Best of
Race

2010

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness


Michelle Alexander - 2010
    His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole."As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status--much like their grandparents before them.In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community--and all of us--to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration


Isabel Wilkerson - 2010
    Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power


Danielle L. McGuire - 2010
    Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written. In this important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer—Rosa Parks—to Abbeville. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against black women and added fire to the growing call for change.

Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority


Tom Burrell - 2010
    In fact, they are much more. They are survivors of the Middle Passage and centuries of humiliation and deprivation, who have excelled against the odds, constantly making a way out of “No way!” At this pivotal point in history, the idea of black inferiority should have had a “Going-Out-of-Business Sale.” After all, Barack Obama has reached America’s Promised Land.Yet, as Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority testifies, too many in black America are still wandering in the wilderness. In this powerful examination of “the greatest propaganda campaign of all time”—the masterful marketing of black inferiority, aka the BI Complex—Burrell poses ten disturbing questions that will make black people look in the mirror and ask why, nearly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, so many blacks still think and act like slaves. Burrell’s acute awareness of the power of words and images to shift, shape, and change the collective consciousness has led him to connect the contemporary and historical dots that have brought us to this crossroads. Brainwashed is not a reprimand—it is a call to action. It demands that we question our self-defeating attitudes and behaviors. Racism is not the issue; how we respond to media distortions and programmed self-hatred is the issue. It’s time to reverse the BI campaign with a globally based initiative that harnesses the power of new media and the wisdom of intergenerational coalitions. Provocative and powerful, Brainwashed dares to expose the wounds so that we, at last, can heal.

The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race


Willie James Jennings - 2010
    Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions?  In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity’s highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies.   A probing study of the cultural fragmentation—social, spatial, and racial—that took root in the Western mind, this book shows how Christianity has consistently forged Christian nations rather than encouraging genuine communion between disparate groups and individuals.Weaving together the stories of Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry, the Jesuit theologian Jose de Acosta, the famed Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the former slave writer Olaudah Equiano, Jennings narrates a tale of loss, forgetfulness, and missed opportunities for the transformation of Christian communities.  Touching on issues of slavery, geography, Native American history, Jewish-Christian relations, literacy, and translation, he brilliantly exposes how the loss of land and the supersessionist ideas behind the Christian missionary movement are both deeply implicated in the invention of race.Using his bold, creative, and courageous critique to imagine a truly cosmopolitan citizenship that transcends geopolitical, nationalist, ethnic, and racial boundaries, Jennings charts, with great vision, new ways of imagining ourselves, our communities, and the landscapes we inhabit.

The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings


James Baldwin - 2010
    In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in our society. Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, “If van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint, Baldwin [was] our twentieth-century one.”

The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America


Khalil Gibran Muhammad - 2010
    We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites--liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners--as indisputable proof of blacks' inferiority. In the heyday of "separate but equal," what else but pathology could explain black failure in the "land of opportunity"?The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans' own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy


Bruce Watson - 2010
    But by the time their first night in the state had ended, three volunteers were dead, black churches had burned, and America had a new definition of freedom. This remarkable chapter in American history, the basis for the controversial film Mississippi Burning, is now the subject of Bruce Watson's thoughtful and riveting historical narrative. Using in- depth interviews with participants and residents, Watson brilliantly captures the tottering legacy of Jim Crow in Mississippi and the chaos that brought such national figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Pete Seeger to the state. Freedom Summer presents finely rendered portraits of the courageous black citizens-and Northern volunteers-who refused to be intimidated in their struggle for justice, and the white Mississippians who would kill to protect a dying way of life. Few books have provided such an intimate look at race relations during the deadliest days of the Civil Rights movement, and Freedom Summer will appeal to readers of Taylor Branch and Doug Blackmon.

Racial Justice and the Catholic Church


Bryan N. Massingale - 2010
    Massingale writes from an abiding conviction that the Catholic faith and the black experience make essential contributions in the continuing struggle against racial injustice that is the work of all people.

Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC


Faith S. Holsaert - 2010
    Since the women spent time in the Deep South, many also describe risking their lives through beatings and arrests and witnessing unspeakable violence. These intense stories depict women, many very young, dealing with extreme fear and finding the remarkable strength to survive. The women in SNCC acquired new skills, experienced personal growth, sustained one another, and even had fun in the midst of serious struggle. Readers are privy to their analyses of the Movement, its tactics, strategies, and underlying philosophies. The contributors revisit central debates of the struggle including the role of nonviolence and self-defense, the role of white people in a black-led movement, and the role of women within the Movement and the society at large.   Each story reveals how the struggle for social change was formed, supported, and maintained by the women who kept their "hands on the freedom plow." As the editors write in the introduction, "Though the voices are different, they all tell the same story--of women bursting out of constraints, leaving school, leaving their hometowns, meeting new people, talking into the night, laughing, going to jail, being afraid, teaching in Freedom Schools, working in the field, dancing at the Elks Hall, working the WATS line to relay horror story after horror story, telling the press, telling the story, telling the word. And making a difference in this world."

Up from the Projects: An Autobiography


Walter E. Williams - 2010
    Williams recalls some of the highlights and turning points of his life. From his lower middle class beginnings in a mixed but predominantly black neighborhood in West Philadelphia to his department chair at George Mason University, Williams tells an "only in America" story of a life of achievement.

The 100 Best African American Poems


Nikki Giovanni - 2010
    Out of necessity, Giovanni admits she cheats a little, selecting a larger, less round number.The result is this startlingly vibrant collection that spans from historic to modern, from structured to freeform, and reflects the rich roots and visionary future of African American verse. These magnetic poems are an exciting mix of most-loved classics and daring new writing. From Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes to Tupac Shakur, Natasha Trethewey, and many others, the voice of a culture comes through in this collection, one that is as talented, diverse, and varied as its people.African American poems are like all other poems: beautiful, loving, provocative, thoughtful, and all those other adjectives I can think of. "Poems know no boundaries." They, like all Earth citizens, were born in some country, grew up on some culture, then in their blooming became citizens of the Universe. "Poems fly from heart to heart," head to head, to whisper a dream, to share a condolence, to congratulate, and to vow forever. The poems are true. They are translated and they are celebrated. They are sung, they are recited, they are "delightful." They are neglected. They are forgotten. They are put away. Even in their fallow periods they sprout images. And fight to be revived. And spring back to life with a bit of sunshine and caring. -Nikki Giovanni"Read" Gwendolyn Brooks Kwame Alexander Tupac Shakur Langston Hughes Mari Evans Kevin Young Asha Bandele Amiri Baraka"Hear" Ruby Dee Novella Nelson Nikki Giovanni Elizabeth Alexander Marilyn Nelson Sonia Sanchez"And many, many, more"Nikki Giovanni is an award-winning poet, writer, and activist. She is the author of more than two dozen books for adults and children, including "Bicycles," "Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea," "Racism 101," "Blues: For All the Changes," and "Love Poems." Her children's book-plus-audio compilation "Hip Hop Speaks to Children "was awarded the NAACP Image Award. Her children's book "Rosa," a picture-book retelling of the Rosa Parks story, was a Caldecott Honor Book and winner of the Coretta Scott King Award. Both books were "New York Times "bestsellers. Nikki is a Grammy nominee for her spoken-word album "The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection "and has been nominated for the National Book Award. She has been voted Woman of the Year by "Essence," "Mademoiselle," and "Ladies' Home Journal." She is a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, where she teaches writing and literature.

Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six


Jordan Flaherty - 2010
    In the tradition of Howard Zinn this could be called 'The People's History of the Storm.' Jordan Flaherty was there on the front lines."Eve Ensler, playwright of "The Vagina Monologues" and activist and founder of V-Day"Jordan Flaherty brings the sharp analysis and dedication of a seasoned organizer to his writing, and insightful observation to his reporting. He unfailingly has his ear to the ground in a city that continues to reveal the floodlines of structural racism in America."Tram Nguyen, author of "We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11""Floodlines" is a firsthand account of community, culture, and resistance in New Orleans. The book weaves the stories of gay rappers, Mardi Gras Indians, Arab and Latino immigrants, public housing residents, and grassroots activists in the years before and after Katrina. From post-Katrina evacuee camps to torture testimony at Angola Prison to organizing with the family members of the Jena Six, "Floodlines" tells the stories behind the headlines from an unforgettable time and place in history.Jordan Flaherty is a writer and community organizer based in New Orleans. In addition to his award-winning post-Katrina journalism, he was the first journalist with a national audience to write about the Jena Six case and played an important role in bringing the story to theattention of the world. He has produced news segments for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and "Democracy Now!" and appeared as a guest on a wide range of television and radio shows, including CNN's "American Morning," "Anderson Cooper 360," "CNN Headline News," "GRITtv," "Keep Hope Alive with Reverend Jesse Jackson," and both local and nationally syndicated shows on National Public Radio.

