This section is broken down into the following categories:
Autobiographies, Biographies, and Memoirs; Essays, Writings, Speeches, and Other Nonfiction;
History; Law and Politics; Literature and the Arts; Protests; Racism; and Slavery
Nat Turner by
In 1831, in the third century of slavery in British North America, thirty-four years before it was ended by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the slave Nat Turner led a revolt against his condition in Southampton County, Virginia. His insurrection was bloody and, in the end, unsuccessful; but it made an indelible impression on the nation and its history....This study of Nat Turner offers a unique approach to his life and the effects of his insurrection on American history. [It includes] the confession (explanation) he made to a scribe just before he died...commentary on the nature of slavery by other slaves such as Frederick Douglass and the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe...immediate responses to the uprising by contemporaries such as northern abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and Virginia Governor John Floyd...[and] perspectives of modern scholars. [It] shows, using documents from Nat Turner's day and from various periods since his death, how his image has changed with successive generations...[and] offers more primary sources from more periods of American history than any other study of Nat Turner....[Includes] an annotated bibliography.--Preface
I Am Not Your Negro by
Transcript of the documentary film, I am not your negro, by Raoul Peck composed of unpublished and published writings, interviews, and letters by James Baldwin on the subject of racism in America.
National Bestseller Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary To compose his stunning documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined James Baldwin's published and unpublished oeuvre, selecting passages from his books, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been. Weaving these texts together, Peck brilliantly imagines the book that Baldwin never wrote. In his final years, Baldwin had envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project have never been published before. Peck's film uses them to jump through time, juxtaposing Baldwin℗s private words with his public statements, in a blazing examination of the tragic history of race in America. This edition contains more than 40 black-and-white images from the film.
Wrapped in Rainbows by
A woman of enormous talent and remarkable drive, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books, many short stories, and several articles and plays over a career that spanned more than thirty years. Today, nearly every black woman writer of significance -- including Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker -- acknowledges Hurston as a literary foremother, and her 1937 masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God has become a crucial part of the modern literary canon.
Wrapped in Rainbows, the first biography of Zora Neale Hurston in more than twenty-five years, illuminates the adventures, complexities, and sorrows of an extraordinary life. Acclaimed journalist Valerie Boyd delves into Hurston's history -- her youth in the country's first incorporated all-black town, her friendships with luminaries such as Langston Hughes, her sexuality and short-lived marriages, and her mysterious relationship with vodou. With the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and World War II as historical backdrops, Wrapped in Rainbows not only positions Hurston's work in her time but also offers riveting implications for our own.
I'm Still Here by
The author's first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when her parents told her they named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. She grew up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, and has spent her life navigating America's racial divide as a writer, a speaker, and an expert helping organizations practice genuine inclusion. While so many institutions claim to value diversity in their mission statements, many fall short of matching actions to words. Brown highlights how white middle-class evangelicalism has participated in the rise of racial hostility, and encourages the reader to confront apathy and recognize God's ongoing work in the world.
Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark by
In the mid-1950s, Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987), a former public school teacher, developed a citizenship training program that enabled thousands of African Americans to register to vote and then to link the power of the ballot to concrete strategies for individual and communal empowerment. In this biography of Clark, Charron demonstrates Clark's crucial role--and the role of many black women teachers--in making education a cornerstone of the twentieth-century freedom struggle.
No Color is My Kind: The Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Integration of Houston by
No Color Is My Kind is an uncommon chronicle of identity, fate, and compassion as two men - one Jewish and one African American - set out to rediscover a life lost to manic depression and alcoholism. In 1984, Thomas Cole discovered Eldrewey Stearns in a Galveston psychiatric hospital. Stearns, a fifty-two-year-old black man, complained that although he felt very important, no one understood him. Over the course of the next decade, Cole and Stearns, in a tumultuous and often painful collaboration, recovered Stearns' life before his slide into madness - as a young boy in Galveston and San Augustine and as a civil rights leader and lawyer who sparked Houston's desegregation movement between 1959 and 1963.
Weaving the tragic story of a charismatic and deeply troubled leader into the record of a major historic event, Cole also explores his emotionally charged collaboration with Stearns. Their poignant relationship sheds powerful and healing light on contemporary race relations in America, and especially on issues of power, authority, and mental illness.
Malcolm X: The Man and His Times by
Twenty writers contribute their viewpoints on the black leader with varied glimpses of Malcolm X as a boy, as a young man and as a revolutionary.
Great Time Coming: The Life of Jackie Robinson, from Baseball to Birmingham by
The author of The Last Yankee and Nine Sides of the Diamond explores in detail the lifelong influences on Jackie Robinson, the pressures he had to bear, and the contributions he made to the cause of integration, illuminating the baseball great's inner strengths and his determination to make a lasting difference in American society. of photos.
The Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths by
From the publication of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave in 1845 to Lorene Cary's Black Ice and Brent Staples's Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White in the 1990s, the autobiography has been the most important literary genre in the African-American intellectual tradition. Whether used to clarify the nature of the relationship between ideology and personal experience or simply because "oftentimes personal truth was stranger than fiction," the autobiography fulfilled the need to define the individual "black self" to a society that denied the existence of black reality. In Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths, V.P. Franklin provides the first comprehensive examination of African-American intellectual history in over twenty-five years, presenting original interpretations of the lives and thought of twelve major black American writers and political leaders who played a central role in this powerful literary genre. Focusing on the autobiographical works of such prominent figures as Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Malcolm X, Gwendolyn Brooks, and James Baldwin, as well as lesser known but equally crucial figures including Alexander Crummell, who declared black Americans a "chosen people" of the Lord, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the most famous black American woman at the turn of the century, Franklin shows that the need to tell the truth to authority, to document the original cultural contributions of rural and urban blacks, and to defend the interests of the black working class has always been a principal preoccupation of African-American intellectuals. The particular areas of the "race problem" that these individuals chose to focus on, however, were as varied as the times in which they wrote: from James Weldon Johnson's commitment to documenting the significant artistic and cultural contributions of African-Americans and James Baldwin's view that African-Americans were destined "to redeem the soul of America" to Malcolm X's rejection of integrationist doctrines and Harry Haywood's determination that the leadership of the Communist Party recognize the revolutionary potential of the black working class. And through it all, the objectives are strikingly similar--self-determination, "race vindication," and the struggle for freedom have all been at the core of the collective experience of African Americans in the United States. Given the negative evaluations of black culture and community coming from the larger white-dominated society, African-American intellectuals used their autobiographies to tell the truth about the nature of the black experience in this society and throughout the world. Providing personal accounts of what freedom meant and how it could be achieved, the autobiography allowed African-American intellectuals to use their personal experience as a mirror to reflect the larger social and political context for black America. A major contribution to American history, Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths acknowledges this rich tradition and makes it clear that these works provide a vital intellectual legacy for African-Americans as they enter the twenty-first century.
Bearing the Cross by
Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, this is the most comprehensive book ever written about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Based on more than seven hundred interviews with all of King's surviving associates, as well as with those who opposed him, and enhanced by the author's access to King's personal papers and tens of thousands of pages of FBI documents, this is a towering portrait of a man's metamorphosis into a legend.
Nat Turner by
Nat Turner's name rings through American history with a force all its own. Leader of the most important slave rebellion on these shores, variously viewed as a murderer of unarmed women and children, an inspired religious leader, a fanatic--this puzzling figure represents all the terrible complexities of American slavery. And yet we do not know what he looked like, where he is buried, or even whether Nat Turner was his real name. In Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, Kenneth S. Greenberg gathers twelve distinguished scholars to offer provocative new insight into the man, his rebellion, and his time, and his place in history. The historians here explore Turner's slave community, discussing the support for his uprising as well as the religious and literary context of his movement. They examine the place of women in his insurrection, and its far-reaching consequences (including an extraordinary 1832 Virginia debate about ridding the state of slavery). Here are discussions of Turner's religious visions--the instructions he received from God to kill all of his white oppressors. Louis Masur places him against the backdrop of the nation's sectional crisis, and Douglas Egerton puts his revolt in the context of rebellions across the Americas. We trace Turner's passage through American memory through fascinating interviews with William Styron on his landmark novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and with Dr. Alvin Poussaint, one of the "ten black writers" of the 1960s who bitterly attacked Styron's vision of Turner. Finally, we follow Nat Turner into the world of Hollywood.
The Confessions of Nat Turner by
areful study of the Nat Turner slave rebellion of 1831 reveals much about master, slaves, and the relationship between them in the antebellum South. The central document in this volume — Nat Turner's confession follwing the rebellion in Virginia — is supported by newspaper articles, trial transcripts, and excerpts from the diary of Virginia governor John Floyd.
Roots: The Saga of an American Family by
Alex Haley did more than recapture the history of his own family. As the first black American writer to trace his origins back to their roots, he has told the story of 25,000,000 Americans of African descent. He has rediscovered for an entire people a rich cultural heritage that slavery took away from them, along with their names and their identities. Roots speaks, finally not just to blacks, or to whites, but to all peoples and all races everywhere, for the story it tells is one of the most eloquent testimonials ever written to the indomitability of the human spirit.
Martin Luther King, Jr. , Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s And 1960s by
The civil rights movement's most prominent leaders, Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) and Malcolm X (1925-1965), represent two wings of the revolt against racism: nonviolent resistance and revolution "by any means necessary." This volume presents the two leaders' relationship to the civil rights movement beyond a simplified dualism. A rich selection of speeches, essays, and excerpts from Malcolm X's autobiography and King's sermons shows the breadth and range of each man's philosophy, demonstrating their differences, similarities, and evolution over time. Organized into six topical groups, the documents allow students to compare the leaders' views on subjects including integration, the American dream, means of struggle, and opposing racial philosophies. An interpretive introductory essay, chronology, selected bibliography, document head-notes, and questions for consideration provide further pedagogical support.
Slave and Citizen by
A biography of the escaped slave who became a renowned writer, orator, abolitionist, and diplomat.
"Fugitive slave, abolitionist, orator, journalist, and diplomat--Frederick Douglass, more than any other mid-nineteenth-century American, was truly a representative man, his life exemplifying the dominant political, social, and intellectual themes of his society and of the age. Born a slave who dared to envision freedom, the self-educated Douglass escaped bondage at the age of twenty-one and fled to the North, where his personal triumph over slavery quickly came to the attention of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. At the 1841 Nantucket convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, his stirring words and commanding physical presence propelled him to the fore of the abolitionist movement. That he was still technically a fugitive slave made his case against slavery all the more dramatic. The Civil War provided an opportune stage for Douglass's resounding condemnation of more than two centuries of racial tyranny, but though his vigorous efforts on behalf of black equality contributed to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, he would be deeply disappointed in the failure of Reconstruction to ensure political and social equality. From the beginning of his public career, Douglass was acutely aware of his life as exemplifying something much larger than his private self--of his own remarkable progression from slave to freedman to diplomat bearing visible proof, in the ideology of the age, of the perfectibility of the black man. He published three widely read memoirs during his lifetime--each going beyond the autobiographical into the realm of impassioned polemic--and founded The North Star, which he issued for seventeen years. A champion of all human rights, Douglass joined Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the struggle for women's suffrage. Frederick Douglass's life is an eloquent testimony to the American guiding principle of freedom. Drawing on the life and thought of this extraordinary abolitionist and nationalist, [this book] explores the problem of freedom in the nineteenth century from the antebellum period through Reconstruction, and brings into sharp focus the society's weaknesses as well as its strengths."--Dust jacket.
Walking on Water by
In a hypnotic blend of oral history and travel writing, Randall Kenan sets out to answer a question that has has long fascinated him: What does it mean to be black in America today? To find the answers, Kenan traveled America--from Alaska to Louisiana, from Maine to Las Vegas--over the course of six years, interviewing nearly two hundred African Americans from every conceivable walk of life. We meet a Republican congressman and an AIDS activist; a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah and an ambitious public-relations major in North Dakota; militant activists in Atlanta and movie folks in Los Angeles. The result is a marvelously sharp, full picture of contemporary African American lives and experiences.
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr by
He was a husband, a father, a preacher--and the preeminent leader of a movement that continues to transform America and the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the twentieth century's most influential men and lived one of its most extraordinary lives. Now, in a special volume commissioned and authorized by his family, here is the life and times of Martin Luther King, Jr., drawn from a comprehensive collection of writings, recordings, and documentary materials, many of which have never before been made public.
W. E. B. du Bois, 1919-1963 by
With the follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning first volume, Lewis has garnered a National Book Award nomination. He picks up his account of Du Bois's life with the triumphal return from WWI of African American veterans to the shattering reality of racism, even as America discovers the New Negro of literature and art.
Walking with the Wind by
The award-winning national bestseller, Walking with the Wind, is one of our most important records of the American civil rights movement. Told by John Lewis, who Cornel West calls a "national treasure," this is a gripping first-hand account of the fight for civil rights and the courage it takes to change a nation. In 1957, a teenage boy named John Lewis left a cotton farm in Alabama for Nashville, the epicenter of the struggle for civil rights in America. Lewis's adherence to nonviolence guided that critical time and established him as one of the movement's most charismatic and courageous leaders. Lewis's leadership in the Nashville Movement, a student-led effort to desegregate the city of Nashville using sit-in techniques based on the teachings of Gandhi, set the tone for major civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. Lewis traces his role in the pivotal Selma marches, Bloody Sunday, and the Freedom Rides. Inspired by his mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lewis's vision and perseverance altered history. In 1986, he ran and won a congressional seat in Georgia, and remains in office to this day, continuing to enact change. The late Edward M. Kennedy said of Lewis, "John tells it like it was." Lewis spent most of his life walking against the wind of the times, but he was surely walking with the wind of history.
Malcolm X by
Draws on new research to trace the life of Malcolm X from his troubled youth through his involvement in the Nation of Islam, his activism in the world of Black Nationalism, and his assassination.
James Baldwin Now by
One of the most prolific and influential African American writers, James Baldwin was for many a harbinger of hope, a man who traversed the genres of art-writing novels, essays, and poetry.
James Baldwin Now takes advantage of the latest interdisciplinary work to understand the complexity of Baldwin's vision and contributions without needing to name him as exclusively gay, expatriate, black, or activist. It was, in fact, Baldwin who said, "it is quite impossible to write a worthwhile novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse . . . to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion." McBride has gathered a unique group of new scholars to interrogate Baldwin's life, his presence, and his political thought and work. James Baldwin Now finally addresses the man who spoke, and continues to speak, so eloquently to crucial issues of the twentieth century.
