Best of
Race

1998

Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement


John Lewis - 1998
    The son of an Alabama sharecropper, and now a sixth-term United States Congressman, John Lewis has led an extraordinary life, one that found him at the epicenter of the civil rights movement in the late '50s and '60s. As Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lewis was present at all the major battlefields of the movement. Arrested more than forty times and severely beaten on several occasions, he was one of the youngest yet most courageous leaders. Written with charm, warmth, and honesty, Walking with the Wind offers rare insight into the movement and the personalities of all the civil rights leaders-what was happening behind the scenes, the infighting, struggles, and triumphs. Lewis takes us from the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he led more than five hundred marchers on what became known as "Bloody Sunday." While there have been exceptional books on the movement, there has never been a front-line account by a man like John Lewis. A true American hero, his story is "destined to become a classic in civil rights literature." (Los Angeles Times)

Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays


James Baldwin - 1998
    His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.” Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Library of America’s Collected Essays is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin’s nonfiction ever published.With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic wit, Baldwin fearlessly articulated issues of race and democracy and American identity in such famous essays as “The Harlem Ghetto,” “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” “Many Thousands Gone,” and “Stranger in the Village.”Here are the complete texts of his early landmark collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), which established him as an essential intellectual voice of his time, fusing in unique fashion the personal, the literary, and the political. “One writes,” he stated, “out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.” With singular eloquence and unblinking sharpness of observation he lived up to his credo: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”The classic The Fire Next Time (1963), perhaps the most influential of his writings, is his most penetrating analysis of America’s racial divide and an impassioned call to “end the racial nightmare…and change the history of the world.” The later volumes No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976) chart his continuing response to the social and political turbulence of his era and include his remarkable works of film criticism. A further 36 essays—nine of them previously uncollected—include some of Baldwin’s earliest published writings, as well as revealing later insights into the language of Shakespeare, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the music of Earl Hines.

The Color Purple, Alice Walker: Notes


Neil McEwan - 1998
    

The Children


David Halberstam - 1998
    Magisterial in scope, with a strong you-are-there quality, The Children is a story one of America's preeminent journalists has waited years to write, a powerful book about one of the most dramatic movements in American history. They came together as part of Rev. James Lawson's workshops on nonviolence, eight idealistic black students whose families had sacrificed much so that they could go to college. They risked it all, & their lives besides, when they joined the growing civil rights movement. Halberstam shows how Martin Luther King Jr recruited Lawson to come to Nashville to train students in Gandhian techniques of nonviolence. We see the strength of the families the Children came from, moving portraits of several generations of the black experience in America. We feel Diane Nash's fear before the first sit-in to protest segregation of Nashville lunch counters. Then we see how Diane Nash & others--John Lewis, Gloria Johnson, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, Curtis Murphy, James Bevel, Rodney Powell--persevered until they ultimately accomplished that goal. After the sit-ins, when the Freedom Rides to desegregate interstate buses were in danger of being stopped because of violence, it was these same young people who led the bitter battle into the Deep South. Halberstam takes us into those buses, lets us witness the violence the students encountered in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma. He shows what has happened to the Children since the 60s, as they have gone on with their lives.

Blueprint for Black Power: A Moral, Political, and Economic Imperative for the Twenty-First Century


Amos N. Wilson - 1998
    Blueprints posits that an African American/Caribbean/Pan-African bloc would be most potent for the generation and delivery of Black power in the United States and the World to counter White and Asian power networks. Wilson frames this imperative by deconstructing the U.S. elite power structure of government, political parties, think tanks, corporations, foundations, media, interest groups, banking and foreign investment particulars. Potentially strong Black institutions as the church, media and think tanks; industry; collectives such as investment clubs and credit unions; rotating credit associations such as Afrikan-originated esusu, tontine and partner are analyzed. Pan-Afrikanism, Black Nationalism, ethnocentrism and reparation are assessed, often misused and underused financial institutions as securities, mutual funds, stocks, bonds, underwriting, and incubators advocated, thus elucidating oft-negated opportunities for economic empowerment --- ---Dick Hertz"

Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday


Angela Y. Davis - 1998
    Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture.The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith--published here in their entirety for the first time--Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.

Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom


Ira Berlin - 1998
    Using excerpts from the thousands of interviews conducted with ex-slaves in the 1930s by researchers working with the Federal Writers’ Project, the astonishing audiotapes made available the only known recordings of people who actually experienced enslavement—recordings that had gathered dust in the Library of Congress until they were rendered audible for the first time specifically for this set.Remembering Slavery received the kind of commercial attention seldom accorded projects of this nature—nationwide critical and review coverage as well as extensive coverage on prime-time television, including Good Morning America, Nightline, CBS Sunday Morning, and CNN. Reviewers called the set “chilling … [and] riveting” (Publishers Weekly) and “something, truly, truly new” (The Village Voice).Now the groundbreaking book component of the set is available for a new generation of readers.

Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow


Leon F. Litwack - 1998
    . . . Its effects remain the nation's most pressing business. Trouble in Mind is an absolutely essential account of its dreadful history and calamitous legacy."  --The Washington Post"The most complete and moving account we have had of what the victims of the Jim Crow South suffered and somehow endured."--C. Vann WoodwardIn April 1899, black laborer Sam Hose killed his white boss in self-defense. Wrongly accused of raping the man's wife, Hose was mutilated, stabbed, and burned alive in front of 2,000 cheering whites. His body was sold piecemeal to souvenir seekers; an Atlanta grocery displayed his knuckles in its front window for a week.With the same narrative skill he brought to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Been in the Storm So Long, Leon Litwack constructs a searing history of life under Jim Crow. Drawing on new documentation and first-person accounts by blacks and whites, he describes the injustices--both institutional and personal--inflicted against a people. Here, too, are the black men and women whose activism, literature, and music preserved the genius of their human spirit. Painstakingly researched, important, and timely, Trouble in Mind recalls the bloodiest and most repressive period in the history of race relations in the United States--and the painful record of discrimination that haunts us to this day."Moving, elegant, earthy and pointed. . . . It forces us to reckon with the tragic legacies of freedom as well as of slavery. And it reminds us of the resilience and creativity of the human spirit." --Steven Hahn, The San Diego Union-Tribune"A chilling reminder of how simple it has been for Americans to delude themselves about the power of race."         --The Raleigh News & Observer

The Angela Y. Davis Reader


Angela Y. Davis - 1998
    Davis has written on liberation theory and democratic praxis. Challenging the foundations of mainstream discourse, her analyses of culture, gender, capital, and race have profoundly influenced democratic theory, antiracist feminism, critical studies and political struggles. Even for readers who primarily know her as a revolutionary of the late 1960s and early 1970s (or as a political icon for militant activism) she has greatly expanded the scope and range of social philosophy and political theory. Expanding critical theory, contemporary progressive theorists - engaged in justice struggles - will find their thought influenced by the liberation praxis of Angela Y. Davis.The Angela Y. Davis Reader presents eighteen essays from her writings and interviews which have appeared in If They Come in the Morning, Women, Race, and Class, Women, Culture, and Politics, and Black Women and the Blues as well as articles published in women's, ethnic/black studies and communist journals, and cultural studies anthologies. In four parts - Prisons, Repression, and Resistance, Marxism, Anti-Racism, and Feminism, Aesthetics and Culture, and recent interviews - Davis examines revolutionary politics and intellectualism.Davis's discourse chronicles progressive political movements and social philosophy. It is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary political philosophy, critical race theory, social theory, ethnic studies, American studies, African American studies, cultural theory, feminist philosophy, gender studies.

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics


George Lipsitz - 1998
    Addressing the common view that whiteness is a meaningless category of identity, this book aims to show that public policy and private prejudice insure that whites wind up on top of the social hierarchy.

Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary


Juan Williams - 1998
    This New York Times Notable Book of the Year, 1998, is now in trade paper.From the bestselling author of Eyes on the Prize, here is the definitive biography of the great lawyer and Supreme Court justice.

Living For Change: An Autobiography


Grace Lee Boggs - 1998
    Grace Lee Boggs, Chinese American, middle class, highly educated, discovers through her encounters with remarkable rebels, blue collars as well as philosophers, where the body is buried: who is doing what to whom in our society. It is an adventure that is truly liberating". Studs Terkel"Grace Lee Boggs has made a fundamental difference in keeping alive the traditions of the struggles for freedom and democracy". Cornel WestLiving for Change is a sweeping account of the life of an untraditional radical from the end of the thirties, through the cold war, the civil rights era, and the rise of Black Power, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers to the present efforts to rebuild our crumbling urban communities. This fascinating autobiography traces the story of a woman who transcended class and racial boundaries to pursue her passionate belief in a better society.Grace Lee Boggs was raised in New York City during a time when her father was not allowed to buy land for their home because he was Chinese. Educated at Barnard and Bryn Mawr, Boggs was in her twenties when radical politics beckoned, and she was inspired to become a revolutionary focusing on the black community.During her early years as an activist in New York, Boggs began a twenty-year friendship and collaboration with C. L. R. James, the brilliant and influential West Indian Marxist to whom she devotes a revelatory chapter of this book. In 1953, she moved to Detroit where, she writes, "radical history had been made and could be made again". It was also the home of James Boggs, an African American auto worker (and later author and revolutionarytheoretician) who would become one of the movement's freshest and most persuasive voices, as well as Grace's husband. Beginning with their work together on the newsletter Correspondence, Grace and James formed the core of a network that over the years would include Malcolm X, Lyman Paine, Ping Ferry, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Kwame Nkrumah, Stokely Carmichael, and inner-city youth.Rich in the personalities and anecdotes of twentieth-century progressive activism, Living for Change is an involving and inspiring look at a remarkable woman who continues to dedicate her life to social justice.

Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta


Clyde Woods - 1998
    Woods traces the decline and resurrection of plantation ideology in national public policy debates, showing the ways in which African Americans in the Delta have continued to push forward their agenda for social and economic justice despite having suffered countless defeats under the planter regime. Woods interweaves the role of music in sustaining their efforts, surveying a musical tradition that embraced a radical vision of social change.

Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression


Meri Nana-Ama Danquah - 1998
    Wrapped within Danquah's engaging account of this universal affliction is rare and insightful testimony about what it means to be black, female, and battling depression in a society that often idealizes black women as strong, nurturing caregivers. A startlingly honest, elegantly rendered depiction of depression, Willow Weep for Me calls out to all women who suffer in silence with a life-affirming message of recovery. Meri Danquah rises from the pages, a true survivor, departing a world of darkness and reclaiming her life.

All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery


Henry Mayer - 1998
    Mayer's consequential biography will be read for generations to come.

Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice


Patricia Hill Collins - 1998
    Now, in Fighting Words, Collins expands and extends the discussion of the "outsider within" presented in her earlier work, investigating how effectively Black feminist thought confronts the injustices African American women currently face.Collins takes on a broad range of issues -- poverty, mothering, white supremacy and Afrocentrism, the resegregation of American society by race and class, the ideas of Sojourner Truth and how they can serve as a springboard for more liberating social theory. Contrasting social theories that support unjust power relations of race, class, gender, and nation with those that challenge inequalities, Collins investigates why some ideas are granted the status of "theory" while others remain "thought". "It is not that elites produce theory while everyone else produces mere thought", she writes. "Rather, elites possess the power to legitimate the knowledge that they define as theory as being universal, normative, and ideal".Collins argues that because African American women and other historically oppressed groups seek economic and social justice, their social theories may emphasize themes and work from assumptions that are different from those of mainstream American society, generating new angles of vision on injustice. Collins also puts such oppositional social theory to the test: while the words of these theories may challenge injustice, do the ideas make a difference in the lives of the people they claim to represent?Throughout,Collins provides an essential understanding of how "outsiders" resist mainstream perspectives, and what the mainstream can learn from such "outsiders". Historically situated yet transcending the specific, Fighting Words provides a new interpretive framework for both thinking through and overcoming social injustice.

De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century


Elizabeth Martínez - 1998
    and the Latina/o youth movement, De Colores Means All of Us will appeal to readers and activists seeking to organize for the future and build new movements for liberation.

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America


Ira Berlin - 1998
    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. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation.Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves--who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites--gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil.As the nature of the slaves' labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.

Affirmative Acts


June Jordan - 1998
    Continuing in the tradition of her classic collections Civil Wars and Technical Difficulties, Jordan acquaints readers with moments of American life threatened by social negligence and economic despair. With her characteristic insight, Jordan unveils how these too-frequent bouts of civil unrest bring out the weakest parts of the American spirit and challenges readers to remain inspired as society approaches the millennium.June Jordan's wisdom shines through in this brilliant collection of inspirational essays, which will be eagerly awaited by Jordan loyalists and enjoyed by her new readers.

Surviving the Silence: Black Women's Stories of Rape


Charlotte Pierce-Baker - 1998
    It opens with the author's harrowing and courageous account of her rape and includes the stories of the author's own family's response, plus the voices of black men who have supported rape survivors.