High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America


Jessica B. Harris - 2010
    Harris has spent much of her life researching the food and foodways of the African Diaspora. High on the Hog is the culmination of years of her work, and the result is a most engaging history of African American cuisine. Harris takes the reader on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way. From chitlins and ham hocks to fried chicken and vegan soul, Harris celebrates the delicious and restorative foods of the African American experience and details how each came to form such an important part of African American culture, history, and identity. Although the story of African cuisine in America begins with slavery, High on the Hog ultimately chronicles a thrilling history of triumph and survival. The work of a masterful storyteller and an acclaimed scholar, Jessica B. Harris's High on the Hog fills an important gap in our culinary history. Praise for Jessica B. Harris: "Jessica Harris masters the ability to both educate and inspire the reader in a fascinating new way." -Marcus Samuelsson, chef owner of Restaurant Aquavit

Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids


Kip Fulbeck - 2010
    At a time when 7 million people in the U.S. alone identify as belonging to more than one race, interest in issues of multiracial identity is rapidly growing. Overflowing with uplifting elements—including charming images, handwritten statements from the children, first-person text from their parents, a foreword by Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng (President Obama's sister), and an afterword by international star Cher (who is part Cherokee)—this volume is an inspiring vision of the future.

All Labor Has Dignity


Martin Luther King Jr. - 2010
    King’s speeches on labor rights and economic justice Covering all the civil rights movement highlights--Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham, Selma, Chicago, and Memphis--award-winning historian Michael K. Honey introduces and traces Dr. King's dream of economic equality. Gathered in one volume for the first time, the majority of these speeches will be new to most readers. The collection begins with King's lectures to unions in the 1960s and includes his addresses made during his Poor People's Campaign, culminating with his momentous "Mountaintop" speech, delivered in support of striking black sanitation workers in Memphis. Unprecedented and timely, "All Labor Has Dignity" will more fully restore our understanding of King's lasting vision of economic justice, bringing his demand for equality right into the present.

The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease


Jonathan M. Metzl - 2010
    But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. In The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia—for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s—and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind


Safiya Bukhari - 2010
    The young pre-med student felt compelled to intervene in defense of the Panther’s First Amendment right; she ended up handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police car.The War Before traces Bukhari’s lifelong commitment as an advocate for the rights of the oppressed. Following her journey from middle-class student to Black Panther to political prisoner, these writings provide an intimate view of a woman wrestling with the issues of her time—the troubled legacy of the Panthers, misogyny in the movement, her decision to convert to Islam, the incarceration of out spoken radicals, and the families left behind. Her account unfolds with immediacy and passion, showing how the struggles of social justice movements have paved the way for the progress of today.

12 Angry Men: True Stories of Being a Black Man in America Today


Gregory S. Parks - 2010
    From a Harvard law school student tackled by a security guard on the streets of Manhattan, a federal prosecutor detained while walking in his own neighborhood in Washington, DC, and a high school student in Colorado arrested for "loitering" in the subway station as he waits for the train home, to a bike rider in Austin, Texas, a professor at a Big Ten university in Iowa, and the head of the ACLU's racial profiling initiative (who was pursued by national guardsmen after arriving on the red-eye in Boston's Logan airport), here are true stories of law-abiding Americans who also happen to be black men (Publishers Weekly).Cumulatively, the effect is staggering, and will open the eyes of anyone who thinks we live in a "post-racial" or "colorblind" America."Powerful." --Jet"This is raw testimony intended to vividly capture the invasions of privacy and the assaults on dignity that always accompany unreasonable government intrusion." --Kirkus Reviews

Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation


Rawn James Jr. - 2010
    The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education is widely considered a seminal point in the battle to end segregation, but it was in fact the culmination of a decades-long legal campaign. Root and Branch is the epic story of the two fiercely dedicated lawyers who led the fight from county courthouses to the marble halls of the Supreme Court, and, in the process, laid the legal foundations of the civil rights movement. Charles Hamilton Houston was the pioneer: After becoming the first African-American on the Harvard Law Review, he transformed the law school at all-black Howard University into a West Point for civil rights advocacy. One of Houston's students at Howard was a brash young man named Thurgood Marshall. Soon after Marshall's graduation, Houston and Marshall opened the NAACP's legal office. The abstemious, proper Houston and the folksy, easygoing Marshall made an unlikely duo, but together they faced down angry Southern mobs, negotiated with presidents and senators, and convinced even racist judges and juries that the Constitution demanded equal justice under law for all American citizens. Houston, tragically, would die before his strategy came to fruition in the Brown suit, but Marshall would argue the case victoriously and go on to become the first African-American Supreme Court justice--always crediting his mentor for teaching him everything he knew. Together, the two advocates changed the course of American history.

Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson featuring exchanges with an Outlaw


Kevin "Rashid" Johnson - 2010
    This book consists primarily of letters between Rashid and Outlaw, another revolutionary New Afrikan prisoner, smuggled between the segregation wing and general population over a period of months. These comrades educate themselves - and us as well - on Marxism and Maoism, the Five-Percenters, Dialectical Materialism, Dead Prez, Capitalism, Racism, Imperialism, Class Struggle, Revolutionary Nationalism, New Afrikan Independence, Psychology, and a host of other subjects, as they grapple with how to promote revolutionary consciousness in the most hostile of environments.Rashid has been in prison for twenty years - the past eighteen of which in segregation (solitary confinement). Shortly after this correspondence between himself and Outlaw, he and his comrade Shaka Sankofa Zulu founded the New Afrikan Black Panther Party–Prison Chapter. The NABPP-PC has since developed branches in various prisons across the u$ empire and has its own newsletter, Right On!A number of Rashid's essays written as Minister of Defense of the NABPP-PC are also included in this book.

Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California


Donna Murch - 2010
    Drawing on oral history and untapped archival sources, she explains how a relatively small city with a recent history of African American settlement produced such compelling and influential forms of Black Power politics. During an era of expansion and political struggle in California's system of public higher education, black southern migrants formed the BPP. In the early 1960s, attending Merritt College and other public universities radicalized Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and many of the young people who joined the Panthers' rank and file. In the face of social crisis and police violence, the most disfranchised sectors of the East Bay's African American community--young, poor, and migrant--challenged the legitimacy of state authorities and of an older generation of black leadership. By excavating this hidden history, Living for the City broadens the scholarship of the Black Power movement by documenting the contributions of black students and youth who created new forms of organization, grassroots mobilization, and political literacy.

Arab & Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, & Belonging


Rabab Abdulhadi - 2010
    Contributors hail from multiple geographical sites, spiritualities, occupations, sexualities, class backgrounds, and generations. Poets, creative writers, artists, scholars, and activists employ a mix of genres to express feminist issues and highlight how Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives simultaneously inhabit multiple, overlapping, and intersecting spaces: within families and communities; in anticolonial and antiracist struggles; in debates over spirituality and the divine; within radical, feminist, and queer spaces; in academia and on the street; and between each other.Contributors explore themes as diverse as the intersections between gender, sexuality, Orientalism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism, and the restoration of Arab Jews to Arab American histories. This book asks how members of diasporic communities navigate their sense of belonging when the country in which they live wages wars in the lands of their ancestors. Arab and Arab American Feminisms opens up new possibilities for placing grounded Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives at the center of gender studies, Middle East studies, American studies, and ethnic studies.