Aliened American by
William Howard Day was one of the nineteenth century's most profound civil rights heroes. During his lifetime, Day collaborated intimately with Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, David Ruggles, Henry Highland Garnet, and Martin Delany. In 1858, while living in Canada, Day was hired by John Brown to print the soon-to-be-martyr's constitution. Biographer Todd M. Mealy has taken extreme measures to unearth one of the most important studies of the civil rights movement. Based on recently undiscovered documents, especially letters, minutes, and speeches of people who worked with Day, Aliened American is the first biography of this courageous figure. Mealy has carefully recounted Day's profound record as an educator, preacher, and secretary in the A.M.E. Zion Church, newspaper publisher, and unvarnished orator for the Republican Party, Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, Colored Citizens League, and the Equal Rights League - all of which ignited the civil rights movement
Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. by
Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award and the Christopher Award, this brilliant examination of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., portrays a very real man with a powerful dream that helped shape American history. 15 halftone illustrations.
Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life by
A historian hoping to reconstruct the social world of all-black towns or the segregated black sections of other towns in the South finds only scant traces of their existence. In Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life, Tiffany Ruby Patterson uses the ethnographic and literary work of Zora Neale Hurston to augment the few official documents, newspaper accounts, and family records that pertain to these places hidden from history. Hurston's ethnographies, plays, and fiction focused on the day-to-day life in all-black social spaces as well as the Negro farthest down in labor camps. Patterson shows how Hurston's work complements the fragmented historical record, using the folklore and stories to provide a full description of these people of these towns as active human subjects, shaped by history and shaping their private world. Beyond the view and domination of whites in these spaces, black people created their own codes of social behavior, honor, and justice. In Patterson's view Hurston renders her subjects faithfully and with respect for their individuality and endurance, enabling all people to envision an otherwise inaccessible world.
Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké’s Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders by
A history of the Grimke family describes members' initial involvement in the abolitionist movement, their active roles in the founding of the NAACP, and their success as performers during the Harlem Renaissance.
Young Frederick Douglas by
Details Douglass's life from birth to his escape North and recounts his experience as a slave, his flight to freedom, and his subsequent return to Maryland as the national spokesman for black Americans.
Jackie Robinson by
Details the life of the first African American to play baseball in the major-leagues, Jackie Robinson.
Blood Brothers by
In 1962, boxing writers and fans considered Cassius Clay an obnoxious self-promoter, and few believed that he would become the heavyweight champion of the world. But Malcolm X, the most famous minister in the Nation of Islam--a sect many white Americans deemed a hate cult--saw the potential in Clay, not just for boxing greatness, but as a means of spreading the Nation's message. The two became fast friends, keeping their interactions secret from the press for fear of jeopardizing Clay's career. Clay began living a double life--a patriotic "good Negro" in public, and a radical reformer behind the scenes. Soon, however, their friendship would sour, with disastrous and far-reaching consequences. Based on previously untapped sources, from Malcolm's personal papers to FBI records, "Blood Brothers" is the first book to offer an in-depth portrait of this complex bond. Acclaimed historians Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith reconstruct the worlds that shaped Malcolm and Clay, from the boxing arenas and mosques, to postwar New York and civil rights-era Miami. In an impressively detailed account, they reveal how Malcolm molded Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali, helping him become an international symbol of black pride and black independence. Yet when Malcolm was barred from the Nation for criticizing the philandering of its leader, Elijah Muhammad, Ali turned his back on Malcolm--a choice that tragically contributed to the latter's assassination in February 1965. Malcolm's death marked the end of a critical phase of the civil rights movement, but the legacy of his friendship with Ali has endured. We inhabit a new era where the roles of entertainer and activist, of sports and politics, are more entwined than ever before. "Blood Brothers" is the story of how Ali redefined what it means to be a black athlete in America--after Malcolm first enlightened him. An extraordinary narrative of love and deep affection, as well as deceit, betrayal, and violence, this story is a window into the public and private lives of two of our greatest national icons, and the tumultuous period in American history that they helped to shape.--Dust jacket.
I Never Had It Made by
Before Ken Griffey Jr., before Reggie Jackson, before Hank Aaron, baseball's celebrated stars had one undeniable trait in common: they were all white. In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke that barrier, changing the world of sports forever.
Black Heroes by
Now available for the first time in paperback, "Black Heroes" is a "who's who" of 150 individuals who have made a lasting and profound impact on our culture, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Colin Powell, from Rosa Parks to Maya Angelou. 215 photos.
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by
The definitive political biography of Rosa Parks examines her six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement and presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks.
James Farmer Jr by
James Farmer Jr.: The Great Debater provides a rhetorical and biographical guide to how the American Civil Rights Movement came into being. It details James Farmer Jr.?s intellectual emergence as a young debater at an HBCU in Marshall, Texas and ultimately chronicles how this led to the emergence of the first non-violent sit-in against segregation in 1942 in Chicago. Farmer was a key founder of the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE] that pioneered the non-violent strategies that would later be used by Martin Luther King. He debated important figures like Malcolm X to provide a powerful advocacy grounded in the praxis of argumentation. Ben Voth demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Farmer's successful debate methodology in resolving contemporary race problems in the 21st century such as Black Lives Matter.
Maya Angelou by
A comprehensive biographical and critical reading of the works of American poet and memoirist Maya Angelou (1928-2014). Linda Wagner-Martin covers all six of Angelou's autobiographies, as well as her essay and poetry collections, while also exploring Angelou's life as an African American in the United States, her career as stage and film performer, her thoughtful participation in the Civil Rights actions of the 1960s, and her travels abroad in Egypt, Africa, and Europe. In her discussion of Angelou's methods of writing her stunning autobiography, which began with the 1970 publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Wagner-Martin writes about the influences of the Harlem Writers Group (led by James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, and John O. Killens) as well as Angelou's significant friendships with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders from both international and African American United States cultures. Crucial concepts throughout include the role of oral traditions, of song and dance, of the spiritualism of art based on religious belief, of Angelou's voiced rhythms and her polished use of dialogue to convey more abstract "meaning." Wagner-Martin shows that, viewing herself as a global citizen, Angelou never lost her spirit of adventure and discovery as well as her ability to overcome"-- Provided by publisher.
"A comprehensive critical and biographical reading of Maya Angelou's life and work, from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) to His Day Is Done, A Nelson Mandela Tribute (2014).
Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin by
Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door examines the thirty-eight-year relationship between painter Beauford Delaney (born in Knoxville, 1901; died in Paris, 1979) and writer James Baldwin (born in New York, 1924; died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 1987) and the ways their ongoing intellectual exchange shaped each other?s creative output and worldview. This full-color publication documents the groundbreaking exhibition organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art (KMA) and is drawn from the KMA?s extensive Delaney holdings, from public and private collections around the country, and from unpublished photographs and papers held by the Knoxville-based estate of Beauford Delaney. This book seeks to identify and disentangle the skein of influences that grew over and around a complex, lifelong relationship with a selection of Delaney's works that reflects the powerful presence of Baldwin in Delaney's life. While no other figure in Beauford Delaney?s extensive social orbit approaches James Baldwin in the extent and duration of influence, none of the major exhibitions of Delaney's work has explored in any depth the creative exchange between the two. The volume also includes essays by Mary Campbell, whose research currently focuses on James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney within the context of the civil rights movement; Glenn Ligon, an internationally acclaimed New York-based artist with intimate knowledge of Baldwin?s writings, Delaney's art, and American history and society; Levi Prombaum, a curatorial assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum who did his doctoral research at University College London on Delaney's portraits of James Baldwin; and Stephen Wicks, the Knoxville Museum of Art's Barbara W. and Bernard E. Bernstein Curator, who has guided the KMA's curatorial department for over 25 years and was instrumental in building the world?s largest and most comprehensive public collection of Beauford Delaney's art at the KMA.
The King God Did Not Save: Reflections on the Life and Death of Martin Luther King, Jr. by
This work examines Martin Luther King Jr. life and legacy and the effect of white supremacy on Luther and his work.
Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr by
Civil rights activist Medgar Wiley Evers was well aware of the dangers he would face when he challenged the status quo in Mississippi in the 1950s and '60s, a place and time known for the brutal murders of those who challenged the status quo. Nonetheless, Evers consistently investigated the rapes, murders, beatings, and lynchings of black Mississippians and reported them to a national audience, all the while organizing economic boycotts, sit-ins, and street protests in Jackson as the NAACP's first full-time Mississippi field secretary. He organized and participated in voting drives and nonviolent direct-action protests, joined lawsuits to overturn school segregation, and devoted himself to a career that cost him his life. This biography of a lesser-known but seminal civil rights leader draws on personal interviews from Evers's widow, his remaining siblings, friends, schoolmates, and fellow activists to elucidate Evers as an individual, leader, husband, brother, and father. His story is a testament to the important role that grassroots activism played in exacting social change.
A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics by
Poet and playwright Amiri Baraka is best known as one of the African American writers who helped ignite the Black Arts Movement. This book examines Baraka's cultural approach to Black Power politics and explores his role in the phenomenal spread of black nationalism in the urban centers of late-twentieth-century America, including his part in the election of black public officials, his leadership in the Modern Black Convention Movement, and his work in housing and community development.
Komozi Woodard traces Baraka's transformation from poet to political activist, as the rise of the Black Arts Movement pulled him from political obscurity in the Beat circles of Greenwich Village, swept him into the center of the Black Power Movement, and ultimately propelled him into the ranks of black national political leadership. Moving outward from Baraka's personal story, Woodard illuminates the dynamics and remarkable rise of black cultural nationalism with an eye toward the movement's broader context, including the impact of black migrations on urban ethos, the importance of increasing population concentrations of African Americans in the cities, and the effect of the 1965 Voting Rights Act on the nature of black political mobilization.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by
In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America.
The Fire Next Time by
Contains a letter to Baldwin's nephew on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Also describes his childhood, views on Black Muslims, and his visions.
Black Is the Body by
An extraordinary exquisitely written memoir (of sorts) that looks at race in a fearless, penetrating, honest, true way. ... "I am black-and brown, too," writes Emily Bernard. "Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell." These twelve telltale, connected, deeply personal essays explore, up close, the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities, of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in New England today. The storytelling, and the mystery of Bernard's storytelling, of getting to the truth, begins with a stabbing in a New England college town. Bernard writes how, when she was a graduate student at Yale, she walked into a coffee shop and, along with six other people, was randomly attacked by a stranger with a knife. "I was not stabbed because I was black," she writes (the attacker was white), "but I have always viewed the violence I survived as a metaphor for the violent encounter that has generally characterized American race relations. ... There was no connection between us ... yet we were suddenly and irreparably bound by a knife, an attachment that cost us both: him, his freedom; me, my wholeness." Bernard explores how that bizarre act of violence set her free and unleashed the storyteller in her ("The equation of writing and regeneration is fundamental to black American experience"). Each essay goes beyond a narrative of black innocence and white guilt; each is anchored in a mystery; each sets out to discover a new way of telling the truth as Bernard has lived it. And what most interests Bernard is looking at "blackness at its borders, where it meets whiteness, in fear and hope, in anguish and love."
Between the World and Me by
For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? In Tremble for My Country, Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings -- moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield with a rogue historian, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's 'long war on black people, ' or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police. In his trademark style -- a mix of lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history, essayistic argument, and reportage -- Coates provides readers a thrillingly illuminating new framework for understanding race: its history, our contemporary dilemma, and where we go from here.
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by
We Were Eight Years in Power was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America's "first white president." But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period, and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation's old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective, the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president. We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates's iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including "Fear of a Black President," "The Case for Reparations," and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates's own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era. We Were Eight Years in Power is a vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment
The Selected Writings of W.E.B. DuBois by W.E.B. DuBois: The Crisis Writings by
A varied and representative selection of ... [the author's] writings from the Crisis magazine.
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by
Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the space race, [this book] follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances, and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country's future.
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race by
Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, [the author] offers a ... new framework for how to see, acknowledge and counter racism.
Black in America by
Black in America samples the breadth of non-fiction writing on African American experiences in the United States. The emphasis is on the twenty-first century (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine, and Roxane Gay figure prominently), but a substantial representation of vitally important work from other eras is also included, from Olaudah Equiano and Sojourner Truth to James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker; in all there are over 50 selections. The anthology includes examples of academic writing, of writing for popular audiences, of journalism, of speeches, and of blog posts and other writing that originated on the web. Selections are arranged by author in rough chronological order; the book also includes alternative tables of contents listing material by thematic subject and by genre and rhetorical style. Each selection is prefaced by a headnote providing context, and followed by questions and suggestions for discussion. Explanatory annotations are provided at the bottom of the page, and paragraphs are numbered for ready reference during class discussions. Brief biographical notes appear at the back of the book.
Facing up to the American Dream by
Hochschild combines survey data and vivid anecdote to clarify several paradoxes. Since the 1960s, white Americans have seen African Americans as having better and better chances to achieve the dream. At the same time middle-class blacks, by now one-third of the African American population, have become increasingly frustrated personally and anxious about the progress of their race. Most poor blacks, however, cling with astonishing strength to the notion that they and their families can succeed despite their terrible, perhaps worsening, living conditions. Meanwhile, a tiny number of the estranged poor, who have completely given up on the American dream or any other faith, threaten the social fabric of the black community and the very lives of their fellow blacks. Will the still optimistic majority of poor African Americans eventually follow the alienated minority into neighborhood and even society-wide destruction? Does the new black middle class vindicate the American dream, or does the frustration of its members make apparent the limits of a vision never intended to include African Americans? Hochschild probes these questions, and gives them historical depth by comparing the experience of today's African Americans to that of white ethnic immigrants at the turn of the century. She concludes by claiming that America's only alternative to the social disaster of intensified racial conflict lies in the inclusiveness, optimism, discipline, and high-mindedness of the American dream at its best.
A Testament of Hope by
Finally in paperback: "The most powerful and enduring words of the man who touched the conscience of the nation and the world." ("The Kansas City Star"). "A Testament of Hope" has sold more than 46,000 copies in hardcover.
We Are the Change We Seek by
A collection of Barack Obama's greatest speeches, now including his farewell address, selected and introduced by columnist E.J. Dionne and MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid. We Are the Change We Seek is a collection of Barack Obama's 27 greatest addresses: beginning with his 2002 speech opposing the Iraq War and closing with his emotional farewell address in Chicago in January 2017. As president, Obama's words had the power to move the country, and often the world, as few presidents before him. Whether acting as Commander in Chief or Consoler in Chief, Obama adopted a unique rhetorical style that could simultaneously speak to the national mood and change the course of public events. Obama's eloquence, both written and spoken, propelled him to national prominence and ultimately made it possible for the son of a Kenyan man and a white woman from Kansas to become the first black president of the United States. These speeches span Obama's career--from his time in state government through to the end of his tenure as president--and the issues most important to our time: war, inequality, race relations, gun violence and human rights. The book opens with an essay placing Obama's oratorical contributions within the flow of American history by E.J. Dionne Jr., columnist and author of Why The Right Went Wrong, and Joy Reid, the host of AM Joy on MSNBC and author of Fracture.
