This issue of the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race is dedicated to the living memory and many contributions of distinguished historian John Hope Franklin. Writing in his autobiography Mirror to America, Franklin said that:

In the concluding line of his opening note to Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois, wrote “I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience” (1934[2007], p. xliii). Doing so was an intellectually courageous step at the time Du Bois wrote. Jim Crow strictures, after all, were almost fully institutionalized across the South by that time and larger cultural motifs stressing redemption and reconciliation were steadily undoing the meager steps toward uplift and equality for African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Enormous progress notwithstanding, we know that great challenges of enduring inequality and persistent cultural racism remain in our time. The spirit of this declaration and the a priori intellectual posture it embraces have, quite fittingly then, animated this journal from our inception.

Since meeting him three decades ago, John Hope Franklin has served as my best model for what a professional historian should be. Even as a graduate student, his writings were my beacon—a standard of scholarly excellence and social relevance to which I could aspire. Having never taken a course in African American history before entering graduate school, his authoritative text, From Slavery to Freedom, provided an overview of what I wanted to study as well as a challenging reminder of how much I still needed to learn. W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King, Jr., had helped to remove the racial barriers that had once restricted the opportunities of Black scholars, but for my generation of Black students who entered graduate school in the late 1960s and 1970s, Franklin's writings demonstrated that we could use our training to produce scholarship that not only advanced our understanding of our racial past but also exhibited the highest standards of the historical profession.

This enthographically-based essay uses the case of Starbucks and the company's diversity policies and relationship with Magic Johnson to explore the desire for postracialism in post Civil Rights—post Martin Luther King, Jr. and post protest—mainstream America. Where did this desire come from and how did corporate America package this desire? What is the relationship between the selling of postracialism and voting for Barack Obama? What are the implications of these marketing moves? What do they tell us about business and about ourselves?

When I was twenty, I decided to hitchhike across the African continent, more or less following the line of the Equator, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. I packed only one pair of sandals and one pair of jeans to make room for the three hefty books I had decided to read from cover to cover: Don Quixote, Moby Dick, and From Slavery to Freedom, by John Hope Franklin. I read the latter—the black and white bound third edition of the book—while recovering from a severe bout of amoebic dysentery sailing down the Congo River. It became such a valued reference for me that I kept it, for years, in the bookcase at my bedside.

The concept of the “African Personality” was celebrated by the continent's first post-colonial President, Kwame Nkrumah. Sweeping to power in Ghana's first general election in 1951, Nkrumah and his Convention People's Party—inspired by Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois—espoused the doctrines of nationhood and self-reliance. The conceptual dimensions of Nkrumah's “African Personality” and the role he had in mind for Association Football (soccer) as an instrument of its expression are crucial points of this analysis. Here we attempt to locate Nkrumah's political ideal within the contemporary realities of the migration of young Ghanaian soccer talent, examining at the same time the socio-economic processes which act as “push” and “pull” mechanisms in the context of such migratory trends. While Nkrumah's “race-conscious,” pan-African forces have been utilized in the face of post-colonial identifications, soccer loyalties and objectives which are far more immediate and parochial in character continue to supersede those surrounding national or “racial” interests. Ghana's domestic game and national selection are riven by ethnic and regional hostilities while interlopers from Europe—some acting alone, others as emissaries for European soccer clubs—have laid down roots in Ghana, recognizing the nation as a breeding ground for talented, and comparatively cheap, young soccer talent. We argue that such inveterate ethno-regional rivalries, along with the conditions of neoliberal capitalism and its instrumental system of uneven geographical development, have provided entry points for the post-colonial forces so maligned by Nkrumah. Furthermore, we question the wisdom of notions of belonging based on bounded units such as “race” and attendant expressions of “race-consciousness.”

Mirror to America, the title John Hope Franklin gave his autobiography, implied that one might recognize important themes of the nation's life-story in his own. Be that as it may, it is indisputable that in his life one can find the main themes and plot lines of the professional study of African American history, both its origins and its maturation, in the twentieth century.

