Best of
Social-Justice

1995

Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought


Beverly Guy-Sheftall - 1995
    The first comprehensive collection to trace the development of African-American feminist thought.

Killing Rage: Ending Racism


bell hooks - 1995
    But whereas many women have been recognized for their writing on gender politics, the female voice has been all but locked out of the public discourse on race.Killing Rage speaks to this imbalance. These twenty-three essays are written from a black and feminist perspective, and they tackle the bitter difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it. They address a spectrum of topics having to do with race and racism in the United States: psychological trauma among African Americans; friendship between black women and white women; anti-Semitism and racism; and internalized racism in movies and the media. And in the title essay, hooks writes about the "killing rage"—the fierce anger of black people stung by repeated instances of everyday racism—finding in that rage a healing source of love and strength and a catalyst for positive change.bell hooks is Distinguished Professor of English at City College of New York. She is the author of the memoir Bone Black as well as eleven other books. She lives in New York City.

All God's Children


Fox Butterfield - 1995
    Butterfield follows the Bosket family of Edgefield County, South Carolina, from the days of slavery to the present. Photos.

Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation


Jonathan Kozol - 1995
    Tender, generous and often religiously devout, they speak with eloquence and honesty about the poverty and racial isolation that have wounded but not hardened them. The book does not romanticize or soften the effects of violence and sickness. One fourth of the child-bearing women in the neighborhoods where these children live test positive for HIV. Pediatric AIDs, life-consuming fires and gang rivalries take a high toll. Several children die during the year in which this narrative takes place.A gently written work, Amazing Grace asks questions that are at once political and theological. What is the value of a child's life? What exactly do we plan to do with those whom we appear to have defined as economically and humanly superfluous? How cold -- how cruel, how tough -- do we dare be?

Live from Death Row


Mumia Abu-Jamal - 1995
    . . . Abu-Jamal offers expert and well-reasoned commentary on the justice system. . . . His writings are dangerous." –Village Voice"Resonates with the moral force of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter From Birmingham Jail." –Boston GlobeAfter twenty years on death row, Mumia Abu-Jamal has been released from his death sentence . . .but not the conviction. This once prominent radio reporter was convicted for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1982, after a trial many have criticized as profoundly biased. Live from Death Row is a collection of his prison writings--and impassioned yet unflinching account of the brutalities and humiliations of prison life, and a scathing indictment of racism and political bias in the American judicial system.

G-Dog and the Homeboys: Father Greg Boyle and the Gangs of East Los Angeles


Celeste Fremon - 1995
    Originally published in 1995, this paperback edition updates us on the lives of the homeboys with whom Father Greg Boyle continues to work, allowing for a unique analysis as to how some former gang members are able to make it out, while others are not.

Doing the Truth in Love: Conversations about God, Relationships and Service


Michael J. Himes - 1995
    +

June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint


June Jordan - 1995
    A dedicated and inspired teacher, her innovative and highly successful poetry program, Poetry for the People, has recently emerged as a national phenomenon.

Passion for Peace; Reflections on War and Nonviolence


Thomas Merton - 1995
    To meet the great need for nonviolent wisdom in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, Crossroad presents this new and reedited version of Thomas Merton’s Passion for Peace. The book, never before available in an attractive trade edition, presents Merton’s most important insights into themes such as the nature of violence, armed conflict, Christian responsibility, and the individual in the state.

Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil


Gerard Colby - 1995
    Photos; maps.

Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality


Melvin L. Oliver - 1995
    An examination of how assets are created, expanded and preserved reveals a deep economic divide between blacks and whites. Charting the changing structure of inequality over many generations, the authors examine how and why many blacks have had difficulty accumulating wealth and opportunities for a better life. In combining quantitative data from over 12,000 households and interviews with a range of black and white families, the racial face of wealth in America is measured and conceptualized.

Native American Postcolonial Psychology


Eduardo Duran - 1995
    Native American cosmology and metaphor are used extensively in order to deal with specific problems such as alcoholism, suicide, family, and community problems. The authors discuss what it means to present material from the perspective of a people who have legitimate ways of knowing and conceptualizing reality and show that it is imperative to understand intergenerational trauma and internalized oppression in order to understand the issues facing Native Americans today.

