Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

The Tuskegee Student Uprising begins and ends with students shutting down Alabama's Tuskegee Institute campus in 1968. Renamed Tuskegee University in 1984, the Institute was founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington, an advocate of Black self-help and accommodation of white supremacy, who once told his students, "This is not a college" (p. 31). Jones (New York Public Library) offers the rich, long backstory of the student protests at Tuskegee dating back to 1896, and details a range of issues that exploded in 1968 at the height of the Black Power era. Jones bases his research solidly on archival collections and oral history interviews, and "builds on historical scholarship that emphasizes continuity between civil rights and Black Power" (p. 5). More than an institutional history, this book "illuminates the southern roots of the broader Black Power movement" (p. 2), which Jones argues "stood for an expansive conception of democracy" (p. 5) that ultimately helped provoke "a split among white southerners [and] cracked the 'solid South'..." (p. 88). Tuskegee students were at the epicenter of local and statewide civil rights struggles and national student HBCU reform campaigns. A thought-provoking, compelling, nuanced, and highly accessible reading for all levels.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

While faculty retention is extensively discussed in higher education, few scholarly manuscripts focus exclusively on its intersection with race. Even though pipeline issues and microaggressions have been researched by many DEI scholars, there have been scant research articles highlighting the lived experiences of Black faculty. This makes We're Not OK a crucial read that will fill the gap in the current literature and discourses taking place in the field of higher education. The book comprises both review and original research articles as well as personal narratives about the journey through academia, from being Black students to becoming faculty, mental wellness, and resistance strategies. Compared to the authors' proposed institutional policies and actions, the individual strategies proposed here may provoke more in-depth and fresher discussions. For example, some particularly insightful perspectives delve into the experiences of Black faculty and adult returning students; masking behaviors in classrooms; virtual learning and Zoom; and the intersections of class, race, and gender. Just as the collection discusses "speaking truth to power" as one of Black women faculty's strategies of resistance, the book itself is a bold act of defiance to oppressions.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Warren (public policy and public affairs, Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston) charts the achievements of the movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, beginning in the late 1990s and reaching national visibility in the 2010s. Originating with African American parents' and community organizers' direct participation in Mississippi, the movement was unique in that various local organizations began successfully "nationalizing local struggles," challenging the dominant model of Washington-based professional advocacy. Interweaving statistics with in-depth interviews and observations, Warren details how these grassroots coalitions were on the forefront, centering discussions of educational equity in racial analysis and creating a democratic model where local struggles inform national movements and national movements lift up community organizers' work. Like Michelle Alexander's comprehensive analysis of mass incarceration in The New Jim Crow (CH, Nov'10, 48-1766), this volume thoroughly analyzes the movement to end the school-to-prison pipeline. Integrating discussions of national movements, community organizing, and white supremacy using community-engaged scholarship, Warren demonstrates the deliberate pushout of Black and brown children. Responding to this, these relationship-focused organizations have won district-wide policy changes, federal legislation, and other concrete gains like police-free schools, the ending of exclusionary discipline, and the implementation of restorative justice practices. This book offers detailed lessons for community activists, social justice researchers, and college students.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.