What I’m Reading These Days

A few weeks ago I made a post on the various literatures, sub-fields, and specialties that informed my book, American Power in the Netherlands. I suspect many non-historians don’t fully understand the extent of other scholarship upon which historians rely to tell their stories, the cumulative and accretional building that goes into any work of legitimate history.

The context—what practitioners call “historiography”—for my Lampkin biography is no less extensive. Our lives touch so many other lives in so many ways, and this richness produces endless lines of investigation by scholars endeavoring to capture these connections. This is why we have regional and local histories, political histories, cultural histories, social and sociological histories, gender histories, diplomatic and military histories, intellectual and ideological histories, material and technological histories, and so much more.

It is incredibly stimulating to engage with all these stories in the context of the Lampkin project. I had done the obligatory reading on the civil rights movement, suffrage, Jim Crow, and other topics back in graduate school. But there is a wealth of new material out there that informs the project. Much of it is academic history, but it’s also been inspiring to discover the breadth and quality of popular, non-academic history relevant to Daisy’s story.

​Here is just a sampling of what I am currently reading, have recently read, or am shortly planning to read to give substance to the Lampkin narrative:

​The first book I encountered is one of those popular histories, Mark Whitaker’s Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance. I continue to recommend this book enthusiastically on its own terms, but it’s also a model for what I hope my Lampkin biography achieves. It’s vibrant, exceptionally well-written, and presents a picture of a community. Whitaker gives short-shrift to Lampkin, but as I’ll discuss later on the blog, this gives me an opportunity to correct the record. Such corrections, amplifications, and new points of emphases are why history writing—“historiography”—is cumulative and accretional.

Regional histories are important, and one of the great joys is to be able to learn about Pittsburgh generally, and histories of black Pittsburgh in particular. On this latter score the work of Joe Trotter, Laurence Glasco, Rob Ruck, and Adam Lee Cilli, among others, has been particularly important. Sports fans will love Ruck’s book on the Negro Leagues (which had important connections to Daisy’s Hill district) Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh; any book with Satchell Paige as a central character has to be a lively book. The esteemed historian Joe Trotter has written a host of books on black Pittsburgh and the wider region; his Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh since World War II (with Jared Day) is a detailed sociological account. Laurence Glasco has written books on black Pittsburgh and the New Deal. He has a new biography out, August Wilson’s American Century: Life as Art, about the great Pittsburgh writer who came from, and has written about, the Hill community in which he grew up and in which Daisy was so active. Wilson and Lampkin never crossed paths, but Wilson’s work, some of the most important American writing in the last century, carries the legacy of the community that Lampkin did so much to build.

Just the other day I ordered Adam Lee Cilli’s Canaan, Dim and Far: Black Reformers and the Pursuit of Citizenship in Pittsburgh, 1915–1945. I don’t know how Cilli will tell his story yet, but I suspect it will offer the most detailed accounts of Lampkin’s work in the community to yet appear in the scholarship. So I am really looking forward to this one. I may offer a full review of Canaan, Dim and Far in the near future.

It wasn’t only Pittsburgh that shaped (and was shaped by) Daisy’s life. Philadelphia and Washington, DC, both played important roles in Lampkin’s early upbringing, and Philadelphia helped to shape her early political work. So I’ll also be reading up on those two cities. Philadelphia and Washington were not only important because Lampkin grew up in those regions, but because both were, for similar reasons, vital centers of black cultural and political life. Both cities had longstanding and well-developed communities of free African Americans prior to the Civil War, and remained centers of intellectual and political life long after.

Philadelphia, in particular, was shaped by abolitionist politics. In part because of abolitionism, Philadelphia became the center of the AME Church in America, and AME history is a big part of Lampkin’s early life. There are important books on AME history that I will be consulting shortly.

