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Harmony and Harassment traces the headwaters of critical race theory (CRT) to the rural community of Harmony, Mississippi, at the height of the 1960s US civil rights movement. As Aja Y. Martinez and Robert O. Smith explore these headwaters, readers meet key community leaders such as Behonor McDonald, Winson Hudson, and Dovie Hudson. These Black women's activism for civil rights, voting rights, and educational access transformed their community while also providing the foundations for Derrick Bell's legal theories, Alice Walker's womanist concept, and the enduring educational program now known as Head Start. Building on extensive archival research and a web of deeply human relationships, Martinez and Smith argue for renewed appreciation of counterstory as central to CRT methodology. Harmony and Harassment shows how CRT developed from the ground up; from this foundation, its insights continue to hold great potential for strengthening education, legal studies, and the humanities and social sciences.
Aja Y. Martinez is Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of the multi-award-winning book Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory, now in its second edition.
Robert O. Smith (Chickasaw) is Vice President and Dean of Academic Affairs at Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and author of More Desired Than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism.
Together, Martinez and Smith are coauthors of The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas That Created a Movement.
"In Harmony and Harassment, Aja Martinez and Robert Smith use their expertise as archival researchers to document and illustrate what it means metaphorically to 'search for the headwaters' of critical race theory (CRT). Using CRT methodologies as touchstones, and with particular regard for storytelling as a core operational element, they take readers on a journey of discovery to understand the evolution of CRT within the context of civil and human rights. They identify Harmony, Mississippi, as a prime but largely unrecognized example of a highly consequential action arena, bringing visibility to patterns of action and influence that have shaped and guided pursuits of freedom and social justice. Most especially, they bring well-deserved attention to the people and networks who have functioned as visionaries, advocates, activists, and leaders of such pursuits, with African American women at the forefront of this work. In other words, Martinez and Smith have presented a broadly rendered, multidimensional view of on-the-ground means of civic engagement, community action, and sociopolitical leadership as complex enterprises. In doing so, they offer a volume that is insightful, instructive, and accessible for both academic and general audiences as we remember the past and work to sustain our bedrock values as a democratic nation."—Jacqueline Jones Royster, author of Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women
"A well-written, original, lively, and accessible book that is a pleasure to read. Harmony and Harassment provides an introduction to CRT through a compelling story of one of its leading figures. Martinez and Smith deftly and persuasively reveal how Derrick Bell's work emerged from the wisdom and labor of many unsung Black women whose love, intelligence, and care for their communities kept the movement going. It intriguingly places Bell in conversation with Paulo Freire and sheds light on the development of some of Bell's most controversial positions, such as 'racial realism' and his skepticism of school desegregation and the generally assimilationist goals of the NAACP. At a moment when critical race theory has been deliberately misunderstood and even treated as a slur, it is all the more important to return to why this body of work remains inspiring and will endure."—Angela P. Harris, coeditor of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia
"Martinez and Smith invoke the term prosopography to describe their process in composing Harmony and Harassment, an approach that allows for the stories behind the stories, rendering the story whole. That’s what this book provides: the full story of an astonishing misrepresentation of critical race theory, told beautifully. Harmony and Harassment provides a wonderful account of an archival and ethnographic project that will engage anyone interested in the relation between racism and story."—Victor Villanueva, author of Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color