Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America

Abstract Between 31 July and 2 August 1948, Liverpool experienced three nights of racial violence on a scale not witnessed since the end of the First World War. Despite being initiated by white rioters, the so-called ‘race riots’ of 1948 were more significant in terms of the relationship between the police and Liverpool’s black population. Previous studies have sought to understand why and what happened during the riots; however, there has been little analysis of the aftermath. This article looks specifically at how black people responded to the ‘race riots’ in 1948 and argues that this episode led to a period of heightened political activity at a local and national level centred around the issue of policing. It focusses on the Colonial Defence Committee (CDC) that was formed immediately after the riots to organize the legal defence of individuals believed to have been wrongfully arrested. In its structure and organizational methods, the CDC represented a prototype of the defence committees that became a hallmark of black political opposition to policing during the 1970s and 1980s. Examining the aftermath of the Liverpool ‘race riots’ in 1948, thus, offers new perspectives on the historical development of black political resistance to policing in twentieth-century Britain. On the one hand, it reveals a longer history of struggle against racially discriminatory policing, which predates the ‘Windrush years’ migration of the 1950s and early 1960s. It also highlights the historical continuities in the way that black resistance to policing manifested itself over the twentieth century.

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AHR Conversation: Black Internationalism

The American Historical Review ◽

10.1093/ahr/rhaa513 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 125 (5) ◽

pp. 1699-1739

Author(s):

Monique Bedasse ◽

Kim D. Butler ◽

Carlos Fernandes ◽

Dennis Laumann ◽

Tejasvi Nagaraja ◽

...

Keyword(s):

African Diaspora ◽

White Supremacy ◽

The United States ◽

Deep Roots ◽

Multiple Points ◽

Black Internationalism ◽

Black Resistance ◽

History Of ◽

The Caribbean ◽

Intellectual Production

Abstract This annual AHR Conversation focuses on the issues and historiographic debates raised by the term “Black Internationalism.” Participants Monique Bedasse, Kim D. Butler, Carlos Fernandes, Dennis Laumann, Tejasvi Nagaraja, Benjamin Talton, and Kira Thurman bring a wide array of interests and areas of expertise to bear on the origins, evolution, and meaning of the concept of Black Internationalism; its application within Africa, the U.S., and the African diaspora more generally; and its relationship to gender, nationalism, and anticolonialism. In addition to tracing the deep roots of this framework for writing the history of Black resistance to slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy as global phenomena, they insist on seeing Black Internationalism from multiple points on the compass. Perspectives derived from the history—and intellectual production—of Africa, Europe, South America, and the Caribbean prove just as important, if not more so, than those emanating from the United States.

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‘Let no one say the past is dead’: History wars and the poetry of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Sonia Sanchez

Queensland Review ◽

10.1017/qre.2018.14 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 25 (1) ◽

pp. 163-176

Author(s):

Ameer Chasib Furaih

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Civil Rights ◽

English Language ◽

Minor Literature ◽

Black Resistance ◽

Global Movement ◽

History Of ◽

Shared Awareness ◽

The 1960S

AbstractThe histories of Australian Aboriginal and African American peoples have been disregarded for more than two centuries. In the 1960s, Aboriginal and African American civil rights activists addressed this neglect. Each endeavoured to write a critical version of history that included their people(s). This article highlights the role of Aboriginal Australian poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker) (1920–93) and African American poet Sonia Sanchez (born 1934) in reviving their peoples’ history. Using Deleuze and Guattari's concept of ‘minor literature’, the essay shows how these poets deterritorialise the English language and English poetry and exploit their own poetries as counter-histories to record milestone events in the history of their peoples. It will also highlight the importance of these accounts in this ‘history war’. It examines selected poems from Oodgeroo's My People: A Kath Walker Collection and Sanchez's Home Coming and We A BaddDDD People to demonstrate that similarities in their poetic themes are the result of a common awareness of a global movement of black resistance. This shared awareness is significant despite the fact that the poets have different ethnicities and little direct literary impact upon each other.

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Psychology and Black Liberation in Richard Wright’s Black Power (1954)

The Politics of Richard Wright ◽

10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0013 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 198-210

Author(s):

Dorothy Stringer

Keyword(s):

Black People ◽

Richard Wright ◽

Historical Trauma ◽

Political Systems ◽

Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽

Black Liberation ◽

Psychic Life ◽

Travel Writings ◽

Black Resistance ◽

History Of

In his travel writings on the Gold Coast/Ghana, Richard Wright drew on two psychological theories—Freudian psychoanalysis and the implicit psychology of African American literary tradition—to describe the relationships among colonialism, state power, racial identity and psychic life. Dorothy Stringer’s essay notes that while Wright’s rationalism and belief in modern progress often prompted him to question, and even condemn, the local cultures and political systems he encountered, his emphasis on actual and historical trauma (above all the traumas of the slave trade) also allowed him to understand daily life, quotidian relationships and minor economic transactions as political in nature, as continuous with a broad history of black resistance, and as tools for projecting a different future for black people.

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Freedom and Resistance

10.5744/florida/9780813054476.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Christopher Curry

Keyword(s):

Social History ◽

American Revolution ◽

Caribbean Region ◽

Free Blacks ◽

The Bahamas ◽

Black And White ◽

Treaty Of Versailles ◽

The Social ◽

Black Resistance ◽

History Of

A popular misconception about the American Revolution is that it was largely contained within the continental boundaries of North America. However, the American Revolution neither ended with the cessation of armed conflict in 1781 nor the Treaty of Versailles in 1783; rather it continued and mutated in unusual places, a revolution often carried by those who had the most to lose by being denied the freedom that was promised at the outset of the war. Freedom and Resistance: A Social History of Black Loyalists in the Bahamas studies the struggles for freedom of a group of black loyalists (those enslaved and free blacks loyal to the British causes), who settled in the non-plantation, slave-holding colony of the Bahamas, located on the periphery of the Caribbean region. By focusing on the struggles for freedom that black loyalists experienced in the Bahamas, this book not only aims to recover the social history of black loyalists but seeks to examine the nature of their contributions to Bahamian society. One of the major themes explored in this study is black resistance and political activism. Much of this activism was shaped by the racial discord which erupted in the Bahamas between black and white loyalists in two distinct locales: the previously uninhabited islands of Abaco and the older, more urban center of Nassau, located on the island of New Providence.

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