Progress Denied (Volume 12)

Hollie A. Teague is an independent scholar focusing on the social history of North Texas and Oklahoma in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She holds a master's degree in history and a PhD in sociology from Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas. Recently, she appeared as a featured historian in the documentary Quakertown, USA, and her publications can be found in the Journal of Black Studies, Great Plains Quarterly, Southern Studies, and the American Studies Journal.

"Progress Denied offers a thorough, compelling, and deeply unsettling history of racial violence in North Texas. Through detailed archival research, Teague reveals the many ways violence-both obscene and ordinary-was deployed to undermine Black families' economic stability and collective progress. Centering on Denton, Texas, Teague examines how the constant threat of physical violence, combined with ostensibly race-neutral policies, facilitated the forced removal of a thriving Black middle-class community known as Quakertown. Through close analysis of local actors and institutions, Progress Denied demonstrates how racial domination operated through interconnected systems of extralegal brutality and publicly organized political and civic exclusion-revealing institutionalized racism not as an aberration but as a governing logic of the region."-William Scarborough, author of Gendered Places: The Landscape of Local Gender Norms Across the United States "I have not encountered historical treatments of Quakertown, and certainly none that elevate Black counternarratives about the community while showing how white public memory came to hold such a prominent place in the town's public spaces. Considering the existing literature in the field, this book will add much-needed context to what little we've known about the Quakertown story thus far and serve as a fruitful basis for extended discussions about historical memory in Texas."-Delaina Price, assistant professor of history, University of Texas at Arlington "In Progress Denied, Hollie A. Teague passionately asserts, 'The onus is on us to have the eyes that see and the ears that hear the truth.' She deftly uses the story of Quakertown to remind the reader 'democracy is tricky.' Her skillful weaving of individual narratives and broader historical context allows the reader to understand how a thriving Black community allowed itself to be pushed out of existence so its people could survive. This story is a worthy foil to the Tulsa Race Massacre, illustrating how the same ends have been reached using different methods. Teague connects long-standing state and local organizations to the white supremacism at their roots. She thereby asks the reader to question their own beliefs about foundations underlying US society and democracy."-Monica Cubberly, professor of history at Collin College