Jimmie R. Hawkins – författare

In this compelling and informative volume, Jimmie R. Hawkins walks the reader through the many forms of Black protest in American history, from pre-colonial times though the George Floyd protests of 2020. Hawkins breaks American history into five sections, with subsections highlighting how Black identity helped to shape protest during that period. These protests include slave ship mutinies, the abolitionist movement, the different approaches to protest from Frederick Douglas, W. E. B. Dubois, and Booker T. Washington, protest led by various Black institutions, Black Lives Matter movements, and protests of today''s Black athletes, musicians, and intellectuals, such as Lebron James, Beyonce, and Kendrick Lamar. Hawkins also covers the backlash to these protests, including the Jim Crow era, the Red Summer of 1919, and modern-day wars on the Black community in the form of the War on Drugs and voter suppression.

Turn the traditional generational groupings on their head through this examination of Black life, culture, and the struggle for racial justice in the United States.

The Shaping of Black Identities explores the generations of African Americans who have lived in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the impact that living in the United States has had on them. Jimmie R. Hawkins examines how identity is formed and shaped by internal and external forces. He investigates collective memory and the stories told to each succeeding generation about the lives of the preceding generations. But most of all, this book is about belonging.

Using the generational time frames established by the Pew Research Center, Hawkins proposes six new generational categories rooted in the Black experience: the New Negro, Motown, Black Power, Hip-Hop, #BlackLivesMatter, and Obama generations. He emphasizes the need for reexamination in distinguishing generational uniqueness with attention to disparate, nondominant groups. Given the history of racial and cultural discrimination against Blacks in the United States, such an examination of the ways in which Black life has taken its own unique shape among generations offers new ways to understand the transition in identity adopted by Blacks. Hawkins examines the historical contexts that shaped each generation and the general attitudes and perceptions of each generation as influenced by the cultural, political, and racial environment of the nation. Throughout, there is a unique focus on Black protest. With its attention to each generation of Blacks, The Shaping of Black Identities speaks to this active, liberative, and distinct historical attempt to define the self in the pivotal and ongoing search for meaning.