A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers


Will Friedwald - 2010
    From giants like Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland to lesser-known artists like Jeri Southern and Joe Mooney, they have created a body of work that continues to please and inspire. Here is the most extensive biographical and critical survey of these singers ever written, as well as an essential guide to the Great American Songbook and those who shaped the way it has been sung. The music crosses from jazz to pop and back again, from the songs of Irving Berlin and W. C. Handy through Stephen Sondheim and beyond, bringing together straightforward jazz and pop singers (Billie Holiday, Perry Como); hybrid artists who moved among genres and combined them (Peggy Lee, Mel Tormé); the leading men and women of Broadway and Hollywood (Ethel Merman, Al Jolson); yesterday’s vaudeville and radio stars (Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor); and today’s cabaret artists and hit-makers (Diana Krall, Michael Bublé). Friedwald has also written extended pieces on the most representative artists of five significant genres that lie outside the songbook: Bessie Smith (blues), Mahalia Jackson (gospel), Hank Williams (country and western), Elvis Presley (rock ’n’ roll), and Bob Dylan (folk-rock). Friedwald reconsiders the personal stories and professional successes and failures of all these artists, their songs, and their performances, appraising both the singers and their music by balancing his opinions with those of fellow musicians, listeners, and critics.  This magisterial reference book—ten years in the making—will delight and inform anyone with a passion for the iconic music of America, which continues to resonate throughout our popular culture.

Suck on the Marrow


Camille T. Dungy - 2010
    The book traces the experiences of fugitive slaves, kidnapped Northern-born blacks, and free people of color, exploring the interdependence between plantation life and life in Northern and Southern American towns and illuminating the connections between the successes and difficulties of a wide range of Americans, free and slave, black and white, Northern and Southern. This neo-slave narrative treats the truths of lives touched by slavery with reverence but is not afraid to question the ways the old stories have too often been told. In addition to creating new stories, Suck on the Marrow develops new ways of telling those tales.

Living the Revolution: Italian Women's Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945


Jennifer Guglielmo - 2010
    Jennifer Guglielmo brings to life the Italian working-class women of New York and New Jersey who helped shape the vibrant radical political culture that expanded into the emerging industrial union movement. Tracing two generations of women who worked in the needle and textile trades, she explores the ways immigrant women and their American-born daughters drew on Italian traditions of protest to form new urban female networks of everyday resistance and political activism. She also shows how their commitment to revolutionary and transnational social movements diminished as they became white working-class Americans.

Song for my Fathers


Tom Sancton - 2010
    Contemporaries of Louis Armstrong, most of them had played in local obscurity until Preservation Hall launched a nationwide revival of interest in traditional jazz. They called themselves “the mens.” And they welcomed the young apprentice into their ranks.The boy was introduced into this remarkable fellowship by his father, an eccentric Southern liberal and failed novelist whose powerful articles on race had made him one of the most effective polemicists of the early Civil Rights movement. Nurtured on his father’s belief in racial equality, the aspiring clarinetist embraced the old musicians with a boundless love and admiration. The narrative unfolds against the vivid backdrop of New Orleans in the 1950s and ‘60s. But that magical place is more than decor; it is perhaps the central player, for this story could not have taken place in any other city in the world.

Persons Unknown


Jake Adam York - 2010
    These elegiac and documentary poems seek justice and understanding for such sacrifices as Mack Charles Parker, lynched in Mississippi in 1959, his body disposed of in the waters of the Pearl River; Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, abducted into the depths of the Homochitto Forest, beaten, and drowned in the Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan; and Medgar Evers, dedicated activist, whose assassination outside his home in 1963 sent shockwaves throughout the South. Drawing on photographs, articles, legal documents, and other cultural artifacts, York deftly weaves history and memory into a lyrical reckoning for these often-overlooked victims of the bitter struggle for Civil Rights. A Natural History of MississippiA blade of rust from the oceanand from the air a rumorthat corrodes the earth in tongues,lichen, moss, magnolia,until each gossip’s true.Things go this way,each green repeating its factof sun and wind and rain,its dialect, its blade,while beneath each leafa quiet cuts between the veins.Laced, pale wings opento learn the particular weather,the place or part of speechthat will darkenand give them a name.So each sugar furlsto burn and bitteragainst whatever mouthsmight swallow,each skin becomesthe history of its harbor,another word for here.This hatch of bark and shadehangs like a photographof all it covers, so perfect,so still, its edgesblur, then disappear.

Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City


Antero Pietila - 2010
    The Federal Housing Administration continued discriminatory housing policies even into the 1960s, long after civil rights legislation. This all-American tale is told through the prism of Baltimore, from its early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of white flight after World War II, and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. The events are real, and so are the heroes and villains. Mr. Pietila's narrative centers on the human side of residential real estate practices, whose discriminatory tools were the same everywhere: restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, predatory lending.

We Rise: Speeches by Inspirational Black Women


Amanda MeadowsShirley Chisholm - 2010
    Spanning decades and elucidating the fight for equality, it not only captures important pieces of black history, but reveals the struggle from a female perspective. The live recordings in this captivating collection are preceded by a short biography to introduce each speaker. SPEECHES INCLUDE:◆ Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention (2008)◆ Shirley Chisholm on Equal Rights for Women (1969)◆ Barbara Jordan, "Who Will Speak for the Common Good? (1976)◆ Fannie Lou Hamer at the Democratic National Convention (1964)◆ Rosa Parks at the Million Man March (1995)◆ Myrlie Evers (widow of Medgar Evers, Chairman of NAACP, 1995-98)◆ Dorothy Height (Chairperson/Executive Committee of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and longtime social activist)◆ Anita Hill at Simmons College (2008)◆ Dorothy Cotton at Cornell, MLK Commemorative Lecture (2007)◆ Angela Davis, How Does Change Happen? at UC Davis (2006)RUNNING TIME ⇒ 2hrs. and 8mins.©2010 Phoenix (P)2010 Phoenix

The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is


Fannie Lou Hamer - 2010
    Far fewer people are familiar with the speeches Hamer delivered at the 1968 and 1972 conventions, to say nothing of addresses she gave closer to home, or with Malcolm X in Harlem, or even at the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus. Until now, dozens of Hamer's speeches have been buried in archival collections and in the basements of movement veterans. After years of combing library archives, government documents, and private collections across the country, Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck have selected twenty-one of Hamer's most important speeches and testimonies.As the first volume to exclusively showcase Hamer's talents as an orator, this book includes speeches from the better part of her fifteen-year activist career delivered in response to occasions as distinct as a Vietnam War Moratorium Rally in Berkeley, California, and a summons to testify in a Mississippi courtroom.Brooks and Houck have coupled these heretofore unpublished speeches and testimonies with brief critical descriptions that place Hamer's words in context. The editors also include the last full-length oral history interview Hamer granted, a recent oral history interview Brooks conducted with Hamer's daughter, as well as a bibliography of additional primary and secondary sources. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer demonstrates that there is still much to learn about and from this valiant black freedom movement activist.

Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead


Frank Meeink - 2010
    Frank’s violent childhood in South Philadelphia primed him to hate, while addiction made him easy prey for a small group of skinhead gang recruiters. By 16 he had become one of the most notorious skinhead gang leaders on the East Coast and by 18 he was doing hard time. Teamed up with African-American players in a prison football league, Frank learned to question his hatred, and after being paroled he defected from the white supremacy movement and began speaking on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League. A story of fighting the demons of hatred and addiction, Frank's downfall and ultimate redemption has the power to open hearts and change lives.

Meditations on Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings


James "Yaki" Sayles - 2010
    This exercise is also about us, and about some of the things that We need to understand and to change in ourselves and our world."A a�aJames Yaki Sayles One of those who eagerly picked up Fanon in the 60s, who carried out armed expropriations and violence against white settlers, Sayles reveals how, behind the image of Fanon as race thinker, there is an underlying reality of antiracist communist thought.

Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation


Derald Wing Sue - 2010
    This book insightfully looks at the various kinds of microaggressions and their psychological effects on both perpetrators and their targets. Thought provoking and timely, Dr. Sue suggests realistic and optimistic guidance for combating--and ending--microaggressions in our society.Praise for Microaggressions in Everyday Life:"In a very constructive way, Dr. Sue provides time-tested psychological suggestions to make our society free of microaggressions. It is a brilliant resource and ideal teaching tool for all those who wish to alter the forces that promote pain for people." --Melba J. T. Vasquez, PhD, ABPPPresident, American Psychological Association"Microaggressions in Everyday Life offers an insightful, scholarly, and thought-provoking analysis of the existence of subtle, often unintentional biases, and their profound impact on members of traditionally disadvantaged groups. The concept of microaggressions is one of the most important developments in the study of intergroup relations over the past decade, and this volume is the definitive source on the topic." --John F. Dovidio, PhD Professor of Psychology, Yale University"Derald Wing Sue has written a must-read book for anyone who deals with diversity at any level. Microaggressions in Everyday Life will bring great rewards in understanding and awareness along with practical guides to put them to good use." --James M. Jones, PhD Professor of Psychology and Director of Black American Studies, University of Delaware"This is a major contribution to the multicultural discourse and to understanding the myriad ways that discrimination can be represented and its insidious effects. Accessible and well documented, it is a pleasure to read." --Beverly Greene, PhD, ABPP Diplomate in Clinical Psychology and Professor of Psychology, St. John's University

The Imperative of Integration


Elizabeth S. Anderson - 2010
    As a signal achievement of that legacy, in 2008, Americans elected their first African American president. Some would argue that we have finally arrived at a postracial America, but The Imperative of Integration indicates otherwise. Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates that, despite progress toward racial equality, African Americans remain disadvantaged on virtually all measures of well-being. Segregation remains a key cause of these problems, and Anderson skillfully shows why racial integration is needed to address these issues. Weaving together extensive social science findings — in economics, sociology, and psychology — with political theory, this book provides a compelling argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, and to build a better democracy.Considering the effects of segregation and integration across multiple social arenas, Anderson exposes the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left. She reveals the limitations of conservative explanations for black disadvantage in terms of cultural pathology within the black community and explains why color blindness is morally misguided. Multicultural celebrations of group differences are also not enough to solve our racial problems. Anderson provides a distinctive rationale for affirmative action as a tool for promoting integration, and explores how integration can be practiced beyond affirmative action.Offering an expansive model for practicing political philosophy in close collaboration with the social sciences, this book is a trenchant examination of how racial integration can lead to a more robust and responsive democracy.

A Princess Found: An American Family, an African Chiefdom, and the Daughter Who Connected Them All: Volume 2


Sarah Culberson - 2010
    

African Women Writing Resistance: An Anthology of Contemporary Voices


Jennifer Browdy - 2010
    Thematically organized, it presents women’s writing on such issues as intertribal and interethnic conflicts, the degradation of the environment, polygamy, domestic abuse, the controversial traditional practice of female genital cutting, Sharia law, intergenerational tensions, and emigration and exile.    Contributors include internationally recognized authors and activists such as Wangari Maathai and Nawal El Saadawi, as well as a host of vibrant new voices from all over the African continent and from the African diaspora. Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection provides an excellent introduction to contemporary African women’s literature and highlights social issues that are particular to Africa but are also of worldwide concern.  It is an essential reference for students of African studies, world literature, anthropology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and women’s studies.  A Choice Outstanding Academic BookOutstanding Book, selected by the Public Library AssociationBest Books for High Schools, Best Books for Special Interests, and Best Books for Professional Use, selected by the American Association of School Libraries

Pages From A Black Radical's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader


James Boggs - 2010
    During and after the years he spent in the auto industry, Boggs wrote two books, co-authored two others, and penned dozens of essays, pamphlets, reviews, manifestos, and newspaper columns to become known as a pioneering revolutionary theorist and community organizer. In Pages from a Black Radical's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, editor Stephen M. Ward collects a diverse sampling of pieces by Boggs, spanning the entire length of his career from the 1950s to the early 1990s.Pages from a Black Radical's Notebook is arranged in four chronological parts that document Boggs's activism and writing. Part 1 presents columns from Correspondence newspaper written during the 1950s and early 1960s. Part 2 presents the complete text of Boggs's first book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, his most widely known work. In part 3, "Black Power-Promise, Pitfalls, and Legacies," Ward collects essays, pamphlets, and speeches that reflect Boggs's participation in and analysis of the origins, growth, and demise of the Black Power movement. Part 4 comprises pieces written in the last decade of Boggs's life, during the 1980s through the early 1990s. An introduction by Ward provides a detailed overview of Boggs's life and career, and an afterword by Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs's wife and political partner, concludes this volume.Pages from a Black Radical's Notebook documents Boggs's personal trajectory of political engagement and offers a unique perspective on radical social movements and the African American struggle for civil rights in the post-World War II years. Readers interested in political and ideological struggles of the twentieth century will find Pages from a Black Radical's Notebook to be fascinating reading.

In Canaan


Shane McCrae - 2010
    “I couldn’t stop/Hurting her because it hurt,” writes McCrae in the voice of Garner, “Before that night I never had the chance to love / Anyone/ she was the first person I loved.” McCrae composes in broken forms and shattered fragments, retelling a harrowing historical story through the imagined first-person point of view of its tortured and terrified heroine. Shane McCrae is the author of Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010), In Canaan (Rescue Press, 2010), and One Neither One (Octopus Books, 2009). His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2010, The American Poetry Review, African American Review, Agni, The Kenyon Review, Octopus Magazine, Typo, and others. He went to school at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workhop and Harvard Law, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa.

The Young Lords: A Reader


Darrel Enck-Wanzer - 2010
    Part of the original Rainbow Coalition with the Black Panthers and Young Patriots, the politically radical Puerto Ricans who constituted the Young Lords instituted programs for political, social, and cultural change within the communities in which they operated.The Young Lords offers readers the opportunity to learn about this vibrant organization through their own words and images, collecting an array of their essays, journalism, photographs, speeches, and pamphlets. Organized topically and thematically, this volume highlights the Young Lords' diverse and inventive activism around issues such as education, health care, gentrification, police injustice and gender equality, as well as self-determination for Puerto Rico.In recovering these rare written and visual materials, Darrel Enck-Wanzer has given voice to the lost chorus of the Young Lords, while providing an indispensable resource for students, scholars, activists, and others interested in learning about this influential grassroots "street political" organization.

We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama


Stephen Tuck - 2010
    In this exciting revisionist history, Stephen Tuck traces the black freedom struggle in all its diversity, from the first years of freedom during the Civil War to President Obama's inauguration.

Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans After 9/11


Lori Peek - 2010
    Public discussion revealed that widespread misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Islam persisted, despite the striking diversity of the Muslim community. Letting the voices of 140 ordinary Muslim American men and women describe their experiences, Lori Peek's path-breaking book, Behind the Backlash, presents moving accounts of prejudice and exclusion. Muslims speak of being subjected to harassment before the attacks, and recount the discrimination they encountered afterwards. Peek also explains the struggles of young Muslim adults to solidify their community and define their identity during a time of national crisis. Behind the Backlash seeks to explain why blame and scape-goating occur after a catastrophe. Peek sets the twenty-first century experience of Muslim Americans, who were vilified and victimized, in the context of larger sociological and psychological processes. Peek's book will be of interest to those in disaster research studies, sociology of religion, and race and ethnic relations.

Beads on a String-America's Racially Intertwined Biographical History


Ey Wade - 2010
    With hyperlinks and videos Beads on a String-America’s Racially Intertwined Biographical History never stops celebrating our heritages and lauds loudly the accomplishments of all races that helped make America the great country it has become.

Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter's Civil Rights Journey


Ana Maria Spagna - 2010
    In January 1957, Joseph Spagna and five other young men waited to board a city bus called the Sunnyland in Tallahassee, Florida. Their plan was simple but dangerous: ride the bus together—three blacks and three whites—get arrested, and take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Fifty years later Ana Maria Spagna sets off on a journey to understand what happened and why. Spagna travels from her remote mountain home in the Pacific Northwest to contemporary Tallahassee, searching for the truth of the incident and her father’s involvement. Her journey is complicated by the fact that her father never spoke of the Sunnyland experience and died unexpectedly when she was eleven. Seeking out the other bus riders, now in their seventies, Spagna tries to make sense of their conflicting stories. Her odyssey becomes further troubled by the sudden diagnosis of her mother’s terminal cancer. Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction prize, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus deftly weaves cultural and personal history, memoir, and reportage in this fascinating look at a family and a nation’s past.

The Invisible: What the Church Can Do to Find and Serve the Least of These


Arloa Sutter - 2010
    They are the hungry. They are the thirsty. They are those within our own churches who would never acknowledge their need for clothing. How can we begin to serve the invisible in our midst?In this powerful book, Arloa Sutter will give you vision. Through her own compelling stories and those of many others, she sensitively examines the hard issues of poverty through real-life examples, theological and philosophical models, and practical direction. With wisdom and first-hand knowledge from her own established ministry to the poor, Sutter will open your eyes to what is happening around your very own neighborhood.Look and see the invisible like you've never seen them before. And then capture your own vision for helping those whom the world considers "the least of these," but whom Jesus called his "brothers" (Matt. 25:40).Study guide included for personal or group study.

