Project MUSE®: Global Black Thought - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Global Black Thought.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2025) through current issueLatest Articles: Global Black ThoughtTWOProject MUSE®Global Black Thought3065-19133065-1905Latest articles in Global Black Thought. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons by Benjamin Barson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984034
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If you are fleeing from slavery, which way should you run? In America, conventional wisdom says to go North. Go North and go under the cover of night. Go North and travel by the backroads, away from surveilling eyes and watchful crowds. Go North and do not stop running until you are so far out of the reaches of slavery's empire that you can live without fear of being forcibly returned. In the mythology of Black radicalism, this is how one escapes. How surprised might we be, then, to read about the fugitive slave named Pierre who, in the early nineteenth century, escaped from bondage in Charleston, South Carolina, only to make his way to New Orleans, the then-newly acquired largest slave market in the United States?
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallBrassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons by Benjamin Barson (review)2026-03-04text/htmlen-USBrassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons by Benjamin Barson (review)2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®161582026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Editor's Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984035
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The Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, one of the most significant developments in United States history, toppled the "separate but equal" precedent established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Brown helped usher in the end of Jim Crow segregation in the United States and provided fuel for the national fight for Black citizenship rights during the modern civil rights era. While mainstream historical narratives often center the contributions of NAACP leaders such as attorneys Thurgood Marshall and Robert L. Carter, this special issue of Global Black Thought, edited by historian Hettie V. Williams, highlights some of the courageous Black women and girls whose labor was equally vital to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallEditor's Note2026-03-04text/htmlen-USEditor's Note2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®57392026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Special Issue Introduction: Black Women and the Brown Decision
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984036
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Black American women such as Pauli Murray, Constance Baker Motley, Mamie Phipps Clark, and Ruby Gainer were the architects of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This landmark case, considered one of the most significant in U.S. history, declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional and eroded the precedent of "separate but equal" that had provided the legal rationale for segregation. Ruby Bridges, Malaika Favorite, and other Black girls also left their mark by being at the forefront of the lawsuits that paved the way to Brown. While these contributions have been omitted from most mainstream historical narratives, Black women and girls laid much of the intellectual foundation
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallSpecial Issue Introduction: Black Women and the Brown Decision2026-03-04text/htmlen-USSpecial Issue Introduction: Black Women and the Brown Decision2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®106762026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Brown, Race, and Education: An Interview with Derrick P. Alridge
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984037
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Can you give us a brief background of your education, teaching, and research interests?I was educated in the public schools of Rock Hill, South Carolina, where I was born during the Civil Rights Movement and came of age in the 1970s, a period identified as the post-Civil Rights era. I attended Winthrop University in the 1980s, majoring in history and receiving a BA in 1987 and an M.Ed. in 1992. I taught middle school social studies and high school history in Columbia, South Carolina, from 1989 to 1993. I received a doctorate in education in 1997 from Penn State, where I studied the history and philosophy of education and intellectual history. It was an exciting time to be at Penn State, where I was able to develop
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallBrown, Race, and Education: An Interview with Derrick P. Alridge2026-03-04text/htmlen-USBrown, Race, and Education: An Interview with Derrick P. Alridge2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®140912026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04"Rebel with a Cause": Ruby J. Gainer, Black Educators, and the Long-Brown Era
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984038
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To Ruby Jackson Gainer on behalf of her heroic stand in support of equality for [B]lack education in the state of Alabama and to those who lost their positions but not their honor and dignity.In February 1947, Ruby Jackson Gainer, an African American teacher at Praco High School in Birmingham, Alabama, filed suit in federal court against the Jefferson County School Board and the school superintendent. Gainer contended that the school board had failed to live up to a 1945 federal court decree that had explicitly forbidden "discrimination in the payment of salaries … on account of race and color" in the county.2 In the lawsuit, she sought backpay for Black teachers and to hold the Board in contempt for "knowingly"
