Nishani Frazier is associate professor of History at Miami University. She is the coeditor, with Manning Marable and John McMillan, of Freedom on My Mind: The Columbia Documentary History of the African American Experience.
"...the book corrects elements of national CORE's early history,
asserts the significant contributions of Cleveland CORE leaders,
and focuses attention on the economic strategies of the movement
with a new understanding about Black Power within CORE to give
insight into how CORE became one of the most dynamic civil rights
organizations in the Black Power era."
--Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, April 2017
"Both the book and Web site present important interpretations about
the relationship between core's local chapters and its national
office and the emergence and assessment of black power. Frazier's
work also raises interesting questions about the relationship
between scholars and historical actors and their respective roles
and obligations in the process of historical production. The
digital archive Harambee City does not resolve these
difficult--perhaps unresolvable--tensions, but its expansive vision
to engage scholars, activists, and other audiences is admirable and
much needed."
--Watson W. Jennison, The Journal of American History Metagraph,
June 2019
"Historian Frazier (Miami Univ.) uses extensive oral histories and
archival sources to provide a detailed account of the
mid-20th-century intermittent development of the Cleveland Congress
of Racial Equality (CORE). Supporting analysis of CORE's national
leadership frames the Cleveland story. Acknowledging both the
ideals put forth in organizational materials and the reality of
members' actions, she shows how conflicts over interracialism and
nonviolence played out at local and national levels. Frazier also
demonstrates the organization's dependency on individual leaders
(many of them women) and financial support. Her account joins those
of other scholars in tracing the historical development of black
power prior to 1966. In this case, black leadership that emphasized
self-determination emerged in Cleveland CORE in the early 1960s.
The chapter's wide-ranging struggles with school desegregation,
McDonald's, and the Ford Foundation illustrate the complexities of
the black freedom movement in the urban North. Particularly useful
is Frazier's examination of CORE's embrace of communal capitalism
as a foundation of economic development in the late 1960s."
Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and
above.
--Choice Reviews, October 2017
"Using archival sources and interviews, Frazier lays bare the ways
in which Black Nationalism appeared in much of CORE's early history
and how it aided the development of Black Power in the organization
by the 1960s. ... Black Studies scholars, social movement
historians, and historians of capitalism will find Harambee City a
welcomed addition to their fields."
--Dara Walker, The Black Scholar, January 2019
"Nishani Frazier has given us an important new story of the
Congress of Racial Equality, demonstrating what happens when we
center the history not on a bus full of Freedom Riders heading
South but with a group of Cleveland activists encountering
significant resistance to their direct action campaigns for racial
equity in jobs, housing, and schools in the Midwest. In the
process, Harambee City changes how we see the organization, the
racial limits of northern liberalism, and the diversity of Black
Power politics on the ground."--Jeanne Theoharis, author of The
Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks
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