Harambee City : the Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the rise of Black power populism

"...the book corrects elements of national CORE's early history, asserts the significant contributions of Cleveland CORE leaders, and focuses attention on the economic strategies of the movement with a new understanding about Black Power within CORE to give insight into how CORE became one of the most dynamic civil rights organizations in the Black Power era." --Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, April 2017 "Both the book and Web site present important interpretations about the relationship between core's local chapters and its national office and the emergence and assessment of black power. Frazier's work also raises interesting questions about the relationship between scholars and historical actors and their respective roles and obligations in the process of historical production. The digital archive Harambee City does not resolve these difficult--perhaps unresolvable--tensions, but its expansive vision to engage scholars, activists, and other audiences is admirable and much needed." --Watson W. Jennison, The Journal of American History Metagraph, June 2019 "Using archival sources and interviews, Frazier lays bare the ways in which Black Nationalism appeared in much of CORE's early history and how it aided the development of Black Power in the organization by the 1960s. ... Black Studies scholars, social movement historians, and historians of capitalism will find Harambee City a welcomed addition to their fields." --Dara Walker, The Black Scholar, January 2019 "Historian Frazier (Miami Univ.) uses extensive oral histories and archival sources to provide a detailed account of the mid-20th-century intermittent development of the Cleveland Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Supporting analysis of CORE's national leadership frames the Cleveland story. Acknowledging both the ideals put forth in organizational materials and the reality of members' actions, she shows how conflicts over interracialism and nonviolence played out at local and national levels. Frazier also demonstrates the organization's dependency on individual leaders (many of them women) and financial support. Her account joins those of other scholars in tracing the historical development of black power prior to 1966. In this case, black leadership that emphasized self-determination emerged in Cleveland CORE in the early 1960s. The chapter's wide-ranging struggles with school desegregation, McDonald's, and the Ford Foundation illustrate the complexities of the black freedom movement in the urban North. Particularly useful is Frazier's examination of CORE's embrace of communal capitalism as a foundation of economic development in the late 1960s."Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Choice Reviews, October 2017 "Nishani Frazier has given us an important new story of the Congress of Racial Equality, demonstrating what happens when we center the history not on a bus full of Freedom Riders heading South but with a group of Cleveland activists encountering significant resistance to their direct action campaigns for racial equity in jobs, housing, and schools in the Midwest. In the process, Harambee City changes how we see the organization, the racial limits of northern liberalism, and the diversity of Black Power politics on the ground."--Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks 再读一些...