Black Lives, White Lives : Three Decades of Race Relations in America.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Blauner, Bob.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (492 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2022.

Summary:

Now with a new foreword, this timely reissue features a remarkable collection of oral histories that trace three decades of turbulent race relations and social change in the United States for a new generation of activists. One evening in 1955, Howard Spence, a Mississippi field representative for the NAACP investigating the Emmett Till murder, was confronted by Klansmen who burned an eight-foot cross on his front lawn. "I felt my life wasn't worth a penny with a hole in it." Twenty-four years later, Spence had become a respected pillar of that same Mississippi town, serving as its first Black alderman. The story of Howard Spence is just one of the remarkable personal dramas recounted in Black Lives, White Lives. Beginning in 1968, Bob Blauner and a team of interviewers recorded the words of those caught up in the crucible of rapid racial, social, and political change. Unlike most retrospective oral histories, these interviews capture the intense racial tension of 1968 in real time, as people talk with unusual candor about their deepest fears and prejudices. The diverse experiences and changing beliefs of Blauner's interview subjects--sixteen of them Black, twelve of them white--are expanded through subsequent interviews in 1979 and 1986, revealing as much about ordinary, daily lives as the extraordinary cultural shifts that shaped them. This book remains a landmark historical and sociological document, and an exceptional primary-source commentary on the development of race relations since the 1960s. Republished with a foreword by Professor Gerald Early, Black Lives, White Lives offers new generations of scholars and activists a galvanizing meditation on how divided America was then and still is today.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One. 1968 Surviving the sixties

Integration or Black Power? The Great Debate

1. The Politics of Manhood and the Southern Black Experience

“My father was from Alabama”

“Promised Land is just like the old plantation”

“I wouldn’t want to treat anybody like I’ve been treated in Mississippi”

2. Whites on the Front Lines of Racial Conflict

“Stokely Carmichael ain’t no better than me”

You break your neck to do something, and they give you a hard time”

“Sometimes you wish you were black”

“I was the wrong color in my black man’s eyes”

3. Four Black Women and the Consciousness of the Sixties

“I’m tired of being scared”

“This is no dream world, baby”

“Those that came from a different social experience I feared”

“Something happened in my childhood I’ve never forgotten”

4. White Backlash: The Fear of a Black Majority and Other Nightmares

“They’re afraid the colored people are gonna move in and take over”

“We’ve got the lowest, poorest type”

“We didn’t have a great sense of racial awareness”

“It’s just a strong apartheid on the street”

“The whole racial thing makes me burst with sadness”

5. Black Youth and the Ghetto Streets

“White boys, they’re always innocent”

“I would like to kill a white man, just to put it on the books”

“The marching and demonstrations is stupid”

“Denying you the right to be a man”

6. The Paradox of Working-Class Racism

“They’ve got the right to have every human dignity that I have”

“If I can help a colored man without hurting myself, I haven’t got anything to lose”

“My oldest daughter married a black man”

7. Black Workers: New Options and Old Problems

“The Negro don’t want to work”

“The postal system has become a Negro-type job”

“Being a man is being part of the world”

“These people had been treating me bad all my life, and I didn’t know it”

“They call me an instigator”

“I’d come home bitching and yelling”

“This was my means of retaliating”

Part Two. 1978–1987 growing older in the seventies and eighties

The Ambiguities of Racial Change

8. “Still in the Struggle”: Black Activists Ten Years Later

“I’m going to protect this land”

“Dealing with the human issues”

“I haven’t changed that much”

9. White Lives and the Limits of Integration

“The man is a damn fool who won’t change his mind”

“That was such a strong time of change”

“The world changed exactly the way I was going”

“We’ve turned life itself into a quota business”

“What I really do is live in a white neighborhood”

10. Black Youth: The Worsening Crisis

“The American black man is a dying species”

“Without [the Black Panthers], my generation would be a different generation”

“I had him and everything just changed”

“Two counts against me: I’m black and I’m gay”

11. Blue-Collar Men in a Tight Economy

“He’s just a boy, Daddy”

“Even Walnut Creek, it’s integrating”

“The federal government and AT&T screwed up”

“Smelling like a rose”

“Peoples of forty, they’re no longer thinking about a race thing”

12. Men, Women, and Opportunity

“I have not been able to achieve selfhood through the civil rights movement”

“If they had gave me the green light”

“To grow and develop with the times”

“If I were a white guy . . .”

13. Keeping the Spirit of the Sixties Alive

“The caring factor”

“The way that you view humanity and the earth, those are the main things”

“My whole damn culture’s gone”

“I as an individual will continue to resist”

Conclusion

Appendix: Methodology

Notes

Bibliographic Essay

About the authors

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780520386020

0520386027

OCLC:

1314854299