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Books by
Ronald Walters
Black Presidential Politics in America
(1989) /
Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora
(1993) /
African American Leadership (1999)
Bibliography of African American
Leadership: An Annotated Guide (2000)
White Nationalism Black Interests
(2003)
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Ronald W. Walters.
The Price of Racial Reconciliation
University of
Michigan Press (January 22, 2008) 264 pages
About the Book
The issue of
reparations in America provokes a lot of interest, but
the public debate usually occurs at the level of
historical accounting: "Who owes what for slavery?" This
book attempts to get past that question to address
racial restitution within the framework of larger
societal interests. For example, the answer to the "why
reparations?" question is more than the moral of payment
for an injustice done in the past. Ronald Walters
suggests that, insofar as the impact of slavery is still
very much with us today and has been reinforced by forms
of post-slavery oppression, the objective of racial
harmony will be disrupted unless it is recognized with
the solemnity and amelioration it deserves. The author
concludes that the grand narrative of black oppression
in the United States—which contains the past and present
summary of the black experience—prevents racial
reconciliation as long as some substantial form of
racial restitution is not seriously considered. This is
"the price" of reconciliation.
The method for
achieving this finding is grounded in comparative
politics, where the analyses of institutions and
political behaviors are standard approaches. The author
presents the conceptual difficulties involved in the
project of racial reconciliation by comparing South
African Truth and Reconciliation and the demand for
reparations in the United States.
Reviews
In The
Price of Racial Reconciliation, Ronald Walters offers an
abundance of riches. This book provides an
extraordinarily comprehensive and persuasive set of
arguments for reparations, and will be the lens through
which meaningful opportunities for reconciliation are
viewed in the future. If this book does not lead to the
success of the reparations movement, nothing will.
—Charles J.
Ogletree, Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, Harvard Law
School
The Price of Racial Reconciliation is a seminal study of
comparative histories and race(ism) in the formation of
state structures that prefigure(d) socioeconomic
positions of Black peoples in South Africa and the
United States. The scholarship is meticulous in
brilliantly constructed analysis of the politics of
memory, reparations as an immutable principle of
justice, imperative for nonracial(ist) democracy, and a
regime of racial reconciliation.
—James Turner,
Professor of African and African American Studies and
Founder, Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell
University
A fascinating and path-breaking analysis of the attempt
at racial reconciliation in South Africa which asks if
that model is relevant to the contemporary American
racial dilemma. An engaging multidisciplinary approach
relevant to philosophy, sociology, history, and
political science.
—William
Strickland, Associate Professor of Political Science,
W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies,
University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Dr. Ronald Walters is internationally known for
his expertise on the issues of African American leadership and
politics, his writing and his media savvy. Walters carries three
major titles. He is director of the African American Leadership
Institute and Scholar Practitioner Program, Distinguished
Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of
Leadership, and professor in government and politics at the
University of Maryland. For the 2000 presidential election
season, Walters also served as senior correspondent for the
National Newspaper Publishers Association and political analyst
for Black Entertainment Television's Lead Story.
Walters is a frequent guest on local and major media as an
analyst of African American politics.
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He has appeared on such
shows as CNN's Crossfire and The Jesse Jackson Show, Lead Story
(BET), CBS News Nightline, NBC Today Show, C-Span, public
television shows such as the Jim Lehrer News Hour and Think
Tank, Evening Exchange, radio shows such as All Things
Considered (NPR), Living Room (Pacifica), and many others. Dr.
Walters also writes a weekly opinion column for newspapers and
Web sites.
Dr. Walters is the author of over 100 articles and six books.
His book,
Black Presidential Politics in America
(SUNY Press,
1989), won the Ralph Bunche Prize, given by the American
Political Science Association and the Best Book award from the
National Conference of Black Political Scientist (NCOBPS).
Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora
(Wayne State University
Press, 1993) also won the NCOBPS Best Book award. His most
recent books are
African American Leadership, (SUNY Press, 1999)
and, with Cedric Johnson,
Bibliography of African American
Leadership: An Annotated Guide (Greenwood Press, 2000).
Walters is the winner of many awards, including a distinguished
faculty award from Howard University (1982), Distinguished
Scholar/Activist Award, The Black Scholar Magazine (1984), W.E.B.
DuBois/Frederick Douglas Award, African Heritage Studies
Association (1983), the Ida Wells Barnett Award, Association of
Black School Educators, (1985), the Fannie Lou Hammer Award,
National Conference of Black Political Scientist (1996),
Distinguished Faculty Contributions to the Campus Diversity,
University of Maryland (1999), and the Ida B. Wells-W.E.B.
DuBois Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the National
Council for Black Studies (March 2000). He was awarded the honor
of "Alumnus of the Year" by the School of
International Service of the American University in April 2000.
Walters received his Bachelor of Arts degree in History and
Government with Honors from Fisk University (1963) and both his
M.A. in African Studies (1966) and Ph.D. in International
Studies (1971) from American University. He has served as
professor and chair of the political science department at
Howard University, assistant professor and chair of
Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University, and assistant
professor of political science at Syracuse University. He has
also served as visiting professor at Princeton University and as
a fellow of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of
Government, Harvard University. He is a former member of the
governing council of the American Political Science Association
and a current member of the Board of Directors of the Ralph
Bunch Institute of the CUNY Graduate School and University
Center. Walters has also served as the senior policy staff
member for Congressman Charles Diggs, Jr. and Congressman
William Gray.
In 1984, Walters served as deputy campaign manager for issues of
the Jesse Jackson campaign for president, and in 1988, he was
consultant for convention issues for the Jackson campaign
directed by former Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. He serves as
a senior policy consultant to the W.K.Kellogg Foundation and is
consultant to its Devolution Initiative Project and Director of
its Scholar/Practitioner Program.
Ron Walters, Director African American Leadership Institute (AALI)
and Distinguished Leadership Scholar
301.405.1787 and 301.405.2560 Email:
rwalters@academy.umd.edu
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Dr Ron Walters Dies at 72
Ronald W. Walters, one of the country's
leading scholars of the politics of race, who was a longtime
professor at Howard University and the University of Maryland,
died Friday [September 10, 2010] of cancer at Suburban Hospital
in Bethesda. He was 72.
[Ronald William Walters was
born July 20, 1938, in Wichita, Kansas.. His father was a
musician and had served in the military; his mother was a civil
rights investigator for the state.]
Dr. Walters was both an
academic and an activist, cementing his credentials with his
early involvement in the civil rights movement. In 1958, in his
home town of Wichita, he led what many historians consider the
nation's first lunch-counter sit-in protest. Later, he became a
close adviser to Jesse L. Jackson as one of the principal
architects of Jackson's two failed presidential campaigns. "Ron
was one of the legendary forces in the civil rights movement of
the last 50 years," Jackson said Saturday.
Dr. Walters also helped
develop the intellectual framework of the Congressional Black
Caucus in the 1970s. Some of his political ideas, such as
comprehensive health care and a proposed two-state solution to
the Israeli-Palestinian problem, were viewed as radical. A
quarter-century later, they are part of the intellectual
mainstream. . . . Dr. Walters had recently edited a book about
D.C. politics,
Democratic Destiny and the District of Columbia and was
at work on a book about Obama at the time of his death. In an
essay in January, Dr. Walters defended Obama's record in the
face of criticism from the left and the right.— WashingtonPost
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 13 October 2011
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