Restoring At-Risk Communities: Doing It Together and Doing It Right


John M. Perkins - 1995
    A comprehensive handbook to urban ministry introduces and shows how to implement a Christian community development program.

Beyond Black and White: Rethinking Race in American Politics and Society


Manning Marable - 1995
    The realities of contemporary black America capture the nature of the crisis: life expectancy for black males is now below retirement age; median black income is less than 60 per cent that of whites; over 600,000 African-Americans are incarcerated in the US penal system; 23 per cent of all black males between the ages of eighteen and 29 are either in jail, on probation or parole, or awaiting trial. At the same time, affirmative action programs and civil rights reforms are being challenged by white conservatism.Confronted with a renascent right and the continuing burden of grotesque inequality, Manning Marable argues that the black struggle must move beyond previous strategies for social change. The politics of black nationalism, which advocates the building of separate black institutions, is an insufficient response. The politics of integration, characterized by traditional middle-class organizations like the NAACP and Urban League, seeks only representation without genuine power. Instead, a transformationist approach is required, one that can embrace the unique cultural identity of African-Americans while restructuring power and privilege in American society. Only a strategy of radical democracy can ultimately deconstruct race as a social force.Beyond Black and White brilliantly dissects the politics of race and class in the US of the 1990s. Topics include: the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy; the factors behind the rise and fall of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition: Benjamin Chavis and the conflicts within the NAAPC; and the national debate over affirmative action. Marable outlines the current debates in the black community between liberals, ‘Afrocentrists’, and the advocates of social transformation. He advances a political vision capable of drawing together minorities into a majority which can throw open the portals of power and govern in its own name.

Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom


Lisa D. Delpit - 1995
    This anniversary paperback edition features a new introduction by Delpit as well as new framing essays by Herbert Kohl and Charles Payne.In a radical analysis of contemporary classrooms, MacArthur Award–winning author Lisa Delpit develops ideas about ways teachers can be better “cultural transmitters” in the classroom, where prejudice, stereotypes, and cultural assumptions breed ineffective education. Delpit suggests that many academic problems attributed to children of color are actually the result of miscommunication, as primarily white teachers and “other people’s children” struggle with the imbalance of power and the dynamics plaguing our system.A new classic among educators, Other People’s Children is a must-read for teachers, administrators, and parents striving to improve the quality of America’s education system.

Real Hope in Chicago


Wayne L. Gordon - 1995
    That was twenty-five years ago. Today, what began as the Gordons' seedling Bible study has become the Lawndale Community Church. It has a staff of 150, has renovated more than 100 local apartments, has helped more than 50 young people graduate from college, runs a medical clinic that treated 50,000 patients in 1994, and has become a vital part of rebuilding an inner-city neighborhood into a community of faith and hope. Real Hope in Chicago is Wayne Gordon's inspiring account of how people, white and black, rich and poor, old and young, worked together to transform a decaying neighborhood into a place where love is lived out in practical and miraculous ways. It offers an exciting model for interracial cooperation, urban-suburban church partnering--and real hope for the inner cities of our nation.

This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class


C.L. Dews - 1995
    Describing conflict and frustration, this book exposes a divisive middle-class bias in the university setting.

Pretty Fire


Charlayne Woodard - 1995
    This humorous and touching one-woman tour de force won NAACP Theatre Awards for Best Play and Best Playwright.

The Cry of Tamar: Violence against Women and the Church's Response


Pamela Cooper-White - 1995
    She describes specific forms of such violence and outlines appropriate pastoral responses. The second edition of this groundbreaking work is thoroughly updated and examines not only where the church has made progress since 1995 but also where women remain at unchanged or even greater risk of violence.

I Speak for This Child: True Stories of a Child Advocate


Gay Courter - 1995
    Following her first tentative approach to her local Court Appointed Special Advocates program to her more determined efforts, we get an insider's glimpse on this hidden world and learn what it takes to ensure that America's most vulnerable citizens are treated with care and respect. Courter's story is both heartbreaking and heartwarming, and is an inspiration for anyone who has ever looked up from a newspaper and wondered, "What can I do to help?"