White Man's Heaven: The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, 1894-1909


Kimberly Harper - 2010
    Kimberly Harper explores events in the towns of Monett, Pierce City, Joplin, and Springfield, Missouri, and Harrison, Arkansas, to show how post–Civil War vigilantism, an established tradition of extralegal violence, and the rapid political, economic, and social change of the New South era happened independently but were also part of a larger, interconnected regional experience. Even though some whites, especially in Joplin and Springfield, tried to stop the violence and bring the lynchers to justice, many African Americans fled the Ozarks, leaving only a resilient few behind and forever changing the racial composition of the region.

Street Value: Shopping, Planning, and Politics on Fulton Street


Rosten Woo - 2010
    A colossus of commerce, itwelcomes over one hundred thousand shoppers daily and ranks among the most profitable commercial real estate in the entire country, and is also home to some of the city's most recognized institutions, including cheesecake mecca Junior's, that have been immortalized in song, film, and culture. Despite its historic link to Brooklyn's past and its financial success as a shopping district, Fulton Street is rarely celebrated in New York. The street's hand-painted signs, customized jewelry, rare sneakers, mega-church, and vendors offer a special sampling of noncorporate commerce, but many consider its sensorial and physical density a sign of blight. Misunderstandings about race, class, and profitability have led Fulton Street to be characterized as run-down, dangerous, or underutilized, and as a result it has been subject to nearly continuous renovation. Recently rezoned and becoming increasingly attractive to national chain stores, Fulton Street is once again poised for big changes. Street Value is a challenge to creatively rethink the planning and urban design of Fulton Street and other urban shopping districts. Street Value explores the mall's historical and contemporary conditions through original essays, oral histories, new and archival photographs, historic documents, and interviews with key planners, developers, city officials, historians, and activists from the 1960s to the present. Street Value probes the ideology of redevelopment and demonstrates how commercial, governmental, and activist forces have coalesced to produce one of Brooklyn's most legendary public spaces.

Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State


Anne E. Marshall - 2010
    Marshall traces the development of a Confederate identity in Kentucky between 1865 and 1925, belying the fact that Kentucky never left the Union. After the Civil War, the people of Kentucky appeared to forget their Union loyalties and embraced the Democratic politics, racial violence, and Jim Crow laws associated with former Confederate states. Marshall looks beyond postwar political and economic factors to the longer-term commemorations of the Civil War by which Kentuckians fixed the state's remembrance of the conflict for the following sixty years.

Longing: Stories of Racial Healing


Phyllis A. Unterschuetz - 2010
    Their stories describe a longing to heal from the racial separation that has so deeply wounded this country.

You Know Who You Are


Ian Williams - 2010
    His poems address the crisis of young, black masculinity in cities, paint starkly urban portraits of live and break open stereotypes. Sly humor laces through this collection, and Williams is adept at playing with language to change meanings in unexpected ways. For him it's easy to turn the word go into gone.

The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature


Byron M. Roth - 2010
    Roth argues that the current debate over immigration policy is unlikely to produce a satisfying outcome since it takes place uninformed by the science of human nature. Any policy of mass immigration will be profoundly constrained by fundamental features of human psychology, prominent among them is a natural bias toward one’s own kind and a wariness and suspicion of – if not hostility towards – others. The prospect for social harmony in multi-ethnic societies is thus problematic at best, and difficulties are compounded when groups differ in ability and temperament in non-trivial ways.Roth explores the history of immigration to the United States, revealing that the earlier, pre-war immigration experience was so different from current patterns that it cannot provide a useful template for understanding and assessing them. In addition, Roth addresses the disturbingly undemocratic nature of the regime of mass immigration imposed by authorities on the citizens of all Western nations in defiance of their clearly expressed wishes. He shows that the chasm between elite views and public opinion is so deep that current policies can only be maintained by an increasingly totalitarian suppression of dissent that undermines the very foundations of Western society.

Mendez V. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican-American Rights


Philippa Strum - 2010
    Board of Education remains much more famous, Mendez v. Westminster School District (1947) was actually the first case in which segregation in education was successfully challenged in federal court. Finally giving Mendez its due, Philippa Strum provides a concise and compelling account of its legal issues and legacy, while retaining its essential human face: that of Mexican Americans unwilling to accept second-class citizenship. 1945 Gonzalo and Felcitas Mendez, California farmers, sent their children off to the local school, only to be told that the youngsters would have to attend a separate facility reserved for Mexican Americans. In response the Mndezes and other aggrieved parents from nearby school districts went to federal court to challenge the segregation. Uniquely, they did not claim racial discrimination, since Mexicans were legally considered white, but rather discrimination based on ancestry and supposed language deficiency that denied their children their Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection under the law.In 1945 Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, California farmers, sent their children off to the local school, only to be told that the youngsters would have to attend a separate facility reserved for Mexican Americans. In response the Mendezes and other aggrieved parents from nearby school districts went to federal court to challenge the segregation. Uniquely, they did not claim racial discrimination, since Mexicans were legally considered white, but rather discrimination based on ancestry and supposed language deficiency that denied their children their Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection under the law.Strum tells how, thanks to attorney David Marcus's carefully crafted arguments, federal district court judge Paul McCormick came to support the plaintiffs on the grounds that the social, psychological, and pedagogical costs of segregated education were damaging to Mexican-American children. The school districts claimed that federal courts had no jurisdiction over education, but the Ninth Circuit upheld McCormick's decision, ruling that the schools' actions violated California law. The appeal to the Ninth Circuit was supported by amicus briefs from leading civil liberties organizations, including the NAACP, which a few years later would adapt the arguments of Mendez in representing the plaintiffs in Brown.Strum effectively weaves together narrative and analysis with personality portraits to create a highly readable and accessible story, allowing us to hear the voices of all the protagonists. She also presents the issues evenhandedly, effectively balancing her presentation of arguments by both the plaintiffs and the schools that sought to continue the segregation of Mexican-American students.Ultimately, Mendez highlights how Mexican Americans took the lead to secure their civil rights and demonstrates how organization, courage, and persistence in the Mexican-American communities could overcome the racism of the school boards. Their inspiring example is particularly timely given the current controversies over immigration and the growing national interest in Latino life.

Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader


Jean Yu-Wen Shen WuDavianna McGregor - 2010
    This comprehensive anthology, arranged in four parts and featuring a stellar group of contributors, summarizes and defines the current shape of this rapidly changing field, addressing topics such as transnationalism, U.S. imperialism, multiracial identity, racism, immigration, citizenship, social justice, and pedagogy.Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen have selected essays for the significance of their contribution to the field and their clarity, brevity, and accessibility to readers with little to no prior knowledge of Asian American studies. Featuring both reprints of seminal articles and groundbreaking texts, as well as bold new scholarship, Asian American Studies Now addresses the new circumstances, new communities, and new concerns that are reconstituting Asian America.

Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific


Setsu Shigematsu - 2010
    The contributors theorize the effects of militarization across former and current territories of Japan and the United States, such as Guam, Okinawa, the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, and Korea, demonstrating that the relationship between militarization and colonial subordination—and their gendered and racialized processes—shapes and produces bodies of memory, knowledge, and resistance. Contributors: Walden Bello, U of the Philippines; Michael Lujan Bevacqua, U of Guam; Patti Duncan, Oregon State U; Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, U of Hawai‘i, M noa; Insook Kwon, Myongji U; Laurel A. Monnig, U of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign; Katharine H. S. Moon, Wellesley College; Jon Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, U of Hawai‘i, M noa; Naoki Sakai, Cornell U; Fumika Sato, Hitotsubashi U; Theresa Cenidoza Suarez, California State U, San Marcos; Teresia K. Teaiwa, Victoria U, Wellington; Wesley Iwao Ueunten, San Francisco State U.

Critical Race Theory Matters: Education and Ideology


Margaret Zamudio - 2010
    Critical Race Theory Matters provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of this influential movement, shining its keen light on specific issues within education.

