Books Written and Edited by Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker
Hurricane Katrina: America’s Unnatural Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009)
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana and Mississippi. The storm devastated the region and its citizens. But its devastation did not reach across racial and class lines equally. In an original combination of research and advocacy, Hurricane Katrina: America’s Unnatural Disaster questions the efficacy of the national and global responses to Katrina’s central victims, African Americans.
This collection of polemical essays explores the extent to which African Americans and others were, and are, disproportionately affected by the natural and manmade forces that caused Hurricane Katrina. Such an engaged study of this tragic event forces us to acknowledge that the ways in which we view our history and life have serious ramifications on modern human relations, public policy, and quality of life.
Praise for Hurricane Katrina: America’s Unnatural Disaster:
“Professors Levitt and Whitaker have produced the book on Katrina we’ve been waiting for. Don’t miss it!” Cornel West, Class of 1943 University Professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University and author of Race Matters and Democracy Matters
“Jeremy I. Levitt and Matthew C. Whitaker have prepared a fact-laden and analytically rich collection of writings about the social inequities that exacerbated the suffering wrought by Hurricane Katrina. It is an important contribution to a variety of disciplines including history, law, sociology, political science, and African American studies. The impassioned authors who speak in this anthology are determined to prevent amnesia from erasing from American memory this signal tragedy. They deserve a wide and attentive audience.”Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard University Law School and author of Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal
“Jeremy I. Levitt and Matthew C. Whitaker, and the distinguished contributors to this illuminating anthology, critically assess the magnitude and complexity of the Katrina catastrophe. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the relevance of race, class, and gender, and the consequences of entrenched poverty and governmental ineptitude.” Darlene Clark Hine, Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and professor of history at Northwestern University and coauthor of The African American Odyssey
“Levitt and Whitaker have made a distinct contribution to the expanding body of scholarship and reflection on the social and political meanings of Hurricane Katrina. Their book also represents an urgent call to action—designed to address the persistence of racial inequality and poverty in the United States and to prevent the future transformation of natural disasters into man-made calamities.” Joe William Trotter Jr., Giant Eagle Professor of History and Social Justice and head of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University and author of The African American Experience
African American Icons of Sport: Triumph, Courage, and Excellence
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008)
This book offers an examination of African Americans in sports, from a variety of perspectives and through a lively range of rhetoric styles, and illuminates the history of highly successful and influential individuals, athletes and teams who have transcended “mere” celebrity to come to represent a given Zeitgeist to a sizable part of the world. It also explores the history and lives of complex, multi-layered personages and groups. Finally, it examines the extent to which modern mass media and popular culture have contributed greatly to the rise, and sometimes fall, of the these powerful symbols of athletic, individual, and group excellence.
Icons of African American Sports includes chapters on: The Williams Sisters, Shaquille O’Neal, Jim Brown, Harlem Globetrotters, Jack Johnson, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Magic Johnson, Wilma Rudolph, Muhammad Ali, Barry Bonds, Negro Baseball Leagues, Arthur Ashe, George Foreman, and others. Icons of African American Sports is a timely study and a desperately needed contribution to the fields of United States history, African American history, and sports history.
Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West
(University of Nebraska Press, 2005)
Nearly sixty years ago, Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale descended upon the isolated, somewhat desolate, and entirely segregated city of Phoenix, Arizona, in search of freedom and opportunity—a move that would ultimately transform an entire city and, arguably, the nation. Race Work tells the story of this remarkable pair, two of the most influential black activists of the post–World War II American West, and through their story, supplies a missing chapter in the history of the civil rights movement, American race relations, African Americans, and the American West.
Matthew C. Whitaker explores the Ragsdales’ family history and how their familial traditions of entrepreneurship, professionalism, activism, and “race work” helped form their activist identity and placed them in a position to help desegregate Phoenix. His work, the first sustained account of white supremacy and black resistance in Phoenix, also uses the lives of the Ragsdales to examine themes of domination, resistance, interracial coalition building, race, gender, and place against the backdrop of the civil rights and post–civil rights eras. An absorbing biography that provides insight into African Americans’ quest for freedom, Race Work reveals the lives of the Ragsdales as powerful symbols of black leadership who illuminate the problems and progress in African American history, American Western history, and American history during the post–World War II era.
