Roderick D. Bush

Roderick Douglas Bush (November 12, 1945 – December 5, 2013) was an American sociologist, social activist, author, public intellectual, and academic. His work primarily concerned the Civil Rights Movement. Born in the 'Jim Crow' South, Bush moved to Rochester, New York, as a child. He attended Howard University and became involved in the Black Power Movement. He began his doctoral work at the University of Kansas but left to become a full-time political activist, returning to academia in 1998. He earned his Ph.D. from Binghamton University in 1992 and served as a Sociology Professor at St. John's University. Bush specialized in race and ethnicity, the black experience, social movements, world-systems studies, globalization, social inequality, social change, urban sociology, community organizing, and political sociology. He received several awards, including the American Sociological Association's Marxist Section Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. His books include 'We are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century,' 'The New Black Vote: Politics and Power in Four American Cities,' and 'The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line.' He also co-authored 'Tensions in the American Dream: Rhetoric, Reverie or Reality?'