This work examines the strategies Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people use in Black environments to proclaim a gay identity that is simultaneous with a Black identity. It identifies three distinctive features of LGBT protest in Black communities. Black gay2 protest takes on a particular form when individuals are also trying to maintain solidarity with the racial group despite the threat of distancing that occurs as a result of their sexual minority status. Black sexual minorities who see their self-interests as linked to those of other Blacks use cultural references to connect their struggles to historical efforts for Black equality and draw from nationalist symbols and language to frame their political work. They believe that increasing their visibility in Black spaces will promote a greater understanding of gay sexuality as an identity status that can exist alongside, rather than in competition with, race. The findings of this research have implications for larger discussions of identity, protest, and gay sexuality in intraracial contexts.

Like many people, I knew John Hope Franklin long before we ever met. During an age when the disjuncture between public personal and private persona is usually jarring, part of the honor of being in his presence was the seamlessness between the man he presented himself to be and the man he was. Erudite and exacting yet gracious and generous in his writings and public appearances, Franklin brought those same virtues to the private gatherings I was privileged to witness and share with him.

Dawson (1994) submits Black linked fate is a major predictor of Black political behavior. This theory conjectures that the experiences of African Americans with race and racial discrimination in the United States unify their personal interests under a rubric of interests that are best for the Black racial group. With increasing Black ethnic diversity in the United States, however, it becomes important to ascertain how African Americans perceive linkages across Black ethnic groups. This study examines African Americans' linkages with West Indian and African peoples in the United States, referred to here as diasporic linked fate. The study tests the influence of parent-child, intra-racial socialization messages on these linkages. Results suggest that, while a majority of African Americans acknowledge Black linked fate, they distinguish these linkages based on ethnicity and have more tenuous linkages with West Indians and Africans in the United States. While intra-racial socialization messages offer some import in explaining perceived differences in Black ethnic groups' living experiences, more frequent experiences with racial discrimination, and membership in a Black organization offer more import in explaining diasporic linked fate.

Long before I had the pleasure of making his acquaintance in person, John Hope Franklin's writings were a vital presence in my academic life. His books were some of the earliest sign posts that I encountered when I first ventured into the new and unfamiliar territory of the historian. The Free Negro in North Carolina was critical to the framework of my first research paper in graduate school. The Militant South was required reading in C. Vann Woodward's reading and discussion seminar in Southern history. I turned to Reconstruction: After the Civil War hoping that it would help me put limits to the deepening puzzles of Reconstruction. But perhaps none of these works—important as they are—has influenced the historical imagination as profoundly as what is undoubtedly his most widely read work, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, first published in 1947. It kept me company over an anxious winter when I prepared for oral exams. I adopted its fifth edition as required reading in the first course that I taught as a graduate student. Known to general and academic readers alike, From Slavery to Freedom does not recount the progressive unfolding of an emancipatory project, even though its title early named what has become a theme central to analysis of the historical experiences of African Americans in the United States. Instead, it locates the emergence of a distinctively brittle racial regime in the United States within the complex contradictions of modern freedom that were set in motion by Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. “It was forces let loose by the Renaissance and the Commercial Revolution,” he writes, “that created the modern institution of slavery and the slave trade” (Franklin 1947, p. 43; 1980, p. 31). There are thus no postwar echoes of NATO triumphalism in Franklin's conception of Atlantic modernity:

This paper argues that researchers may be misgauging family resources by focusing narrowly on the nuclear family when measuring these resources. While social scientists have long been interested in the ways that families' material resources affect their ability to provide for their offspring, the traditional measures of family resources have emphasized parents' income and parents' wealth, although the interest in the latter is relatively new (Conley 2009 [1999]; Haveman et al., 2001; Oliver and Shapiro, 2006 [1995]). This paper attempts to shift the focus to the extended family, and it uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Child Development Supplement (CDS) to paint a portrait of the volume of wealth that is available in the grandparent generation of a child's family tree. After theorizing about the potential ways that grandparent wealth can affect children's life chances, the research shows that there are substantial differences in extended-family wealth by race. The Black/White wealth ratio is on the order of 0.11 in the grandparent generation at the median, which indicates that the typical Black child has grandparents with only about eleven cents of wealth for every dollar that the grandparents of the typical White child possess. Some implications of this wealth gap for children and society are discussed.

