| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics and Postwar America. By Waldo E. Martin Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. xii, 161 pp. $19.95, ISBN 0-674-01507-X.)
No Coward Soldiers emerged from the Nathan I. Huggins lectures presented at Harvard University. It is a fine representation of contemporary efforts in history, ethnic studies, and American studies to examine the cultural dimensions of politics, the politicization of culture, and the interaction between the two arenas. Specifically, it focuses on Afro-American culture, identity, and politics and their interrelationship and influence on overall American culture, identity, and politics. Waldo E. Martin Jr. contends that blacks' influence on the nation's culture has been profound and constitutes one of its central essences. Furthermore, the African American historical experience is in many ways not peripheral; it is rather the essence of the nation's historical trajectory.	1
Martin dissects the complicated strands of postwar Afro-American culture, including its assimilationist, nationalist, Pan-African, and Americanist components and the opposing and contradictory elements within the black historical experience as well as the freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth century. Rather than apologize for black nationalist, separatist, or essentialist thinking, he reveals how different African American responses were rooted in the nation's adamant support of white racist behavior and institutions.	. . .

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