The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story


Tiya Miles - 2010
    In this first full-length study to reconstruct the history of the plantation, Tiya Miles tells the story of Diamond Hill's founding, its flourishing, its takeover by white land-lottery winners on the eve of the Cherokee Removal, its decay, and ultimately its renovation in the 1950s.This moving multiracial history sheds light on the various cultural communities that interacted within the plantation boundaries--from elite Cherokee slaveholders to Cherokee subsistence farmers, from black slaves of various ethnic backgrounds to free blacks from the North and South, from German-speaking Moravian missionaries to white southern skilled laborers. Moreover, the book includes rich portraits of the women of these various communities. Vividly written and extensively researched, this history illuminates gender, class, and cross-racial relationships on the southern frontier.

Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness


Nicole R. Fleetwood - 2010
    Through trenchant analysis, Nicole R. Fleetwood reorients the problem of black visibility by turning attention to what it means to see blackness and to the performative codes that reinforce, resignify, and disrupt its meaning. Working across visual theory and performance studies, Fleetwood asks, How is the black body visualized as both familiar and disruptive? How might we investigate the black body as a troubling presence to the scopic regimes that define it as such? How is value assessed based on visible blackness?Fleetwood documents multiple forms of engagement with the visual, even as she meticulously underscores how the terms of engagement change in various performative contexts. Examining a range of practices from the documentary photography of Charles “Teenie” Harris to the “excess flesh” performances of black female artists and pop stars to the media art of Fatimah Tuggar to the iconicity of Michael Jackson, Fleetwood reveals and reconfigures the mechanics, codes, and metaphors of blackness in visual culture.

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century


Hazel Rose Markus - 2010
    Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe.Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are, but rather sets of actions that people do.Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

Social Welfare Policy: Regulation and Resistance Among People of Color


Jerome H. Schiele - 2010
    It illuminates the need for culturally competent social welfare policy practitioners, illustrating how racism continues to be at the center of many contemporary social problems such as issues of employment, public and bilingual education, housing and residential patterns, citizens′ rights, and affirmative action--and of the social welfare policies used to address these issues.This book is an ideal core or supplementary text for Social Policy courses in departments of social work or human services. It is also a must-read for social welfare policy advocates and analysts and for anyone interested in how the themes of social welfare policy regulation and resistance are relevant to people of color.

Haiti: A Slave Revolution: 200 Years After 1804


Ramsey Clark - 2010
    These essays explain the background to the current crisis in Haiti, revealing the intertwined relationship between the United States and Haiti and the untold stories of the Haitian people’s resistance to U.S. aggression and occupations. Included are a time line, photo essay, author biographies, and bibliography. This revised edition also includes context surrounding the response to the tragic 2010 earthquake disaster.

The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction: Continuity and Reclamation in Borikén (Puerto Rico)


Tony Castanha - 2010
    The author reveals extensive narratives of Jíbaro Indian resistance and cultural continuity on the island of Borikén. Since the epistemological boundaries of the early history and literature had been written through colonial eyes, key fallacies have been passed down for centuries. Many stories have been kept within family histories having gone “underground” as the result of an abusive past. Whole communities of Jíbaro people survive today.

"What Will Happen to Me?"


Howard Zehr - 2010
    As Taylor says, "I want other kids to know that, even though your parents are locked up, they're not bad people. "And I want them to know that we'll get through it. As long as we have someone there to help us, we can get through it. It makes you stronger."The material in "What Will Happen to Me?" has been gathered and written by two nationally-recognized experts:Howard Zehr is known around the world as the "grandfather of restorative justice." He lectures and consults internationally on that topic and related issues. He is currently a member of the Victims Advisory Group of the U.S. Sentencing Commission.Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz travels the U.S. doing mediation work in severe crime cases. She provides consulting and training for agencies and communities seeking to implement programs of restorative justice.This book of portraits and text includes: Reflections of several grandparents who are unexpectedly parenting children whose parents are incarcerated. "Ten Questions Often Asked by Children." "Dealing with Emotions"—including grief and loss, shame and stigma, anger and isolation. Resources for "Staying in Touch," "Finding Moments of Celebration," "Adjusting to a Parent's Return," "Self-Care for Family Caregivers," and "Suggestions for Third-Party Caregivers." "The Children's Bill of Rights," along with thoughtful consideration about how to apply restorative justice and respect for relationships in these difficult situations.

A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany


Maria Höhn - 2010
    Thanks in large part to its military occupation of Germany after World War II, America’s unresolved civil rights agenda was exposed to worldwide scrutiny as never before. At the same time, its ambitious efforts to democratize German society after the defeat of Nazism meant that West Germany was exposed to American ideas of freedom and democracy to a much larger degree than many other countries. As African American GIs became increasingly politicized, they took on a particular significance for the Civil Rights Movement in light of Germany’s central role in the Cold War. While the effects of the Civil Rights Movement reverberated across the globe, Germany represents a special case that illuminates a remarkable period in American and world history. Digital archive including videos, photographs, and oral history interviews available at www.breathoffreedom.org

The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the "Age of Discovery" to the Age of Abolition: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque


David Bindman - 2010
    Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector's items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.The much-awaited "Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque" has been written by an international team of distinguished scholars, and covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of slavery and the presence of black people in Europe irrevocably affected the works of the best artists of the time. Essays on the black Magus and the image of the black in Italy, Spain, and Britain, with detailed studies of Rembrandt and Heliodorus's "Aethiopica," all presented with superb color plates, make this new volume a worthy addition to this classic series.

Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson


Blair L.M. Kelley - 2010
    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.

The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960


Lawrence P. Jackson - 2010
    The years between these two indispensable epochs saw the communal rise of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and many other influential black writers. While these individuals have been duly celebrated, little attention has been paid to the political and artistic milieu in which they produced their greatest works. With this commanding study, Lawrence Jackson recalls the lost history of a crucial era.Looking at the tumultuous decades surrounding World War II, Jackson restores the "indignant" quality to a generation of African American writers shaped by Jim Crow segregation, the Great Depression, the growth of American communism, and an international wave of decolonization. He also reveals how artistic collectives in New York, Chicago, and Washington fostered a sense of destiny and belonging among diverse and disenchanted peoples. As Jackson shows through contemporary documents, the years that brought us "Their Eyes Were Watching God," "Native Son," and "Invisible Man" also saw the rise of African American literary criticism--by both black and white critics.Fully exploring the cadre of key African American writers who triumphed in spite of segregation, The Indignant Generation paints a vivid portrait of American intellectual and artistic life in the mid-twentieth century.

Had Slaves


Catherine Sasanov - 2010
    HAD SLAVES by Catherine Sasanov is winner of the inaugural Sentence Book Award, which goes annually to a manuscript consisting entirely or substantially of prose poems or other hard-to-define work situated in the grey areas between poetry and other genres work that promotes the mission of SENTENCE: A JOURNAL OF PROSE POETICS to extend the conception of what the prose poem is or can be. Written out of Sasanov's discovery of slaveholding among her Missouri ancestors, and the fragmented evidence left behind of the eleven men, women, and children held in their bondage, HAD SLAVES pieces together lives endured from slavery to Jim Crow across a landscape lost beneath big box stores, subdivisions, and tourist sites. Avoiding Gone with the Wind stereotype, Sasanov takes her readers to slavery's less expected locale: where big house means log cabin and plantation is a small grain farm with tarantulas mating in the corn. An unflinching look at a stumbled-upon past set in motion after finding the words, HAD SLAVES."

The Cool Woman


John Aubrey Anderson - 2010
    Although he’s at the top of his Air Force class and married to a beautiful woman, his life is centered on drinking and partying—perhaps a way to escape a haunting memory. As a ten-year-old, Bill killed the two white men who beat his black mother to death.In 1972, Mann is in Vietnam, flying his aircraft, The Cool Woman, in combat environs that have been called the most hazardous in air warfare history. He remains confident and considers himself "the envied of the envied" until the moment his beautiful wife says she wants a divorce, and the downward spiral of Mann’s life and his survival odds begins.

Toy Story 3: Look and Find


Publications International - 2010
    Eights extra busy scenes, and lists of more challenges at the end of each book are perfect entertainment on car and plane rides as well as fun for kids to share together.