Praise for Race Work:
“A dual biography of Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale, and a fascinating retrospective on the struggle for Civil Rights in Arizona.” True West
“Race Work moves African American western history to a new level of sophistication. This book is a rare dual biography of a remarkable couple, Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale. But it is much more. Race Work examines class dynamics in the African American community, including the tension between the pursuit of material success and racial responsibility, the gendered visions and expectations of male and female ‘leadership,’ the history of the civil rights movement in a major western city, and the failure of coalition building among people of color.” Quintard Taylor, author of In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the West, 1528-1990
“Race Work is a well-researched, readable, engrossing, and long overdue examination of a tumultuous time of social injustice in the U.S. that no proud American has a right to ignore. More important, this book is a fascinating retrospective on the struggle for civil rights in Arizona. Matthew Whitaker skillfully immortalizes this story in the pages of this compelling history. This is a must read for all who would understand the importance of the struggle in the West; a struggle fought with strength, pride and purpose, by ordinary people of extraordinary value.” Phil Gordon, Mayor of Phoenix
“In Race Work, Matthew Whitaker vividly demonstrates how individuals make history. This book significantly advances our understanding of the legacies of African Americans who have called the Southwest home.” Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America
Buy Now at Amazon.com for 37% off: $22.05
Forthcoming books by Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker:
“Facing the Rising Sun”: A History of African Americans in Arizona
(Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press).
Historian Richard White posits that “without the special experiences of its minorities, the [American] West might as well be New Jersey with Mountains and deserts.” “Facing the Rising Sun” will refute the assumption that Arizona has little if any African American history. It will demonstrate that this inaccurate view has its roots in, among other things, a vast body of historical literature that has by accident and design, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and ignored the experiences and contributions of black people to the development of one of the most diverse and inclusive states in the U.S. This book will argue that beginning with Esteban De Dorantes in 1528, and continuing through the Reconstruction, migration, settlement and black community building experiences in Arizona to 1939, blacks wove themselves into the fabric of a complex and burgeoning region. It will also posit that World War II, and the industries which arose to support it, greatly improved the prospect of good jobs and a freer life for everyone in Arizona, particularly black people. As a result, a relative large migration ensued that increased the black Arizona population significantly, and intensified the area’s Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s. These changes brought a dynamic new black leadership to Arizona, and paved the way for much of the success that people of color are experiencing in today’s Southwestern politics and surging interest in multiculturalism.
“Over Jordan”: African Americans in the Twentieth Century
(Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc.).
Over Jordan will cast twentieth century United States History within the indispensable and illuminating experiences and struggles of people of African descent in America. Beginning by underscoring African Americans’ unrelenting efforts to define freedom during and after Reconstruction, not only for themselves but for the entire nation, it will then offer an examination of the extent to which black people transformed, and were transformed by, World War I, the Great Depression, and industrial and post-industrial changes during the first half of the twentieth century. Over Jordan will argue that these changes helped mold the lives of African Americans, their culture, and the ways in which they resisted widespread racism, economic exploitation, social marginalization, and in the case of black women, sexism.
World War II, and the industries which arose to support it, improved the prospect of good jobs and a freer life for African Americans, particularly in the American West. As a result, relative large migrations ensued that increased the black population in the nation’s urban centers significantly, and intensified the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s. These changes produced a dynamic new professional and grassroots black leadership, and paved the way for much of the success that people of color are experiencing in today’s politics and surging interest in black self-determination and multiculturalism. Over Jordan will analyze this success, but it will also look critically at the intersection of race and class in the modern African American experience. It will pay close attention to the plight of poor inner city blacks, the rise in the black middle and upper classes following the Civil Rights Movement, and the new roles, wealth, and power of African Americans in sports and entertainment in an increasingly overt multi-racial society.
During the past thirty years, African American history has emerged as an established field of intellectual inquiry. “Not only is it one of the most dynamic areas in American history, containing some of the most exciting contemporary historical debates,” John H. Bracy, Jr. and Manisha Sinha have argued, “but it is also changing the very way in which we view American history as a whole. African American history is not merely the addition of black people to a larger American historical narrative; it has its own issues and concerns.” Like most recent studies of black history and life, Over Jordan will not be one of victimization, despite the indignities and terrors that were inflicted upon African Americans. It will be a lucid, compact, illuminating chronicle of a people who dared to fight the forces that sought to dehumanize and oppress them.
Over Jordan will examine black professionalism and community activism, and emphasize the importance of region, race, gender, culture, and the prominence and interconnectedness of black institutions and interracial alliances. Its primary objective is to offer a sustained, scholarly, somewhat provocative, yet accessible history of African Americans in the Twentieth Century, that will lead its readers to reconsider the “consensus” view of American history by highlighting the extent to which African American history illuminates the contradictions and conflicts embedded within our system. This book will be primarily built upon the predominant body of secondary literature in African American history, in addition to a smaller number of appropriate federal and state documents, and organizational records. Over Jordan will be a concise, yet discerning contribution to the ongoing effort to lay bare the history of African Americans, and to reexamine American history from a black perspective.