Historical Perspectives on AntiBlack Violence and Visions for the Future
Wednesday, June 24 at noon, professors and historians Dr. Simon Balto and Dr. Ashley Howard discussed the history of violence against the black community and how to move forward. The event was moderated by Dr. Jo Butterfield, UICHR staff member and Adjunct Professor in the UI Department of History.
About the speakers
Simon Balto teaches, researches, and writes about African American history in the United States. His first book, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), explores the development of a police system in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods that over the course of the mid-twentieth century became simultaneously brutally repressive and neglectful. His writing has also appeared in TIME magazine, The Washington Post, The Progressive, the Journal of African American History, Labor, and numerous other popular and scholarly outlets.
Ashley Howard received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois. She joins the University of Iowa faculty in fall 2019 coming from Loyola University, New Orleans. Her research interests include African Americans in the Midwest; the intersection between race, class, and gender; and the global history of racial violence. Her manuscript Prairie Fires: Class, Gender, and Regional Intersections in the 1960s Urban Rebellions analyzes the 1960s urban rebellions in the Midwest, grounded in the way race, class, gender, and region played critical and overlapping roles in defining resistance to racialized oppression. Dr. Howard's work has appeared in Real News Network, The Black Scholar, NoJargon podcast, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her 'Then the Burnings Began" article is the winner of the 2018 James L. Sellers Memorial Prize.
For additional resources, please see the recommended list below the recording.
Select Reading Recommendations
Full reading-list-Historical-Perspectives
Short Reads--Editorials and Op-Eds: Historical Perspectives on AntiBlack Violence
- Colin Gordon, “The Making of Ferguson,” Dissent (August, 16, 2014)
- Ashley M. Howard, “Why Ferguson Isn’t the Tale of Two Protests,” The Black Scholar (August 18, 2014)
- Austin McCoy, “When Whites Riot, Humanity is a Given,” Nursing Clio (October 30, 2014)
- Marcia Chatelain, “Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus,” Dissent(November 28, 2014)
- Walter Johnson, “Ferguson’s Fortune 500 Company,” The Atlantic (April 26, 2015)
- Heather Cox Richardson, “Reconstructing the American Tradition of Domestic Terrorism,” Werehistory.org (June 18, 2015)
- Michael Eric Dyson, “Love and Terror in the Black Church,” New York Times (June 20, 2015)
- Douglas R. Egerton, “Before Charleston’s Church Shooting, a Long History of Attacks,” New York Times June 18, 2015)
- Yoni Applebaum, “Why Is the Flag Still There?,” The Atlantic (June 21, 2015)
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Take Down the Confederate Flag–Now,” The Atlantic (June 18. 2015)
- Simon Balto, “Why Police Cheered Trump’s Dark Speech,” Washington Post, Made by History (July 31, 2017)
- Stuart Schraeder, “An Empire of Patrolmen,” Jacobin(October 18, 2019)
- Chad Williams, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain, #CharlestonSyllabus, African American Intellectual History Society (AAHIS)
- Allissa V. Richardson, “Why cell phone videos of black people’s deaths should be considered sacred, like lynching photographs,” The Conversation(May 28, 2020)
- August H. Nimtz, Jr., “It’s a big deal that the outrage expressed over George Floyd’s death was massive and multiracial,” MinnPost(May 28, 2020)
- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Of Course There Are Protests. The State is Failing Black People,” New York Times(May 29, 2020)
- Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., “George Floyd’s Murder Shows Once More that we Cannot Wait for White America to End Racism,” Time (May 29, 2020)
- Elizabeth Hinton, “The Minneapolis Uprising in Context,” Boston Review(May 29, 2020)
- Keisha N. Blain, “Violence in Minneapolis is rooted in the history of racist policing in America,” Washington Post, Made by History (May 30, 2020)
- Melvin Rogers, “We Should Be Afraid, But Not of Protesters,” Boston Review(May 30, 2020)
- Robert Greene II, “We Are Living in a Red Spring,” Jacobin (May 31, 2020)
- Kali Nicole Gross, “By Remembering Our Sisters, We Challenge Police Violence Against Black Women and Legacies that Eclipse these Injustices,” Association of Black Women Historians (May 31, 2020)
- Kellie Carter Jackson, “The Double-Standard of the American Riot,” The Atlantic(June 1, 2020)
- Ibram X. Kendi, “The American Nightmare,” The Atlantic(June 1, 2020)
- Carol Anderson, “In 1919, the state failed to protect black Americans. A century later, it's still failing,” The Guardian (June 2, 2020)
- Connie Hassett-Walker, “The racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops” The Conversation (June 6, 2020)
- Jeanne Theoharis, “Using MLK to Quell Outrage Distorts His Legacy” AAIHS (June 8, 2020)
- Emily Tamkin, “The history of America’s racist police, from slave patrols to present: Understanding the creation of the police force in the United States is essential to reforming it,” NewStatesman (June 13, 2020)
Books on the History of AntiBlack Racism
- Ralph Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings (1962)
- David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991)
- Fitzgerald Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (1993)
- Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: the Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994)
- Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996)
- Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America(1997)
- Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (1998)
- David Grimsted, American Mobbing: Toward Civil War(1998)
- Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (1999)
- Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994(1999)
- Sheila Smith McKoy, When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Culture(2001)
