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Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Julius B. Fleming Jr., "Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation" (NYU Press, 2022)
Description: âFreedom, Now!â This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people waitâin the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyardsâfor their long-deferred liberation.In Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (NYU Press, 2022), Julius B. Fleming Jr. argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins a...