Undoing Privilege: Unearned Advantage in a Divided World


Bob Pease - 2010
    In Undoing Privilege, Bob Pease argues that privilege, as the other side of oppression, has received insufficient attention in both critical theories and in the practices of social change. As a result, dominant groups have been allowed to reinforce their dominance. Undoing Privilege explores the main sites of privilege, from Western dominance, class elitism, and white and patriarchal privilege to the less-examined sites of heterosexual and able-bodied privilege. Pease points out that while the vast majority of people may be oppressed on one level, many are also privileged on another. He also demonstrates how members of privileged groups can engage critically with their own dominant position, and explores the potential and limitations of them becoming allies against oppression and their own unearned privilege. This is an essential book for all who are concerned about

Hope Abundant: Third World and Indigenous Women's Theology


Kwok Pui-Lan - 2010
    The book has been widely used as an important resource for understanding women's liberation theologies, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America emerging out of women's struggles for justice in church and society. More than twenty years have passed and it is time to bring out a new collection of essays to signal newer developments and to include emerging voices. Divided into four partsContext and Theology; Scripture; Christology; and Body, Sexuality, and Spiritualitythese carefully selected essays paint a vivid picture of theological developments among indigenous women and other women living in the global South who face poverty, violence, and war and yet find abundant hope through their faith.

The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlan, 1970-2010


Chon A. Noriega - 2010
    These essays correspond to the themes that organize the original set of essays: "Decolonizing the Territory," "Performing Politics," "Configuring Identities, and Remapping the World." The revised edition documents the foundation of Chicano studies, testifies to its broad disciplinary range, and explores its continuing development.The contributors are Eric Avila, Maxine Baca Zinn, Gilberto Cardenas, David Carrasco, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, John Alba Cutler, Karen Mary Davalos, Adelaida R. Del Castillo, Shifra M. Goldman, Juan Gomez-Quinones, Deena J. Gonzalez, Ramon A. Gutierrez, Jorge A. Huerta, Jessica E. Jones, Chon A. Noriega, Americo Paredes, Fernando Penalosa, Rafael Perez-Torres, Beatriz M. Pesquera, David Roman, Robert Chao Romero, Rosaura Sanchez, Chela Sandoval, Alex M. Saragoza, Denise A. Segura, Marian E. Schlotterbeck, Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell, Kay Turner, and Steven S. Volk.

If Jesus Were Gay


Emanuel Xavier - 2010
    Yet as deeply personal as these poems are, they are universal enough to move any reader. Both sacred and profane, it is a compelling and confessional collection from a daring and ambitious voice in contemporary poetry.

Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves South Carolina Narratives, Part 2


Work Projects Administration - 2010
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Empire and Nation: Selected Essays


Partha Chatterjee - 2010
    Beginning in the 1980s, his work, particularly within the context of India, has served as the foundation for subaltern studies, an area of scholarship he continues to develop.In this collection, English-speaking readers are finally able to experience the breadth and substance of Chatterjee's wide-ranging thought. His provocative essays examine the phenomenon of postcolonial democracy and establish the parameters for research in subaltern politics. They include an early engagement with agrarian politics and Chatterjee's brilliant book reviews and journalism. Selections include one never-before-published essay, "A Tribute to the Master," which considers through a mock retelling of an episode from the classic Sanskrit epic, The Mahabharata, a deep dilemma in the study of postcolonial history, and several Bengali essays, now translated into English for the first time. An introduction by Nivedita Menon adds necessary context and depth, critiquing Chatterjee's ideas and their influence on contemporary political thought.

Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment: The Military Career of Charles Young


Brian G. Shellum - 2010
    military attaché, the first African American officer to command a Regular Army regiment, and the highest-ranking black officer in the Regular Army until his death. Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment tells the story of the man who—willingly or not—served as a standard-bearer for his race in the officer corps for nearly thirty years, and who, if not for racial prejudice, would have become the first African American general. Brian G. Shellum describes how, during his remarkable army career, Young was shuffled among the few assignments deemed suitable for a black officer in a white man’s army—the Buffalo Soldier regiments, an African American college, and diplomatic posts in black republics such as Liberia. Nonetheless, he used his experience to establish himself as an exceptional cavalry officer. He was a colonel on the eve of the United States’ entry into World War I, when serious medical problems and racial intolerance denied him command and ended his career. Shellum’s book seeks to restore a hero to the ranks of military history; at the same time, it informs our understanding of the role of race in the history of the American military.

The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy through Race, Class, and Gender


Michele Tracy Berger - 2010
    Taking stock of this transformative paradigm, The Intersectional Approach guides new and established researchers to engage in a critical reflection about the broad adoption of intersectionality that constitutes what the editors call a new "social literacy" for scholars.In eighteen essays, contributors examine various topics of interest to students and researchers from a feminist perspective as well as through their respective disciplines, looking specifically at gender inequalities related to globalization, health, motherhood, sexuality, body image, and aging. Together, these essays provide a critical overview of the paradigm, highlight new theoretical and methodological advances, and make a strong case for the continued use of the intersectional approach both within the borders of women's and gender studies and beyond.Contributors: Lidia Anchisi, Gettysburg CollegeNaomi Andre, University of MichiganJean Ait Belkhir, Southern University at New OrleansMichele Tracy Berger, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillKia Lilly Caldwell, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillElizabeth R. Cole, University of MichiganKimberle Crenshaw, University of California, Los AngelesBonnie Thornton Dill, University of MarylandMichelle Fine, Graduate Center, City University of New YorkJennifer Fish, Old Dominion UniversityMako Fitts, Seattle UniversityKathleen Guidroz, Mount St. Mary's UniversityIvette Guzman-Zavala, Lebanon Valley CollegeKaaren Haldeman, Durham, North CarolinaCatherine E. Harnois, Wake Forest UniversityAnaLouise Keating, Texas Woman's UniversityRachel E. Luft, University of New OrleansGary K. Perry, Seattle UniversityJennifer Rothchild, University of Minnesota, MorrisAnn Russo, DePaul UniversityNatalie J. Sabik, University of Michigan Jessica Holden Sherwood, University of Rhode IslandYvette Taylor, University of Newcastle, United Kingdom Nira Yuval-Davis, University of East LondonThe contributors are Lidia Anchisi, Naomi Andre, Jean Ait Belkhir, Michele Tracy Berger, Kia Lilly Caldwell, Elizabeth R. Cole, Kimberle Crenshaw, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Michelle Fine, Jennifer Fish, Mako Fitts, Kathleen Guidroz, Ivette Guzman-Zavala, Kaaren Haldeman, Catherine E. Harnois, AnaLouise Keating, Rachel E. Luft, Gary K. Perry, Jennifer Rothchild, Ann Russo, Natalie J. Sabik, Jessica Holden Sherwood, Yvette Taylor, and Nira Yuval-Davis. The editors are Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz.

Say It Loud: Great Speeches on Civil Rights and African American Identity


Catherine Ellis - 2010
    With recordings unearthed from libraries and sound archives, and made widely available here for the first time, Say It Loud includes powerful speeches by Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Martin Luther King Jr., James Cone, Toni Morrison, Colin Powell, and many others.Bringing the rich immediacy of the spoken word to a vital historical and intellectual tradition, Say It Loud illuminates the diversity of ideas and arguments pulsing through the black freedom movement.

Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema


Jane Chi Hyun Park - 2010
    Jane Chi Hyun Park demonstrates how this fantasy is sustained through imagery, iconography, and performance that conflate East Asia with technology, constituting what Park calls oriental style.Park provides a genealogy of oriental style through contextualized readings of popular films-from the multicultural city in Blade Runner and the Japanese American mentor in The Karate Kid to the Afro-Asian reworking of the buddy genre in Rush Hour and the mixed-race hero in The Matrix. Throughout these analyses Park shows how references to the Orient have marked important changes in American popular attitudes toward East Asia in the past thirty years, from abjection to celebration, invisibility to hypervisibility. Unlike other investigations of racial imagery in Hollywood, Yellow Future centers on how the Asiatic is transformed into and performed as style in the backdrop of these movies and discusses the significance of this conditional visibility for representations of racial difference.

Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the United States


William G. Roy - 2010
    Reds, Whites, and Blues examines the political force of folk music, not through the meaning of its lyrics, but through the concrete social activities that make up movements. Drawing from rich archival material, William Roy shows that the People's Songs movement of the 1930s and 40s, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s implemented folk music's social relationships--specifically between those who sang and those who listened--in different ways, achieving different outcomes.Roy explores how the People's Songsters envisioned uniting people in song, but made little headway beyond leftist activists. In contrast, the Civil Rights Movement successfully integrated music into collective action, and used music on the picket lines, at sit-ins, on freedom rides, and in jails. Roy considers how the movement's Freedom Songs never gained commercial success, yet contributed to the wider achievements of the Civil Rights struggle. Roy also traces the history of folk music, revealing the complex debates surrounding who or what qualified as "folk" and how the music's status as racially inclusive was not always a given.Examining folk music's galvanizing and unifying power, Reds, Whites, and Blues casts new light on the relationship between cultural forms and social activity.

The Science and the Myth of Melanin: Exposing the Truths


T. Owens Moore - 2010
    

After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region


Wayde Compton - 2010
    This is a brilliant and original work that should be mandatory reading for any student of race and history."—Danzy Senna, author of CaucasiaAfter Canaan, the first nonfiction book by acclaimed African Canadian poet Wayde Compton, repositions the North American discussion of race in the wake of the tumultuous twentieth century. Written from the perspective of someone who was born and lives outside of African American culture, it riffs on the concept of Canada as a promised land (or "Canaan") encoded in African American myth and song since the days of slavery. These varied essays, steeped in a kind of history rarely written about, explore the language of racial misrecognition (also known as "passing"), the failure of urban renewal, humor as a counterweight to "official" multiculturalism, the poetics of hip hop turntablism, and the impact of the Obama phenomenon on the way we speak about race itself. Compton marks the passing of old modes of antiracism and multiculturalism, and points toward what may or may not be a "post-racial" future, but will without doubt be a brave new world of cultural perception.After Canaan is a brilliant and thoughtful consideration of African (North) American culture as it attempts to redefine itself in the Obama era.Wayde Compton's previous books include the poetry collections 49th Parallel Psalm and Performance Bond. He teaches English in Vancouver, BC.

Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture


Cheryl Suzack - 2010
    A vital and sophisticated discussion, these timely essays will change the way we think about modern feminism and Indigenous women.

Black Rebellion: Eyewitness Accounts of Major Slave Revolts


Sujan Dass - 2010
    Who will tell the stories of those who refused to be slaves? The Atlantic slave trade transported millions of humans from the coasts of West Africa into the New World, stripping them of their dignity, freedom, language and culture. The accepted notion is that these Blacks willingly submitted to the chattel slave system, accepting their new lot in life. When one scours the records, a different story emerges. Black Rebellion chronicles the active resistance of Africans in the New World against their oppressors. These firsthand accounts reveal much that has been neglected in the traditional telling of history. Black Rebellion is a collection of historical literature documenting major slave revolts and uprisings throughout the Americas, written primarily by contemporaries and eyewitnesses. It contains accounts of Nat Turner's Revolt, Gabriel Prosser's Rebellion, Denmark Vesey's Conspiracy, the Stono Rebellion, the Haitian Revolution, and the Maroon Wars of Jamaica and Surinam, as well as a timeline of Western slavery and revolt. This collection is further illuminated by an introduction by Dr. Sujan Dass.

Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Essays, and Poems


Carole Boyce Davies - 2010
    I spent my formative political years in Claudia Jones's London stamping ground of Notting Hill -- it was the classic centre of post-war black activism in Britain. Most West Indian immigrants in the 1950s came by boat to Southampton and the train from there took them into Paddington. Hence the large black community in that part of West London. So I know people who had worked with Claudia Jones and spoke of her with awe. She founded two of Black Britain's most important institutions; the first black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, and she was also one of the founding organizers of the Notting Hill Carnival.Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment transcends the silencing and erasure historically accorded women of achievement: it makes accessible and brings to wider attention the words of an often overlooked twentieth-century political and cultural activist, who tirelessly campaigned, wrote, spoke out, organized, edited and published autobiographical writings, poetry, essays on subjects close to her political heart -- human rights, peace, struggles related to gender, race and class -- this is a collection that unites the many facets of a woman whose identities as a radical thinker and as a black woman are not in conflict. --Book Jacket (from WorldCat)

Arab Americans in Toledo: Cultural Assimilation and Community Involvement


Samir Abu-Absi - 2010
    The contributors to this collection come from all walks of life and write on diverse subjects concerning the life and livelihood of Arab Americans, from economics, to politics, entertainment, to language. Altogether, the chapters constitute a living history of an important segment of multicultural America and an important, well-timed contribution to the growing body of research on American ethnicity.Samir Abu-Absi is a Professor Emeritus of English and Linguistics at the University of Toledo. He received his B.A. in English from the American University of Beirut and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from Indiana University. His teaching and scholarly interests have focused on the study of language structure – particularly Arabic and English, the application of linguistic principles to language instruction, and the relationship between language and culture.This book brings back wonderful memories of my childhood: the friends, the families, the neighborhood hangouts. It also serves as a record of how a group of proud and hard-working immigrants, some of whom settled in the North End of Toledo over a century ago and others who are relatively new arrivals, have contributed to their community in so many positive and significant ways. -Jamie Farr, Actor and entertainerToledo's Arab American experience is a great American story of an ethnic community finding fertile soil, sinking roots and flourishing. This has been the story of ethnic groups whose American experience predates that of Arab Americans and it is being written anew by more recent immigrant communities. Thanks to Samir Abu-Absi and The University of Toledo for collecting and publishing this material. It will help to enrich our national self-understanding. -James J. Zogby, Founder and President, Arab American InstituteSamir Abu-Absi's book offers a rejuvenating tonic of thoughtful examinations in a time which could definitely use more positive linkages between the Middle East and the United States. Many of us have long believed a "world of education" or a "world of exchange" could be much more useful than a "world at war" and here's a strong vote in that direction - Abu-Absi promotes meaningful dialogue and inspires discovery in community. We are lucky for this labor of care and hope. -Naomi Shihab Nye, Award-winning poet, essayist and songwriter

Fly Away: The Great African American Cultural Migrations


Peter M. Rutkoff - 2010
    Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott trace the ideas that inspired African Americans to abandon the South for freedom and opportunity elsewhere.Black Southerners fled the Low Country of South Carolina, the mines and mills of Birmingham, Alabama, the farms of the Mississippi Delta, and the urban wards of Houston, Texas, for new opportunities in New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Los Angeles. They took with them the South’s rich tradition of religion, language, music, and art, recreating and preserving their Southern identity in the churches, newspapers, jazz clubs, and neighborhoods of America’s largest cities. Rutkoff and Scott’s sweeping study explores the development and adaptation of African American culture, from its West African roots to its profound and lasting impact on mainstream America.Broad in scope and original in its interpretation, Fly Away illuminates the origins, development, and transformation of national culture during an important chapter in twentieth-century American history.

Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy


Maria del Guadalupe Davidson - 2010
    These convergences are not random or forced, but are in many ways natural and necessary: the same issues of agency, identity, alienation, and power inevitably are addressed by both camps. Never before has a group of scholars worked together to examine the resources these two traditions can offer one another. By bringing the relationship between these two critical fields of thought to the forefront, the book will encourage scholars to engage in new dialogues about how each can inform the other. If contemporary philosophy is troubled by the fact that it can be too limited, too closed, too white, too male, then this groundbreaking book confronts and challenges these problems.

Who Killed Emmett Till


Susan Klopfer - 2010
    The Mississippi Delta is not a place I would have picked to live and if you had asked me a few years ago what I knew about the region, it would have been a puzzle since I knew nothing of its history or culture -- I'd never even heard of Emmett Till.

The False Assumptions of "Democracy"


Anthony Mario Ludovici - 2010
    There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.

Growing Up Black in White


Kevin D. Hofmann - 2010
    Born to a white mother and black father in Detroit in 1967, only weeks before the terrible race riots that brought a major city to its knees, the author was taken to a foster home and then adopted by a white minister and his wife, already the parents of three biological children. In this fascinating memoir, Hofmann reveals the difficulties and joys of being part of this family, particularly during a time and in a location where acceptance was tentative and emotions regarding race ran high and hot. Hofmann shares with readers the pressures and joys of being part of a family that navigated through tumultuous waters, and came out the victors in an old and oft-fought battle. This is a book that offers insight, humor, and plenty of hope.