Violence in the Black Imagination by
Ronald T. Takaki presents three short novels of major African-American leaders in the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the leading black abolitionist; Martin Delany, the father of black nationalism; and William Wells Brown, a pioneer of the black novel. The novels are accompanied by substantive essays which provide both biographical information on the author and explore the common theme of their work--the issue of black revolutionary violence in antebellum America.
The Collected Essays of Josephine J. Turpin Washington by
Newspaper journalist, teacher, and social reformer, Josephine J. Turpin Washington led a life of intense engagement with the issues facing African American society in the post-Reconstruction era. This volume recovers numerous essays, many of them unavailable to the general public until now, and reveals the major contributions to the emerging black press made by this Virginia-born, Howard University-educated woman who clerked for Frederick Douglass and went on to become a writer with an important and unique voice. Written between 1880 and 1918, the work collected here is significant in the ways it disrupts the nineteenth-century African American literary canon, which has traditionally prioritized slave narratives. It paves the way for the treatment of race and gender in later nineteenth-century African American novels, and engages Biblical scriptures and European and American literatures to support racial uplift ideology. It also articulates shrewdly the aesthetic needs and responsibilities necessary for the black press to establish a reputable literary sphere. Part of a vibrant movement in recent scholarship to reclaim writings of nineteenth-century African American women writers, this expertly edited and annotated collection represents not only a valuable scholarly resource but a powerful example of the determination of a southern black woman to inspire others to improve their own lives and those of all African Americans.
Southern Horrors and Other Writings by
This brief volume introduces readers to the prominent reformer and journalist Ida B. Wells and her late-nineteenth-century crusade to abolish lynching. Built around three crucial documents - Well's pamphlet Southern Horrors (1892), her essay A Red Record (1895), and her case study Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900) - the volume shows how Wells defined lynching for an international audience as an issue deserving public concern and action. The editor's introduction places lynching in its historical context and provides important background information on Well's life and career. Also included are illustrations, a chronology, questions for consideration, a bibliography, and an index.
The Sound of Freedom by
Award-winning civil rights historian Arsenault describes the dramatic story behind Marian Anderson's concert at the Lincoln Memorial--an early milestone in civil rights history--on the 70th anniversary of her performance.
Parting the Waters by
Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American Civil Rights Movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations.
Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.
Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder.
Epic in scope and impact, Branch's chronicle definitively captures one of the nation's most crucial passages.
The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood by
On the evening of August 21, 1831, Nat Turner and six men launched their infamous rebellion against slaveholders. The rebels swept through Southampton County, Virginia, recruiting slaves to their ranks and killing nearly five dozen whites--more than had ever been killed in any slave revolt in American history. Although a hastily assembled group of whites soon suppressed the violence, its repercussions had far-reaching consequences. In The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood, Patrick H. Breen uses the dramatic events in Southampton to explore the terrible choices faced by members of the local black community as they considered joining the rebels, a choice that would likely cost them their lives, supporting their masters, or somehow avoiding taking sides. Combining fast-paced narrative with rigorous analysis, Breen shows how, as whites regained control, slaveholders created an account of the revolt that saved their slaves from white retribution, the most dangerous threat facing the slaveholders' human property. By probing the stories slaveholders told that allowed them to get non-slaveholders to protect slave property, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood reveals something surprising about both the fragility and power of slavery.
Assassination of Malcolm X by
Exposes the cover-up surrounding the murder of Malcolm X and probes once-secret FBI files that shed light on the government's hostility to him and point toward its complicity in the crime.
American Violence by
A history of the violence in American society throughout its existence.
From Storefront to Monument: Tracing the Public History of the Black Museum Movement by
Today well over two hundred museums focusing on African American history and culture can be found throughout the United States and Canada. Many of these institutions trace their roots to the 1960s and 1970s, when the struggle for racial equality inspired a movement within the black community to make the history and culture of African America more "public." This book tells the story of four of these groundbreaking museums: the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago (founded in 1961); the International Afro-American Museum in Detroit (1965); the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, D.C. (1967); and the African American Museum of Philadelphia (1976). Andrea A. Burns shows how the founders of these institutions, many of whom had ties to the Black Power movement, sought to provide African Americans with a meaningful alternative to the misrepresentation or utter neglect of black history found in standard textbooks and most public history sites. Through the recovery and interpretation of artifacts, documents, and stories drawn from African American experience, they encouraged the embrace of a distinctly black identity and promoted new methods of interaction between the museum and the local community. Over time, the black museum movement induced mainstream institutions to integrate African American history and culture into their own exhibits and educational programs. This often controversial process has culminated in the creation of a National Museum of African American History and Culture, now scheduled to open in the nation's capital in 2015.
Stepdaughters of History by
In Stepdaughters of History, noted scholar Catherine Clinton reflects on the roles of women as historical actors within the field of Civil War studies and examines the ways in which historians have redefined female wartime participation. Clinton contends that despite the recent attention, white and black women’s contributions remain shrouded in myth and sidelined in traditional historical narratives. Her work tackles some of these well-worn assumptions, dismantling prevailing attitudes that consign women to the footnotes of Civil War texts.
Clinton highlights some of the debates, led by emerging and established Civil War scholars, which seek to demolish demeaning and limiting stereotypes of southern women as simpering belles, stoic Mammies, Rebel spitfires, or sultry spies. Such caricatures mask the more concrete and compelling struggles within the Confederacy, and in Clinton’s telling, a far more balanced and vivid understanding of women’s roles within the wartime South emerges. New historical evidence has given rise to fresh insights, including important revisionist literature on women’s overt and covert participation in activities designed to challenge the rebellion and on white women’s roles in reshaping the war’s legacy in postwar narratives. Increasingly, Civil War scholarship integrates those women who defied gender conventions to assume men’s roles—including those few who gained notoriety as spies, scouts, or soldiers during the war.
As Clinton’s work demonstrates, the larger questions of women’s wartime contributions remain important correctives to our understanding of the war’s impact. Through a fuller appreciation of the dynamics of sex and race, Stepdaughters of History promises a broader conversation in the twenty-first century, inviting readers to continue to confront the conundrums of the American Civil War.
The African American Heritage of Florida by
Africans participated in all the Spanish explorations and settlements in Florida, as they did throughout the Spanish Americas. In Florida they helped establish St. Augustine and the free black community of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. Africans and African Americans fought in the many conflicts that wracked Florida, including the three Seminole Wars and the Civil War. Despite the oppressions of slavery and segregation, black Floridians struggled to establish their own communities, combat racism and economic deprivation, and negotiate the terms of their labor. Against overwhelming odds, they helped develop communities like Jacksonville, Tampa, and Miami, and they served as the critical labor force for the state's citrus, agricultural, and timber industries. For centuries, however, their heritage has been ignored. These twelve essays examine the rich and substantial African American heritage of Florida, documenting African American contributions to the state's history from the colonial era to the late twentieth century.
Africans in the Americas by
This book provides a comparative history of African Americans, from the arrival of the first Africans in the Western Hemisphere to the twentieth century. Within a chronological organization, the book has topical chapters that compare the political, economic, social, and cultural contributions of African Americans to life in the U.S., the Caribbean, Brazil, and Spanish America. By offering an overview of African-American history and by considering the roles of Africans and their descendants in the development of all the Americas, the book places the black diaspora in the larger context of world history. The book begins with a chapter on African antiquity and early contacts with Europe. It continues with a comparative history of the slave trade and emancipation. Other topics include the role of free blacks throughout African-American history, women and gender relations, and African-American relations with Europeans and Native American populations. The book concludes with chapters on twentieth-century race and economic relations in the Americas and a chapter on the continuing ties between African Americans and Africa.
In the Cause of Liberty by
Ten scholars discuss the societal impact of the Civil War conflict in terms of three Americas-- antebellum, wartime, and postbellum war nations-- and recognize the critical role in this transformative era of three groups of Americans-- white northerners, white southerners, and African Americans in the North and South)-- during this decisive period in American history. Contributors address crucial ongoing controversies at the epicenter of the cultural, political, and intellectual history.
Enjoy the Same Liberty by
In this cohesive narrative, Edward Countryman explores the American Revolution in the context of the African American experience, asking a question that blacks have raised since the Revolution: What does the revolutionary promise of freedom and democracy mean for African Americans? Countryman, a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, draws on extensive research and primary sources to help him answer this question. He emphasizes the agency of blacks and explores the immense task facing slaves who wanted freedom, as well as looking at the revolutionary nature of abolitionist sentiment. Countryman focuses on how slaves remembered the Revolution and used its rhetoric to help further their cause of freedom.
Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895 by
In nearly 700 entries, this set documents the full range of the African American experience during the period from the arrival of the first slave ship to the death of Frederick Douglass, and shows how all aspects of American culture, history, and national identity have been profoundly influenced by the experience of African Americans.
Milestone Documents in African American History by
The four-volume set covers more than 130 iconic primary source documents from the Revolutionary era to the present day. Each entry offers the full text of the document in question as well as an in-depth, analytical essay that places the document in its historical context. Among the documents included in the set are Revolutionary era standards such as Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. Important presidential sources include Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Franklin Roosevelt's speech following the attack on Pearl Harbor, John F. Kennedy's 1963 address on integration, and George W. Bush's address on September 11, 2001. Influential decisions of the Supreme Court are also included, from Marbury v. Madison to Brown v. Board of Education to Bush v. Gore. Critical documents related to minority rights are also present: Andrew Jackson's message "On Indian Removal, " the Seneca Falls Declaration, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech, " and the Equal Rights Amendment.
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. by
A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind. The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked 'a new birth of freedom' in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the 'nadir' of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance. Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. Bringing a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a "New Negro" to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to America as it hurtled toward the modern age. The book will be accompanied by a new PBS documentary series on the same topic, with full promotional support from PBS.
The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh by
In the 1930s, the WPA's Federal Writers' Project provided work to thousands of unemployed writers, editors, and researchers of all races. The monumental American Guide Series featured books on stats, cities, rivers, and ethnic groups, opening an unprecedented view into the lives of the American people. University of Pittsburgh English professor J. Ernest Wright was selected to compile and edit "The Negro in Pittsburgh." He assembled an impressive, racially mixed team of writers and other professionals - including newspaper editors, teachers, preachers, and social workers - but when a hostile Congress abruptly terminated funding for the program in 1939, the nearly completed project languished, almost forgotten in the depths of the Pennsylvania State Library.
Never before published, The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh combines the original texts with an introduction and explanatory notes by historian Laurence Glasco." "The essays in this pioneering history of African Americans in Pittsburgh were written before World War II and the economic recovery that followed the Great Depression; before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and desegregation: before the destruction of a black cultural locus in the lower Hill District. The book, therefore, not only tells the history of African Americans in Pittsburgh from colonial times to the 1930s, but also captures the perspective of the period in which it was created.
Defining Moments in Black History by
With his trademark acerbic wit, incisive humor, and infectious paranoia, one of our foremost comedians and most politically engaged civil rights activists looks back at 100 key events from the complicated history of black America. A friend of luminaries including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Medgar Evers, and the forebear of today℗s popular black comics, including Larry Wilmore, W. Kamau Bell, Damon Young, and Trevor Noah, Dick Gregory was a provocative and incisive cultural force for more than fifty years. As an entertainer, he always kept it indisputably real about race issues in America, fearlessly lacing laughter with hard truths. As a leading activist against injustice, he marched at Selma during the Civil Rights movement, organized student rallies to protest the Vietnam War; sat in at rallies for Native American and feminist rights; fought apartheid in South Africa; and participated in hunger strikes in support of Black Lives Matter. In this collection of thoughtful, provocative essays, Gregory charts the complex and often obscured history of the African American experience. In his unapologetically candid voice, he moves from African ancestry and surviving the Middle Passage to the creation of the Jheri Curl, the enjoyment of bacon and everything pig, the headline-making shootings of black men, and the Black Lives Matter movement. A captivating journey through time, Defining Moments in Black History explores historical movements such as The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as cultural touchstones such as Sidney Poitier winning the Best Actor Oscar for Lilies in the Field and Billie Holiday releasing Strange Fruit. An engaging look at black life that offers insightful commentary on the intricate history of the African American people, Defining Moments in Black History is an essential, no-holds-bar history lesson that will provoke, enlighten, and entertain.
The Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope by
[This book] is my attempt to help followers of Jesus...ponder one question: How are we to be committed to the cause of Jesus during and after the presidency of Donald J. Trump? For those of us who are committed to do justice and love mercy, President Trump's election was more than an electoral surprise. It was a distressing moral and ethical reality that forces us to ponder how President Trump's political support by people who self-identify as evangelical followers of Jesus can be reconciled with the love and justice imperatives of the religion of Jesus. In many ways [this book] will examine the religious contributors to the current divisive mood within the country--a mood defined by white racism, partriarchy and misogyny, crass materialism, militarism, imperialism, white religious nationalism, and xenophobia. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once asked, "Where do we go from here?" The answer is: prophetic hope. I believe in a subversive and liberating vision of hope based on the faith tradition inspired by the religion of Jesus. Acting on that hope allows those who believe in the Spirit of God to confront, condemn, and overcome political, social, commercial, and religious actions that promote alienation, fear, hate, and despair. That means I believe we can survive distressing seasons.... Readers will quickly conclude that I do not consider support for the presidency of Donald Trump to be in keeping with the redemptive love of God manifested by the life, ministry, death, resurrection, and lordship of Jesus Christ. But readers will also find that I am equally moved to criticize Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Secretary Hillary Clinton, and any other public official whose views and conduct violate the biblical command to love God with his or her entire being, to care for the most vulnerable, and to treat our neighbors as ourselves.... I urge those who read these pages to treat my comments as just that--my thoughts and opinions on the national and global consequences of the contentious and highly controversial 2016 presidential election that will impact the intersection of politics and faith in the marketplace of ideas.... Please consider my words as admittedly dim and partial, imperfect and therefore questionable notions about God, the religion of Jesus, salvation, and social justice. --excerpt from author's "Introduction"
The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940 by
With the social change brought on by the Great Migration of African Americans into the urban northeast after the Great War came the surge of a biracial sensibility that made America different from other Western nations. How white and black people thought about race and how both groups understood and attempted to define and control the demographic transformation are the subjects of this new book by a rising star in American history.
In Black and White by
“Our problem is not racial, but human and economic. . . . We hold the Negro racially responsible for conditions common to all races on his economic plane.” The writings of reformer Lily Hardy Hammond (1859-1925) are filled with such forthright criticisms of southern white attitudes toward African Americans―enough so that her stature as a southern progressive thinker would seem assured. Yet Hammond, who once stood at the intellectual center of the southern women’s social gospel movement and was in her time the South’s most prolific female writer on the “race question,” has been marginalized.