- Christopher Waldrep, Lynching in America: A History in Documents(2006)
- Mark Smith, How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (2006)
- David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy & White Racial Politics in Suburban America (2007)
- Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (2007)
- Bruce E. Baker, What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South (2007)
- Kevin Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America (2007)
- Kate Dossett, Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism and Integration, 1896-1935(2008)
- Rebecca Nell Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-lynching and Labor Defense in US Radical History(2008)
- Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II (2008)
- Crystal Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching(2009)
- Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Post-Emancipation South(2009)
- Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940(2009)
- Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (2009)
- Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance(2010)
- Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (2011)
- Khalil Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (2011)
- Kidada Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (2012)
- Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2012)
- Michael J. Pfeifer, Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South(2013)
- Brenda E. Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots(2013)
- Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (2015)
- David F. Krugler, 1919, the Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (2015)
- Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016)
- Elizabeth Dale, Robert Nixon and Police Torture in Chicago, 1871-1971 (2016)
- Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (2016)
- Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (2016)
- Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Xlan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (2017)
- Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2017)
- Tera Agyepong, The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile System, 1950-1972 (2018)
- Simon Balto, Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (2019)
- Laurence Ralph, The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence (2020)
Books on the Long Civil Rights Movement-Black Power Era
- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time(1963)
- James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power(1969)
- Howell Raines, My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered(1977)
- Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s(1981)
- Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (1984)
- David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference(1986)
- Adam Fairclough,To Redeem the Soul of America: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1987)
- Jo Ann Gibson Robinson and David J. Garrow, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It : The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson(1987)
- Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: American in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988)
- Clayborne Carson, The Eyes on the Prize: Civil Rights Reader(1991)
- William Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975(1992)
- David L. Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement(1994)
- John Dittmer, Local People: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi(1994)
- Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle(1995)
- Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s(1995)
- Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns(1998)
- Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer(1999)
- Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) And Black Power Politics (1999)
- Jennifer Smith, An International History of the Black Panther Party(1999)
- Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality(2001)
- Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement(2001)
- Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003)
- Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City(2003)
- Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (2003)
- Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement(2004)
- Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia(2005)
- Clive Webb, Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction(2005)
- Christina Greene, Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina (2005)
- Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America(2006)
- Thomas Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice(2007)
- Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950(2008)
- Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North(2008)
- Hasan Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt(2009)
- Erik S. Gellman, Deathblow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights (2012)
- Akinyele Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement(2013)
- Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party(2013)
- Jay Winston Driskell, Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics (2014)
- Rhonda Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century(2015)
- Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (2016)
- Jeanne Theoharis, More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (2018)
- Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (2018).
- Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (2019)
- Le’Trice D. Donaldson, Duty Beyond the Battlefield African American Soldiers Fight for Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870–1920 (2020)
**Select recommended readings list adapted from Trish Kahle, “Teaching in an Uprising: Readings on Race and Democracy” (AAHIS, June 2, 2020); Marcia Chatelain, #FergusonSyllabus; and Chad Williams, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain, #CharlestonSyllabus (AAHIS). This list is not intended to be comprehensive. Apologies in advance for omissions. Created 6.24.2020