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmall"Rebel with a Cause": Ruby J. Gainer, Black Educators, and the Long-Brown Era2026-03-04text/htmlen-US"Rebel with a Cause": Ruby J. Gainer, Black Educators, and the Long-Brown Era2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®1356802026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Girls on the Front Line: Malaika Favorite, Gender, and School Desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984039
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Without warning and seemingly out of the blue, the white superintendent of schools in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, made an appearance at Malaika Favorite's school, Prairieville High School, in Geismar, Louisiana—about ten miles down the Mississippi river from Baton Rouge—in the spring of 1964. Everyone was shocked. "We never saw white people come into the school," Favorite remembers. According to Favorite, the superintendent went to a few classrooms and "made a little speech. And he said, 'You know the government has passed a law that you can choose'" which high school to attend in the parish. His tone was one of resignation. "This is my duty to inform you that you have this right," Favorite intoned, "And I'm
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallGirls on the Front Line: Malaika Favorite, Gender, and School Desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka2026-03-04text/htmlen-USGirls on the Front Line: Malaika Favorite, Gender, and School Desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®1100722026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Pauli Murray's Prophetic Imagination: Brown v. Board, and the Struggle for Equal Rights in the United States
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984040
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In his influential theological text, The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann introduces readers to the idea of practicing prophetic imagination. This practice is not merely a spiritual or intellectual undertaking. Prophetic imagination is a call to faith communities to deeply engage in the lived realities of the oppressed and imagine compassionate worlds distinct from the singular truth of tyrants. Brueggemann states, "It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing future alternatives to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one."1 Pauli Murray, Episcopal priest, poet, educator, and writer, personified Brueggemann's words
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallPauli Murray's Prophetic Imagination: Brown v. Board, and the Struggle for Equal Rights in the United States2026-03-04text/htmlen-USPauli Murray's Prophetic Imagination: Brown v. Board, and the Struggle for Equal Rights in the United States2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®940012026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04"There were no 'Idiot Savants' in the Group": Mamie Phipps Clark and the Brown v. Board Decision
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984041
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The activist work of women such as Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Clarke, Dorothy Height, Ella Baker, and others has recently received attention as a growing body of research continues to deepen our understanding of the role of women in the larger Black freedom struggle in the United States.1 Yet recognition of Black women as the progenitors of some of the movement's central ideas is still lacking. The success of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, for example, is frequently linked to the work of psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark whose studies on Black children made plain the far-reaching impact of racial segregation on their development. This landmark Supreme Court case ended racial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmall"There were no 'Idiot Savants' in the Group": Mamie Phipps Clark and the Brown v. Board Decision2026-03-04text/htmlen-US"There were no 'Idiot Savants' in the Group": Mamie Phipps Clark and the Brown v. Board Decision2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®1089442026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Weapons of the Furious: Vengeance Feminism as "Loving Correction"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984042
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Kali Nicole Gross's Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women's Fury in Lawless Times opens with the story of how Mary Johnson came to have a hatchet in her hand in October 1886, staving off the blows rained on her head by Edward Snyder, a married man and father of her child. Her act of self-defense—which Snyder survived—landed her in court and branded her a violent woman in the headlines of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. From the start, Gross is at pains to situate Mary's history in the long arc of Black feminism—and to redeem Mary's recourse to violence as an act of self-protection and vengeance that makes her an undeniable and legitimate part of the ideology's history. The book teems with similarly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallWeapons of the Furious: Vengeance Feminism as "Loving Correction"2026-03-04text/htmlen-USWeapons of the Furious: Vengeance Feminism as "Loving Correction"2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®203712026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Black Women Fighting Back: Philadelphia Style
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984043
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Black women's history is filled with examples of individual women—and the organizations they helped to create—fighting back against a host of injustices. Anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, feminist educator Anna Julia Cooper, and members of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs—the first Black civil rights organization—represent a range of ways Black women used their public writing and community engagement to fight back against racism and sexism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Working-class and poor women in Philadelphia fought back against injustice too. These women's backgrounds and behavior ranged from the "wanton, lascivious," and "intemperate" to "those who had education
