I have studied Black politics since I was an undergraduate student at Savannah State College. My principal mentor at Savannah State was Hanes Walton, Jr. Walton (1941-2013) devoted his career to laying the intellectual foundations for the study of Black politics as a subfield in American political science. I have spent my career researching and teaching Black politics. I have authored and/or edited eight books. I am an expert on American politics, urban politics, and racial and ethnic politics.
Journalist Wil Haygood’s 1993 biography of U.S. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell is an engaging portrayal of perhaps the most well-known Black American who ever served in the U.S. Congress.
Haygood’s writing is vivid and moving. He captures the flamboyant and publicity-seeking congressman on Capitol Hill, challenging the segregationist members of his party, at home in Harlem, touring in his fancy sports cars, in his pulpit at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, preaching about civil rights and racism, and traveling to Paris and other foreign destinations, often accompanied by attractive young women staffers.
From his arrival in Congress in 1945 until the early 1960s, Powell stood virtually alone as a national Black figure in taking a no-compromise position on civil rights and in challenging racial bigotry. Haygood provides a penetrating look at an interesting and complex Black American leader during a turbulent era.
Before Barack Obama, Colin Powell, and Martin Luther King, Jr., there was Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. -- the most celebrated and controversial black politician of his generation. An astute businessman known as "Mr. Civil Rights," he represented Harlem for twenty-four years in the House of Representatives. He was a man of the cloth and a civil rights leader, but Powell's reputation for flamboyance, arrogance, and womanizing made him his own worst enemy. In this towering and definitive biography, acclaimed journalist Wil Haygood paints a vivid portrait of one of black America's most memorable dignitaries.
Robert C. Smith (1947-2023) was one of the most prolific political scientists who wrote about Black political leadership.
This book is a critical examination of national Black political leadership in the U.S. after the 1960s. Smith posits a thesis that after the Civil Rights Movement, Black Americans became incorporated into the Democratic Party, becoming a critical component of the party’s governing coalition. However, Smith maintains that Black political leadership also became much more mainstream, co-opted, and marginalized.
This book questions the extent to which Black Americans have made substantive policy gains since the 1960s and whether their incorporation into the political system has helped or hurt their capacity to press their demands on the political system.
This comprehensive study of African American politics since the civil rights era concludes that the black movement has been co-opted, marginalized, and almost wholly incorporated into mainstream institutions.
CHOICE 1997 Outstanding Academic Books
This is the first comprehensive study of African American politics from the end of the 1960s civil rights era to the present. Not an optimistic book, it concludes that the black movement has been almost wholly encapsulated into mainstream institutions, co-opted, and marginalized. As a result, the author argues, African American leadership has become largely irrelevant in the development of organizations, strategies, and programs that would address…
Former Congressman William Clay, a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, provides a historical look at Black members in the U.S. Congress from Reconstruction to 1992.
Until the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s Black members of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House had been the highest-ranking Black federal officials. However, we know very little about them. Historians have largely ignored Black members of Congress.
Clay’s book is especially useful because it is partly historical and participant-observation. He chronicles and documents the experiences of America’s first Black congressional representatives who served during Reconstruction.
Readers interested in Black congressional leadership during the 1960s through the early 1990s will glean a lot from Clay’s first-hand perspective on the formation of the Congressional Black Caucus, Richard Nixon, the 1972 National Black Political Convention, and the expansion and maturation of the Black congressional delegation.
William L. Clay, one of the most important players in Congress, offers a candid, up-to-date history of black elected officials in the U.S. Congress.As the senior member of the Missouri Congressional delegation and a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, William L. Clay shares thirty-four years of experiences and insight into the political process and the roles that black elected officials have played in the process, from the post-Civil War era up to now. From the election of Senator Hiram R. Revels in 1870 to the election of Congresswoman Maxine Waters in 1991, Congressman Clay dispels the myths and…
In 1972, Black politics was at a crossroads. Leonard N. Moore’s examination of the National Black Political Convention of March 1972 is a wonderful and comprehensive study of perhaps the most important political gathering of Black political leaders.
Moore’s concise and readable account of the convention is riveting and at times dramatic. The reader can feel the tension in the Gary, Indiana high school gymnasium between the disparate ideological factions of Black political leadership at the time – the Black integrationist and moderates versus the Black nationalists and radicals.
Black leaders convened in Gary to confront a central question about the future of Black politics: whether Black voters should work separately or in coalition with other racial minorities and liberal whites to advance their policy goals.
Moore details how the coalition approach won out at the convention and connects what happened in Gary, Indiana in 1972 to the political incorporation of Black Americans into the Democratic Party.
For three days in 1972 in Gary, Indiana, eight thousand American civil rights activists and Black Power leaders gathered at the National Black Political Convention, hoping to end a years-long feud that divided black America into two distinct camps: integrationists and separatists. While some form of this rift existed within black politics long before the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his death- and the power vacuum it created- heightened tensions between the two groups, and convention leaders sought to merge these competing ideologies into a national, unified call to action. What followed, however, effectively crippled the Black…
This biography of Louis Martin, sometimes called the “Godfather of Black Politics,” provides a brilliant portrayal of a Black political leader who worked as a close adviser to three Democratic presidents.
Louis Martin was a journalist who worked for the Chicago Defender and in 1936 became founding editor of Detroit’s Michigan Chronicle. Martin was an activist journalist. In 1944, he moved to New York to work as publicity man for the Democratic National Committee. Martin never left Democratic Party politics. He worked in the White House as a close adviser for John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter.
Poinsett is a good storyteller. He explores what it was like for one of the first Black Americans to be close to power as a top aide in the White House to three U.S. presidents.
In the last weeks of the 1960 presidential race, Louis Martin pulled off a minor miracle. With two days to go before the election, this passionate civil rights advocate and Democratic activists put two million pamphlets into the hands of black voters across America, informing them of Senator John F. Kennedy's sympathetic phone call to Martin Luther King, Jr., then languishing in a Georgia prison. The center of gravity in black partisan support shifted, and Kennedy won by a hair. This is just one example of the remarkable influence Louis Martin had on national politics for more than four decades.…
House of Diggs is the first biography of Congressman Charles C. Diggs, Jr., perhaps the most consequential Black federal legislator to ever serve in the U.S. Congress. During his political career, Diggs, Michigan’s first Black member of Congress, was the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr., founded the Congressional Black Caucus, was the chief architect of legislation that restored home-rule to Washington, D.C., and in the 1960s, ignited, virtually alone, the American anti-apartheid movement.
Diggs practiced a “politics of strategic moderation,” an approach that was typically quieter than the militant race politics practiced by Adam Clayton Powell and more appealing than the conservative Chicago-style approach of William Dawson, and more effective than both.
