Along The Color Line

An edition of a classic in African American history.

This book chronicles the 1933 Amenia Conference in upstate New York which brought together a young group of African-American activists who would shape the ongoing civil rights movement during the Depression, World War II, and beyond.

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.

"Rather than simply engaging in a triumphalist narrative of overcoming where both disability and disablement are shunned alike, Disabilities of the Color Line argues that Black authors and activists have consistently avowed disability as a part of Black social life in varied and complex ways. Sometimes their affirmation of disability serves to capture how their bodies, minds, and health have been and are made vulnerable to harm and impairment by the state and society. Sometimes their assertion of disability symbolizes a sense of commonality and community that comes not only from a recognition of the shared subjection of blackness and disability but also from a willingness to imagine and create a world distinct from the dominant social order. Through the work of David Walker, Henry Box Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, and Mamie Till-Mobley, Disabilities of the Color Line examines how Black writer-activists have engaged in an aesthetics of redress: modes of resistance that show how Black communities have rigorously acknowledged disability as a response to forms of racial injury and in the pursuit of racial and disability justice"--

“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

What is "race"? What role, if any, should race play in our moral obligations to others and to ourselves? Ethics along the Color Line addresses the question of whether black Americans should think of each other as members of an extended racial family and base their treatment of each other on this consideration, or eschew racial identity and envision the day when people do not think in terms of race. Anna Stubblefield suggests furthermore that white Americans should consider the same issues. She argues, finally, that for both black and white Americans, thinking of races as families is crucial in helping to combat anti-black oppression.Stubblefield is concerned that the philosophical debate--argued notably between Kwame Anthony Appiah and Lucius Outlaw--over whether or not we should strongly identify in terms of race, and whether or not we should take race into account when we decide how to treat each other, has stalled. Drawing on black feminist scholarship about the moral importance of thinking and acting in terms of community and extended family, the author finds that strong racial identification, if based on appropriate ideals, is morally sound and even necessary to end white supremacy.

Examines the history of black-owned barber shops in the United States, from pre-Civil War Era through today.

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

"Fine and Turner present a wonderful exploration into what our seemingly mundane rumor-sharing means for race in our society. Filled with examples that we all can recognize, and superbly written and argued, Whispers on the Color Line will be a classic in the study of race and culture."—Mary Pattillo-McCoy, author of Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class "Fine and Turner have written a disturbing, yet important book. Taking racially tinged (or drenched, as the case may be) rumors as an unobtrusive measure of the state of black-white relations in the U.S., the authors document the yawning social-cultural chasm in the nation. Contradicting the tepid national narrative that celebrates the "before" and "after" racial transformation achieved by the civil rights struggle, Whispers on the Color Line reminds us that the "peculiar dilemma" Gunnar Myrdal wrote about fifty-seven years ago is still very much with us. Until the "whispers" grow into a far more open and honest dialogue, nothing will change."—Doug McAdam, author of Freedom Summer "Whispers on the Color Line is a logical and necessary extension of the authors' earlier books (Fine's Manufacturing Tales and Turner's I Heard It Through the Grapevine), which work in tandem to explore racial issues through everyday narratives. The authors themselves represent an American cultural dialectic."—Janet Langlois, author of Belle Gunness, The Lady Bluebeard "Whispers on the Color Line is insightful and thought-provoking, powerfully underscoring the social significance of hearsay, rumors, and legends in everyday life. This rich and poignant narrative reveals and educates--an important contribution to social science understanding and to the ongoing discourse about race matters in this country."—Elijah Anderson, author of Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City "This book speaks loudly to our most troubling contemporary problem: interactions among the "races" that are carried out in secret. The development of media such as the Internet (with its various aspects, from personal email to screeds sent out through listserves) has helped us recognize that rumors have gone public--and that we need to become involved in managing this process."—Roger Abrahams, author of Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South

In the course of the 20th century, cancer went from being perceived as a white woman's nemesis to a "democratic disease" to a fearsome threat in communities of color. Drawing on film and fiction, on medical and epidemiological evidence, and on patients' accounts, Keith Wailoo tracks this transformation in cancer awareness, revealing how not only awareness, but cancer prevention, treatment, and survival have all been refracted through the lens of race.Spanning more than a century, the book offers a sweeping account of the forces that simultaneously defined cancer as an intensely individualized and personal experience linked to whites, often categorizing people across the color line as racial types lacking similar personal dimensions. Wailoo describes how theories of risk evolved with changes in women's roles, with African-American and new immigrant migration trends, with the growth of federal cancer surveillance, and with diagnostic advances, racial protest, and contemporary health activism. The book examines such powerful and transformative social developments as the mass black migration from rural south to urban north in the 1920s and 1930s, the World War II experience at home and on the war front, and the quest for civil rights and equality in health in the 1950s and '60s. It also explores recent controversies that illuminate the diversity of cancer challenges in America, such as the high cancer rates among privileged women in Marin County, California, the heavy toll of prostate cancer among black men, and the questions about why Vietnamese-American women's cervical cancer rates are so high.A pioneering study, How Cancer Crossed the Color Line gracefully documents how race and gender became central motifs in the birth of cancer awareness, how patterns and perceptions changed over time, and how the "war on cancer" continues to be waged along the color line.