As readers of the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race are well aware, this journal aims to be the principal journal for social scientists exploring the intersection of race, ethnicity and culture. As book review editor it gives me great pleasure to introduce a new feature of the journal to our readers. From time to time in the State of the Discourse section of the Du Bois Review we will spotlight multiple reviews of a single book. In focusing intently on a single contribution our purpose is to highlight significant pieces of scholarship that provide novel conceptual and/or empirical analysis of ethnoracial dynamics in society. We are especially interested in bringing to the attention of our readers books that provide alternative frameworks and/or set new and daring intellectual agendas for the study of race and ethnicity.

Do not miss Robin D. G. Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, for it will stand as the definitive biography of the great American composer and pianist for many years to come. What distinguishes Kelley's treatment of Monk's complicated and enigmatic life is the sheer depth and breadth of primary research, including, for the first time, the active cooperation and involvement of Thelonious Monk's family. In his acknowledgments, Kelley describes a long process of convincing Thelonious Monk, III to grant permission culminating in a six-hour meeting in which his knowledge, credentials, and commitment were thoroughly tested and challenged. Once he had secured “Toot's” blessings, as well as that of his wife Gale and brother-in-law Peter Grain, Kelley was introduced to Nellie Monk, Thelonious Monk's wife, and a wide range of family and friends who shared their memories and personal archives of photos, recordings, and papers. This is not an authorized biography, however, since Thelonious Monk, Jr. never demanded the right to see drafts or dictate the content. Rather Kelley was admonished to “dig deep and tell the truth.”

At the conclusion of Barack Obama's State of the Union address on January 27, 2010, MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews lavished praise on the president, infamously gushing, “It's interesting: he is post-racial, by appearances. I forgot he was Black tonight for an hour.” According to many, this is the greatest of all Obama's super-powers; the ability to sweet-talk the public into a euphoric political hallucination, transporting followers into a world where he is cleansed of the stain of Blackness and the citizenry lives in racial harmony. If this is true, White voters, including Matthews, forgot Obama was Black long before the State the Union. By many accounts, this post-racial amnesia, rather than the nuts and bolts of voter mobilization, fundraising, message-crafting, or opponents' mistakes, ultimately resulted in Obama's victory in the 2008 election.

Among the advanced industrial nations, the United States has the most unequal distribution of income. Douglas Massey emphasizes that the purchasing power of households in the top five percent of the income distribution rose sharply from the early 1980s to 2000 while the purchasing power of those in the bottom twenty percent of the income distribution remained constant—proving a much larger economic gap between rich and poor households. This book summarizes an extensive array of studies from a variety of disciplines and cogently describes federal policies that promoted income disparity. Many sections of this book provide lucid information about the changing status of women, shifts in racial disparities, and the consequences of immigration from Mexico. It is not, however, a definitive book about inequality in this nation.

During the historic 2008 election, media pundits from far and wide proclaimed that Barack Obama was coming to power in a new post-racial era. The most enduring divide in American politics had apparently become passé, and the racial cleavages that have defined the social, economic, and political landscape since the country's founding somehow had become transformed. The actual election results did little to support this point of view, however. Approximately ninety-five percent of Black Americans supported Obama, as did approximately two-thirds of Latinos and Asian Americans. White Americans did not reject Obama out of hand, with forty-three percent supporting him, but race was not inconsequential to the vote (Pasek et al., 2009). Race clearly mattered in 2008, as it does now.

“Race is the modality in which class is lived” (Hall et al., 1978, p. 394). That's how Stuart Hall evocatively put it, emphasizing the extent to which class relations can actually and substantively “function as race relations” for working class Black Brits (and others). He was arguing, amongst other things, against the neatly reified distinctions scholars traditionally policed between class-based analyses and racial ones.