DR. GERALD HORNE

Dr. Gerald Horne is an African American historian, author, and Communist who currently holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. He received his PhD from Columbia University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a frequent contributor to Political Affairs magazine.

A prolific author, Horne has published on W. E. B. Dubois and has written books on a wide range of neglected but by no means marginal or minor episodes of world history. He specialises in illuminating previously obscure or misrepresented struggles of humanity for social justice, in particular communist struggles and struggles against imperialism, colonialism, fascism and racism. Individuals whose lives his work has highlighted in their historical contexts have included the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter John Howard Lawson, Ferdinand Smith (Jamaican-born communist, sailor, labor leader), the perplexing Lawrence Dennis,^[2] an African-American fascist and racist who passed for white, and the feminist, anti-colonialist, internationalist intellectual Shirley Graham DuBois whose own career was overshadowed by that of her famous husband. While many of Horne’s books use a celebrated, intriguing or politically engaged individual as a prism to inspect the historical forces of their times, Horne has also produced broad canvas chronicles of infrequently examined periods and aspects of the history of white supremacy and imperialism such as the post-civil war involvement of the US ruling class—newly dispossessed of human chattels—with slavery in Brazil, which was not legally abolished until 1888, or the attempts by Japanese imperialists in the mid-20th century to appear as the leaders of a global war against white supremacy, thus allies and instruments of liberation for people of color oppressed by Anglo-American Empire.

Manning Marable has said: “Gerald Horne is one of the most gifted and insightful historians on racial matters of his generation.”

Selected Books:

• The End of Empires: African Americans and India Temple University Press (2009)
• W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography Greenwood (2009)
• The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States NYU Press (2009)
• Mau Mau in Harlem?: The U.S. and the Liberation of Kenya Palgrave MacMillan (2009)
• Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica NYU Press (2009)
• Blows Against the Empire: U.S. Imperialism in Crisis International Publishers (2008)
• The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade NYU Press (2007)
• The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas After the Civil War Univesity of Hawaii Press (2007)
• The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten University of California Press (2006)
• Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire NYU Press (2005)
• Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920 NYU Press (2005)
• Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois NYU Press (2002)
• Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950 : Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds and Trade Unionists University of Texas Press (2001)
• From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980 University of North Carolina Press (2000)
• Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising And The 1960s Da Capo Press (1997)
• Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party University of Delaware Press (1994)
• Black and red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American response to the Cold War SUNY Press (1986)

Department of History
The University of Houston
524 Agnes Arnold Hall
Houston, TX 77204-3003
(713) 743-3083