Struggle on Their Minds - by Alex Zamalin (Hardcover)

About the Book

Struggle on Their Minds shows how the American political tradition have been continually challenged--and strengthened--by antiracist resistance, creating a rich legacy of African American thought. Alex Zamalin focuses on five activists across two centuries who fought to foreground slavery and racial injustice in American political discourse.

Book Synopsis

American political thought has been shaped by those who fought back against social inequality, economic exclusion, the denial of political representation, and slavery, the country's original sin. Yet too often the voices of African American resistance have been neglected, silenced, or forgotten. In this timely book, Alex Zamalin considers key moments of resistance to demonstrate its current and future necessity, focusing on five activists across two centuries who fought to foreground slavery and racial injustice in American political discourse. Struggle on Their Minds shows how the core values of the American political tradition have been continually challenged--and strengthened--by antiracist resistance, creating a rich legacy of African American political thought that is an invaluable component of contemporary struggles for racial justice.

Zamalin looks at the language and concepts put forward by the abolitionists David Walker and Frederick Douglass, the antilynching activist Ida B. Wells, the Black Panther Party organizer Huey Newton, and the prison abolitionist Angela Davis. Each helped revise and transform ideas about power, justice, community, action, and the role of emotion in political action. Their thought encouraged abolitionists to call for the eradication of slavery, black journalists to chastise American institutions for their indifference to lynching, and black radicals to police the police and to condemn racial injustice in the American prison system. Taken together, these movements pushed political theory forward, offering new language and concepts to sustain democracy in tense times. Struggle on Their Minds is a critical text for our contemporary moment, showing how the political thought that comes out of resistance can energize the practice of democratic citizenship and ultimately help address the prevailing problem of racial injustice.

Review Quotes

Zamalin...make[s] a significant contribution to contemporary political theory by demonstrating the importance of taking black thinkers seriously.--Justin Rose "Contemporary Political Theory "

Zamalin thoughtfully and concisely illustrates how his chosen writers reveal not only the paradoxes of resistance but also the inherent tensions within American democracy. Struggle on Their Minds will work well in undergraduate classrooms as a systematic deconstruction of the idea that America has arrived at a 'so-called postracial moment.' . . . He shows how Walker, Douglass, Wells, Newton, and Davis have radically explicated the inherent, continual, pervasive and pernicious commitment to white supremacy that runs throughout U.S. history.--Chernoh M. Sesay Jr. "Journal of American History "

Overall, the book offers an alternative view to American consensus theories on history, politics, and race. Excellent for American history, race, and political thought collections.--Choice

Struggle on Their Minds places Alex Zamalin at the forefront of scholars concerned with the political thought of African American activists. I can think of no reading more timely than this rich account of the centrality of black resistance to U.S. democracy and democratic citizenship.--Nick Bromell, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Fred Moten memorably wrote that the "history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist." Alex Zamalin reaffirms this assertion through exquisite examination of narratives of resistance--not merely protest--by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Huey Newton, and Angela Davis. Zamalin's deft treatise demonstrates how Afro-modern political thought refashions our fundamental understandings of resistance and the attendant ideals of democracy and freedom.--Neil Roberts, author of Freedom as Marronage, Williams College

In intellectually compelling and valuable ways, this book presents significant (but relatively neglected) figures in the canon of African American political theorizing and relates them both to broad idioms of American political thought and to our contemporary political conjuncture.--George Shulman, Professor of Political Science at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University

About the Author

Alex Zamalin is assistant professor of political science and director of the African American Studies Program at University of Detroit Mercy. He is the author of African American Political Thought and American Culture: The Nation's Struggle for Racial Justice (2015); Antiracism: An Introduction (2019); and Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (Columbia, 2019).