Description: Despite black gains in modern America, racism's end is not yet in sight. Singh asks what happened to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the 20th century.
Brief description: Nikhil Pal Singh is Visiting Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History Director of the Program in American Studies at New York University.
Review Quotes: Black Is a Country is a beautifully, written, elegantly argued, and exhaustively researched study of the links between African American social movements and new ways of knowing. From his skilled exegesis of 1930s writings by W. E. B. Du Bois through provocative arguments about the prominence of the Black Panther Party during the 1960s to his sophisticated understanding of the limits of both multiculturalism and 'color blind' interchangeability, Singh presents challenging, original, and persuasive interpretations of topics that are much discussed but little understood. This is a splendid book, one that will be widely read, frequently taught, and often cited.--George Lipsitz, University of California, Santa Cruz