished Professor of History and Education at the University of California, Riverside, and to celebrate his tenure as Editor of ASALH’s The Journal of African American History. For the last 40 years, V. P. Franklin has produced pioneering research on a multitude of subjects of African American life, culture, and history. Trained as a historian who initially focused on education, Franklin quickly expanded his intellectual interests to include African American intellectual and cultural history, specifically, Black nationalism, African American autobiography, African American–Jewish relations, and the history of black social movements, particularly the Civil Rights Movement and the contributions of African American women. Over the course of his career Franklin enlarged his work in educational history to explore questions of teachers’ role in community leadership, Black Catholics, cultural capital, IQ testing, the role of black newspapers in community education, the education of quasi-free blacks for colonization in West Africa, the history of apartheid education, black student activism, and the pedagogical possibilities of Hip Hop music. Near the end of his life in academia, Franklin can look back on an exceptionally productive career in which he generated both high quality and often pioneering work. Franklin was frequently the tip of the spear launching new approaches and pursuing heretofore-untrod paths of struggle. Since 2002, Franklin has served as the Editor of The Journal of African American History. Under his leadership, the JAAH has been revived and returned to its preeminent role as the site for knowledge production on the lives, cultures, and histories of people of African descent, in the United States and abroad. In his inaugural editorial launching his editorship in the JAAH Winter 2002 issue, Franklin

IntroductionOn August 9, 2014, Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson, two African American teenagers, were walking in the street in Ferguson Missouri, when Officer Darren Wilson had an encounter that significantly impacted society's attitudes towards policing. After hearing of this incident, most in the policing profession took the side of Officer Wilson, while many in the African American community have been outraged with police. This incident has begun an important discussion involving the intersection of race and the practice of policing, as it has highlighted the police need to make dramatic reforms. There is now a spotlight on issues of police practice and conduct, especially in working-class, African American communities. One of the largest issues involves the evident display of distrust racial minority communities have shown in the police following the Ferguson incident. There is no one, simple answer for how police may gain the trust of all citizens, though this should be the...

O N AUGUST 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, devastating towns and cities from Alabama to Louisiana. In its wake Katrina left at least 1,836 people dead, destroyed or damaged 275,000 homes, and caused damages to property estimated at over 81 billion dollars. In ajune 2006 report, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) described Katrina as "the costliest hurricane in US history and one of the five deadliest hurricanes to ever strike the US. " However, Katrina was probably even deadlier and more costly than the NOAA recognized. Perhaps more than any single event in US history, Hurricane Katrina exposed the relationship between class, power, race, and place in the United States. The winds of Hurricane Katrina blew the cover off the relationship between race, class, power, and place. The deluge exposed the propaganda of "compassionate conservatism" as just that, propaganda. The floodwaters washed away the far;:ade of fairness covering George W. Bush's colorblind America to reveal a racially malignant state lorded over by an ignorant, insensible, right-wing racist. Along with the bodies of the dead, the receding waters exposed extensive poverty, whose eradication was the goal of government forty years ago. Hurricane Katrina uncovered the extent to which the country had abandoned both the pursuit of racial equality and the War on Poverty. These noble pursuits were dashed on the jagged rocks of global capitalism and the United States' pursuit of empire. At the root of the social and political crisis

African American interest in the martial arts is ubiquitous in the contempo-rary United States. It can be seen in the burgeoning numbers of black youths enrolled in self-defense classes and in hip-hop culture. African Americans' fascination with the martial arts cuts across ...

We investigated how ethnocultural empathy and colorblind racial beliefs were associated through the racial composition of close friendship groups in police recruits. In a sample of White police recruits in a midwestern training academy ( N = 192), mediation analyses revealed a significant association between ethnocultural empathy and colorblind racial beliefs through Black friendships. Specifically, findings from path analyses indicated an indirect effect between earlier empathy for Black, Indigenous, People of Color and later reduced denial of institutional racism. Although both ethnocultural empathy and racial beliefs were associated with Asian American and Latinx friends, these close cross-racial friendships were not significant mediators. Limitations, directions for future research, and implications for training and intervention in police samples are discussed.

... Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Charles David Phillips, "Exploring Relations Among Forms of Social Control: The Lynching and Execution of Blacks in North Carolina, 1889-1918," Law and Society Review 21 (1987): 361-74; Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, "'A ...

