Bro you’re speaking my language right now!! Those two books are absolutely highly slept-on and offer an abundance of important insights into our current political situation, particularly with respect to leftist thought and challenges in deteriorating cities with large black populations. Cedric would be the first to tell you Reed is one of his biggest influences along with Harold Cruse and maybe James Boggs.
The class with Cedric was seminar-style and we read one book every week. It was only me and two other students so we just chopped it up with him for like three hours every week. Dude is super cool. I still keep in contact with him. He actually just emailed me like two weeks ago about a job opportunity
The class basically covered the development of black political thought and action over the last century or so. I can’t remember every book we read but some of them were: Aldon Morris “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” Harold Cruse “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” a James Boggs reader, Preston Smith “Racial Democracy in the Black Meteopolis,” William Grimshaw “Bitter Fruit,” Adolph Reed “Stirrings in the Jug,” John Arena “Driven from New Orleans,” and Fredrick Harris “The Price of the Ticket.”
All the books were insightful in different ways. I probably liked the Reed and Arena books the most.
America needs a lib version of Fox News.imagine if obama used a deliberate misspelling like schitt to insult someone. imagine the blowback
trump has degraded the presidential office to the point where nobody will bat an eye about that tweet.
We already do, it is called observable reality.
Fam, YES. And what’s so crazy is I had no idea going into the class what I was in store for. I studied social work throughout school and this was an elective I took in the last semester of my PhD program. I hadn’t read any of his stuff or Reed’s or anything at that point. My perceptions of most of these issues from a scholarly perspective had been shaped by urban sociologists and historians—William Julius Wilson, Arnold Hirsch, Loic Wacquant, Massey and Denton, etc. Cedric’s class opened my mind up to a whole new set of perspectives rooted in political analysis. It didn’t take long for me to realize that dude was really smart and I was being given a golden opportunity. I definitely took advantage. I’m assuming you studied political science?
Fam, YES. And what’s so crazy is I had no idea going into the class what I was in store for. I studied social work throughout school and this was an elective I took in the last semester of my PhD program. I hadn’t read any of his stuff or Reed’s or anything at that point. My perceptions of most of these issues from a scholarly perspective had been shaped by urban sociologists and historians—William Julius Wilson, Arnold Hirsch, Loic Wacquant, Massey and Denton, etc. Cedric’s class opened my mind up to a whole new set of perspectives rooted in political analysis. It didn’t take long for me to realize that dude was really smart and I was being given a golden opportunity. I definitely took advantage. I’m assuming you studied political science?
I gotta check out Spence’s book. I’ve read some articles he’s written and it definitely seems like he’s cut from that Reed and Johnson cloth. Reed’s tome on DuBois is sitting on my bookshelf but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. The introduction to “Class Notes” is more insightful than many people’s entire career outputs
Man that must have been incredible to meet Adolph Reed and Harold Cruse. Those are some serious intellectual giants. There’s not many of those folks I’d be truly honored or excited to meet but they’d be on a short list. Mike Davis too.
