Austin graduated from Westwood High School in Memphis, Tennessee,[1] and then attended the Christian Brothers University, earning a bachelor's degree in history with a minor in political science in 1987.
[2][5] When Austin became Director in 2012, the University of Florida began offering a major in African-American Studies, and under her tenure the program grew to the point that the University of Florida had the most students majoring in African-American Studies of any program in the United States.
[8] The book arrived at this finding through a combination of historical and sociological methods, personal interviews, and statistical analysis on extensive data.
Austin tested the extent to which the political behaviour of Black immigrants would differ from or resemble the distinctive contemporary and historical features of African-American politics, since the phenomenon of Black immigrants arriving to the United States from several different countries simultaneously is relatively recent, and recent immigrants may not have been present for various formative events in African-American political history.
[10] To test this question, Austin chooses to focus on the cities Boston, Chicago, Miami, and New York City, and presents results from 2,359 survey or interview respondents who were African-Americans, Cape Verdeans, Haitians, or West Indians there,[11] making this book "the largest comparative African-American urban survey.