This volume reprints In Black and White, the most important of Hammond’s ten books, along with a sampling of the dozens of articles she published. Elna C. Green’s biographical introduction tells of Hammond’s marriage to a prominent Methodist minister and educator. It also traces Hammond’s career within the context of prevailing gender and racial attitudes in the Jim Crow South. Hammond, who had roots in Methodist home mission work, was also active in such secular and ecumenical organizations as the Southern Sociological Congress, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Hammond worked alongside blacks to promote education, improve living conditions, and stop lynching. As a suffragist and temperance advocate, she urged the leaders of those largely white women’s movements to partner with African Americans.
Historians of religion, social science, and race relations will welcome the reintroduction of this remarkable but virtually forgotten figure.
The African-American Odyssey by
The African-American Odyssey is a compelling story of agency, survival, struggle and triumph over adversity. The authors highlight what it has meant to be black in America and how African-American history is inseparably woven into the greater context of American history. The text provides accounts of the lives of ordinary men and women alongside those of key African-Americans and the impact they have had on the struggle for equality to illuminate the central place of African-Americans in U.S. history more than any other text.
Shades of Glory by
Drawing on years of research, Shades of Glory traces the history of black baseball from the 19th century to the first great teams, such as the Cuban Giants, and on to the era of the vibrant barnstorming teams from the East Coast, Chicago, and Cuba. The unparalleled Rube Foster started the first Negro League in 1920, with such dominant teams as the Chicago American Giants and the Kansas City Monarchs. Pittsburgh soon produced two of the greatest teams of all time, the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords, featuring such stars as Satchel Paige, John Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and many more. Their superb brand of baseball rivaled the best of the major leagues until the historic signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Shades of Glory chronicles a bygone era of black baseball and the stars who were shadowed by racial prejudice, but now shine forth in all their sparkling brilliance.
The Nashville Way by
Among Nashville’s many slogans, the one that best reflects its emphasis on manners and decorum is the Nashville Way, a phrase coined by boosters to tout what they viewed as the city’s amicable race relations. Benjamin Houston offers the first scholarly book on the history of civil rights in Nashville, providing new insights and critiques of this moderate progressivism for which the city has long been credited.
Civil rights leaders such as John Lewis, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and James Lawson who came into their own in Nashville were devoted to nonviolent direct action, or what Houston calls the “black Nashville Way.” Through the dramatic story of Nashville’s 1960 lunch counter sit-ins, Houston shows how these activists used nonviolence to disrupt the coercive script of day-to-day race relations. Nonviolence brought the threat of its opposite—white violence— into stark contrast, revealing that the Nashville Way was actually built on a complex relationship between etiquette and brute force. Houston goes on to detail how racial etiquette forged in the era of Jim Crow was updated in the civil rights era. Combined with this updated racial etiquette, deeper structural forces of politics and urban renewal dictate racial realities to this day.
In The Nashville Way, Houston shows that white power was surprisingly adaptable. But the black Nashville Way also proved resilient as it was embraced by thousands of activists who continued to fight battles over schools, highway construction, and economic justice even after most Americans shifted their focus to southern hotspots like Birmingham and Memphis.
Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs by
Among the most prolific of American writers, Langston Hughes gained international attention and acclaim in nearly every genre of writing. While scholars and general readers have enjoyed relatively easy access to most of his writings, Hughes's work in one genre "the essay" has gone largely unnoticed. From his radical pieces praising revolutionary socialist ideology in the 1930s to the more conservative, previously unpublished "Black Writers in a Troubled World," which he wrote a year before his death, Hughes used the essay form as a vehicle through which to comment on the contemporary issues he found most pressing at various stages of his career.
Hughes generated some of his most powerful critiques of economic and racial exploitation and oppression through his masterful essays. It was the essay as a literary form that allowed Hughes to document the essential contributions made by African Americans to literature, music, film, and theater, and to chronicle the immense difficulties black artists faced in gaining recognition, fair remuneration, and professional advancement for these contributions. Finally, it was in certain essays that Hughes most fully represented the unique and endearing persona of the blues-poet-in-exile.
Many of the essays and other pieces of short nonfiction included in this volume have long been out of print and will be new to most readers. Through them, Langston Hughes reaffirmed a belief in the political potential of African American writers that remained consistent throughout his forty-six-year professional writing career: "Ours is a social as well as a literary responsibility." Such a belief resounds everywhere in this volume "a true testament of a man committed to the capabilities of language to generate social awareness and, ultimately, to compel social change."
Black Savannah, 1788-1864 by
Fourth in the University of Arkansas Press series in Black Community Studies, this examination of the black community of Savannah, Georgia, during the antebellum and the Civil War periods is a groundbreaker. It begins in 1788 with the founding of Savannah?s first black public institution, an independent church, and closes in 1864 with Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman?s capture of Savannah and the subsequent end to slavery. Using a wide range of primary sources, including the little-used Southern Claims Case Files, and a vast number of secondary sources, Whittington Johnson gracefully elucidates the most important features of slave and free African-American life in this period. Johnson maintains that, unlike Charleston and New Orleans, Savannah had a comparatively small population of free blacks, containing only a slim majority of mulattoes and few large property owners, a demographic that greatly affected the contours of the black class structure. Among the most interesting groups that created Savannah?s community were ?nominal slaves,? slaves in name only, who lived apart from their masters, seeking and finding their own employment. Black Savannah focuses upon efforts of African Americans, free and slave, who worked together to establish and maintain a variety of religious, social, and cultural institutions; to carve out niches in the larger economy; and to form cohesive families. The result was an autonomous black community in a key city of the Old South.
Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America by
Thomas Jefferson had three daughters: Martha and Maria by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and Harriet by his slave Sally Hemings. In Jefferson's Daughters, Catherine Kerrison, a scholar of early American and women's history, recounts the remarkable journey of these three women--and how their struggle to define themselves reflects both the possibilities and the limitations that resulted from the American Revolution.
Although the three women shared a father, the similarities end there. Martha and Maria received a fine convent school education while they lived with their father during his diplomatic posting in Paris--a hothouse of intellectual ferment whose celebrated salonnières are vividly brought to life in Kerrison's narrative. Once they returned home, however, the sisters found their options limited by the laws and customs of early America.
Harriet Hemings followed a different path. She escaped slavery--apparently with the assistance of Jefferson himself. Leaving Monticello behind, she boarded a coach and set off for a decidedly uncertain future.
For this groundbreaking triple biography, Kerrison has uncovered never-before-published documents written by the Jefferson sisters when they were in their teens, as well as letters written by members of the Jefferson and Hemings families. She has interviewed Hemings family descendants (and, with their cooperation, initiated DNA testing) and searched for descendants of Harriet Hemings.
The eventful lives of Thomas Jefferson's daughters provide a unique vantage point from which to examine the complicated patrimony of the American Revolution itself. The richly interwoven story of these three strong women and their fight to shape their own destinies sheds new light on the ongoing movement toward human rights in America--and on the personal and political legacy of one of our most controversial Founding Fathers.
Stride Toward Freedom by
Chronicles the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott sparked by Mrs. Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white male, describing the plans and problems of a nonviolent campaign, reprisals by the white community, and the eventual attainment of desegrated city bus service.
Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era by
This original and vital study enriches our understanding of the New Deal, the African American experience, and liberal reform.
We Will Win the Day by
James "Mudcat" Grant would not sing the right words. He knew they were a lie. Home of the Brave. Land of the Free. For who? Not black Americans. Not in 1960. Grant remembered vividly growing up in poverty in Lacooche, Florida, in a shack that had no hot water, no electric lights, or an indoor toilet, while his widowed mother supported her family on her menial wages working as a domestic in white people's home and then trying to supplement her meager wages at the local citrus plant. He remembered the white kids who would bully the black kids and call them racist names, the white cop who pointed a gun at him while his partner kicked him in the rear, and the unequal school system where black kids received old school supplies deemed unfit for white kids, where he studied in a school that was really a house with blankets dividing the classrooms. There were the segregated spring training games in Florida, his Cleveland Indians teammates who yelled racist remarks at black fans, and his pitching coach, Ted Wilks, who in 1947 as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals tried to organize a boycott to avoid playing Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers, and as a pitcher regularly threw at the heads of black batters." -- Provided by publisher.
"Most books that focus on ties between sports, black athletes, and the Civil Rights Movement focus on specific issues or people. They discuss, for example, how baseball was integrated or tell the stories of individuals like Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali. This book approaches the topic differently. By examining the connection between sports, black athletes and the Civil Rights Movement overall, it puts the athletes and their stories into the proper context. Rather than romanticizing the stories and the men and women who lived them, it uses the roles these individuals played--or chose not to play--to illuminate the complexities and nuances in the relationship between black athletes and the fight for racial equality. Arranged thematically, the book starts with Jackie Robinson's entry into baseball when he signed with the Dodgers in 1945 and ends with the revolt of black athletes in the late 1960s, symbolized by Tommie Smith and John Carlos famously raising their clenched fists during a medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympics. Accounts from the black press and the athletes themselves help illustrate the role black athletes played in the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, the book also examines how the black public viewed sports and the contributions of black athletes during these tumultuous decades, showing how the black communities' belief in merit and democracy--combined with black athletic success--influenced the push for civil rights.
Strength for the Fight by
Covers the role of Afro-American troops in Civil War, Reconstruction, Indian wars, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War.
Analyzes the dual struggle Blacks have faced in the military against both America's enemies and racial policies and prejudices, and examines the contributions they have made on behalf of America's defense over the past two hundred years.
A Black Patriot and a White Priest: André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans by
This book chronicles the intersecting lives of the first black military Civil War hero, Captain André Cailloux of the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, and the lone Catholic clerical voice of abolition in New Orleans, the Reverend Claude Paschal Maistre. Their paths converged in July 1863, when Maistre, in defiance of his archbishop, officiated at a large public military funeral for Cailloux, who had perished while courageously leading a doomed charge against the Confederate bastion of Port Hudson. The story of how Cailloux and Maistre arrived at that day and what happened as a consequence provides a prism through which to view the black military experience and the complex interplay of slavery, race, radicalism, and religion during American democracy's most violent upheaval.
War! What Is It Good For? by
African Americans' long campaign for "the right to fight" forced Harry Truman to issue his 1948 executive order calling for equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. Phillips examines how blacks' participation in the nation's wars after Truman's order and their protracted struggles for equal citizenship galvanized a vibrant antiwar activism that reshaped their struggles for freedom.
Black Americans by
This comprehensive and contemporary book presents a brief yet complete assessment of the lives of African Americans in the United States. Covers many areas, including anthropology, history, economics, political science and other pertinent areas relevant to what might be called “the Black Experience in America” . Sections in this reader-friendly book include homelessness, homicide as a public health problem, the prevalence of police brutality, and capital punishment. For anyone interested in learning more about race relations, black studies, black history, and black culture.
In Search of Power by
In Search of Power is a history of the era of civil rights, decolonization and Black Power. In the critical period from 1956 to 1974, the emergence of newly independent states worldwide and the struggles of the civil rights movement in the United States exposed the limits of racial integration and political freedom. Dissidents, leaders and elites alike were linked in a struggle for power in a world where the rules of the game had changed. Brenda Gayle Plummer traces the detailed connections between African Americans' involvement in international affairs and how they shaped American foreign policy, integrating African American history, the history of the African Diaspora and the history of United States foreign relations. These topics, usually treated separately, not only offer a unified view of the period but also reassess controversies and events that punctuated this colorful era of upheaval and change"-- Provided by publisher.
"In Search of Power is a history of the era of civil rights, decolonization, and Black Power. In the critical period from 1956 to 1974, the emergence of newly independent states worldwide and the struggles of the civil rights movement in the United States exposed the limits of racial integration and political freedom. Dissidents, leaders, and elites alike were linked in a struggle for power in a world where the rules of the game had changed. Brenda Gayle Plummer traces the detailed connections between African Americans' involvement in international affairs and how they shaped American foreign policy, integrating African American history, the history of the African Diaspora, and the history of United States foreign relations. These topics, usually treated separately, not only offer a unified view of the period but also reassess controversies and events that punctuated this colorful era of upheaval and change.
Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885 by
This revisionist work delineates the major social and economic contours of the large black population in the pivotal Southern city of Charleston, S.C., historical seaport center for the slave trade. The work draws upon census data, manuscript collections, and newspaper accounts to expand our knowledge of this particular community of nineteenth-century black urbanites. Although the federal government codified the rights of African-Americans into law following the Civil War, it was the initiatives taken by black men and women that actually transformed the theoretical benefits of emancipation into clear achievement.
Because of its large free black population, Charleston provided a case study of black social-class stratification and social mobility even before the war. Reconstruction only emphasized that stratification, and Powers examines in detail the aspirations and concessions that shaped the lives of the newly freed blacks - led by a black upper class that sometimes seemed more inclined to emulate white social mores than act as a vanguard for fundamental social change. Unlike most Reconstruction studies, which concentrate on politics, Black Charlestonians explores the era's vital socioeconomic challenges for blacks as they emerged into full citizenship in an important city in the South.
Hellhound on His Trail by
April, 1967: a prison escape. James Earl Ray, nondescript thief and con man, drifts through the South, into Mexico, and then Los Angeles, where he is galvanized by George Wallace's racist presidential campaign. February, 1968: a Memphis garbage strike. Martin Luther King joins the sanitation workers' cause, but their march turns violent. King vows to return to Memphis in April. Historian Sides follows Ray and King as they crisscross the country, one stalking the other, until the drifter catches up with his prey. Against the backdrop of the resulting nationwide riots and the pathos of King's funeral, Sides gives us a cross-cut narrative of the assassin's flight and the 65-day search that led investigators to Canada, Portugal, and England--a massive manhunt ironically led by Hoover's FBI. Drawing on previously unpublished material, this nonfiction thriller illuminates how history is so often a matter of the petty bringing down the great.
Lift Every Voice by
Provides an extensively researched examination of the NAACP's growth and influence, from its inception in 1909 to the present.
The Original Black Elite by
In this outstanding cultural biography, the author of the New York Times bestseller A Slave in the White House chronicles a critical yet overlooked chapter in American history: the inspiring rise and calculated fall of the black elite, from Emancipation through Reconstruction to the Jim Crow Era, embodied in the experiences of an influential figure of the time, academic, entrepreneur, and political activist and black history pioneer Daniel Murray. In the wake of the Civil War, Daniel Murray, born free and educated in Baltimore, was in the vanguard of Washington, D.C.'s black upper class. Appointed Assistant Librarian at the Library of Congress, at a time when government appointments were the most prestigious positions available for blacks, Murray became wealthy through his business as a construction contractor and married a college-educated socialite. The Murrays' social circles included some of the first African-American U.S. Senators and Congressmen, and their children went to the best colleges, Harvard and Cornell. Though Murray and other black elite of his time were primed to assimilate into the cultural fabric as Americans first and people of color second, their prospects were crushed by Jim Crow segregation and the capitulation to white supremacist groups by the government, which turned a blind eye to their unlawful, often murderous, acts. Elizabeth Dowling Taylor traces the rise, fall, and disillusionment of upper-class African Americans, revealing that they were a representation not of hypothetical achievement but what could be realized by African Americans through education and equal opportunities. As she makes clear, these well-educated and wealthy elite were living proof that African Americans did not lack ability to fully participate in the social contract as white supremacists claimed, making their subsequent fall when Reconstruction was prematurely abandoned all the more tragic. Illuminating and powerful, her magnificent work brings to life a dark chapter of American history that too many Americans have yet to recognize.
