Black Bourgeoisie

Black Bourgeoisie
Author: Franklin Frazier
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1997-02-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0684832410

Originally published: Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, [1957].

From Bourgeois to Boojie

From Bourgeois to Boojie
Author: Vershawn Ashanti Young
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2011
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780814334683

Vershawn Ashanti Young and Bridget Harris Tsemo collect a diverse assortment of pieces that examine the generational shift in the perception of the black middle class, from the serious moniker of "bourgeois" to the more playful, sardonic "boojie." Including such senior cultural workers as Amiri Baraka and Houston Baker, as well as younger scholars like Damion Waymer and Candice Jenkins, this significant collection contains essays, poems, visual art, and short stories that examine the complex web of representations that define the contemporary black middle class.

The Hornes

The Hornes
Author: Gail Lumet Buckley
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2002
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781557835642

Recounts the story of the Horne family spanning eight generations and describing America's developing black middle class by Lena Horne's daughter.

E. Franklin Frazier and Black Bourgeoisie

E. Franklin Frazier and Black Bourgeoisie
Author: James E. Teele
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2002-05-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0826263496

When E. Franklin Frazier was elected the first black president of the American Sociological Association in 1948, he was established as the leading American scholar on the black family and was also recognized as a leading theorist on the dynamics of social change and race relations. By 1948 his lengthy list of publications included over fifty articles and four major books, including the acclaimed Negro Family in the United States. Frazier was known for his thorough scholarship and his mastery of skills in both history and sociology. With the publication of Bourgeoisie Noire in 1955 (translated in 1957 as Black Bourgeoisie), Frazier apparently set out on a different track, one in which he employed his skills in a critical analysis of the black middle class. The book met with mixed reviews and harsh criticism from the black middle and professional class. Yet Frazier stood solidly by his argument that the black middle class was marked by conspicuous consumption, wish fulfillment, and a world of make-believe. While Frazier published four additional books after 1948, Black Bourgeoisie remained by far his most controversial. Given his status in American sociology, there has been surprisingly little study of Frazier's work. In E. Franklin Frazier and Black Bourgeoisie, a group of distinguished scholars remedies that lack, focusing on his often-scorned Black Bourgeoisie. This in-depth look at Frazier's controversial publication is relevant to the growing concerns about racism, problems in our cities, the limitations of affirmative action, and the promise of self-help.

The Original Black Elite

The Original Black Elite
Author: Elizabeth Dowling Taylor
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2017-01-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0062346113

New York Times–Bestselling Author: “A compelling biography of Daniel Murray and the group the writer-scholar W.E.B. DuBois called ‘The Talented Tenth.’” —Patricia Bell-Scott, National Book Award nominee and author of The Firebrand and the First Lady In this outstanding cultural biography, the author of A Slave in the White House chronicles a critical yet overlooked chapter in American history: the inspiring rise and calculated fall of the black elite, from Emancipation through Reconstruction to the Jim Crow Era—embodied in the experiences of an influential figure of the time: academic, entrepreneur, political activist, and black history pioneer Daniel Murray. In the wake of the Civil War, Daniel Murray, born free and educated in Baltimore, was in the vanguard of Washington, D.C.’s black upper class. Appointed Assistant Librarian at the Library of Congress—at a time when government appointments were the most prestigious positions available for blacks—Murray became wealthy as a construction contractor and married a college-educated socialite. The Murrays’ social circles included some of the first African-American US senators and congressmen, and their children went to Harvard and Cornell. Though Murray and others of his time were primed to assimilate into the cultural fabric as Americans first and people of color second, their prospects were crushed by Jim Crow segregation and the capitulation to white supremacist groups by the government, which turned a blind eye to their unlawful—often murderous—acts. Elizabeth Dowling Taylor traces the rise, fall, and disillusionment of upper-class African Americans, revealing that they were a representation not of hypothetical achievement but what could be realized by African Americans through education and equal opportunities. “Brilliantly researched . . . an emotional story of how race and class have long played a role in determining who succeeds and who fails.” —The New York Times Book Review “Brings insight to the rise and fall of America’s first educated black people.” —Time “Deftly demonstrates how the struggle for racial equality has always been complicated by the thorny issue of class.” —Patricia Bell-Scott, author of The Firebrand and the First Lady “Reads like a sweeping epic.” —Library Journal

Black on the Block

Black on the Block
Author: Mary Pattillo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2010-04-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226649334

