Martha Biondi
· Director of Graduate Studies, Lorraine H. Morton Professor of Black Studies; Professor of HistoryNorthwestern University · Sociology
Active 1995–2022
About
Martha Biondi is the Lorraine H. Morton Professor of Black Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on 20th Century African American History, with particular emphasis on social movements, politics, labor, gender, cities, and international affairs. Biondi is the author of several notable works, including 'The Black Revolution on Campus,' which describes the protests and reforms of Black students in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and explores the impact of these movements on higher education and academic knowledge. Her scholarship has received multiple awards, such as the 2012 National Book Award from the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, the Wesley-Logan Prize, and the Myers Outstanding Book Award. She is also working on a forthcoming book titled 'We Are Internationalists,' which examines the transnational anti-apartheid and anti-colonial solidarity movement through the organizing work of Prexy Nesbitt. Biondi's research and publications contribute significantly to the understanding of African American history, social activism, and the development of Black Studies as an academic discipline.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Art
- Geography
- History
- Aesthetics
Selected publications
New York University Press eBooks · 2022
- Geography
This book had its origins in a chance encounter on a mid-Manhattan street in the late summer of 1993.I had just left the offices of the radio station WBAI when I bumped into David Du Bois, whom I had known as a result of my earlier research on the life of W. E. B. Du Bois
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-11-20
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe Rise of the Reparations Movement
Duke University Press eBooks · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Political Science
- History
2019-12-31
paratext1st authorCorrespondingColumbia University Press eBooks · 2019-06-13
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe Journal of African American History · 2019-01-01
article1st authorCorrespondingPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsChristopher M. Tinson, Radical Intellect: Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 346. $90.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).Martha BiondiMartha BiondiNorthwestern University Search for more articles by this author Northwestern UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreChristopher M. Tinson has written an engaging examination of an important organ of black radical thought and debate in the 1960s. Published for a decade beginning in 1961, the Liberator was initially produced by the Liberation Committee for Africa (LCA), a small group led by Daniel H. Watts, an architect-turned-militant. While the journal would come to focus on the Black Liberation movement in the United States, it began as an organ to support the fight against European colonialism and American imperialism in Africa. Even though a chief aim of the Red Scare had been to stamp out black radicalism, especially its solidarity with the African liberation struggles, the LCA and Liberator reveal that such repression, even if successful in dismantling organizations or incarcerating individuals, cannot fully extinguish ideas, analyses, and aspirations. The Liberator bridged two eras, attracting veterans of the old Left with younger radicals and Black Nationalists. But in contrast to Freedomways, it embraced Black Nationalism and assailed mainstream civil rights leadership. Its readers and writers greatly admired Malcolm X and aspired to continue and deepen the political trajectory he was creating at the time of his assassination. As Tinson perceptively notes, many historians have used the Liberator as a source, but his is the first scholarly treatment of the journal itself.Based in New York City, the Liberator fostered a public sphere of Black Nationalist and black left thought and debate well before the popularization of the term “Black power” and well before the growth of revolutionary Black Nationalism in organizations such as the Black Panther Party. Because New York City was an early site of civil rights liberalism, it was also a place where many came to see its betrayal or insufficiency. Well before passage of the federal Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, many activists in northern and western cities such as New York had become quite skeptical of the promises made by the northern Democratic Party, indeed of the cultural project of integration itself. The pages of the Liberator remind us that a major feature of the Black Liberation movement was the search for new identities and forms. And this search was expansive, covering politics, international affairs, culture, and gender relations. Tinson has organized the book’s chapters thematically, although they roughly track a chronological development. His chapter on black women’s intellectual and political activism and contribution to the making of the Liberator continues the broader scholarly project of revising our understanding of the gendered world of Black Nationalism as well as illuminating the deep social roots of black feminism. Tinson argues that black women’s writings in the early 1960s anticipate key contours of the more assertive feminism that arose a decade later. Indeed, a few of the essays and writers that appeared in Toni Cade Bambara’s iconic and influential 1970 anthology The Black Woman first appeared in the pages of the Liberator.Radical Intellect includes many well-known intellectuals, artists, and activists, but a signal contribution of the book is