In his groundbreaking new book Charles Pete Banner-Haley explores the history of African American intellectualism and reveals the efforts of black intellectuals in the ongoing struggle against racism, showing how they have responded to Jim Crow segregation, violence against black Americans, and the more subtle racism of the postintegration age. Banner-Haley asserts that African American intellectuals—including academicians, social critics, activists, and writers—serve to generate debate, policy, and change, acting as a moral force to persuade Americans to acknowledge their history of slavery and racism, become more inclusive and accepting of humanity, and take responsibility for social justice. Other topics addressed in this insightful study include the disconnection over time between black intellectuals and the masses for which they speak; the ways African American intellectuals identify themselves in relation to the larger black community, America as a whole, and the rest of the world; how black intellectuals have gained legitimacy in American society and have accrued moral capital, especially in the area of civil rights; and how that moral capital has been expended. Among the influential figures covered in the book are W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Weldon Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Ralph Bunche, Oliver C. Cox, George S. Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Charles Johnson, and Barack Obama. African American intellectuals, as Banner-Haley makes clear, run the political gamut from liberal to conservative. He discusses the emergence of black conservatism, with its accompanying questions about affirmative action, government intervention on behalf of African Americans, and the notion of a color-blind society. He also looks at how popular music—particularly rap and hip-hop—television, movies, cartoons, and other media have functioned as arenas for investigating questions of identity, exploring whether African American intellectuals can also be authentically black. A concluding discussion of the so-called browning of America, and the subsequent rise in visibility and influence of black intellectuals culminates with the historic election of President Barack Obama, an African American intellectual who has made significant contributions to American society through his books, articles, and speeches. Banner-Haley ponders what Obama’s election will mean for the future of race relations and black intellectualism in America.

Timely, multidisciplinary analysis of Obama’s presidential campaign, its context, and its impact.

“This incisive work” examining Obama’s speeches and the theories of W.E.B. DuBois “illuminates the influences of words and ideas” (Choice). The racial history of US citizenship is vital to our understanding of both citizenship and race. Robert E. Terrill argues that, to invent a robust manner of addressing one another as citizens, Americans must draw on the indignities of racial exclusion that have stained citizenship since its inception. In Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama, Terrill demonstrates how President Barack Obama’s public address models such a discourse. Terrill contends that Obama’s most effective oratory invites his audiences to experience a form of “double-consciousness,” famously described by W. E. B. Du Bois as a feeling of “two-ness” resulting from the African American experience of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” An effect of cruel alienation, this double-consciousness can also offer valuable perspectives on society. When addressing fellow citizens, Obama asks each to share in the “peculiar sensation” that Du Bois described. Through close analyses of selected speeches from Obama’s 2008 campaign and first presidential term, this book argues that Obama does not present double-consciousness merely as a point of view but as an idiom with which we might speak to one another. Of course, as Du Bois’s work reminds us, double-consciousness results from imposition and encumbrance, so that Obama’s oratory presents a mode of address that emphasizes the burdens of citizenship together with the benefits, the price as well as the promise.

This booktraces W.E.B. Du Bois’s fictionalization of history in his five major works of fiction and in his debut short story The Souls of Black Folk through a thematic framework of cosmopolitanism. In texts like The Negro and Black Folk: Then and Now, Du Bois argues that the human race originated from a single source, a claim authenticated by anthropologists and the Human Genome Project. This book breaks new ground by demonstrating the fashion in which the variants of cosmopolitanism become a profound theme in Du Bois’s contribution to fiction. In general, cosmopolitanism claims that people belong to a single community informed by common moral values, function through a shared economic nomenclature, and are part of political systems grounded in mutual respect. This book addresses Du Bois’s works as important additions to the academy and makes a significant contribution to literature by first demonstrating the way in which fiction could be utilized in discussing historical accounts in order to reach a global audience. “The Coming of John”, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Dark Princess: A Romance, and The Black Flame, an important trilogy published sequentially as The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and Worlds of Color are grounded in historical occurrences and administer as social histories providing commentary on Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, African American leadership, school desegregation, the Pan-African movement, imperialism, and colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

This is the first book to focus on the significance of religion during President Obama's years in the White House. Addressing issues ranging from identity politics, immigration, income inequality, Islamophobia and international affairs, Religion in the Age of Obama explores the religious and moral underpinnings of the Obama presidency and subsequent debates regarding his tenure in the White House. It provides an analysis of Obama's beliefs and their relationship to his vision of public life, as well as the way in which the general ethos of religion and non-religion has shifted over the past decade in the United States under his presidency. Topics include how Obama has employed religious rhetoric in response to both international and domestic events, his attempt to inhabit a kind of Blackness that comforts and reassures rather than challenges White America, the limits of Christian hospitality within U.S. immigration policy and the racialization of Islam in the U.S. national imagination. Religion in the Age of Obama shows that the years of the Obama presidency served as a watershed moment of significant reorganization of the role of religion in national public life. It is a timely contribution to debates on religion, race and public life in the United States.

