From the author's vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde's work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.--Off Our Backs

    A collection of 25 essays examining the neuroses of white supremacy.

    On April 4th, 1968 a shot rang out in the Memphis sky bringing to a close the life of the last great American hero, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jnr.Although known to most for the delivery of his "I Have a Dream" address, which followed the peaceful march on Washington DC of 250,000 people, and as the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (at age thirty-five), King in his eleven years as elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organisation formed to provide new leadership to the then burgeoning civil rights movement, travelled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action.Let the Trumpet Sound is the detailed examination of this life, written by Stephen B Oates, winner of the Robert E Kennedy Memorial Book Award and the Christopher Award.

    In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South. Slavery is shown to be a parasitic relationship between master and slave, invariably entailing the violent domination of a natally alienated, or socially dead, person. The phenomenon of slavery as an institution, the author argues, is a single process of recruitment, incorporation on the margin of society, and eventual manumission or death.Distinctions abound in this work. Beyond the reconceptualization of the basic master-slave relationship and the redefinition of slavery as an institution with universal attributes, Patterson rejects the legalistic Roman concept that places the "slave as property" at the core of the system. Rather, he emphasizes the centrality of sociological, symbolic, and ideological factors interwoven within the slavery system. Along the whole continuum of slavery, the cultural milieu is stressed, as well as political and psychological elements. Materialistic and racial factors are deemphasized. The author is thus able, for example, to deal with "elite" slaves, or even eunuchs, in the same framework of understanding as fieldhands; to uncover previously hidden principles of inheritance of slave and free status; and to show the tight relationship between slavery and freedom.Interdisciplinary in its methods, this study employs qualitative and quantitative techniques from all the social sciences to demonstrate the universality of structures and processes in slave systems and to reveal cross-cultural variations in the slave trade and in slavery, in rates of manumission, and in the status of freedmen. "Slavery and Social Death" lays out a vast new corpus of research that underpins an original and provocative thesis.

    He challenges African Americans to consider the incorporation of Marxism into their theological perspectives, thereby adopting the mindset that it is class more so than race that renders one powerless in America. Armed with a new introduction by the author, this Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Prophesy Deliverance! is a must have.

    In a remarkable meditation on a subject at the troubled center of American life, Albert Memmi investigates racism as social pathology -- a cultural disease that prevails because it allows one segment of society to empower itself at the expense of another. By turns historical, sociological, and autobiographical, Racism moves beyond individual prejudice and taste to engage the broader questions of collective behavior and social responsibility.The book comprises three sections -- "Description, " "Definition, " and "Treatment" -- in which Memmi delineates racism's causes and hidden workings, examines its close affinity to colonialism, and considers its everyday manifestations over a period of centuries throughout the West. His topics include bigotry against Blacks, anti-Semitism, the meaning of "whiteness, " and the status of the Quebecois.For Memmi, the structure of racism has four "moments": the insistenc on difference; the negative valuation imposed on those who differ; the generalizing of this negative valuation to an entire group; and the use of generalization to legitimize hostility. Memmi shows how it is not racism's content -- which can change at will -- but its form that gives it such power and tenacity.

    Two were soon lynched. The third, James Cameron, with a noose around his neck and an angry mob calling for his blood, was spared. This is his story, told 64 years later with anger, insight, and reflection.

    Anatomy of a Lynching carefully reconstructs the grim events surrounding the death of Claude Neal one of an estimated three thousand blacks to die at the hands of southern lynch mobs in the six decades between the 1880's and the outbreak of World War II.

    It is the compelling story of racial ideologies, southwestern politics, and incendiary journalism, and of an embattled black community's struggle to hold onto its land and freedom. More than just the chronicle of one of the nation's most devastating racial pogroms, this critically acclaimed study of American race relations is, above all, a gripping story of terror and lawlessness, and of courage, heroism, and human perseverance.

    Newton knew repression first hand and became a symbol of Black urban resistance in the United States, as well as a hero to radical political movements all over the world. From a handful of men the Panthers grew into a major organization, operating community programmes wherever they based themselves. Since his death, Newton's legacy and work remains controversial, and is now being rediscovered by a new generation.

    Washington.