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallBlack Women Fighting Back: Philadelphia Style2026-03-04text/htmlen-USBlack Women Fighting Back: Philadelphia Style2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®149712026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Honor, Fury, and Reproductive Retribution in 19th-Century Philadelphia
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984044
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Vengeance Feminism is a bold and timely Black feminist reading of Black women's enactments of violence in the archives of late nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Personal, political, and affective, Gross's theorization of vengeance feminism holds together instances of Black feminist vigilantism, self-defense, and, perhaps most unexpectedly, emotional "exorcism" (11). With vivid recounting of details from her sources, Gross theorizes vengeance feminism as a form of Black feminism that reverberates into the present, taking the context of state abandonment, misogynoir, desperation, fear, and fury in the lives of Philadelphia's late nineteenth-century Black women as a case study. Drawing upon a painstakingly-compiled
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallHonor, Fury, and Reproductive Retribution in 19th-Century Philadelphia2026-03-04text/htmlen-USHonor, Fury, and Reproductive Retribution in 19th-Century Philadelphia2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®139662026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Black Women's Criminalization, Sexual Exploitation, and Dehumanization
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984045
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In the early summer of 2025, the nation became aware of the story of Adriana Smith, a Black woman from Georgia, who was forcefully placed on ventilators to keep her and her fetus alive after she suffered a medical emergency and was declared brain dead months earlier. In the weeks after Smith's story was first brought to light, Black women lamented their disposability and expressed their anger at the complete disregard for the wishes of Adriana and her family who did not want her to lay as an incubator for months. The strict abortion bans in Georgia and other states after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022 have led to the senseless deaths of women of all races, but they are a particular sticking point for Black
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallBlack Women's Criminalization, Sexual Exploitation, and Dehumanization2026-03-04text/htmlen-USBlack Women's Criminalization, Sexual Exploitation, and Dehumanization2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®102452026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Fury and Disrepute: Black Women's Feminism in Lawless Times
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984046
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We rarely read stories about unrespectable women. When we do, they are often white, middle class, heterosexual, and cisgender. Unrespectable women in history are typically framed as selfless martyrs whose primary motivations originate from outside of themselves rather than from within. When Black women are framed in unrespectable terms, they are often cast as lascivious villains, the Sapphires and Jezebels whose inner anger emanates from unknown sources rather than from the systemic discrimination, persistent anti-Blackness, unrelenting sexual violence, and the brutal injustices they encounter daily. In Vengeance Feminism, Kali Nicole Gross writes against the innumerable historical narratives that render Black
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallFury and Disrepute: Black Women's Feminism in Lawless Times2026-03-04text/htmlen-USFury and Disrepute: Black Women's Feminism in Lawless Times2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®115502026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Framing Black Women's Lives in Philadelphia
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984047
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I am a multigenerational survivor of domestic terror in the United States, most of it north of the Mason Dixon Line or in states that sided with the Union during the American Civil War. I may have something like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; I have reoccurring memories of collective and individual violence interrupting my waking moments. Some might believe that my peers and I were hostages of the War on Drugs, collateral damage to the cocaine-induced 'yuppie' anti-Blackness that was stimulated by greed and the undocumented economies associated with the 1980s that funded two decades or more of the Cold War and/or proxy wars between the Soviet Union and the United States. During that time, I was a kid like the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallFraming Black Women's Lives in Philadelphia2026-03-04text/htmlen-USFraming Black Women's Lives in Philadelphia2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®154442026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Author's Response
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984048
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I am indebted to the scholars who read Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women's Fury in Lawless Times (Seal, 2024) for this forum. They have raised interesting questions and offered generative observations about its contents. I am also grateful to Global Black Thought for curating these pieces. My essay will blend responses to their work with a meditation on the challenges of writing a book like this.Among my published books to date, Vengeance Feminism was the most difficult to write. I literally wept writing some of the sections—particularly the afterword. At other times, I laughed out loud—like when a sister reportedly knocked out a teen who blew cigarette smoke in her face as she strode past him. It began
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallAuthor's Response2026-03-04text/htmlen-USAuthor's Response2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®92802026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom by Gregory Nobles (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984049
