Three Black Generations At The Crossroads

Drawing on research and interviews in an ongoing project on black professionals in the US and utilizing the postfigurative, cofigurative, and prefigurative models of anthropologist Margaret Mead, Benjamin has provided a neat structure to understand 20th-century US cultural values through the window of the African American community. Recommended for a variety of readers and students of the 20th century. --Choice Magazine

Three Generations at the Crossroads weaves a collective tapestry, linking personal biographies of individuals in different generations to the larger social forces acting on them. This second edition contains new chapters on politicians and artists, two groups that are symbolic...

Using in-depth interviews of high achieving African Americans who came of age prior to or before the Civil Rights movement and those who grew up in the post-Civil Rights era, this book documents that race still matters in the twenty-first century. The work details the lived experiences of African Americans and how they grapple daily with what W. E. Du Bois called the double consciousness, living within and between two worlds. A new chapter details how the post-Civil Rights generation interprets and navigates the racial terrain differently than the Civil Rights generation, which has implication for group identity and group mobility.

In 1962, James Meredith became a civil rights hero when he enrolled as the first African American student at the University of Mississippi. Four years later, he would make the news again when he reentered Mississippi, on foot. His plan was to walk from Memphis to Jackson, leading a "March Against Fear" that would promote black voter registration and defy the entrenched racism of the region. But on the march's second day, he was shot by a mysterious gunman, a moment captured in a harrowing and now iconic photograph. What followed was one of the central dramas of the civil rights era. With Meredith in the hospital, the leading figures of the civil rights movement flew to Mississippi to carry on his effort. They quickly found themselves confronting southern law enforcement officials, local activists, and one another. In the span of only three weeks, Martin Luther King, Jr., narrowly escaped a vicious mob attack; protesters were teargassed by state police; Lyndon Johnson refused to intervene; and the charismatic young activist Stokely Carmichael first led the chant that would define a new kind of civil rights movement: Black Power. Aram Goudsouzian's Down to the Crossroads is the story of the last great march of the King era, and the first great showdown of the turbulent years that followed. Depicting rural demonstrators' courage and the impassioned debates among movement leaders, Goudsouzian reveals the legacy of an event that would both integrate African Americans into the political system and inspire even bolder protests against it. Full of drama and contemporary resonances, this book is civil rights history at its best.

Drawing on a wealth of oral interviews, Conversations on Black Leadership uses the lives of prominent African Americans to trace the contours of Black leadership in America. Included here are fascinating accounts from a wide variety of figures such as John Lewis, Clarence Thomas, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka, and many more.

In this masterful work of family-focused sociology, Lois Benjamin considers the lives of Pennie and Roscoe James and their children, revealing how a large, close-knit African American family with humble origins in a small town of North Carolina is shaped by the contours of its religious and ethical value system. Despite the challenges of daily experiences, the James elders transmitted values to their children that provided them with the resources to thrive and the resilience to meet adversity. The James children recount their personal, unique perspectives on how faith, familial solidarity, and savvy entrepreneurship led to their continued generational success. Benjamin uses a blend of ethnographic and qualitative methods to place the James family's experiences in broader historical context. In doing so, she shows that the family's values of compassion, empathy, and communitarian and enterprising spirit offer hope in this polarized society.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether African American Studies is a discipline, or multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary field. Some scholars assert that African American Studies use a well-defined common approach in examining history, politics, and the family in the same way as scholars in the disciplines of economics, sociology, and political science. Other scholars consider African American Studies multidisciplinary, a field somewhat comparable to the field of education in which scholars employ a variety of disciplinary lenses-be they anthropological, psychological, historical, etc., --to study the African world experience. In this model the boundaries between traditional disciplines are accepted, and researches in African American Studies simply conduct discipline based an analysis of particular topics. Finally, another group of scholars insists that African American Studies is interdisciplinary, an enterprise that generates distinctive analyses by combining perspectives from d

Historically Black College Leadership & Social Transformation Little research has been conducted to identify aspects of effective social transformation leadership in American college and university leadership. The authors of this book argue that while much less has been done at predominantly White institutions to practically apply the processes of social transformation as a leadership model, HBCUs have historically relied upon strategies of social transformation as they sought to build and sustain the distinct mission of their institutions that enhance college access, inclusion, and choice. This publication is intended to serve as a departure from the examination of the typology of transformation leadership in the private sector and, instead, view this leadership model through the lens of higher education. The authors’ intent is to focus on institutional leadership at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and provide a deeper understanding of the Social Change Model and how it can be successfully situated as a conduit for realizing and sustaining the mission of Black colleges from perspectives of the past, present, and future.

With this purported new "era of high-profile, mega successful, black women who are changing the face of every major field worldwide" and growing socioeconomic diversity among black women as the backdrop, Embracing Sisterhood seeks to determine where contemporary black women's ideas of black womanhood and sisterhood merge with social class status to shape certain attachments and detachments among them. Similarities as well as variations in how black women of different social backgrounds perceive and live black womanhood are interpreted for a range of social contexts. This book confirms what many of today's African-American women and interested observers have known for some time: Conceptions and experience of black womanhood are quite diverse and appear to have grown more diverse over time. However, the potential for a pervasive and polarizing black "step-sisterhood" is considerably undermined by the passion with which these women cling to the promises of cross-class gender/ethnic "community" and of group determination. Embracing Sisterhood draws its analysis from in-depth interviews with eighty-eight contemporary black women aged 18 to 89 covering a variety of issues prompted by a survey questionnaire capturing various dimensions of gender/ethnic identity and consciousness.

With the erosion of strong class theory, sociologists have recently started to look at aspects of social stratification other than class. One of the most interesting new areas of investigation is the sociology of generations. This book brings together the work of scholars who are making a major contribution to this new sociological interest. Through a combination of innovative theoretical and empirical studies, this book shows that an analysis of generations is essential to an understanding of major social, political and intellectual trends in the postwar period. Each author brings to the volume insights from their own area of specialism - with rich illustrative material spanning topics as diverse as African American identity and Spanish youth culture. Theoretical inspiration also comes from a range of traditions, including cultural and historical sociology; social interactionism; social and cognitive psychology and life course theory. However, a unifying thread emerges around questions about how generations should be conceptualized; the role of trauma generating generational consciousness; the relationship between auto-biography and generational identity and the nature of inter and intra-generational relationships. This volume, therefore, provides a lively contribution to debates about the nature of generations and a stimulating basis for further work in this area.