Looking White People in the Eye


Sherene H. Razack - 1998
    Most studies examining this encounter between dominant and subordinate groups focus on how it occurs in films, books, and popular culture. In contrast, Razack addresses how non-white women are viewed, and how they must respond, in classrooms and courtrooms. Examining the discussion of equity issues in the classroom and immigration and sexual violence cases in the courtroom, she argues that non-white women must often present themselves as culturally different instead of oppressed. Seen as victims of their own oppressive culture who must be pitied and rescued by white men and women, non-white women cannot then be seen as subjects. This book makes clear why we must be wary of educational and legal strategies that begin with saving 'Other' women. It offers powerful arguments for why it is important to examine who are the saviours and who are the saved, and what we must do to disrupt these historical relations of power.

A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America


Craig Werner - 1998
    . . extraordinarily far-reaching. . . . highly accessible."-Notes"No one has written this way about music in a long, long time. Lucid, insightful, with real spiritual, political, intellectual, and emotional grasp of the whole picture. A book about why music matters, and how, and to whom."-Dave Marsh, author of Louie, Louie and Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story"This book is urgently needed: a comprehensive look at the various forms of black popular music, both as music and as seen in a larger social context. No one can do this better than Craig Werner."-Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University"[Werner has] mastered the extremely difficult art of writing about music as both an aesthetic and social force that conveys, implies, symbolizes, and represents ideas as well as emotion, but without reducing its complexities and ambiguities to merely didactic categories."-African American ReviewA Change Is Gonna Come is the story of more than four decades of enormously influential black music, from the hopeful, angry refrains of the Freedom movement, to the slick pop of Motown; from the disco inferno to the Million Man March; from Woodstock's "Summer of Love" to the war in Vietnam and the race riots that inspired Marvin Gaye to write "What's Going On."Originally published in 1998, A Change Is Gonna Come drew the attention of scholars and general readers alike. This new edition, featuring four new and updated chapters, will reintroduce Werner's seminal study of black music to a new generation of readers.Craig Werner is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and author of many books, including Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse and Up Around the Bend: An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival. His most recent book is Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul.

The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom


Barbara Smith - 1998
    As one of the first writers in the United States to claim black feminism for black women, Barbara Smith has done groundbreaking work in defining black women’s literary traditions and in making connections between race, class, sexuality, and gender.Smith’s essay “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” is often cited as a major catalyst in opening the field of black women’s literature. Pieces about racism in the women’s movement, black and Jewish relations, and homophobia in the Black community have ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers address. The collection also brings together topical political commentaries on the 1968 Chicago convention demonstrations; attacks on the NEA; the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas Senate hearings; and police brutality against Rodney King and Abner Louima. It also includes a never-before-published personal essay on racial violence and the bonds between black women that make it possible to survive.

White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society


Ghassan Hage - 1998
    In this book, he asks whether that desire is indeed limited to racists. Drawing upon the Australian experience, Hage draws conclusions that might also be applicable in France, the United States and Great Britain, each being examples of multicultural environment under the control of white culture. Hage argues that governments have promised white citizens that they would lose nothing under multiculturalism. However, migrant settlement has changed neighbourhoods, challenged white control, created new demands for non-whites, and led to white backlash. This book suggests that white racists and white mulitculturalists may share more assumptions than either group suspects.

Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994


Deborah Gray White - 1998
    Wells to Anita Hill. Although most prominently a history of the century-long struggle against racism and male chauvinism, Deborah Gray White also movingly illuminates 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. Writing with the same magisterial eye for historical detail as in her best-selling Ar'n't I a Woman, Deborah Gray White has given us a moving and definitive history of struggle and freedom. "Splendid . . . a broad and sweeping history that becomes an intensely personal experience for the reader. . . . An inspiring showcase of scholarship and sistership." - Nell Irvin Painter, Raleigh News & Observer

The Stolen Children: Their Stories


Human Rights Commission - 1998
    Personal stories, mostly unedited from unlocked confidential files.

Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White


David R. Roediger - 1998
    Roediger has brought together some of the most important black writers throughout history to explore the question: What does it really mean to be white in America?From folktales and slave narratives to contemporary essays, poetry, and fiction, black writers have long been among America's keenest students of white consciousness and white behavior, but until now much of this writing has been ignored.  Black on White reverses this trend by presenting the work of more than fifty major figures, including James Baldwin, Derrick Bell, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker to take a closer look at the many meanings of whiteness in our society.Rich in irony, artistry, passion, and common sense, these reflections on what Langston Hughes called "the ways of white folks" illustrate how whiteness as a racial identity derives its meaning not as a biological category but as a social construct designed to uphold racial inequality. Powerful and compelling, Black on White provides a much-needed perspective that is sure to have a major impact on the study of race and race relations in America.

Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy


David S. Cecelski - 1998
    Frustrated by decades of African American self-assertion and threatened by an interracial coalition advocating democratic reforms, white conservatives used violence, demagoguery, and fraud to seize political power and disenfranchise black citizens. The most notorious episode of the campaign was the Wilmington race riot of 1898, which claimed the lives of many black residents and rolled back decades of progress for African Americans in the state.Published on the centennial of the Wilmington race riot, Democracy Betrayed draws together the best new scholarship on the events of 1898 and their aftermath. Contributors to this important book hope to draw public attention to the tragedy, to honor its victims, and to bring a clear and timely historical voice to the debate over its legacy.The contributors are David S. Cecelski, William H. Chafe, Laura F. Edwards, Raymond Gavins, Glenda E. Gilmore, John Haley, Michael Honey, Stephen Kantrowitz, H. Leon Prather Sr., Timothy B. Tyson, LeeAnn Whites, and Richard Yarborough.

Blackness Visible


Charles W. Mills - 1998
    Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual whiteness has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination.European expansionism in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention.Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and unreal: ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one's being without being in one's shape.His essays explore the contrasting sums of a white and black modernity, examine standpoint epistemology and the metaphysics of racial identity, look at black-Jewish relations and racial conspiracy theories, map the workings of a white-supremacist polity and the contours of a racist moral consciousness, and analyze the presuppositions of Frederick Douglass's famous July 4 prognosis for black political inclusion. Collectively they demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophy is made visible and addressed.

Spirits of the Cloth: Contemporary African American Quilts


Carolyn L. Mazloomi - 1998
    African American quilts are of particular interest because -- unlike European-American quilts that focus on pattern and technique -- they are often emotionally expressive and graced with narrative imagery.Spirits of the Cloth celebrates this artistic tradition by showcasing 150 of the most stunning contemporary African American quilts in full-color photographs and by allowing their creators to expand upon the story that stands behind each piece.African Americans who are looking for beautiful books featuring black collectibles, and everyone interested in the quilting tradition, will welcome this as one of the most important and gorgeous quilting books ever published.

The Triumphs Of Joseph: How Today's Community Healers Are Reviving Our Streets And Neighborhoods


Robert L. Woodson Sr. - 1998
    Always accessible and colorful, this powerful appeal for the health of America's inner cities can resurrect the passion to fight poverty--but only through the vision and deeds of street-level heroes.

Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality


Luana Ross - 1998
    People from my reservation appeared to simply vanish and magically return. [As a child] I did not realize what a 'real' prison was and did not give it any thought. I imagined this as normal; that all families had relatives who went away and then returned."In this pathfinding study, Ross draws upon the life histories of imprisoned Native American women to demonstrate how race/ethnicity, gender, and class contribute to the criminalizing of various behaviors and subsequent incarceration rates. Drawing on the Native women's own words, she reveals the violence in their lives prior to incarceration, their respective responses to it, and how those responses affect their eventual criminalization and imprisonment. Comparisons with the experiences of white women in the same prison underline the significant role of race in determining women's experiences within the criminal justice system.

Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery: Poems


Pamela Sneed - 1998
    From beginning to end some of these poems chart the journey that is life and one woman's cycle of dependency as she recovers her lost identity. Thematically, it is bound by a writer's search for love and fight for freedom, drawing on the spirit and will of Harriet Tubman, the image of the bloated body of Emmett Till, the bombing of Philadelphia Move, and lesbian love. In the tradition of June Jordan and Sapphire, Pamela Sneed presents an in-your-face, powerful, and stirring debut.

A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America


Shelby Steele - 1998
    In A Dream Deferred Shelby Steele argues that a second betrayal of black freedom in the United States--the first one being segregation--emerged from the civil rights era when the country was overtaken by a powerful impulse to redeem itself from racial shame. According to Steele, 1960s liberalism had as its first and all-consuming goal the expiation of America guilt rather than the careful development of true equality between the races. This "culture of preference" betrayed America's best principles in order to give whites and America institutions an iconography of racial virtue they could use against the stigma of racial shame. In four densely argued essays, Steele takes on the familiar questions of affirmative action, multiculturalism, diversity, Afro-centrism, group preferences, victimization--and what he deems to be the atavistic powers of race, ethnicity, and gender, the original causes of oppression. A Dream Deferred is an honest, courageous look at the perplexing dilemma of race and democracy in the United States--and what we might do to resolve it.