The Great Migration in Historical Perspective by
Legions of black Americans left the South to migrate to the jobs of the North, from the meat-packing plants of Chicago to the shipyards of Richmond, California. These essays analyze the role of African Americans in shaping their own geographical movement, emphasizing the role of black kin, friend, and communal network. Contributors include Darlene Clark Hine, Peter Gottlieb, James R. Grossman, Earl Lewis, Shirley Ann Moore, and Joe William Trotter, Jr.
Black Brotherhood: Afro-Americans and Africa by 
Black Troops, White Commanders and Freedmen During the Civil War by
In the ten probing essays collected in this volume, Howard C. Westwood recounts the often bitter experiences of black men who were admitted to military service and the wrenching problems associated with the shifting status of African Americans during the Civil War.
Peace Be Still by
A concise, engaging, and provocative history of African Americans since World War II, Peace Be Still is also nothing less than an alternate history of the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Organizing this history around culture, politics, and resistance, Matthew C. Whitaker takes us from World War II as a galvanizing force for African American activism and the modern civil rights movement to the culmination of generations of struggle in the election of Barack Obama. From the promise of the post-World War II era to the black power movement of the 1960s, the economic and political struggles of the 1970s, and the major ideological realignment of political culture during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, this book chronicles a people fighting oppression while fashioning a dynamic culture of artistic and religious expression along with a program of educational and professional advancement. A resurgence of rigid conservative right-wing policies, the politics of poverty, racial profiling, and police brutality are ongoing counterpoints to African Americans rising to political prominence and securing positions once denied them. A history of African Americans for a new generation, Peace Be Still demonstrates how dramatically African American history illuminates the promise, conflicts, contradictions, hopes, and victories that all Americans share.
Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 by
Too Heavy a Load explores this century's rich history of black women defending, defining, and explaining themselves. Although most prominently a history of the century-long struggle against racism and male chauvinism, it also brings to light and celebrates twentieth-century African American women's unlauded support for women's rights, civil rights, and civil liberties. Too Heavy a Load also takes us beyond the reach of history in its moving and fascinating illumination of black women's painful struggle to hold their racial and gender identities intact while feeling the inexorable pull of the agendas of white women and black men. Finally, it tells the larger and lamentable story of how Americans began this century measuring racial progress by the status of black women, but gradually came to focus on the status of black men -- the masculinization of America's racial consciousness.
The Warmth of Other Suns by
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.
Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance by
Dietrich Bonhoeffer publicly confronted Nazism and anti-Semitic racism in Hitler's Germany. The Reich's political ideology, when mixed with theology of the German Christian movement, turned Jesus into a divine representation of the ideal, racially pure Aryan and allowed race-hate to become part of Germany's religious life. Bonhoeffer provided a Christian response to Nazi atrocities. In this book author Reggie L. Williams follows Bonhoeffer as he defies Germany with Harlem's black Jesus. The Christology Bonhoeffer learned in Harlem's churches featured a black Christ who suffered with African Americans in their struggle against systemic injustice and racial violence-and then resisted. In the pews of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, under the leadership of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., Bonhoeffer absorbed the Christianity of the Harlem Renaissance. This Christianity included a Jesus who stands with the oppressed rather than joins the oppressors and a theology that challenges the way God can be used to underwrite a union of race and religion. Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus argues that the black American narrative led Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the truth that obedience to Jesus requires concrete historical action. This ethic of resistance not only indicted the church of the German Volk, but also continues to shape the nature of Christian discipleship today.
The New Jim Crow by
It is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet, as legal star Alexander reveals, today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.
The Case for Black Reparations by
The groundbreaking first book on black reparations, essential reading for the twenty-first century Originally published in 1972, Boris Bittker's riveting study of America's debt to African-Americans was well ahead of its time. Published by Toni Morrison when she was an editor, the book came from an unlikely source: Bittker was a white professor of law at Yale University who had long been ambivalent about the idea of reparations. Through his research into the history and theory of reparations-namely the development and enforcement of lawsdesigned to compensate groups for injustices imposed on them-he found that it wasn't a'crazy, far-fetched idea.' In fact, beginning with post-Civil War demands for forty acres and a mule, African-American thinkers have long made the case that compensatory measures are justified not only for the injury of slavery but for the further setbacks of almost a century of Jim Crow laws and forced school and job segregation, measures that effectively blocked African-Americans from enjoying the privledges of citizenship. The publication of important recent books by black scholars like Randall Robinson and the growth of a highly vocal reparations movement in the beginning of this century make this book, long unavailable, essential reading. Bittker carefully illuminates the historical provisions and statutes for legitimate claims to reparations, the national and international precedents for such claims, and most important, the obstacles to a national policy of reparations.
Negro Social and Political Thought, 1850 - 1920, Representative Texts by
A compilation of opposing viewpoints favoring either some form of separatism (Martin R. Delany, Edward W. Blyden, James T. Holly, Alexander Crummell, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey) or assimilation (Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, Booker T. Washington, Archibald H. Grimke).
Black Power by
A revolutionary work since its publication, Black Power exposed the depths of systemic racism in this country and provided a radical political framework for reform: true and lasting social change would only be accomplished through unity among African-Americans and their independence from the preexisting order. An eloquent document of the civil rights movement that remains a work of profound social relevance 50 years after it was first published.
Legacy and Legitimacy by
Thoroughly grounded in the latest scholarly literature, theoretical sources, and experimental results, Legacy and Legitimacy substantially advances understanding of Black Americans' attitudes toward the Supreme Court, the Court's ability to influence Blacks' opinions about the legitimacy of public policies, and the role of media in shaping Blacks' judgements.
We Face the Dawn by
The decisive victories in the fight for racial equality in America were not easily won, much less inevitable; they were achieved through carefully conceived strategy and the work of tireless individuals dedicated to this most urgent struggle. In We Face the Dawn, Margaret Edds tells the gripping story of how the South's most significant grassroots legal team challenged the barriers of racial segregation in mid-century America. Virginians Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson initiated and argued one of the five cases that combined into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, but their influence extends far beyond that momentous ruling. They were part of a small brotherhood, headed by social-justice pioneer Thurgood Marshall and united largely through the Howard Law School, who conceived and executed the NAACP's assault on racial segregation in education, transportation, housing, and voting. Hill and Robinson's work served as a model for southern states and an essential underpinning for Brown. When the Virginia General Assembly retaliated with laws designed to disbar the two lawyers and discredit the NAACP, they defiantly carried the fight to the United States Supreme Court and won. At a time when numerous schools have resegregated and the prospects of many minority children appear bleak, Hill and Robinson's remarkably effective campaign against various forms of racial segregation can inspire a new generation to embrace educational opportunity as the birthright of every American child.
Devil in the Grove by
Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life. In 1949, Florida?s orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor with the help of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old girl cried rape, McCall pursued four young blacks who dared envision a future for themselves beyond the groves. The Ku Klux Klan joined the hunt, hell-bent on lynching the men who came to be known as "the Groveland Boys." Associates thought it was suicidal for Marshall to wade into the "Florida Terror," but the young lawyer would not shrink from the fight despite continuous death threats against him. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI's unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund files, Gilbert King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader.
Kennedy and King by
An account of the contentious relationship between the thirty-fifth president and Martin Luther King, Jr. throughout the tumultuous early years of the civil rights movement explores their influence on one another and the important decisions that were inspired by their rivalry.
"The story of civil rights in the early 1960s is a tale of courageous sit-ins and marches, police brutality, violence, and murder. It is also a tale of two men: John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., a pair of gifted, charismatic, and ambitious leaders from strikingly different worlds. When they first met in 1960, as Kennedy lobbied King to back his bid for the presidency, the wealthy Irish Catholic and the Southern Baptist preacher had little natural rapport. Kennedy was cool and Witty, King taut and high-minded. Kennedy was slow to embrace a full-throated position on equality for black Americans, fearing the wrath of southern Democrats. Over the next three years---as America was transfixed by a series of dramatic demonstrations across the South--it was King, more than any other figure, who led Kennedy to finally make a moral commitment to civil rights; and it was Kennedy's hesitation that prompted King to achieve his greatest potential as an activist. This unique and transformative relationship has never been explored in such gripping fashion. From Harry Belafonte's Manhattan apartment to the Birmingham city jail to Joseph Kennedy's Palm Beach estate, [this book] delivers a narrative both public and intimate: the risky strategies, secret meetings, outrageous personalities, and private struggles that absorbed the lives of these two men--and forever bound them together.
African Americans in White Suburbia by
What happens to their social and political attitudes when African Americans become better educated, more affluent, and move to wealthy, largely white suburbs? In this study of affluent African Americans who live in suburbs that remain predominately white, Ernest McGowen shows that they maintain their connections with African American institutions in the inner city and largely minority "black ring" suburbs and tend not to develop attitudes that match those of their white suburban neighbors. Indeed, despite attaining levels of education and affluence that enable them to live among white people of a similar socio-economic status, these African Americans find their race remains a defining marker in their lives and their politics. They seek to maintain connections to institutions and groups that enable them to feel connected to those who share their experience of race in America.
The Color of the Law by
On February 25, 1946, African Americans in Columbia, Tennessee, averted the lynching of James Stephenson, a nineteen-year-old, black Navy veteran who had fought with a white Army veteran and radio repairman at a local department store. That night, after Stephenson was safely out of town, four of Columbia's police officers were shot and wounded when they tried to enter the town's black business district. The next morning, the Tennessee Highway Patrol invaded the district, wrecking establishments and beating men as they arrested them." "Drawing on extensive oral history interviews and a rich array of written records - including federal grand jury records acquired through a court order, a trial transcript thought not to exist, and a transcript of the interrogation of two black suspects just before they were killed in jail - Gail Williams O'Brien tells the dramatic story of the Columbia "race riot" and the events that followed." "O'Brien sees the Columbia events as emblematic of the shift in emphasis during the 1940s from racially motivated mob violence, prevalent for decades in the American South, to increased confrontations between African Americans and the criminal justice system, a nationwide phenomenon.
Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War by
When on May 15, 1918 a French lieutenant warned Henry Johnson of the 369th to move back because of a possible enemy raid, Johnson reportedly replied: "I'm an American, and I never retreat." The story, even if apocryphal, captures the mythic status of the Harlem Rattlers, the African-American combat unit that grew out of the 15th New York National Guard, who were said to have never lost a man to capture or a foot of ground that had been taken. It also, in its insistence on American identity, points to a truth at the heart of this book—more than fighting to make the world safe for democracy, the black men of the 369th fought to convince America to live up to its democratic promise. It is this aspect of the storied regiment's history—its place within the larger movement of African Americans for full citizenship in the face of virulent racism—that Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War brings to the fore.
With sweeping vision, historical precision, and unparalleled research, this book will stand as the definitive study of the 369th. Though discussed in numerous histories and featured in popular culture (most famously the film Stormy Weather and the novel Jazz), the 369th has become more a matter of mythology than grounded, factually accurate history—a situation that authors Jeffrey T. Sammons and John H. Morrow, Jr. set out to right. Their book—which eschews the regiment's famous nickname, the "Harlem Hellfighters," a name never embraced by the unit itself—tells the full story of the self-proclaimed Harlem Rattlers. Combining the "fighting focus" of military history with the insights of social commentary, Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War reveals the centrality of military service and war to the quest for equality as it details the origins, evolution, combat exploits, and postwar struggles of the 369th.
The authors take up the internal dynamics of the regiment as well as external pressures, paying particular attention to the environment created by the presence of both black and white officers in the unit. They also explore the role of women—in particular, the Women's Auxiliary of the 369th—as partners in the struggle for full citizenship. From its beginnings in the 15th New York National Guard through its training in the explosive atmosphere in the South, its singular performance in the French army during World War I, and the pathos of postwar adjustment—this book reveals as never before the details of the Harlem Rattlers' experience, the poignant history of some of its heroes, its place in the story of both World War I and the African American campaign for equality—and its full importance in our understanding of American history.
All Deliberate Speed by
Presenting a vivid pageant of historical characters including Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Earl Warren, Anita Hill, and Clarence Thomas, Ogletree discusses the ambivalence of America's judicial system and reflections on the first half-century of "Brown v. Board of Education."
The Bill of the Century by
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the single most important piece of legislation passed by Congress in American history. This one law so dramatically altered American society that, looking back, it seems preordained--as Everett Dirksen, the GOP leader in the Senate and a key supporter of the bill, said, "no force is more powerful than an idea whose time has come." But there was nothing predestined about the victory: a phalanx of powerful senators, pledging to "fight to the death" for segregation, launched the longest filibuster in American history to defeat it. The bill's passage has often been credited to the political leadership of President Lyndon Johnson, or the moral force of Martin Luther King. Yet as Clay Risen shows, the battle for the Civil Rights Act was a story much bigger than those two men. It was a broad, epic struggle, a sweeping tale of unceasing grassroots activism, ringing speeches, backroom deal-making and finally, hand-to-hand legislative combat. The larger-than-life cast of characters ranges from Senate lions like Mike Mansfield and Strom Thurmond to NAACP lobbyist Charles Mitchell, called "the 101st senator" for his Capitol Hill clout, and industrialist J. Irwin Miller, who helped mobilize a powerful religious coalition for the bill. The "idea whose time had come" would never have arrived without pressure from the streets and shrewd leadership in Congress--all captured in Risen's vivid narrative. This critical turning point in American history has never been thoroughly explored in a full-length account. Now, New York Times editor and acclaimed author Clay Risen delivers the full story, in all its complexity and drama.
The Color of Law by
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation, that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation?the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments?that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post?World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. "The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book" (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein's invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.
