Abstract
The US presidential elections of 1876 and 2008 are separated by 132 years and, at most, six generations of Americans. Yet in racial terms, the distance between these two events represents a historical epoch. In 1876, Democratic presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden, then governor of New York, first appeared to defeat Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by roughly three hundred thousand popular votes. However, due to a handful of contested electoral votes, the election was thrown to the House of Representatives. A deal was brokered that elevated Hayes to the presidency. The so-called Compromise of 1877 removed federal troops that had been stationed throughout the South after the Civil War, and it gave tacit permission to Southern whites to restrict the political and civil rights of African Americans. Within two decades, most black males had been barred from the elective franchise; blacks were largely excluded from most public accommodations and barred from juries; and over one hundred blacks were lynched each year throughout the region. The terrible system of racial stigmatization and social exclusion that had emerged was called “Jim Crow.”1
This the American black man knows: his fight here is a fight to the finish. Either he dies or wins. If he wins it will be by no subterfuge or evasion of amalgamation. He will enter modern civilization here in America as a black man on terms of perfect equality with any white man, or he will enter not at all. Either extermination, root and branch, or absolute equality. There can be no compromise. This is the last great battle of the West.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880
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Notes
See Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black American and Beyond 1945–206, 3rd ed. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), pp. 3–11.
See Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke, eds., Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black Americas New Leadership (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
This is one of the clearest expressions of Frederick Douglass’s liberal integrationist address of 1865, “What the Black Man Wants,” in Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African-American Anthology ed. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, 2nd ed. (Lan-ham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), pp. 122–128.
See David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Holt, 1993)
August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969)
and Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, rev. ed. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2005).
See Manning Marable, “The Pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois,” in W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics and Poetics, ed. Bernard Bell, Emily Grosholz, and James Stewart New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 193–218
and W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History (New York: International Publishers, 1965).
See John G. Jackson, Hubert Henry Harrison (Austin, TX: American Atheist Press, 1987)
and Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (London: Verso, 1998).
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro and Radical Thought,” Crisis 22 (July 1921): pp. 102–104.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Browsing Reader,” Crisis 35 (June 1928): pp. 202, 211
and Claude McKay to W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), pp. 1:374–375.
Marcus Garvey, “Home to Harlem: An Insult to the Race,” Negro World, September 29, 1928.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “Close Ranks,” Crisis 16 (July 1918).
Hubert H. Harrison, “The Descent of Du Bois,” in When Africa Awakens (New York: Porro Press, 1920).
See Mildred I. Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1990)
“Mrs. Ida Barnett, Colored Leader, Dies Suddenly,” Chicago Tribune, March 25, 1931
and “Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Noted Club Woman, Dies Suddenly,” Chicago Defender, March 28, 1931.
See Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Washington, DC: Rans-dell, 1940)
Sharon Harley, “Mary Church Terrell: Genteel Militant,” in Black leaders in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leon Litwack and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 291–307.
A. Jacques Garvey, “Women as Leaders,” Negro World October 25, 1925.
The best introductions to C. L. R. James’s philosophical thought are James, The Future in the Present (London: Alison and Busby, 1977)
and James, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel-Marx-Lenin (London: Alison and Busby, 1980).
A bibliography of Oliver C. Cox’s majorworks includes Caste, Class and Race (New York: Doubleday, 1948)
The Foundations of Capitalism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959)
Capitalism and American leadership (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962)
Capitalism as a System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964)
and Race Relations: Elements and Social Dynamics (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1976).
An excellent introduction to Rustin is Devon W Carbado and Donald Weise, eds., Time on Two Crosses: The CollectedWritings of Bayard Rustin (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003).
David Stout, “Robert F. Williams, 71, Civil Rights Leader and Revolutionary,” New York Times, October 19, 1996.
Douglas Martin, “James Forman Dies at 76; Was Pioneer in Civil Rights,” New York Times, January 12, 2005.
Angela Y. Davis, ed., If They Came in the Morning (New York: Third Press, 1971).
Angela Y Davis, Woman, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981).
Cedric Robinson, Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980).
Elizabeth Robinson, “Twenty-Five Years of the Third World News Review,” Race and Class 47, no. 2 (October 2005).
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Press, 1983).
Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, 2nd rev. ed. (Boston: South End Press, 2001).
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© 2011 Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton
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Marable, M. (2011). Introduction: Black Intellectuals and the World They Made. In: Marable, M., Hinton, E.K. (eds) The New Black History. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230338043_1
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