Tinson’s attention to lesser known but equally fascinating figures. Hortense “Tee” Sie Beveridge, an African American woman whose white husband Pete was the production editor of the Liberator in the early 1960s, became a successful film editor while forging a dynamic activist life doing a range of solidarity work with African students and organizers. Not a writer or public figure, her behind-the-scenes work at the LCA, Liberator, Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and earlier work with the Council on African Affairs, has been forgotten. Charles E. Wilson is another underappreciated participant in forging a new black politics through print journalism in the 1960s. The author of thirty articles and book reviews, this son of Barbadian immigrants, and activist in the Brooklyn NAACP, was deeply influenced by the writings and philosophy of Franz Fanon. Tinson’s final chapter outlining the Liberator’s role in the Black Arts Movement offers fresh appraisals of the political voice of many artist-activists and cultural critics, most notably Larry Neal and Askia Toure.Given what we know about the targets of McCarthyism and COINTELPRO, one imagines that the US government endeavored to surveil if not disrupt the LCA and the broader collective around the Liberator. Tinson does not spend much time on this question, though he acknowledges that rumors had briefly circulated about the professional journalist and writer Richard Gibson, a member of the Liberator’s editorial board who lived abroad for much of the postwar era. Gibson’s name has recently surfaced in media accounts (Newsweek) regarding the release of previously classified CIA files related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Gibson has been identified as a paid source for the CIA for several years beginning in the mid-1960s. Future historians will have to judge how this covert work shaped his role in the movement and affected the organizations and debates he sought to influence.Tinson makes the important observation that the Liberator was a site of Black Studies before Black Studies was incorporated in the university. This point is worth amplifying. Indeed, the book opens a window on a rich culture of political debate and intellectual exchange that is likely what many community-based intellectuals had in mind when they entered the university to build Black Studies. The world the Liberator made, one that emphasized the creation of new institutions, new identities, new political strategies and ideas, is precisely the milieu that animated the early Black Studies movement. It’s no accident that many of the people who produced or wrote for the Liberator later joined Black Studies programs, including Daniel Watts himself, and the Panamanian-born scholar-activist Carlos Russell. Tinson interviewed or corresponded with several persons in the book, but unfortunately not Watts, who remains a somewhat elusive figure. Radical Intellect will hopefully find its place on many syllabi and reading lists in the years to come. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 1Winter 2019 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/701089 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
The Sixties · 2018-07-03
article1st authorCorresponding2017-01-01
articleAlternative imaginaries on US campuses
2017-12-12
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter examines how the victories of the US Black student movement of the late 1960s were incomplete and vulnerable to repeal during the subsequent rise of neoliberalism. The creation of affirmative action and Black Studies were key victories, but the students had generated more radical visions of higher education. This essay revisits those more radical visions, and traces their relevance for Black student organising in the 21st century. As ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ became neoliberal buzzwords, they displaced the alternative imaginaries of campus radicals. Black student activists of the late 1960s and early 1970s challenged sites of power to redefine governance, and to redefine access to higher education as a right rather than a privilege. Their struggles contain meaningful insights for contemporary student activists who, burdened by unprecedented debt, and disciplined by the language of meritocracy and austerity, face continuing assaults on their humanity. A round of 40th anniversary commemorations of Black student protests on many US campuses became critical opportunities to revisit and reclaim the legacy of the Black Power-era student revolts. These reunions often led to oral history projects and other documentation that have triggered new appraisals and appreciations of the era for student activists today.
The Long and Devastating Reach of Federal Crime-Control Policies
Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas · 2017-12-01 · 1 citations
article1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 25 shared
Moon Ho
Columbia University
- 25 shared
Jim Gregory
Northwest University
- 25 shared
Stephanie Smallwood
- 25 shared
Margaret Levi
Stanford University
- 25 shared
Michael Honey
University of Washington Tacoma
- 25 shared
Bruce Burgett
Northwestern University
- 25 shared
Bill Fletcher
New York University
- 25 shared
M. McCann
Education
- 1992
Ph.D., American Studies
University of California, Berkeley
- 1988
M.A., American Studies
University of California, Berkeley
- 1985
B.A., American Studies
University of California, Santa Cruz
Awards & honors
- 2012 National Book Award from the Benjamin L. Hooks Institut…
- 2013 Wesley-Logan Prize from the AHA and the ASALH
- 2004 Myers Outstanding Book Award for To Stand and Fight: th…
- 2003 Thomas J.. Wilson Prize awarded to To Stand and Fight:…
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