The Ferguson Report by
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed African American high school senior, was shot by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. For months afterward, protestors took to the streets demanding justice, testifying to the racist and exploitative police department and court system, and connecting the shooting of Brown with the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and other young black men at the hands of police across the country. In the wake of these protests, the Department of Justice launched a six-month investigation, resulting in a report that Colorlines characterizes as "so caustic it reads like an Onion article" and laying bare what the Huffington Post calls "a totalizing police regime beyond any of Kafka's ghastliest nightmares." Among the report's findings are that the Ferguson Police Department "Engages in a Pattern of Unconstitutional Stops and Arrests in Violation of the Fourth Amendment, " "Detain[s] People Without Reasonable Suspicion and Arrest[s] People Without Probable Cause, " "Engages in a Pattern of First Amendment Violations, " "Engages in a Pattern of Excessive Force, " and "Erode[s] Community Trust, Especially Among Ferguson's African-American Residents." Contextualized here in a substantial introduction by renowned legal scholar and former NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund president Theodore M. Shaw, The Ferguson Report is a sad, sobering, and important document, providing a snapshot of American law enforcement at the start of the twenty-first century, with resonance far beyond one small town in Missouri.
Just Mercy by
The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama recounts his experiences as a lawyer working to assist those desperately in need, reflecting on his pursuit of the ideal of compassion in American justice.
"Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn't commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship--and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever. Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer's coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.
The Blood of Emmett Till by
In 1955, white men in the Mississippi Delta lynched a fourteen-year-old from Chicago named Emmett Till. His murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional ... But what actually happened to Emmett Till--not the icon of injustice but the flesh-and-blood boy? Part detective story, part political history, [this book] draws on a wealth of new evidence, including the only interview ever given by Carolyn Bryant, the white woman in whose name Till was killed.
At Freedom's Door: African American Founding Fathers and Lawyers in Reconstruction South Carolina by
At Freedom's Door rescues from obscurity the identities, images, and long-term contributions of black leaders who helped to rebuild South Carolina after the Civil War. In seven essays, the contributors to the volume explore the role of African Americans in government and law during Reconstruction in the Palmetto State. Bringing into focus a legacy not fully recognized, the contributors collectively demonstrate the legal acumen displayed by prominent African Americans and the impact these individuals had on the enactment of substantial constitutional reforms - many of which, though abandoned after Reconstruction, would be resurrected in the twentieth century.
Heroism and the Black Intellectual by
Before and after writing Invisible Man, novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison fought to secure a place as a black intellectual in a white-dominated society. In this sophisticated analysis of Ellison's cultural politics, Jerry Watts examines the ways in which black artists and thinkers attempt to establish creative intellectual spaces for themselves. Using Ellison as a case study, Watts makes important observations about the role of black intellectuals in America today.
Watts argues that black intellectuals have had to navigate their way through a society that both denied them the resources, status, and encouragement available to their white peers and alienated them from the rest of their ethnic group. For Ellison to pursue meaningful intellectual activities in the face of this marginalization demanded creative heroism, a new social and artistic stance that challenges cultural stereotypes.
For example, Ellison first created an artistic space for himself by associating with Communist party literary circles, which recognized the value of his writing long before the rest of society was open to his work. In addition, to avoid prescriptive white intellectual norms, Ellison developed his own ideology, which Watts terms the 'blues aesthetic.' Watts's ambitious study reveals a side of Ellison rarely acknowledged, blending careful criticism of art with a wholesale engagement with society.
Race, Power, and Political Emergence in Memphis by
Race, Power, and Political Emergence in Memphis examines black political behavior and empowerment strategies in the city of Memphis. Each chapter of the text focuses on three themes-mobilization, emergence, and incorporation. By analyzing the effects of race on black political development in Memphis, scholars will be able to examine broader questions about its effects in other cities. How do political machines use substantial black electorates to their advantage? What forms of protest do black communities conduct to rebel against machine rule? What primary mobilization tactics have black citizens used during the different periods of their political development? Why do blacks mobilize more quickly in some cities? In cities with large and predominantly black populations, what elements prevent black candidates from winning citywide races? What constraints do newly elected black mayors face? What benefits do black citizens gain from their representation? After a predominantly black governing coalition is elected, what obstacles remain? Can black citizens translate proportional representation into strong political incorporation? How much power can African Americans realistic expect to gain in cities? This book is the most comprehensive case study of the city's political scene written to date. The text primarily shows that white racism is not the only obstacle to black political development. Black citizens can have population majorities, but lose elections for other reasons. Their ability to win elections and gain full incorporation depends heavily on whether they minimize internal conflict and establish coalitions with middle-class citizens and the business establishment.
Performing the Word by
Performing the Word offers readers of African American poetry a way of understanding and appreciating body of work that has received little critical attention. While African American literary tradition begins with eighteenth-century poets like Lucy Terry, Jupiter Hammon, and Phillis Wheatley, critical discussions of African American Poetry have been sparse. Aside from a few studies of "major" poets, such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Rita Dove, or period histories of phenomena such as the Harlem Renaissance, there has been little sustained critical inquiry into African American poetry as a body of literature- until now. Fahamista Patricia Brown examines elements of African American expressive culture- its language practices, both fold and popular. Her book is an excellent introduction to a diverse group of poets and the common basis of their work in language practices and performativity, in the expressive culture of a people. Performing the Word is an important contribution to the understanding of African American culture and American poetry as a whole.
Each Hour Redeem by
Each Hour Redeem advances a major reinterpretation of African American literature from the late eighteenth century to the present by demonstrating how its authors are centrally concerned with racially different experiences of time. Daylanne K. English argues that, from Phillis Wheatley to Suzan-Lori Parks, African American writers have depicted distinctive forms of temporality to challenge racial injustices supported by dominant ideas of time. The first book to explore the representation of time throughout the African American literary canon, Each Hour Redeem illuminates how the pervasive and potent tropes of timekeeping provide the basis for an overarching new understanding of the tradition. Combing literary, historical, legal, and philosophical approaches, Each Hour Redeem examines a wide range of genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, slave narratives, and other forms of nonfiction. English shows that much of African American literature is characterized by ℗strategic anachronism, ℗ the use of prior literary forms to investigate contemporary political realities, as seen in Walter Mosley℗s recent turn to hard-boiled detective fiction. By contrast, ℗strategic presentism℗ is exemplified in the Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance and their investment in contemporary political potentialities, for example, in Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka℗s adaptation of the jazz of their eras for poetic form and content. Overall, the book effectively demonstrates how African American writers have employed multiple and complex conceptions of time not only to trace racial injustice but also to help construct a powerful literary tradition across the centuries.
Black Expression; Essays By and About Black Americans in the Creative Arts by
Essays by and about black Americans in the creative arts.
Conversations with Nikki Giovanni by
Out of this collection of twenty-two interviews spanning two decades rises the distinctive voice of "the princess of black poetry." Nikki Giovanni entered the literary world at the height of the Black Arts Movement and quickly achieved not simple fame but stardom, a phenomenon almost unprecedented for a poet. Her first two volumes of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talks and Black Judgement, gave expression to the thoughts and feelings of a generation of young African Americans and established Giovanni, in the minds of many, as a "revolutionary," even militant, poet. The image was not altogether accurate, yet it became the gauge by which her later work was judged. In these conversations the reader can follow the evolution of Giovanni's distinctive voice and the sensibility of the poet's mind. She chooses her words carefully, while giving an impression of spontaneity and even of glibness.
Painting Harlem Modern by
Jacob Lawrence was one of the best-known African American artists of the twentieth century. In Painting Harlem Modern, Patricia Hills renders a vivid assessment of Lawrence's long and productive career. She argues that his complex, cubist-based paintings developed out of a vital connection with a modern Harlem that was filled with artists, writers, musicians, and social activists. She also uniquely positions Lawrence alongside such important African American writers as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Drawing from a wide range of archival materials and interviews with artists, Hills interprets Lawrence's art as distilled from a life of struggle and perseverance. Painting Harlem Modern is an absorbing book that highlights Lawrence's heroic efforts to meet his many challenges while remaining true to his humanist values and artistic vision.
Selected Letters of Langston Hughes by
This is the first comprehensive selection from the correspondence of the iconic and beloved Langston Hughes. It offers a life in letters that showcases his many struggles as well as his memorable achievements. Arranged by decade and linked by expert commentary, the volume guides us through Hughes℗s journey in all its aspects: personal, political, practical, and℗above all℗literary. His letters range from those written to family members, notably his father (who opposed Langston℗s literary ambitions), and to friends, fellow artists, critics, and readers who sought him out by mail. These figures include personalities such as Carl Van Vechten, Blanche Knopf, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Vachel Lindsay, Ezra Pound, Richard Wright, Kurt Weill, Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, Amiri Baraka, and Muhammad Ali. The letters tell the story of a determined poet precociously finding his mature voice; struggling to realize his literary goals in an environment generally hostile to blacks; reaching out bravely to the young and challenging them to aspire beyond the bonds of segregation; using his artistic prestige to serve the disenfranchised and the cause of social justice; irrepressibly laughing at the world despite its quirks and humiliations. Venturing bravely on what he called the ℗big sea℗ of life, Hughes made his way forward always aware that his only hope of self-fulfillment and a sense of personal integrity lay in diligently pursuing his literary vocation. Hughes℗s voice in these pages, enhanced by photographs and quotations from his poetry, allows us to know him intimately and gives us an unusually rich picture of this generous, visionary, gratifyingly good man who was also a genius of modern American letters.
Origins of the Dream by
For years, some scholars have privately suspected Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech was connected to Langston Hughes's poetry, and the link between the two was purposefully veiled through careful allusions in King's orations. In Origins of the Dream, W. Jason Miller lifts that veil to demonstrate how Hughes's revolutionary poetry became a measurable inflection in King's voice, and that the influence can be found in more than just the one famous speech. Miller contends that by employing Hughes's metaphors in his speeches, King negotiated a political climate that sought to silence the poet's subversive voice. He argues that by using allusion rather than quotation, King avoided intensifying the threats and accusations against him, while allowing the nation to unconsciously embrace the incendiary ideas behind Hughes's poetry.
The Freedom to Remember by
The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on the theme of freedom, not slavery, defining these works as "liberatory narratives." Mitchell shows how the liberatory narrative functions to emancipate its readers from the legacies of slavery in American society by facilitating a deeper discussion of the issues and by making them new through illumination and interrogation.
Was the Cat in the Hat Black? by
Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structural: it's embedded in culture and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides -- and thus perhaps the best place to oppose it -- is books for young people. Philip Nel presents five serious critiques of the history and current state of children's literature tempestuous relationship with both implicit and explicit forms of racism. Nel examines topics both vivid -- such as The Cat in the Hat's roots in blackface minstrelsy -- and more opaque, like how the children's book industry can perpetuate structural racism via whitewashed covers even while making efforts to increase diversity. Rooted in research, Nel delves into years of literary criticism and recent sociological data in order to show a better way forward. Though much of what is proposed here could be endlessly argued, the knowledge that what we learn in childhood imparts both subtle and explicit lessons about whose lives matter is not debatable. The text concludes with a proposal of actions everyone -- reader, author, publisher, scholar, citizen -- can take to fight the biases and prejudices that infect children's literature.
Black Ink by
Spanning over 250 years of history, Black Ink traces black literature in America from Frederick Douglass to Ta-Nehisi Coates in this masterful collection of twenty-five illustrious and moving essays on the power of the written word. Throughout American history black people are the only group of people to have been forbidden by law to learn to read. This unique collection seeks to shed light on that injustice and subjugation, as well as the hard-won literary progress made, putting some of America?s most cherished voices in a conversation in one magnificent volume that presents reading as an act of resistance. Organized into three sections, the Peril, the Power, and Pleasure, and with an array of contributors both classic and contemporary, Black Ink presents the brilliant diversity of black thought in America while solidifying the importance of these writers within the greater context of the American literary tradition. At times haunting and other times profoundly humorous, this unprecedented anthology guides you through the remarkable experiences of some of America?s greatest writers and their lifelong pursuits of literacy and literature. The foreword was written by Nikki Giovanni. Contributors include: Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture], Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Terry McMillan, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Colson Whitehead. The anthology features a bonus in-depth interview with President Barack Obama.
Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music by
Country music's debt to African American music has long been recognized. Black musicians have helped to shape the styles of many of the most important performers in the country canon. The partnership between Lesley Riddle and A.P. Carter produced much of the Carter Family's repertoire; the street musician Tee Tot Payne taught a young Hank Williams Sr.; the guitar playing of Arnold Schultz influenced western Kentuckians, including Bill Monroe and Ike Everly. Yet attention to how these and other African Americans enriched the music played by whites has obscured the achievements of black country-music performers and the enjoyment of black listeners. The contributors to Hidden in the Mix examine how country music became "white," how that fictive racialization has been maintained, and how African American artists and fans have used country music to elaborate their own identities. They investigate topics as diverse as the role of race in shaping old-time record catalogues, the transracial West of the hick-hopper Cowboy Troy, and the place of U.S. country music in postcolonial debates about race and resistance. Revealing how music mediates both the ideology and the lived experience of race, Hidden in the Mix challenges the status of country music as "the white man's blues."
The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America by
As musicians, listeners, and scholars have sensed for many years, the story of jazz is more than a history of the music. Burton Peretti presents a fascinating account of how the racial and cultural dynamics of American cities created the music, life, and business that was jazz. From its origins in the jook joints of sharecroppers and the streets and dance halls of 1890s New Orleans, through its later metamorphoses in the cities of the North, Peretti charts the life of jazz culture to the eve of bebop and World War II. In the course of those fifty years, jazz was the story of players who made the transition from childhood spasm bands to Carnegie Hall and worldwide touring and fame. It became the music of the Twenties, a decade of Prohibition, of adolescent discontent, of Harlem pride, and of Americans hoping to preserve cultural traditions in an urban, commercial age. And jazz was where black and white musicians performed together, as uneasy partners, in the big bands of Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman. "Blacks fought back by using jazz, " states Peretti, "with its unique cultural and intellectual properties, to prove, assess, and evade the "dynamic of minstrelsy." Drawing on newspaper reports of the times and on the firsthand testimony of more than seventy prominent musicians and singers (among them Benny Carter, Bud Freeman, Kid Ory, and Mary Lou Williams), The Creation of Jazz is the first comprehensive analysis of the role of early jazz in American social history.
A Century of Musicals in Black and White by
This comprehensive reference book provides succinct information on almost thirteen hundred musical stage works written and produced from the 1870s to the 1990s involving contributions by black librettists, lyricists, composers, musicians, producers, or performers or containing thematic materials relevant to the black experience. Organized alphabetically, they include tent and outdoor shows, vaudeville, operas and operettas, comedies, farces, spectacles, revues, cabaret and nightclub shows, children's musicals, skits, one-act musicals, one-person shows, and even a musical without songs. In addition to the hundreds of shows independently created, produced, and performed by black writers and theatrical artists, it presents hundreds more representing a collaboration of black and white talents. An appendix organizes the shows chronologically and highlights those that were most significant in the history of the black American musical stage. An extensive bibliography and indexes of names, songs, and subjects complete the work.