Guide My Feet


Marian Wright Edelman - 1995
    Her first book, The Measure of Our Success was a #1 New York Times bestseller—spending 16 weeks on the list, selling more than 450,000 copies and garnering spectacular praise from Hillary Clinton, Maya Angelou, and Oprah Winfrey. Guide My Feet continues her crusade for the well-being of America's children by providing a counterweight to the lesson society is teaching this generation of children—to be soulless takers instead of empowered givers.Guide My Feet is a collection of prayers and meditations gathered from Edelman's own holiday rituals and experiences and the writings of such inspiring leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Frederick Douglass. It urges readers to commit to and pray for strength and patience, and offers solace and direction for parents troubled by the commercialism and violence running rampant in today's society. Filled with wisdom, compassion and understanding, it provides an important spiritual and moral resource all caregivers can turn to as they strive to instill values, integrity, self-discipline and faith in children.

Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism


Himani Bannerji - 1995
    Himani Bannerji transforms the theorizing of race, gender and class in these essays illuminating the politics of differenceas they affect non-white women in the post-colonial world.

The Trouble with Wilderness


William Cronon - 1995
    This version comes from the New York Times (1995); another version appears as the introduction to a book Cronon edited, "Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature" (1995), a collection of essays on the environment. Cronon, Wiliam. "The Trouble with Wilderness." 1995. The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Nonfiction. Ed. Melissa A. Goldthwaite et al. 14th ed. New York: Norton, 2016. 550-53. Print.

Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered, Black Women


Beth E. Richie - 1995
    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Torn from My Heart: The True Story of a Mother's Desperate Search for Her Stolen Children


Patsy Heymans - 1995
    The cocky, handsome Israeli soldier immediately swept her off her feet, and almost before she knew it, Heymans was married to him, living in Israel, and the mother of three young children. But her life was far from idyllic. Her charismatic husband had a dark side that included a criminal record and a violent temper. Finally, after years of physical and emotional abuse, Heymans and her children fled to her parents' home in Belgium - her husband's warning ringing in her ears: "Whatever it takes, whatever it will cost, I will destroy your life." He proved as good as his word. After their separation, her formerly nonreligious spouse joined the Satmar Hasidim, one of the most insular groups within the cloistered world of Hasidic Jews. With the help of his new confederates, he kidnapped his children, shuttling them through a self-contained and sprawling religious community. To get them back, Heymans would begin a tireless, heart-wrenching search across Europe and, ultimately, through the streets and suburbs of New York City. Shunned by the Satmars, yet armed with a mother's fierce desperation, Heymans singlehandedly and painstakingly marshalled the forces of American and international law enforcement. Battling impossible odds, she finally found herself at the moment that would bring her to the end of her odyssey and to the turning point of her entire life: a closed door suddenly open, a hand on her hand, gently nudging her forward...

Langston Hughes and the *Chicago Defender*: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62


Langston Hughes - 1995
    He has been referred to as the "Dean of Black Letters" and the "poet low-rate of Harlem." But it was as a columnist for the famous African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender that Hughes chronicled the hopes and despair of his people. For twenty years, he wrote forcefully about international race relations, Jim Crow, the South, white supremacy, imperialism and fascism, segregation in the armed forces, the Soviet Union and communism, and African-American art and culture. None of the racial hypocrisies of American life escaped his searing, ironic prose. This is the first collection of Hughes's nonfiction journalistic writings. For readers new to Hughes, it is an excellent introduction; for those familiar with him, it gives new insights into his poems and fiction.