Philadelphia (and to a lesser extent Pittsburgh) also became vital centers of black social life because both cities had been important nodes on the Underground Railroad. Daisy and William Lampkin were both born long after the Underground Railroad ceased to exist. But as a part of the community legacy in both of those cities I’ve also been reading local histories of the Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania. I don’t expect any of those stories to directly inform Lampkin’s life, but there may be a few sites here and there in the 1910s and 1920s that had played important roles a century earlier and that continued to be part of the community well into Daisy’s life. These may add color and texture to my narrative.   

Lampkin’s first entree into formal political organization was in the effort to secure American women the right to vote. There is a vast and growing literature on the suffrage movement, especially investigating the often-fraught relationship between black and white suffrage leaders and organizations. At the local level, Eliza Smith Brown’s recent She Devils at the Door, which examines suffrage leadership in Pittsburgh via two of Brown’s relatives, offers fine-grained local texture to a story often told from a national level. I’ll also be consulting an older book by Elinor Rice Hays, Lucy Stone: One of America’s First and Greatest Feminists, for the backstory on the woman who gave her name to the organization of Lampkin’s first leadership role. There is a broader wealth of scholarship on the suffrage movement that is germane to my story.  

Much of Lampkin’s early political work was also a response to profound changes in American society during her life, notably the vast movement of African Americans from the south to the north, what we call the “Great Migration.” Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration has rightly commanded much recent attention, and I am finishing that now. There are also important scholarly books (Joe Trotter has contributed a number of these), including a favorite of mine that I read several years ago, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America by James N. Gregory. Also on the reading list are related histories of the Urban League, which emerged to help ease the entree of Southern migrants into northern urban areas,  and in which Lampkin was heavily involved.               

The other great endeavor of Lampkins life, of course, was the NAACP. There is a wealth of recent books on the NAACP and its leading figures, some scholarly and some popular, though disappointingly very little mention of Lampkin’s essential role in the association gets mentioned. I’ve revisited Pat Sullivan’s Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement. Rawn James Jr.’s Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation, details the historic work of Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall, but does not mention Daisy. Yvonne Ryan’s biography Roy Wilkins: The Quiet Revolutionary and the NAACP, and Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement each offer compelling portraits of important NAACP leaders, though again neither mentions Lampkin.

There are not as many books on the Pittsburgh Courier as I expected, but there are some titles that examine the black press more generally. Andrew Buni’s biography, Robert L. Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier: Politics and Black Journalism, is several decades old, but remains excellent and highly relevant as the only biography of Vann to thus far appear—some enterprising young scholar should correct that oversight. There are several Master’s theses on Pittsburgh and the Courier into which I will be digging shortly.

Speaking of biographies, a great source of inspiration, and thinking about how to structure and organize a biography, comes from reading other biographies. I finished Jonathan Eig’s masterful work on MLK, King: A Life several months ago. In addition to the NAACP biographies I mention above, I’ll also be getting into—finally, after sitting on my shelf for years—David Levering Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning W. E. B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. DuBois was the leading black scholar of the century, a pivotal figure in the NAACP, and a close colleague of Lampkin. There are new books on black female activist heroes including Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and others to provide key points of connection and emulative models.

I continue to read James Baldwin, one of the most extraordinary writers of the twentieth century. Baldwin disapproved of the NAACP’s bourgeois orientation, so it is necessary to keep his critical voice in my ear as I continue to develop Lampkin’s story.

This is just a start. There is a whole literature on the late suffrage movement that requires attention. I haven’t even mentioned the black women’s club movement, on which there are many good books, and which was a crucial part of Lampkin’s life. She was also very active in Pennsylvania Republic politics in the 1920s, so I will have to bone up on my state-level political history quite a bit. There are, of course, endless rosters of relevant civil rights-related titles to consult.

We’re just scratching the surface here. And all of this is in addition to the archival work the project requires; that will comprise a later post.

The historiography is certainly extensive. There is no element of American history that is untouched by the concerns of race, class, and gender, and Daisy Lampkin positioned herself at the heart of all of these. There are thus few limits to the relevant historiography. Onward into the breach . . .

​—David J. Snyder

​PS: What's not on this list that absolutely should be? What am I missing? Let me know in the comments!