African American Art by
A beautifully illustrated survey of African American art of the twentieth century, including many never-before-seen works by the most important artists of the period. African American Art presents a powerful selection of paintings, sculpture, prints, and photographs by forty-three black artists who explored the African American experience of the twentieth century. Drawn entirely from the Smithsonian American Art Museum's rich collection of African American art, the works include paintings by Benny Andrews, Jacob Lawrence, Thornton Dial Sr., Romare Bearden, Alma Thomas, and Lois Mailou Jones, and photographs by Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, Roland Freeman, Marilyn Nance, and James Van Der Zee.
Blacks in Black and White by
Since its publication in 1977 to acclaim as a pioneering work, this has remained the first and only book to detail all aspects of a unique era in the history of motion pictures-the only time in the U.S. when films featuring an all-Black cast, produced and directed by Blacks, were shown primarily to Black audiences, in theatres many of which were owned and managed by Blacks. Sampson traces the history of the Black film industry from its beginnings around 1910 to its demise in 1950, chronicling the activities of pioneer Black filmmakers and performers who have been virtually ignored by film historians. Significantly more information on Oscar Micheaux and other Black producers of the period and descriptions of many more Black films are included in the second edition. A new chapter discusses the first black images in American film as portrayed by Whites in blackface. The list of film titles from both the sound and the silent periods, including members of the cast, has been greatly expanded. With an extensive list of Black musical "soundies;" full index; and many new and rare photographs.
Long Past Slavery by
From 1936 to 1939, the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project collected life stories from more than 2,300 former African American slaves. These narratives are now widely used as a source to understand the lived experience of those who made the transition from slavery to freedom. But in this examination of the project and its legacy, Catherine A. Stewart shows it was the product of competing visions of the past, as ex-slaves' memories of bondage, emancipation, and life as freedpeople were used to craft arguments for and against full inclusion of African Americans in society. Stewart demonstrates how project administrators, such as the folklorist John Lomax; white and black interviewers, including Zora Neale Hurston; and the ex-slaves themselves fought to shape understandings of black identity. She reveals that some influential project employees were also members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, intent on memorializing the Old South. Stewart places ex-slaves at the center of debates over black citizenship to illuminate African Americans' struggle to redefine their past as well as their future in the face of formidable opposition. By shedding new light on a critically important episode in the history of race, remembrance, and the legacy of slavery in the United States, Stewart compels readers to rethink a prominent archive used to construct that history.
Don't Deny My Name by
Black musical forms profoundly influenced the work of American poet and leading literary figure Lorenzo Thomas, and he wrote about them with keen insight---and obvious pleasure. This book, begun by Thomas before his death in 2005, collects more than a dozen of his savvy yet engagingly personal essays that probe the links between African American music, literature, and popular culture, from the Harlem Renaissance to the present.
Don't Deny My Name (which takes its title from a blues song by Jelly Roll Morton) begins by laying out the case that the blues is a body of literature that captured the experience of African American migrants to the urban North and newer territories to the West. The essays that follow collectively provide a tour of the movement through classic jazz, bop, and the explosions of the free jazz era, followed by a section on R&B and soul. The penultimate essay is a meditation on rap music that attempts to bring together the extremes of emotion that hip hop elicits, and the collection ends with an unfinished preface to the volume.
Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance by
This work shines the spotlight on historically neglected plays and performances that challenged early twentieth-century notions of the stratification of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. On Broadway stages, in Harlem nightclubs and dance halls, and within private homes sponsoring rent parties, African American performers of the 1920s and early 1930s teased the limits of white middle-class morality. Blues-singing lesbians, popularly known as "bulldaggers, " performed bawdy songs; cross-dressing men vied for the top prizes in lavish drag balls; and black and white women flaunted their sexuality in scandalous melodramas and musical revues. Race leaders, preachers, and theater critics spoke out against these performances that threatened to undermine social and political progress, but to no avail: mainstream audiences could not get enough of the riotous entertainment. Many of the plays and performances explored here, central to the cultural debates of their time, had been previously overlooked by theater historians. Among the performances discussed are David Belasco's controversial production of Edward Sheldon and Charles MacArthur's Lulu Belle (1926), with its raucous, libidinous view of Harlem. The title character, as performed by a white woman in blackface, became a symbol of defiance for the gay subculture and was simultaneously held up as a symbol of supposedly immoral black women. African Americans Florence Mills and Ethel Waters, two of the most famous performers of the 1920s, countered the Lulu Belle stereotype in written statements and through parody, thereby reflecting the powerful effect this fictional character had on the popular imagination. This work is based on historical archival research including readings of eyewitness accounts, newspaper reports, songs, and playscripts. Employing a cultural studies framework that incorporates queer and critical race theory, it argues against the widely held belief that the stereotypical forms of black, lesbian, and gay show business of the 1920s prohibited the emergence of distinctive new voices.
Black Protest and the Great Migration by
Documents taken from newspapers, periodicals, journals, and trade publications that highlight a variety of perspectives related to the Great Migration of African Americans from southern to northern states during the World War I era.
This is a well-conceived, important, and highly original volume that will allow instructors to seriously address issues of African American resistance and agency, the reproduction of white racism, and the origins not only of the modern civil rights movement but also of institutionalized racism.
The Black Power Revolt: A Collection of Essays. by
A collection of essays written by people who are concerned with the cultural, economic, and political progress of black individuals in America.
Takin' It to the Streets by
Drawn from mainstream sources, little-known sixties periodicals, pamphlets, public speeches, and personal voices, the selections range from the Port Huron Statement and the NOW Bill of Rights to speeches by Malcolm X, Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, to private letters from civil rights workers and Vietnam soldiers. The book focuses on civil rights, Black Power, the counterculture, the women's movement, anti-war activity, and gay and lesbian struggles, as well as the conservative current that ran counter to more typical sixties movements. These include topics that fell outside the daily attention of the media, as well those that made front-page news. For this revised edition, the editors have added new sections on Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Great Society, popular culture, and the widespread impact of sixties movements, as well as new selections on the American Indian movement, communes, and the environment.
Right to Ride by
Through a reexamination of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, Blair Kelley exposes the fullness of African American efforts to resist the passage of segregation laws dividing trains and streetcars by race in the early Jim Crow era. Right to Ride chronicles the litigation and local organizing against segregated rails that led to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 and the streetcar boycott movement waged in twenty-five southern cities from 1900 to 1907. Kelley tells the stories of the brave but little-known men and women who faced down the violence of lynching and urban race riots to contest segregation. Focusing on three key cities--New Orleans, Richmond, and Savannah--Kelley explores the community organizations that bound protestors together and the divisions of class, gender, and ambition that sometimes drove them apart. The book forces a reassessment of the timelines of the black freedom struggle, revealing that a period once dismissed as the age of accommodation should in fact be characterized as part of a history of protest and resistance.
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by
As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in The Washington Post suggesting that this was, instead, "white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames," she argued, "everyone had ignored the kindling."
Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.
Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.
Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot that Sparked the Civil Rights Movement by
Offers an account of the 1917 race riot in East St. Louis, Illinois; discusses the media's reaction to it; and details the aftermath.
In the 1910s, half a million African Americans moved from the impoverished rural South to booming industrial cities of the North in search of jobs and freedom from Jim Crow laws. But Northern whites often responded with rage, attacking blacks in the streets and laying waste to black neighborhoods in a horrific series of deadly race riots that broke out in dozens of cities across the nation, from Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., to Chicago, Tulsa, and Houston. In East St. Louis, Illinois, corrupt city officials and industrialists had openly courted Southern blacks, luring them north to replace striking white laborers. This tinderbox erupted on July 2, 1917, into what would become one of the bloodiest American riots of the early twentieth century. Its impact was enormous. "There has never been a time when the riot was not alive in the oral tradition," remarks Professor Eugene Redmond. Indeed, prominent blacks like W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Josephine Baker were forever influenced by it. Celebrated St. Louis journalist Harper Barnes has written the first full account of the riot as a dramatic turning point in American history, decisively placing it in the continuum of racial tensions flowing from Reconstruction and as a catalyst of civil rights action in the decades to come. He also pays tribute to the cultural history of East St. Louis--its blues and jazz heritage, from W. C. Handy to "The East St. Louis Blues" to Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" to the city's own Miles Davis; the riot's integral place in artist Jacob Lawrence's revered "The Migration of the Negro" series; and the impact today of native daughter Jackie Joyner-Kersee, an Olympic champion who has built a community center for East St. Louis youth. Drawing from accounts and sources never before utilized, Barnes has crafted a compelling and definitive story that enshrines the riot as a historical rallying cry for all who deplore racial violence.
Racism Without Racists by
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's acclaimed Racism without Racists documents how beneath our contemporary conversation about race lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for, and ultimately justify, racial inequalities. This provocative book explodes the belief that America is now a color-blind society. The fourth edition adds a chapter on what Bonilla-Silva calls "the new racism, " which provides the essential foundation to explore issues of race and ethnicity in more depth. This edition also updates Bonilla-Silva's assessment of race in America after President Barack Obama's re-election. Obama's presidency, Bonilla-Silva argues, does not represent a sea change in race relations, but rather embodies disturbing racial trends of the past. In this fourth edition, Racism without Racists will continue to challenge readers and stimulate discussion about the state of race in America today.
Race in the American South by
'Race in the American South' is an introduction to one of the most important areas of American history - the establishment and dismantling of two systems of racial control in the American South: slavery and segregation.
Essays on Race and Empire by
This edition assembles the major essays on race and imperialism written by Nancy Cunard in the 1930s and 1940s. As a British expatriate living in France, and as a politically-engaged poet, editor, publisher, and journalist, Nancy Cunard devoted much of her energy to the cause of racial justice.
This Broadview edition contextualizes Cunard’s writings on race in terms of the relations among modernism, gender, and empire. It includes a range of contemporaneous documents that place her essays in dialogue with other European writers and with the work of writers of the African diaspora.
White Fragility by
In this groundbreaking and timely book, antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility. Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo explores how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.
Biased by
You don't have to be racist to be biased. Unconscious bias can be at work without our realizing it, and even when we genuinely wish to treat all people equally, ingrained stereotypes can infect our visual perception, attention, memory, and behavior. This has an impact on education, employment, housing, and criminal justice. Now one of the world's leading experts on implicit racial bias offers us insights into the dilemma and a path forward. In [this book], with a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Jennifer Eberhardt tackles one of the central controversies and culturally powerful issues of our time. Eberhardt works extensively as a consultant to law enforcement and as a psychologist at the forefront of this new field. Her research takes place in courtrooms and boardrooms, in prisons, on the street, and in classrooms and coffee shops. She shows us the subtle--and sometimes dramatic--daily repercussions of implicit bias in how teachers grade students, or managers deal with customers. It has an enormous impact on the conduct of criminal justice, from the rapid decisions police officers have to make to sentencing practices in court. Eberhardt's work and her book are both influenced by her own life, and the personal stories she shares emphasize the need for change. She has helped companies that include Airbnb and Nextdoor address bias in their business practices and has led anti-bias initiatives for police departments across the country. Here, she offers practical suggestions for reform and new practices that are useful for organizations as well as individuals. Unblinking about the tragic consequences of prejudice, Eberhardt addresses how racial bias is not the fault of nor restricted to a few "bad apples," but is present at all levels of society in media, education, and business. The good news is that we are not hopelessly doomed by our innate prejudices. In Biased, Eberhardt reminds us that racial bias is a human problem--one all people can play a role in solving.
How to Be an Antiracist by
"The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it -- and then dismantle it." Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America -- but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. In this book, Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. How to Be an Antiracist is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society.
Stamped from the Beginning by
Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America--more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America. Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. And while racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them--and in the process, gives us reason to hope.
Me and White Supremacy by
When Layla Saad began an Instagram challenge called #meandwhitesupremacy, she never predicted it would become a cultural movement. She encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviors, big and small. She was looking for truth, and she got it... Thousands of people participated in the challenge, and over 80,000 people downloaded the supporting work Me and White Supremacy. Updated and expanded from the original edition, Me and White Supremacy teaches readers how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.
Broadcasting Freedom by
The World War II era represented the golden age of radio as a broadcast medium in the United States; it also witnessed a rise in African American activism against racial segregation and discrimination, especially as practiced by the federal government itself. In Broadcasting Freedom, Barbara Savage links these cultural and political forces by showing how African American activists, public officials, intellectuals, and artists sought to access and use radio to influence a national debate about racial inequality.
Blacks and Whites in Christian America by
Conventional wisdom holds that Christians, as members of a “universal” religion, all believe more or less the same things when it comes to their faith. Yet black and white Christians differ in significant ways, from their frequency of praying or attending services to whether they regularly read the Bible or believe in Heaven or Hell. In this engaging and accessible sociological study of white and black Christian beliefs, Jason E. Shelton and Michael O. Emerson push beyond establishing that there are racial differences in belief and practice among members of American Protestantism to explore why those differences exist. Drawing on the most comprehensive and systematic empirical analysis of African American religious actions and beliefs to date, they delineate five building blocks of black Protestant faith which have emerged from the particular dynamics of American race relations. Shelton and Emerson find that America’s history of racial oppression has had a deep and fundamental effect on the religious beliefs and practices of blacks and whites across America.
Crisis in Black and White by 
The Content of Our Character by
An examination of race in America--the causes of the increasing friction between black and white Americans, and the possibiliity of hope for a more harmonious future. The author looks closely at his own life in an integrated society, and, in challenging his own preconceptions about race, causes us to rethink our own.
On Racial Frontiers by
Douglass, Ellison and Marley lived on racial frontiers. Their interactions with mixed audiences made them key figures in an interracial consciousness and culture, integrative ancestors who can be claimed by more than one group. An abolitionist who criticized black racialism; the author of Invisible Man, a landmark of modernity and black literature; a musician whose allegiance was to "God's side, who cause me to come from black and white." The lives of these three men illustrate how our notions of "race" have been constructed out of a repression of the interracial.
The Logic of Slavery by
In American history and throughout the Western world, the subjugation perpetuated by slavery has created a unique "culture of slavery." That culture exists as a metaphorical, artistic, and literary tradition attached to the enslaved - human beings whose lives are "owed" to another, who are used as instruments by another, and who must endure suffering in silence. Tim Armstrong explores the metaphorical legacy of slavery in American culture by investigating debt, technology, and pain in African-American literature and a range of other writings and artworks. Armstrong's careful analysis reveals how notions of the slave as a debtor lie hidden in our accounts of the commodified self and how writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison grapple with the pervasive view that slaves are akin to machines. Finally, Armstrong examines how conceptions of the slave as a container of suppressed pain are reflected in disciplines as diverse as art, sculpture, music, and psychology.
The Half Has Never Been Told by
Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution, the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. Thus the United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation with global influence. Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. It forces readers to reckon with the violence at the root of American supremacy, but also with the survival and resistance that brought about slavery's end, and created a culture that sustains America's deepest dreams of freedom.