Race riot 1921: Events of the Tulsa disaster


Mary E. Jones Parrish - 1998
    

The Star of Deep Beginnings


Charles S. Finch III - 1998
    Finch III. The title, derived from a Dogon name for Sirius B. reflects the cosmic nature of African science.

Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race


Patricia J. Williams - 1998
    Williams asks how we might achieve a world where color doesn't matter--where whiteness is not equated with normalcy and blackness with exoticism and danger. Drawing on her own experience, Williams delineates the great divide between the poles of other people's imagination and the nice calm center of oneself where dignity resides, and discusses how it might be bridged as a first step toward resolving racism. Williams offers us a new starting point--a sensible and sustained consideration--from which we might begin to deal honestly with the legacy and current realities of our prejudices.

Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900-50


Mary-Ellen Kelm - 1998
    Aboriginal access to medical care and the transfer of funds and responsibility for health from the federal government to individual bands and tribal councils are also bones of contention. Comprehensive discussion of such issues, however, has often been hampered by a lack of historical analysis."Colonizing Bodies" examines the impact of colonization on Aboriginal health in British Columbia during the first half of the twentieth century. Mary-Ellen Kelm explores how Aboriginal bodies were materially affected by Canadian Indian policy, which placed restrictions on fishing and hunting, allocated inadequate reserves, forced children into unhealthy residential schools, and criminalized Indigenous healing. She goes on to consider how humanitarianism and colonial medicine were used to pathologize Aboriginal bodies and institute a regime of doctors, hospitals, and field matrons, all working to encourage assimilation. Finally, Kelm reveals how Aboriginal people were able to resist and alter these forces in order to preserve their own cultural understanding of their bodies, disease, and medicine.

Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multiracial Britain


Mike Phillips - 1998
    They were to become the symbolic founders of Britain's black communities. For the first time there were would be communities that would not, could not, blend into the background. British society faced an entirely new challenge.

Jesus and Those Bodacious Women: Life Lessons from One Sister to Another


Linda H. Hollies - 1998
    Time and time again, her words of empathy and inspiration have provided insight to those who suffer from the harsh realities of a hurting world. In "Jesus and Those Bodacious Women," Hollies serves up new spins on the stories of biblical women. From Eve to Mary Magdalene, portraits of the bodaciousness of the many matriarchs of the Christian tradition will prove to be blessings for readers young and old.Hollies includes study questions and suggestions at the end of each chapter, providing examples of how one can grow in faith, spirituality, and of course -- bodaciousness.

The Bus Ride


William Robert Miller - 1998
    A black child protests an unjust law in this story loosely based on Rosa Parks' historic decision not to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.

Sorting Out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975


Thomas W. Hanchett - 1998
    In this book, Thomas Hanchett traces the city's spatial evolution over the course of a century, exploring the interplay of national trends and local forces that shaped Charlotte, and, by extension, other New South urban centers.Hanchett argues that racial and economic segregation are not age-old givens, but products of a decades-long process. Well after the Civil War, Charlotte's whites and blacks, workers and business owners, all lived intermingled in a salt-and-pepper pattern. The rise of large manufacturing enterprises in the 1880s and 1890s brought social and political upheaval, however, and the city began to sort out into a checkerboard of distinct neighborhoods segregated by both race and class. When urban renewal and other federal funds became available in the mid- twentieth century, local leaders used the money to complete the sorting out process, creating a sector pattern in which wealthy whites increasingly lived on one side of town and blacks on the other.

Feminist Foundations: Toward Transforming Sociology


Kristen A. MyersCandace West - 1998
    This edited volume is an outgrowth of a discussion that began on the Sociologists for Women in Society Listserve, in which participants were asked to talk about key pieces in feminist scholarship that had particularly influenced their sociological thinking. Editors Kristen A. Myers, Cynthia D. Anderson, and Barbara J. Risman have chosen articles that fall into what they consider the intellectual genres that compose feminist sociology. This collection differs from others because the editors avoid organizing material by substantive specialty areas (i.e., family, race and ethnicity, criminology, or methods). Their vision instead sees sociology as an integrated discipline, where feminist contributions have systematically influenced the shape of the whole by similarly influencing the distinct parts. In addition to simply compiling a comprehensive list of important articles from the last two decades, the editors have invited major feminist scholars to comment and reflect on the articles in each section of the book. These reflections help provide the historical and social context in which feminist scholarship has taken place. This book will be of obvious appeal to feminist scholars and gender sociologists. Yet, as feminist thought rightfully takes its place away from the margins and toward the center of the discipline, this book stands as a rich and useful resource for any contemporary theory course.