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Almost every morning I pass the garden tucked behind Princeton University's Firestone Library that bears the name of Betsey Stockton. It's an easy place to overlook. A signifying plaque features an image of Stockton and mentions how she was born into slavery in Princeton in the late eighteenth century, that she became a missionary that travelled to Hawai'i, and that she was an educator to generations of Black children. Until reading The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (2022), this fragment of her life was all I knew. But historian Gregory Nobles renders the woman behind the plaque fully legible. His book offers the first full-length scholarly treatment of Betsey Stockton's life and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallThe Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom by Gregory Nobles (review)2026-03-04text/htmlen-USThe Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom by Gregory Nobles (review)2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®127402026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation by Christina Cecilia Davidson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984050
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Christina Cecelia Davidson's Dominican Crossroads: H. C. C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation (2024) examines the intersections of race, religion, and U.S. empire in the Americas during the late nineteenth century. While Dominican Crossroads was not intended to be a conventional biography, it thoroughly depicts the tumultuous and historically infamous life and career of African descendant preacher and politician, H. C. C. Astwood. Drawing on archival sources and historical newspapers from the Dominican Republic, United States, and United Kingdom, Davidson evokes a transnational approach to understand how geopolitical events shaped Astwood's worldview, and in turn, influenced
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallDominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation by Christina Cecilia Davidson (review)2026-03-04text/htmlen-USDominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation by Christina Cecilia Davidson (review)2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®158482026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond by Oneka LaBennett (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984051
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In the hands of countless Guyanese women, a humble broom becomes both tool and metaphor carrying within it the weight of diaspora, labor, and memory. The "pointer broom"—or "pointa" broom—is crafted from the dried spines at the center of coconut palm leaves, bound tightly with strips of cloth or twine into a handleless bundle. As Guyanese women sweep dust, sand, and debris with this humble household staple, the dried spines gradually truncate, growing shorter and shorter with use, forcing the sweeper to bend ever closer to the ground. When the broom loses its efficiency, it is stamped repeatedly against a hard surface to realign the individual spines, extending its life through this ritual of renewal.The rhythmic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallGlobal Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond by Oneka LaBennett (review)2026-03-04text/htmlen-USGlobal Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond by Oneka LaBennett (review)2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®134702026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America by Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984052
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Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America by Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, who specializes in post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history, centers on African Diaspora and Atlantic World history and attempts to offer a cartography of Pan-Africanisms in North America as practiced by people of African descent in North America, which includes African Americans, African Canadians, and African Caribbeans, from 1900 to 2000. According to Adjetey, the book "provides not only a lexicon that reduces analytical fragmentation, harmonizing the diasporic African experience in the Atlantic World, but also a framework that situates historical actors, ideas, associations, and events within a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallCross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America by Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (review)2026-03-04text/htmlen-USCross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America by Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (review)2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®130112026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States by Charisse Burden-Stelly (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984053
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To spark undergraduates' interest in the study of Black radical thought, racial capitalism, and the practice of close reading, two exemplary essays regularly make their way onto my syllabi—Cedric J. Robinson's "Notes toward a 'Native' Theory of History," from 1980 and Charisse Burden-Stelly's blog post from 2017 entitled "Why Claudia Jones Will Always Be More Relevant than Ta-Nehisi Coates." Robinson's essay seeds the larger arguments found in his key 1983 text Black Marxism, namely the erasure of African and African Diasporic history as essential to the simultaneous processes and rearticulations of racialization, capitalism, and global anti-Blackness. Burden-Stelly's essay, a critical assessment of the Black
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/893/image/coversmallBlack Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States by Charisse Burden-Stelly (review)2026-03-04text/htmlen-USBlack Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States by Charisse Burden-Stelly (review)2026-03-042026TWOProject MUSE®137262026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-04