Slavery in the Founding Era by
This booklet includes more than a dozen poems exploring the themes of slavery, abolition, and freedom. They open a window onto the complexity of slavery for the Revolutionary generation.
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America by
This volume sketches the complex evolution of slavery and black society from the first arrivals in the early 1600s through the American Revolution. Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. The author demonstrates that earlier North American slavery had many different forms and meanings that varied over time and from place to place. He shows that slavery and race did not have a fixed character that endured for centuries but were constantly being constructed or reconstructed in response to changing historical circumstances. This work illustrates that complex nature of American slavery, the falsity of many of our stereotypes, and the unique world wrought by the slaves themselves.
Runaways, Coffles and Fancy Girls by
Tennessee had a smaller percentage of slaves than most other Southern states and was the last state to join the Confederacy. Consequently, many believe slavery was "not as bad" in Tennessee as it was in the rest of the South. In this fascinating book, author Bill Carey explains how slavery was embedded in every level of Tennessee society; that many families which didn't own slaves leased them; that local governments used slave labor; that court officials routinely sold small children away from their families; and that professional slave traders operated in all parts of the state. Primarily relying on newspapers and first-person accounts, Carey points out that slavery affected all levels of society and that every resident of antebellum Tennessee would have been accustomed to the sight and sound of enslaved "chain gangs" (known as coffles) being herded from one place to another. This book contains: - Data from more than 900 runaway slave ads published in Tennessee newspapers from 1792 until 1864. - Advertisements for slave traders such as Isaac Bolton, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Rees W. Porter which were commonplace in their day but will strike current readers as disturbing. - Precise descriptions of the 24 slaves bought by the government of Nashville in 1830 and taken away from their families in Virginia and Maryland. - Proof that slaves were given away in several Tennessee lotteries--including one that raised money for state government. - Evidence that a slave died in the construction of the Tennessee State Capitol. - Detailed information about court-mandated slave sales on the steps of courthouses across the state.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by
This volume is a memoir written by famous American orator and ex-slave, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). This work is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. In factual detail, the text describes the events of Douglass' life and is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States, recounting Douglass' life as a slave and his ambition to become a free man.
Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804 by
This is the most succinct, convenient, and accurate history of the Haitian Revolution currently available. The authors have produced an intelligent and highly useful collection of documents, many virtually inaccessible, and conveniently translated them for the English-speaking audience. Their ability to contextualize the events of the revolution briefly is simply exemplary.--Franklin Knight, Johns Hopkins University, on back of book
This is the most amazing document collection I have ever read. It is emotionally gripping, intellectually stimulating, morally provocative, action-packed, and full of points of comparison to histories of slavery and freedom everywhere.
Slavery, Its Origin and Legacy by
Collection of essays by historians on the topic of slavery.
The Crusade Against Slavery by
Perhaps no other crusade in the history of the U.S. provoked so much passion and fury as the struggle over slavery. Many of the problems that were a part of that great debate are still with us. Louis Filler has brought together much information both known and new on those who organized to defeat slavery. He has also re-examined the anti-slavery movement’s ideals, heroes, and martyrs with historical perspective and precision.
Contrary to popular belief, the anti-slavery movement was far from united. It included abolitionists as well as a variety of reformers whose activities place them among the anti-slavery forces. These included men as different in background and temperament as William Lloyd Garrison and John Quincy Adams. Portraits of the many protagonists, their hardships, and their quarrels with Southerners and Northerners alike, bring to life this exciting and tumultuous period.
Filler also examines the many related reform movements that characterized the period: feminism, spiritualism, utopian societies, and educational reform. The volume traces the relationship of the antislavery movement to abolition and probes their connection with the several reforms that dominated the period. He brilliantly recaptures a sense of the contemporary consequences of the reformers efforts. This is an absorbing and important survey of the problems—political, social, and economic—that made this period so crucial in the history of the U.S.
Reconstruction by
From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), a newly updated edition of the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period which shaped modern America, with a new introduction from the author.
Eric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed.
Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans.
This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) remains the standard work on the wrenching post-Civil War period—an era whose legacy still reverberates in the United States today.
The Fiery Trial by
In a landmark work of deep scholarship and insight, Foner gives us a life of Lincoln as it intertwined with slavery, the defining issue of the time and the tragic hallmark of American history. The author demonstrates how Lincoln navigated a dynamic political landscape deftly, moving in measured steps, often on a path forged by abolitionists and radicals in his party, and that Lincoln's greatness lay in his capacity for moral and political growth.
From Slavery to Freedom by
The preeminent history of African-Americans is now available in two volumes. From Slavery to Freedom charts the journey of African-Americans from their origins in the civilizations of Africa, through slavery in the Western Hemisphere, to their struggle for freedom in the West Indies, Latin America, and the United States. Still featuring numerous primary and secondary source boxes, and even more richly illustrated than in previous editions, FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM, maintains its status as one of the most important college textbooks in print.
Mutiny on the Amistad by
This book is the first full-scale treatment of the only instance in history in which African blacks, seized by slave dealers, won their freedom and returned home. In 1839, Joseph Cinque led other blacks in a revolt on the Spanish slave ship, Amistad, in the Caribbean. They steered the ship northward to Montauk, Long Island, where it was seized by an American naval vessel. With the Africans jailed in Connecticut and the Spaniards claiming violation of their property rights, an international controversy erupted. The Amistad affair united abolitionists in the U.S. and England, drove the White House into almost any means to quiet the issue, and placed the U.S. and Spain in a confrontation that threatened to involve England and Cuba. The abolitionists, led by Lewis Tappan, Joshua Leavitt, and others, argued that equal justice was the central issue in the case. Appealing to natural law, evangelical arguments, and "moral suasion" in proclaiming slavery a sin, they sought to establish that all persons, black and white, have an inherent right of liberty and thereby hoped to erase the color line that formed the racial foundation of slavery. In their eyes, the mutiny on the Amistad offered an ideal opportunity to awaken Americans to the injustice of slavery. In this book, Howard Jones shows how the abolitionists' argument put the "laws of nature" on trial in the U.S., as Tappan and the others refused to accept a legal system claiming to dispense justice while permitting artificial distinctions based on race or color. Jones vividly captures the compelling drama that climaxed in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that freed the captives and allowed them to return to Africa. He notes that many of the abolitionists were nonetheless dissatisfied with the decision because it had not rested on the law of nature; yet, he observes, even they failed to grasp the central importance of the affair: that America's legal system had fulfilled its function of securing justice.
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery by
Based on hitherto unexamined sources: interviews with ex-slaves, diaries and accounts by former slaveholders, this "rich and admirably written book" (Eugene Genovese, The New York Times Book Review) aims to show how, during the Civil War and after Emancipation, blacks and whites interacted in ways that dramatized not only their mutual dependency, but the ambiguities and tensions that had always been latent in "the peculiar institution."
Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic by
Giving close consideration to previously neglected debates, Matthew Mason challenges the common contention that slavery held little political significance in America until the Missouri Crisis of 1819. Mason demonstrates that slavery and politics were enmeshed in the creation of the nation, and in fact there was never a time between the Revolution and the Civil War in which slavery went uncontested. The American Revolution set in motion the split between slave states and free states, but Mason explains that the divide took on greater importance in the early nineteenth century. Offering a full picture of the politics of slavery in the crucial years of the early republic, Mason demonstrates that partisans and patriots, slave and free and not just abolitionists and advocates of slavery should be considered important players in the politics of slavery in the United States.
John Brown's War Against Slavery by
Drawing on both new and neglected evidence, this book reconstructs Old John Brown's aborted "war" to free the 3.8 million slaves in the American South before the Civil War. It critiques misleading sources that either exalt Brown's "heroism" and noble purpose or condemn his "monomania" and "lawlessness". McGlone explains the sources of his obsession with slavery and his notorious crime at Pottawatomie Creek in "Bleeding Kansas" as well as how the Harpers Ferry raid figured into Brown's larger vision and why he was captured in the federal armory there. John Brown's War Against Slavery chronicles how this aged American apostle of violence in behalf of the "downtrodden," this abolitionist "fanatic" and "terroriser," ultimately rescued his cause by going to the gallows with resolution and outward calm. By embracing martyrdom, John Brown helped to spread panic in the South and persuaded northern sympathizers that failure can be noble and political violence "righteous.
Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-century Chesapeake and Lowcountry by
On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Morgan compares and contrasts African America life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities.
The Amistad Rebellion by
On June 28, 1839, the Spanish slave schooner Amistad"set sail from Havana on a routine delivery of human cargo. On a moonless night, after four days at sea, the captive Africans rose up, killed the captain, and seized control of the ship. They attempted to sail to a safe port, but were captured by the U.S. Navy and thrown into jail in Connecticut. Their legal battle for freedom eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where their cause was argued by former president John Quincy Adams. In a landmark ruling, they were freed and eventually returned to Africa. The rebellion became one of the best-known events in the history of American slavery, celebrated as a triumph of the legal system in films and books, all reflecting the elite perspective of the judges, politicians, and abolitionists involved in the case. In this powerful and highly original account, Marcus Rediker reclaims the rebellion for its true proponents: the African rebels who risked death to stake a claim for freedom.
Chronology of World Slavery by
This work establishes the fact that slavery has existed since ancient times and tries to dispel the myth that slaves are only people of color. Designed to complement the two-volume Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery (1997), it is much more than a mere chronology of world slavery. The work in divided into six geographical sections (ancient world, Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States), each with an introduction and chronology. More than 100 brief sidebar essays interspersed throughout the book enhance its readability. Extremely useful are 80 full-text historical and legal documents ranging from ancient times to the present, covering topcs from the "Code of Hammurabi" to "the Brazilian Government Recognizes Slave Labor" (1985).
The Slave's Cause by
A groundbreaking history of abolition that recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation from the American Revolution through the Civil War Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive new history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave's cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe.
Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History by
An exploration of the idea of selective and forced slave breeding in the U.S. based on the collective memory and folktales of the descendants of enslaved people.
Holy Warriors by
Abolitionism in early America -- The commitment to immediate emancipation -- Mobs and martyrs: the dynamics of moral suasion -- Petitions, perfectionists, and political abolitionists -- Abolitionists and the rise of free-soil movement -- Race, class, and freedom in American abolitionism -- Abolitionists and the coming of the civil war -- Triumph and tragedy: abolitionists and emancipation.
Slavery Attacked by
Slavery Attacked recreates the zeal of the abolitionist crusade, bringing together the personal letters, sermons, articles, speeches, and debates of the most ardent antislavery spokesman. Arranged chronologically, these ringing accusations show how the moral issue of slavery became intertwined with the divisive political issues confronting the nation, moving the state gradually but inexorably towards civil war.
Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery by
In this ambitious project, historian Katrina Thompson examines the conceptualization and staging of race through the performance, sometimes coerced, of black dance from the slave ship to the minstrel stage. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, Thompson explicates how black musical performance was used by white Europeans and Americans to justify enslavement, perpetuate the existing racial hierarchy, and mask the brutality of the domestic slave trade. Whether on slave ships, at the auction block, or on plantations, whites often used coerced performances to oppress and demean the enslaved. As Thompson shows, however, blacks' "backstage" use of musical performance often served quite a different purpose. Through creolization and other means, enslaved people preserved some native musical and dance traditions and invented or adopted new traditions that built community and even aided rebellion. Thompson shows how these traditions evolved into nineteenth-century minstrelsy and, ultimately, raises the question of whether today's mass media performances and depictions of African Americans are so very far removed from their troublesome roots.
Up from Slavery by
Up From Slavery is one of the most widely read African American autobiographies in the English language. It details how prominent African American leader Booker T. Washington rose from slavery to become one of the nation's most prominent orators and educators at the turn of the 20th century. This reprint of the original 1901 edition is enhanced by 12 related documents and an essay by W. Fitzhugh Brundage that provides students with the necessary background and context to appreciate the role of Up From Slavery in American history. It addresses Washington's life and career, criticisms of Washington from within the African American community, the social and political context in which the book was published, reactions to its publication, and the ways in which Washington carefully crafted his autobiography to further his cause among white audiences. Document headnotes, a chronology of Washington's life, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography provide further pedagogical support.
American Negro Slavery by
Incorporating significant and at times controversial literature on questions about the institution of slavery and the social and cultural response of the blacks to their enslavement, this collection reflects recent investigation, offering thirteen readings, eight of them new to this edition,from the most important and stimulating works.
Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery by
The Emancipation Proclamation is one of the most important documents in American history. As we approach its 150th anniversary, what do we really know about those who experienced slavery? In their pioneering book, Envisioning Emancipation, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed 150 photographs--some never before published--from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans born before and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration. Filled with powerful images of lives too often ignored or erased from historical records, Envisioning Emancipation will be a keepsake for many years to come. Deborah Willis, a leading historian and curator of African American photography and culture, is Chair and Professor of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Her most recent books are Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present and Black Venus 2010: They Called Her "Hottentot" (Temple). Barbara Krauthamer is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South as well as many articles and essays on the history of slavery and emancipation.
Between Slavery and Freedom by
Between Slavery and Freedom explores the complex world of those people of African birth or descent who occupied the "borderlands" between slavery and freedom in the 350 years from the founding of the first European colonies in what is today the United States to the start of the Civil War. However they had navigated their way out of bondage, through flight, through military service, through self-purchase, through the working of the law in different times and in different places, or because they were the offspring of parents who were themselves free; they were determined to enjoy the same rights and liberties that white people enjoyed. In a concise narrative and selected primary documents, noted historian Julie Winch shows the struggle of black people to gain and maintain their liberty and lay claim to freedom in its fullest sense. Refusing to be relegated to the margins of American society and languish in poverty and ignorance, they repeatedly challenged their white neighbors to live up to the promises of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
Violence: The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture by
Much of the violence that has been associated with the United States has had particular salience for the South, from its high homicide rates, or its bloody history of racial conflict, to southerners' popular attachment to guns and traditional support for capital punishment. With over 95 entries, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture explores the most significant forms and many of the most harrowing incidences of violence that have plagued southern society over the past 300 years.
Following a detailed overview by editor Amy Wood, the volume explores a wide range of topics, such as violence against and among American Indians, labor violence, arson, violence and memory, suicide, and anti-abortion violence. Taken together, these entries broaden our understanding of what has driven southerners of various classes and various ethnicities to commit acts of violence, while addressing the ways in which southerners have conceptualized that violence, responded to it, or resisted it. This volume enriches our understanding of the culture of violence and its impact on ideas about law and crime, about historical tradition and social change, and about race and gender--not only in the South but in the nation as a whole.
The Origins of American Slavery by
A study of the beginnings of slavery in England and America examines the meaning of freedom and bondage in sixteenth-century English thought, the ideas Englishmen and women had about Africans, and the reasons why England resorted to slave labor.
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