African Banjo Echoes In Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions


Cecelia Conway - 1995
    In this groundbreaking study, however, Cecelia Conway demonstrates that these European Americans borrowed the banjo from African Americans and adapted it to their own musical culture. Like many aspects of the African-American tradition, the influence of black banjo music has been largely unrecorded and nearly forgotten—until now. Drawing in part on interviews with elderly African-American banjo players from the Piedmont—among the last American representatives of an African banjo-playing tradition that spans several centuries—Conway reaches beyond the written records to reveal the similarity of pre-blues black banjo lyric patterns, improvisational playing styles, and the accompanying singing and dance movements to traditional West African music performances. The author then shows how Africans had, by the mid-eighteenth century, transformed the lyrical music of the gourd banjo as they dealt with the experience of slavery in America. By the mid-nineteenth century, white southern musicians were learning the banjo playing styles of their African-American mentors and had soon created or popularized a five-string, wooden-rim banjo. Some of these white banjo players remained in the mountain hollows, but others dispersed banjo music to distant musicians and the American public through popular minstrel shows. By the turn of the century, traditional black and white musicians still shared banjo playing, and Conway shows that this exchange gave rise to a distinct and complex new genre—the banjo song. Soon, however, black banjo players put down their banjos, set their songs with increasingly assertive commentary to the guitar, and left the banjo and its story to white musicians. But the banjo still echoed at the crossroads between the West African griots, the traveling country guitar bluesmen, the banjo players of the old-time southern string bands, and eventually the bluegrass bands.The Author: Cecelia Conway is associate professor of English at Appalachian State University. She is a folklorist who teaches twentieth-century literature, including cultural perspectives, southern literature, and film.

Reflections of Seattle's Chinese Americans: The First 100 Years


Ron Chew - 1995
    In their own voices, they describe their early life in Chinese villages, their passage to America and Seattle's Chinatown. They share their experiences working in laundries, restaurants and canneries. They tell of the climate of racial discrimination, the era of World War II and the community that emerged after the war. These stories are supplemented by an original historical essay on Seattle's Chinese American community by Doug Chin. The essay provides a window for understanding the struggles and achievements of Chinese Americans during the period from 1860 to the 1960s, the landmark first 100 years.

Bird of Paradise: Glimpses of Living Myth


Monica Furlong - 1995
    

I Am Because We Are: Readings in Black Philosophy


Fred L. Hord - 1995
    -- Library Journal

Global Issues: An Introduction


John L. Seitz - 1995
    Global Issues, Third Edition is an introduction to many of the most important environmental, economic, social, and political concerns of modern life.Offers a unified perspective on a complex range of global issues in a variety of societies, both developed and developing Includes new sections on foreign aid and development assistance, terrorism, the relationship between geography and wealth and poverty, food and the overweight, and the Millennium Development Goals Features an updated and expanded section on climate change, as well as a new glossary Illustrates key topics and issues with diagrams and photographs Provides guides to further reading, media, and internet resources, and suggestions for discussing and studying the material

The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States


Samuel A. Floyd Jr. - 1995
    But in its unforgettable introduction, followed by his unaccompanied talking guitar passage and inserted calls and responses at key points in the musical narrative, Hendrix's performance of the national anthem also hearkened back to a tradition even older than the blues, a tradition rooted in the rings of dance, drum, and song shared by peoples across Africa.Bold and original, The Power of Black Music offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music. Striving to break down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it brilliantly illuminates the centuries-old linkage between the music, myths and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring vitality of African-American music. Inspired by the pioneering work of Sterling Stuckey and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author Samuel A. Floyd, Jr, advocates a new critical approach grounded in the forms and traditions of the music itself. He accompanies readers on a fascinating journey from the African ring, through the ring shout's powerful merging of music and dance in the slave culture, to the funeral parade practices of the early new Orleans jazzmen, the bluesmen in the twenties, the beboppers in the forties, and the free jazz, rock, Motown, and concert hall composers of the sixties and beyond. Floyd dismisses the assumption that Africans brought to the United States as slaves took the music of whites in the New World and transformed it through their own performance practices. Instead, he recognizes European influences, while demonstrating how much black music has continued to share with its African counterparts. Floyd maintains that while African Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory. For example, in speaking of his grandfather Omar, who died a slave as a young man, the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet said, Inside him he'd got the memory of all the wrong that's been done to my people. That's what the memory is....When a blues is good, that kind of memory just grows up inside it. Grounding his scholarship and meticulous research in his childhood memories of black folk culture and his own experiences as a musician and listener, Floyd maintains that the memory of Omar and all those who came before and after him remains a driving force in the black music of America, a force with the power to enrich cultures the world over.

Keeping the Faith: Guidance for Christian Women Facing Abuse


Marie M. Fortune - 1995
    Practical guide addresses issues of faith for battered women—an invaluable resource for victims of domestic violence and the crisis centers that counsel them.