Loïc Wacquant offers a fascinating piece of urban ethnography in Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. It is his account of his three-year experience while a sociology graduate student at the University of Chicago of participating in the Woodlawn Boys and Girls Club, a boxing club for young men who are serious about …
Alford Young on race and sociology
Alford Young is professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and an expert on the life experience of inner-city African-American men. He is also chair of the department of sociology at Michigan. His 2006 book, The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances, is based on several …
Urban futures
I recently spent a half day visiting Detroit with some very perceptive university colleagues. We visited the university's center on Woodward Avenue, the Riverfront Conservancy, and the Madison Building -- all places where exciting signs of change are underway. Along the way we heard a lot of enthusiasm about the progress Detroit is making: more …
Urban marginality
If you live within the reach of a major American city -- and most Americans do -- then you know what "marginality" is. It is the sizable sub-population of metropolitan America of young men and women who have been locked out of what we think of as the indispensable mechanisms of social mobility: decent education, …
Remembering the civil rights struggle
We celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on January 21. Here is a curated set of film clips that serve to recall the major challenges of inequality, segregation, and violence that faced the African American community in the Jim Crow racial system of the 1940s and 1950s. These videos capture some of …
Deacons for Defense
Most of the story we remember of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s centers around the philosophy of non-violence espoused by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the major civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC. A few historians give emphasis to a very different part of the movement in the …
Voter registration, Mississippi, 1960
One of the most important and hard-fought dimensions of the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s was the issue of voting rights. The Jim Crow South had made democratic participation almost impossible for black citizens throughout the first half of the century in spite of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, …
Social sciences and the Civil Rights movement
The American Civil Rights movement was (and is) a complex, extended series of events, actions, and interactions in the United States between roughly 1950 and 1970. (It of course has roots that extend backwards in time through the Civil War and centuries of slavery, and it has consequences that reverberate in American society to the …
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How Jim Crow worked
Understanding history is partly about understanding some of the dry facts of social sequence and cause and effect in the making of various periods of historical change. But it is also about coming to a more visceral understanding of the human realities of the events that historians describe. This is particularly true in the history …
Civil Rights history
What is involved in assembling the history of a complicated period like the US civil rights movement? This is a difficult question for any complex historical phenomenon, and there are many choices that the historian is forced to make. When should we start the story? End of the Civil War Reconstruction Jim Crow period 1950s …
Understanding Society 