In Black on the Block, Mary Pattillo—a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century—uses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago’s North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America. There was a time when North Kenwood–Oakland was plagued by gangs, drugs, violence, and the font of poverty from which they sprang. But in the late 1980s, activists rose up to tackle the social problems that had plagued the area for decades. Black on the Block tells the remarkable story of how these residents laid the groundwork for a revitalized and self-consciously black neighborhood that continues to flourish today. But theirs is not a tale of easy consensus and political unity, and here Pattillo teases out the divergent class interests that have come to define black communities like North Kenwood–Oakland. She explores the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old-timers as they clash over the social implications of gentrification. Along the way, Pattillo highlights the conflicted but crucial role that middle-class blacks play in transforming such districts as they negotiate between established centers of white economic and political power and the needs of their less fortunate black neighbors. “A century from now, when today's sociologists and journalists are dust and their books are too, those who want to understand what the hell happened to Chicago will be finding the answer in this one.”—Chicago Reader “To see how diversity creates strange and sometimes awkward bedfellows . . . turn to Mary Pattillo's Black on the Block.”—Boston Globe

Bourgeois Radicals

Bourgeois Radicals
Author: Carol Anderson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2015
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0521763789

Bourgeois Radicals explores the NAACP's key role in the liberation of Africans and Asians across the globe even as it fought Jim Crow on the home front during the long civil rights movement. In the eyes of the NAACP's leaders, the way to create a stable international system, stave off communism in Africa and Asia, and prevent capitalist exploitation was to embed human rights, with its economic and cultural protections, in the transformation of colonies into nations. Indeed, the NAACP aided in the liberation struggles of multiple African and Asian countries within the limited ideological space of the Second Red Scare. However, its vision of a "third way" to democracy and nationhood for the hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa was only partially realized due to a toxic combination of the Cold War, Jim Crow, and die-hard imperialism. Bourgeois Radicals examines the toll that internationalism took on the organization and illuminates the linkages between the struggle for human rights and the fight for colonial independence.

Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta

Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta
Author: Karen Ferguson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2003-04-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 080786014X

When Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, Atlanta had the South's largest population of college-educated African Americans. The dictates of Jim Crow meant that these men and women were almost entirely excluded from public life, but as Karen Ferguson demonstrates, Roosevelt's New Deal opened unprecedented opportunities for black Atlantans struggling to achieve full citizenship. Black reformers, often working within federal agencies as social workers and administrators, saw the inclusion of African Americans in New Deal social welfare programs as a chance to prepare black Atlantans to take their rightful place in the political and social mainstream. They also worked to build a constituency they could mobilize for civil rights, in the process facilitating a shift from elite reform to the mass mobilization that marked the postwar black freedom struggle. Although these reformers' efforts were an essential prelude to civil rights activism, Ferguson argues that they also had lasting negative repercussions, embedded as they were in the politics of respectability. By attempting to impose bourgeois behavioral standards on the black community, elite reformers stratified it into those they determined deserving to participate in federal social welfare programs and those they consigned to remain at the margins of civic life.

Passing for Black

Passing for Black
Author: Wade H. Hall
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1997-11-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780813109480

to pass for white in a segregated society, Mae felt that she was doing the opposite - choosing to assert her black identity. Passing for Black is her story, in her own words, of how she lived in this racial limbo and the obstacles it presented. As a Kentucky woman of color during a pioneering period of minority and women's rights, Mae Street Kidd seized every opportunity to get ahead. She attended a black boarding academy after high school and went on to become a.

Black Bourgeois

Black Bourgeois
Author: Candice M. Jenkins
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1452961611

Exploring the forces that keep black people vulnerable even amid economically privileged lives At a moment in U.S. history with repeated reminders of the vulnerability of African Americans to state and extralegal violence, Black Bourgeois is the first book to consider the contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that nonetheless remain racially vulnerable. Examining disruptions around race and class status in literary texts, Candice M. Jenkins reminds us that the conflicted relation of the black subject to privilege is not, solely, a recent phenomenon. Focusing on works by Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Danzy Senna, Rebecca Walker, Reginald McKnight, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Michael Thomas, Jenkins shows that the seemingly abrupt discursive shift from post–Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, from an emphasis on privilege and progress to an emphasis on vulnerability and precariousness, suggests a pendulum swing between two interrelated positions still in tension. By analyzing how these narratives stage the fraught interaction between the black and the bourgeois, Jenkins offers renewed attention to class as a framework for the study of black life—a necessary shift in an age of rapidly increasing income inequality and societal stratification. Black Bourgeois thus challenges the assumed link between blackness and poverty that has become so ingrained in the United States, reminding us that privileged subjects, too, are “classed.” This book offers, finally, a rigorous and nuanced grasp of how African Americans live within complex, intersecting identities.