"Lest Harlem Sees Red": Race and Class Themes in the Poetry of Langston Hughes, 1920-1942Universally recognized as the poet laureate of African America Langston Hughes is best known for his folk poetry and social verse. His political poetry, a distinct theme within his social poetic writings, has been slighted. Appearing in small irregularly published left newspapers and journals, Hughes' radical poetry was hidden from critical view. The invisibility of his radical writings was a result of the confluence of two factors. Perhaps, most significant was the refusal of his patrons and major publishing houses to promote his anti-capitalist writings. Nevertheless, Hughes was not simply a victim of bourgeois censorship. He was also an active agent attempting to control his career. Unfortunately, at several moments throughout his career he censored his publications and performances to conform to the conservative political and cultural tastes of the Black "talented tenth" and the bourgeois European American cultural czars. For instance, Hughes targeted his proletarian productions for a left wing audience. Consequently, his ambiguity helped conceal his radical verse from mainstream view.(2)Faith Berry recovered Hughes' previously uncollected radical poetry, thereby rescuing his leftist literary legacy and establishing the foundation for re-evaluating Hughes' poetry. Since Berry's contribution several scholars have commented on Hughes' radical poetry, or on how critics reacted to these works. Despite these interventions there remains a need to assess Hughes# treatment of race/class themes.(3)The purpose of this project is multi-layered. In this essay I investigate Langston Hughes' poetic confrontation with the race/class dialectic between 1920 and 1942. I describe the historical and social situations in which Hughes wrote his political poetry, and analyze several poems to illustrate Hughes' exploration of the intersection between race and class. The objective of this study is to uncover the authorial and aesthetic ideologies embedded in the radical poetry Hughes published during this period. I explicate his authorial and aesthetic ideologies by delineating the relationship between mode, form and content in his political verse. I derived my understanding of the terms authorial ideology, aesthetic ideology, mode, form, and content from the works of Emmanuel Ngara, an African Marxist literary critic. Ngara uses authorial ideology to refer to an author#s social vision, and aesthetic ideology to refer to a writer's use of mode and form. Ngara also differentiates between "mode" and "form." Mode, according to Ngara, refers to a poem's external structure, specifically a particular type of poetry, e.g., blues. For him, form is a more complicated concept. He defines it as "that dimension of a poem that includes the mode, the linguistic structure, imagery, symbolism, tone, rhythmic patterns and sound devices." Ngara describes content as the dynamic interaction between historical, social and ideological factors, and subject matter, theme and ideas.(4)A PERIODIZATION OF HUGHES' POLITICAL POETRY, 1920-1943Hughes published from 1920 to 1967. During this 47 year period he was a primary participant in three social cultural movements: the Harlem Renaissance (1919-1935), the Proletarian Literary Phase (1930-1935), and the Popular Front (1935-1939). Unfortunately, he died on the eve of a fourth, the Black Arts Movement ( 1966-1973 ). As a partisan of these movements Hughes produced poetry that partly conformed to the politics of these literary political movements. That is, his authorial ideology changed as he adjusted to new social conditions and affiliated with new arts movements. Further, his aesthetic ideology changed to correspond to his new dominant authorial ideology.(5)A periodization of Hughes' poetry must account for the ways his poetry was transformed by his participation in the Harlem Renaissance, the Proletarian Literary Phase, and the Popular Front arts' movements. …

Can’t you feel it? Feel the temperature dropping? Feel the icy winds blowing? It’s winter in America. Spring and fall seem to have enveloped summer. The chill comes sooner and lasts longer. It’s winter in America. There’s a blizzard coming. The first frost has already fallen, in Ferguson, Missouri, of all places. Ferguson has ripped the veil off. It is now clear for the world to see how the U.S. plans to deal with its black internal colony.

This chapter analyzes lynching scholars' treatment of African American resistance, and traces African American responses to that racially inspired mob murder in central Illinois in the early years of the Jim Crow era. Academic interest in slavery, especially in slave resistance, escalated after the civil rights and Black Power movements. Moreover, race riots became a major topic of scholarly inquiry only after the 1960s urban insurrections. Scholarly attention to lynching has followed a similar pattern as historians' interest coincided with the 1980s-era resurgence in private racial violence. Consequently, lynching only emerged as a key concern among historians in the 1980s. By the late 1990s, lynching had become a significant area of historical research.

... gogical techniques (Gordon, 1982; Hale-Benson, 1982; MW Lee, ... to include greater variety in instructional techniques, more cooperative activities, increasing student discussion, experiential learning, and greater interaction between student and teacher (Akoto, 1994; Bell, 1994 ...

... in-Publication Data Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita, 1953-America's first Black town : Brooklyn, Illinois, 183o-1915 / Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua. ... African American Land Formations." In an article entitled "The All-Negro Town: Its Evolution and Function," Harold Rose identified Brooklyn as ...

... Trusting neither officers of the law nor popular white opinion, African Americans acted on their own. On the evening of June 28, 1894, African-Americans in Decatur, Illinois, like ... Page 9. 60 JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY mother, Anna, a cook. ...

... (The term Black freedom movement en-Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua is ... discussions of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association rely on Edmund David Cronon's Black Moses and Judith Stein's The World of Marcus Garvey but ignore Tony Martin's Race First ...

This course explores the representation of African Americans in U.S. film. It explores the conflicting presentation of the Black image, male and female, by white and Black filmmakers and the interpretation of those images by critics and activists. We begin with Blacks' initial appearance in US films, trace and critique the white gaze into the present. We will explore counter filmic images created during the Harlem Renaissance, and critically assess the " coon " and race films of the 1940s, the " racial liberal films " of the 1950s-60s, Blaxploitation, the Black cinema movement of the 1970s-80s, especially the Los Angeles School, and Spike Lee, including the " hood " films of the 1990s, as well contemporary features. In this course, we will examine mainstream " Hollywood " films and works by independent filmmakers, Black and white with an eye toward exploring the conflicting presentations of the Black image and explaining how the representation of Blacks has changed over time and across different genres of film. The course is especially concerned with how the struggle over the Black filmic image resonates with broader social struggles and issues in African American life, history and culture. Of utmost importance in Film and the African American Experience is the examination of the sociohistorical context-the political, social, and economic environment-in which film is created, viewed, and understood. The course will also explore the question of Black identity through the treatment of the Black family, religion, and the issues of color, gender, class, sexuality, and their interrelation. Another important aspect of the course will be the examination of filmmakers' depiction of the African American liberation movement, including its activists, and the struggles for social change. Course Objectives: 1. To study filmic representations of African Americans across class, gender, generation, and ideology. 2. To explore the film medium as part of the state ideological apparatus that constructs and reconstructs racist ideologies (i.e., genetic, scientific, cultural, and color-blind racism).