Karen Ferguson – författare

When Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, Atlanta had the South's largest population of college-educated African Americans. The dictates of Jim Crow meant that these men and women were almost entirely excluded from public life, but as Karen Ferguson demonstrates, Roosevelt's New Deal opened unprecedented opportunities for black Atlantans struggling to achieve full citizenship. Black reformers, often working within federal agencies as social workers and administrators, saw the inclusion of African Americans in New Deal social welfare programs as a chance to prepare black Atlantans to take their rightful place in the political and social mainstream. They also worked to build a constituency they could mobilize for civil rights, in the process facilitating a shift from elite reform to the mass mobilization that marked the postwar black freedom struggle. Although these reformers' efforts were an essential prelude to civil rights activism, Ferguson argues that they also had lasting negative repercussions, embedded as they were in the politics of respectability. By attempting to impose bourgeois behavioral standards on the black community, elite reformers stratified it into those they determined deserving to participate in federal social welfare programs and those they consigned to remain at the margins of civic life. |Ferguson looks at how black reformers in Atlanta used New Deal federal programs to advance their struggle for citizenship--and how they used their authority as agents of the state to impose a bourgeois ""politics of respectability"" that effectively stratified the black community.

At first glance, the Ford Foundation and the black power movement would make an unlikely partnership. After the Second World War, the renowned Foundation was the largest philanthropic organization in the United States and was dedicated to projects of liberal reform. Black power ideology, which promoted self-determination over color-blind assimilation, was often characterized as radical and divisive. But Foundation president McGeorge Bundy chose to engage rather than confront black power's challenge to racial liberalism through an ambitious, long-term strategy to foster the "social development" of racial minorities. The Ford Foundation not only bankrolled but originated many of the black power era's hallmark legacies: community control of public schools, ghetto-based economic development initiatives, and race-specific arts and cultural organizations.In Top Down, Karen Ferguson explores the consequences of this counterintuitive and unequal relationship between the liberal establishment and black activists and their ideas. In essence, the white liberal effort to reforge a national consensus on race had the effect of remaking racial liberalism from the top down-a domestication of black power ideology that still flourishes in current racial politics. Ultimately, this new racial liberalism would help foster a black leadership class-including Barack Obama-while accommodating the intractable inequality that first drew the Ford Foundation to address the "race problem."

It started with a comment on social media, actually, that's not true, it had started long before then, but that comment led to a message, which led to several calls and ended with him driving his car into my house. Through the use of genuine text messages, I've opened up my life to show what I went through in the last two years, with an aggressive, lying, stealing, borderline alcoholic, sociopathic husband. I begin by taking you back to the start, where life was good, well, okay at least and as the story unfolds, you can see how not only his behaviour deteriorates, but how the drip drip effect led me to almost lose myself, in a painful and sometimes violent relationship.I show how you can move from a place where you hide your purse under your pillow, and go out with your passport in your handbag to a place of happiness, and I do this through the willingness to share my pain, my confusion and the struggles I went through in order to come out the other side. My Life with a Sociopath gives you access to the raw, unedited messages between me and my husband, which together with my honest commentary, provides an insight into psychological abuse. I hope that it may help those who find themselves in a similar situation and will be a voice for those who may have lost theirs.