“I think I have”: Quoted ibid., 193.
“Today the bickering”: Bill Clinton, “Remarks on Signing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994,” September 13, 1994, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1994), 2:1539–41.
moral panic: See Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), for a discussion of the complicated process of racism and criminalization in the UK.
“the black urban working”: Joe William Trotter, Jr., Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 162.
capitalism has always: Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
“There was talk of”: Adam Nossiter, “Making Hard Time Harder, States Cut Jail TV and Sports,” New York Times, September 17, 1994.
1999–2004: The Black Immigrant
quiet and soft-spoken: Kadiatou Diallo and Craig Wolff, My Heart Will Cross This Ocean: My Story, My Son, Amadou (New York: Random House, 2003).
2004–2009: Hurricane Katrina
“gendered nature”: Barbara Ransby, “Katrina, Black Women, and the Deadly Discourse on Black Poverty in America,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 3, no. 1 (2006): 215–22.
“And so many of”: “Bar: Astrodome ‘Working Well’ for Evacuees,” UPI, September 5, 2005.
“dirty, desperate”: Ransby, “Katrina, Black Women.”
“the Bricks”: Jane Henrici, Chandra Childers, and Elyse Shaw, Get to the Bricks: The Experiences of Black Women from New Orleans Public Housing After Hurricane Katrina, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, August 25, 2015, iwpr.org/iwpr-issues/race-ethnicity-gender-and-economy/get-to-the-bricks-the-experiences-of-black-women-from-new-orleans-public-housing-after-hurricane-katrina/.
falling to 230,172 residents: Allison Plyer, Facts for Features: Katrina Impact, August 26, 2016, www.datacenterresearch.org/data-resources/katrina/facts-for-impact/.
37 percent: “Study: Less Black Women in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Institute for Women’s Policy Research, November 3, 2010, iwpr.org/media/press-hits/study-less-black-women-in-post-katrina-new-orleans/.
“the hunger and thirst”: Avis Jones-DeWeever, Women in the Wake of the Storm: Examining the Post-Katrina Realities of the Women of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, April 2008, 1, vawnet.org/sites/default/files/materials/files/2016-08/D481.pdf.
2009–2014: The Shelby Ruling
a new voter ID law: “Wisconsin’s Voter-ID Law Suppressed 200,000 Votes in 2016 (Trump Won by 22,748),” Nation, May 9, 2017.
voter suppression has taken: Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).
16 million people: “Purges: A Growing Threat to the Right to Vote,” Brennan Center for Justice, July 20, 2018, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/purges-growing-threat-right-vote.
Conclusion
“full freedom”: Kim D. Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 210–11.
CONTRIBUTORS
Derrick Alridge is the Philip J. Gibson Professor of Education and an affiliate faculty member in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. An educational and intellectual historian, Alridge is the author of The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History (2008) and co-editor of Message in the Music: Hip-Hop, History, and Pedagogy (2011) and The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century (forthcoming in 2021).
Esther Armah is an internationally award-winning journalist, radio host, writer, public speaker, and playwright, who has lived and worked in New York, London, and Accra. She is executive director of the Armah Institute of Emotional Justice. Her life’s work is Emotional Justice, a framework she created, for which she won a Community Healer Award at the 2016 Valuing Black Lives Global Emotional Emancipation Summit in Washington, D.C. Her Emotional Justice essays have been featured by WARSCAPES, Ebony, AlterNet, Essence, Gawker, and the Jay Z 4:44 Syllabus, and in books Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, & Racial Violence (2016) and Love with Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (2019), which won a 2020 Lambda Literary Award. She has written five Emotional Justice plays that have been produced and performed in New York, Chicago, and Ghana. She was named Most Valuable New York Radio Host in The Nation’s 2012 Progressive Honors List for her work on Wake-Up Call on Pacifica’s WBAI. She was named one of Africa’s 30 Women Leaders in 2019 by CMO Asia and the Africa Leadership Academy.
Molefi Kete Asante is professor and chair of the Department of Africology at Temple University. He is the co-founder of Afrocentricity International and president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies, as well as the founding and current editor of Journal of Black Studies. Asante, often called the most prolific African American scholar, has published ninety-two books; among them are Radical Insurgencies (2020), The History of Africa (3rd edition, 2019), The African American People: A Global History (2011), Erasing Racism: The Survival of the American Nation (2009), Revolutionary Pedagogy (2017), African American History: A Journey of Liberation (1995), African Pyramids of Knowledge (2015), Facing South to Africa (2014), and the memoir As I Run Toward Africa (2011). Asante has published more than five hundred articles and is one of the most quoted living African authors as well as one of the most distinguished thinkers in the African world. At Temple University, he created the first PhD program in African American Studies in 1988. He has directed more than 135 PhD dissertations, making him the top producer of doctorates among African American scholars. He created the theory of Afrocentricity.
William J. Barber II is senior pastor of the Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), president and senior lecturer at Repairers of the Breach, and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. A 2018 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius award,” he is the author of The Third Reconstruction (2016), Revive Us Again (2018), and We Are Called to Become a Movement (2020).