The Black President - by Claude A Clegg (Hardcover)

About the Book

Combining lively prose with a balanced, nonpartisan portrait of Obama's successes and failures, The Black President will be required reading not only for historians, politics junkies, and Obama fans but for anyone seeking to understand America's contemporary struggles with inequality, prejudice, and fear.

Book Synopsis

The first sweeping, legacy-defining history of the entire Obama presidency.

Finalist of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Biography & Autobiography by the Association of American Publishers

In The Black President, the first interpretative, grand-narrative history of Barack Obama's presidency in its entirety, Claude A. Clegg III situates the former president in his dynamic, inspirational, yet contentious political context. He captures the America that made Obama's White House years possible, while insightfully rendering the America that resolutely resisted the idea of a Black chief executive, thus making conceivable the ascent of the most unlikely of his successors.

In elucidating the Obama moment in American politics and culture, this book is also, at its core, a sweeping exploration of the Obama presidency's historical environment, impact, and meaning for African Americans--the tens of millions of people from every walk of life who collectively were his staunchest group of supporters and who most starkly experienced both the euphoric triumphs and dispiriting shortcomings of his years in office. In Obama's own words, his White House years were "the best of times and worst of times" for Black America. Clegg is vitally concerned with the veracity of this claim, along with how Obama engaged the aspirations, struggles, and disappointments of his most loyal constituency and how representative segments of Black America engaged, experienced, and interpreted his historic presidency.

Clegg draws on an expansive archive of materials, including government records and reports, interviews, speeches, memoirs, and insider accounts, in order to examine Obama's complicated upbringing and early political ambitions, his delicate navigation of matters of race, the nature and impacts of his administration's policies and politics, the inspired but also carefully choreographed symbolism of his presidency (and Michelle Obama's role), and the spectrum of allies and enemies that he made along the way. The successes and the aspirations of the Obama era, Clegg argues, are explicitly connected to our current racist, toxic political discourse. Combining lively prose with a balanced, nonpartisan portrait of Obama's successes and failures, The Black President will be required reading not only for historians, politics junkies, and Obama fans but also for anyone seeking to understand America's contemporary struggles with inequality, prejudice, and fear.

Review Quotes

The Black President: Hope and fury in the age of Obama by Claude A. Clegg III is an impressive attempt to gauge how well the former president performed in that impossible job.... This thoughtful, even-handed, highly useful book looks at the entire span of the forty-fourth US presidency.

--Clifford Thompson "The Times Literary Supplement"

. . . a gracefully written, scrupulously balanced and quite satisfying account of what Obama meant for Black Americans.

-- "The New York Times Book Review"

A brilliant book.

--Dorothy V. Smith, M. Phil, PhD "African & Asian Studies Journal of The Netherlands"

A scholarly and well-written book that considers what the Obama presidency did for Black Americans. Professor Clegg describes very eloquently the glamour and hope of the Obama presidency while assessing the accomplishments and domestic failures beneath it.

--Vince Cable

Clegg is a compelling writer with an understated wit. His account is comprehensive and judicious.

--Daniel Geary "The Irish Times"

About the Author

Claude A. Clegg III is the Lyle V. Jones Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad and Troubled Ground: A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New South.