"Presents a clear, lively, in-depth review of Barack Obama's policies on gay issues, from the early days of his political career through his meteoric rise to prominence-- all in the context of the political landscape of the times"--P. [4] of cover.

In FROM DAVID WALKER TO BARACK OBAMA, Dr. Emma S. Etuk contends that well-known Ethiopianists have o?ered the inspiration for black freedom and must not be forgotten. Ethiopianists and Ethiopianism have little or nothing to do with the government or the country known today as Ethiopia in East Africa. Ethiopianists shared the common belief, hope, and faith in Africa as the land of their ancestors to which, by the grace of God, they would return as free people. They based their hope and faith in Africa upon a biblical text found in Psalm 68:31: Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. Ethiopianism was the ideology, and Ethiopianists were the apostles of the ideology. In this study, Etuk o?ers studies of well-known Ethiopianists W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Edward Blyden, Henry Garnet, Alexander Crummell, Bishop Henry Turner, Martin R. Delany, David Walker, and Frances E. W. Harper, the famed African American poet. Etuk, a professional historian, resurrects these names with a new perspective and argues that these men and women were the keepers of the African Dream. He provides an exhaustive record of their speeches, writings, and actions to provide a solid foundation for his thesis that Ethiopianists are the keepers of the African Dream.

'Potentially... one of the best; or at least one of the most intriguing Obama books to be published'. Robaroundbooks.com A mixture of anecdotes about the author's own growing up in one of America's most formidable Black communities, mixed in with observations on the origins and progress of the music of the South Side: gospel, blues, soul and jazz, and Barack and Michelle Obama's relation to the sound of their community. The Guardian Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, London based author and playwright Bonnie Greer seeks to demonstrate that Barack Obama's Presidency is what she calls a 'South Side Presidency'. And that it is only the South Side of Chicago, with its history and culture and institutions that could have sent an African American, in this day and age, to the White House. 'Obama Music' is a mixture of anecdotes about her own growing up in one of America's most formidable Black communities, mixed in with observations on the origins and progress of the music of the South Side: gospel, blues, soul and jazz, and Barack and Michelle Obama's relation to the sound of their community. All of this is woven in with history ranging from the Great Migration at the end of World War One, to the and of the 60's, an era Obama himself has stated that he feels close to. This is not a conventional history book, nor a reporter-on-the campaign-trail account. 'Obama Music' is one African American woman's account of watching, from the other side of the ocean, history being made, a history rooted in the community of her birth, right in her own home town. Small, opinionated, personal, anecdotal and full of music and insights, this book can sit alongside the more heavyweight tomes as a footnote to the phenomenon that is Obama Music.

This book contains critical analyses of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy instruments toward Africa and suggests how to continue, strengthen, and modify these policy instruments. The examination begins with the theme of policy continuity and change, followed by those on military intervention, competition and perceived threats, crisis management, politics, economic development, and social policy. Each chapter starts with an introduction of the policy instrument, provides an analysis of the instrument, and concludes with suggestions. This book presents the objectives for vibrant and lasting relations between Africa and the United States and the concrete measures to achieve them.

This book introduces America to the Black Reconstruction politicians who fought valiantly for the civil rights of all people—important individuals who have been ignored by modern historians as well as their contemporaries. Between 1865 and 1876, about 2,000 blacks held elective and appointive offices in the South, but these men faced astounding odds. They were belittled as corrupt and inadequate by their white political opponents, who used legislative trickery, libel, bribery, and brutal intimidation of their constituents to rob these black lawmakers of their base of support. Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction-Era Politicians comprises two volumes that examine the leadership and contributions of black politicians during the Reconstruction era—diverse men whose efforts during Reconstruction should not be overlooked. Each biographical essay examines how each individual contributed to the Reconstruction Era and fostered the development of a parallel civil society within black communities, what influence his actions had on the future of blacks in politics, and why he has been ignored. This work also serves to set the record straight about these black politicians who are often scapegoated for the overall failure of the Reconstruction.