Kimberley L. Phillips – författare

Langston Hughes called it "a great dark tide from the South": the unprecedented influx of blacks into Cleveland that gave the city the nickname "Alabama North." Kimberley L. Phillips reveals the breadth of working class black experiences and activities in Cleveland and the extent to which these were shaped by traditions and values brought from the South. Migrants' moves north established complex networks of kin and friends and infused Cleveland with a highly visible southern African American culture. Phillips examines the variety of black fraternal, benevolent, social, and church-based organizations that working class migrants created and demonstrates how these groups prepared the way for new forms of individual and collective activism in workplaces and the city. Giving special consideration to the experiences of working class black women, AlabamaNorth reveals how migrants' expressions of tradition and community gave them a new consciousness of themselves as organized workers and created the underpinning for new forms of black labor activism.

This book examines the century-long migration of African Americans who moved within the South after the Civil War and then left to settle permanently in other regions, irrevocably altering the political, social, and cultural history of the United States; and considers these movements within the broader historical, political, and cultural context of the African Diaspora.Daily Life during African American Migrations focuses attention to the everyday social, cultural, and political lives of migrants in the United States as they established communities far away from their former homes. This book examines blacks' labor and urban experiences, social and political activism, and cultural and communal identities, while also considering the specificity of African Americans' migration as part of their long struggle for freedom and equality.The author merges information from black migration studies, which focus on the internal movement of African American people in the United States, with African Diaspora studies, which consider peoples of African descent who have settled far from their native homes—either voluntarily or through duress—to document how these immigrants and their children create new communities while maintaining cultural connections with Africa. The stories of the nine million African Americans who collectively left the South between 1865 and 1965—and the millions more who left the Caribbean and Africa—not only document this long history of migration, but also present compelling human drama.

African Americans' long campaign for ""the right to fight"" forced Harry Truman to issue his 1948 executive order calling for equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. In War! What Is It Good For?, Kimberley Phillips examines how blacks' participation in the nation's wars after Truman's order and their protracted struggles for equal citizenship galvanised a vibrant antiwar activism that reshaped their struggles for freedom. Using an array of sources--from newspapers and government documents to literature, music, and film--and tracing the period from World War II to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Phillips considers how federal policies that desegregated the military also maintained racial, gender, and economic inequalities. Since 1945, the nation's need for military labour, blacks' unequal access to employment, and discriminatory draft policies have forced black men into the military at disproportionate rates. While mainstream civil rights leaders considered the integration of the military to be a civil rights success, many black soldiers, veterans, and antiwar activists perceived war as inimical to their struggles for economic and racial justice and sought to reshape the civil rights movement into an antiwar black freedom movement. Since the Vietnam War, Phillips argues, many African Americans have questioned linking militarism and war to their concepts of citizenship, equality, and freedom.