Upsetting the Apple Cart: Black-Latino Coalitions in New York City from Protest to Public Office (Columbia History of Urban Life) - Hardcover

Opie, Frederick Douglass

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231149409 ISBN 13: 9780231149402

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Upsetting the Apple Cart surveys the history of black-Latino coalitions in New York City from 1959 to 1989. In those years, African American and Latino Progressives organized, mobilized, and transformed neighborhoods, workplaces, university campuses, and representative government in the nation's urban capital.

Upsetting the Apple Cart makes new contributions to our understanding of protest movements and strikes in the 1960s and 1970s and reveals the little-known role of left-of-center organizations in New York City politics as well as the influence of Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns on city elections. Frederick Douglass Opie provides a social history of black and Latino working-class collaboration in shared living and work spaces and exposes racist suspicion and divisive jockeying among elites in political clubs and anti-poverty programs. He ultimately offers a different interpretation of the story of the labor, student, civil rights, and Black Power movements than has been traditionally told. His work highlights both the largely unknown agents of historic change in the city and the noted politicians, political strategists, and union leaders whose careers were built on this history. Also, as Napoleon said, "An army marches on its stomach," and Opie's history equally delves into the role that food plays in social movements, with representative recipes from the American South and the Caribbean included throughout.

About this title

About the Author:

Frederick Douglass Opie is a professor of history and foodways at Babson College. He is the author of Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America and Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala, 1882–1923, and the editor of the history and food blog www.foodasalens.com.

Review:

Frederick Douglass Opie makes a valuable contribution to the study of the mid- to late-twentieth-century history of New York City. His book provides the reader with a detailed, almost blow-by-blow account of the various attempts by African Americans and Latinos to find a common political cause and build lasting coalitions. (Xavier F. Totti, Lehman College, editor of CENTRO Journal)

Upsetting the Apple Cart outlines for the first time an important part of American working-class history and race relations. Frederick Douglass Opie's narrative delineates how black and Latino coalitions supported by organized labor can become a formula to attain power. He focuses on how these coalitions work and how they become contentious based on mutual suspicions. Provocative and engaging. (Miguel "Mickey" Melendez, author of We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords)

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0231149409
• ISBN 13: 9780231149402
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312