New Books in African American Studies

“The poor, of whatever color, do not trust the law and certainly have no reason to, and God knows we didn't. ‘If you must call a cop,’ we said in those days, ‘for God’s sake, make sure it's a white one.’ We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder—on your head—to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other n******.” James Baldwin (1967)

Professor and journalist Steven Thrasher, author of the critically acclaimed The Viral Underclass (one of Kirkus Reviews best books of 2022), explores in The Overseer Class: A Manifesto (Amistad, 2026) what happens when members of historically minoritized groups are selected for high-visibility positions of power within existing institutions—law enforcement, academia, the military, for profit and not-for-profit corporations, and government—under the conditions of a kind of Faustian bargain.

This is a conversation, and a book, not to be missed.

You can find author Steven Thrasher on Bluesky and Instagram.

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Historian Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2026) recounts the 1984 New York City subway shooting in which Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers—Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur—and became both a fugitive and, later, a celebrated vigilante figure for many Americans frustrated by the social and economic tensions of the Reagan era. The book examines how media outlets like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and later Fox News fueled public fear and anger, transforming Goetz into a hero while casting his victims as villains. Using archival materials and legal records, Thompson revisits the shooting’s lasting impact and argues that it marked a pivotal moment in modern American politics, media, and racial attitudes.

Dr. N'Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University.
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Justin Randolph, assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University, joins Michael Stauch to discuss Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim Crow Countryside (UNC Press, 2026), his new book on policing in Jim Crow Mississippi, told through the lens of that state’s highway patrol. Using oral history and a wide range of archival sources, Randolph narrates efforts by elites in Mississippi to modernize the police while maintaining social hierarchies, as well as efforts on the part of Black Mississippians to envision a world without police.

Highlights include:

What a focus on state-level policing adds to our understanding of policing;

How the founding of the Mississippi highway patrol brought together various forms of policing in the Southwest, including the Texas rangers;

A surprisingly robust discussion of cows, including Mississippi’s economic transformation to a center of cattle raising and the rise of cattlemen’s “Massive Resistance” in the 1950s;

What Nina Simone revealed about policing in Mississippi, and the myth of Southern exceptionalism, in her song “Mississippi Goddam.”

Guest: Justin Randolph is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University, and his other research projects include histories of police desegregation, rural debt peonage, the Taser, and 9-1-1. His writing has appeared in scholarly outlets like the Journal of Southern History and Southern Cultures. He has also written for popular outlets such as The Washington Post, The Mississippi Encyclopedia, and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. He has received an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship and prizes from both the Southern Historical Association and Agricultural History Society.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.
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The black power movement helped redefine African Americans' identity and establish a new racial consciousness in the 1960s. As an influential political force, this movement in turn spawned the academic discipline known as Black Studies. Today there are more than a hundred Black Studies degree programs in the United States, many of them located in America’s elite research institutions. In From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (JHU Press, 2010), Fabio Rojas explores how this radical social movement evolved into a recognized academic discipline.

Rojas traces the evolution of Black Studies over more than three decades, beginning with its origins in black nationalist politics. His account includes the 1968 Third World Strike at San Francisco State College, the Ford Foundation’s attempts to shape the field, and a description of Black Studies programs at various American universities. His statistical analyses of protest data illuminate how violent and nonviolent protests influenced the establishment of Black Studies programs. Integrating personal interviews and newly discovered archival material, Rojas documents how social activism can bring about organizational change.

Shedding light on the black power movement, Black Studies programs, and American higher education, this historical analysis reveals how radical politics are assimilated into the university system.

Interview covers the evolution of Black Studies as a subject area and discipline, the historical role of philanthropy in funding and supporting Black Studies, the comparative existence and need of knowledge production coming from Black Studies think tanks and research centers and institutes, and the State of Black Studies in the 21st Century.
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Starting in the 1880s, Black performers, and those invested in telling stories centering Black people, attempted to counter the dehumanizing and harmful stereotypes used to portray Black characters. Shows began touting “All Colored Revues” to indicate that a cast was made up of actual Black performers rather than white people in blackface, and that these spectacles aimed to build stories around the perception of Black experiences. Although these performances were sometimes flawed, and even overly prejudiced, they represented a significant form of Black American cultural development and expression.

Since theatrical performances were rarely recorded, and many of the movies that featured all Black casts are now considered “lost films,” films for which no copy is known to survive, advertising posters often provide the only remaining evidence of the most important productions featuring Black performers between the 1870s and 1940s. These posters, and the historic innovations of playwrights, composers, directors, producers, and the Black performers behind them, are the subjects of the exhibition, Act Black: Posters From Black American Stage and Screen, curated by our guest for this episode, Assistant Curator of Collections at New York City’s Poster House museum, Es-pranza Humphrey.

Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen is on view at Poster House through September 6, 2026. Exhibition resources are also available via the Bloomberg Connects app until September 6, and at the Poster House online exhibition archive thereafter.

Es-pranza’s recommended reading list is available at the Additions to the Archive Substack.

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