This book starts with 2 shorter essays. I don't remember them. (I read them too long ago.It took me a long time to finish this book.) The major essays are "Resurrecting the Radical DuBois" and "Malcolm X's Life-After-Death." The final essay is on Brown vs. and how it has been overturned in practice, along with the end of affirmative action. I found the Malcolm X essay helpful because recently I was trying to understand how Malcolm X had become a civil rights leader standing next to MLK Jr. and how a visit by Malcolm X's daughter to our University could be greeted by so many people as an exciting happy event. Prof. Marable puts them together, but over closer to where Malcolm stood.

Subtitled “How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future,” this book represents a collection of lectures delivered by the author to universities and scholarly conventions in 2004.

Most of the book’s content is dedicated to black history in a “meta” sense – that is, in how it has been preserved and presented, and the repercussions of this politically-fraught process. A second focus is on the history and changing nature of racial disparity in the U.S., and in particular, how that disparity was interpreted by some of the giants of African-American intellectual history. Thus, this book strikes me as two books in one, and while I could see the value of each, I didn’t necessary feel they belonged together in the same volume.

An example of the first focus is “the near-disappearance of Medgar Evers from the pages of American history (many of the files documenting his tremendous contributions to his battles against Jim Crow racism were dumped in the garbage right after he died);” the ways in which the legacies of W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X have been transmogrified to suit political needs (eliminating “the true content of their radical ideas and revolutionary politics”); and legal disputes that have tied up access to archives.

The second focus is more substantive and thus perhaps of greater interest (although not importance). Marable tries to impart the idea that the nature of racism has changed today:

“Instead of legal segregation, we are confronted with ‘color-blind racism’ … defined by mass unemployment, mass incarceration, and mass disfranchisement.”

In spite of all the celebration of diversity and the individual achievement of some celebrities, blackness, Marable argues, has continued to be stigmatized and relegated to the periphery of power and opportunity. No one who worked to dismantle Jim Crow anticipated what he calls “an even more powerful ‘racial domain,’ a system of racialized economy, warehousing more than one million blacks in prisons, and disfranchising millions more.” Blacks who have been imprisoned for any cause have trouble finding employment once they are released. (A 2005 study found that even white males with prison records receive significantly more job offers for entry-level positions than African Americans who have never been arrested!) The cycle of unemployment and imprisonment then takes on a life of its own. But even those who climb out of the cycle are never allowed to vote again in at least seven states. Marable reports that in New York, prisons are located upstate, in traditionally white Republican constituencies. Even though the prisoners cannot vote, their numbers are counted as part of the residential population for determining boundaries for state legislative districts. So their very existence increases conservative political representation by representatives likely to vote against their interests!

Marable bemoans the existence of “a vast population of racialized outcasts and the dispossessed [who] struggle beneath the cruel weight of permanent unemployment, discriminatory courts and sentencing procedures, dehumanized prisons, voting disfranchisement, residential segregation, and the elimination of most public services for the poor.” He calls for a New Civil Rights Movement for social and racial justice, in our own time. I wish it could be true, but personally, I don’t see it happening…. ( )