Book picks similar to
Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds by Kristin Waters


intellectuals
ida-b-wells
women-and-feminism
african-american-nonfiction

Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980


Kimberly Springer - 2005
    Through original oral history interviews with key activists and analysis of previously unexamined organizational records, Kimberly Springer traces the emergence, life, and decline of several black feminist organizations: the Third World Women’s Alliance, Black Women Organized for Action, the National Black Feminist Organization, the National Alliance of Black Feminists, and the Combahee River Collective. The first of these to form was founded in 1968; all five were defunct by 1980. Springer demonstrates that these organizations led the way in articulating an activist vision formed by the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality.The organizations that Springer examines were the first to explicitly use feminist theory to further the work of previous black women’s organizations. As she describes, they emerged in response to marginalization in the civil rights and women’s movements, stereotyping in popular culture, and misrepresentation in public policy. Springer compares the organizations’ ideologies, goals, activities, memberships, leadership styles, finances, and communication strategies. Reflecting on the conflicts, lack of resources, and burnout that led to the demise of these groups, she considers the future of black feminist organizing, particularly at the national level. Living for the Revolution is an essential reference: it provides the history of a movement that influenced black feminist theory and civil rights activism for decades to come.

I Write What I Like: Selected Writings


Steve Biko - 1978
    They also reflect his conviction that black people in South Africa could not be liberated until they united to break their chains of servitude, a key tenet of the Black Consciousness movement that he helped found.I Write What I Like contains a selection of Biko's writings from 1969, when he became the president of the South African Students' Organization, to 1972, when he was prohibited from publishing. The collection also includes a preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; an introduction by Malusi and Thoko Mpumlwana, who were both involved with Biko in the Black Consciousness movement; a memoir of Biko by Father Aelred Stubbs, his longtime pastor and friend; and a new foreword by Professor Lewis Gordon.Biko's writings will inspire and educate anyone concerned with issues of racism, postcolonialism, and black nationalism.

Huey: Spirit of the Panther


David Hilliard - 2005
    Newton remains one of the most misunderstood political figures of the twentieth century. As cofounder and leader of the Black Panther Party for more than twenty years, Newton (1942-1989) was at the forefront of the radical political activism of the 1960s and '70s. Raised in poverty in Oakland, California, and named for corrupt Louisiana governor Huey P. Long, Newton embodied both the passions and the contradictions of the civil rights movement he sought to advance. In this first authorized biography, Newton's former chief of staff David Hilliard teams up with best-selling authors Keith and Kent Zimmerman to tell the whole story of the man behind the organization that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover infamously dubbed "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country."

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness


Simone Browne - 2015
    She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm.

Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America


Nathan McCall - 1994
    Yet by the age of fifteen, McCall was packing a gun and embarking on a criminal career that five years later would land him in prison for armed robbery.In these pages, McCall chronicles his passage from the street to the prison yard--and, later, to the newsrooms of The Washington Post and ultimately to the faculty of Emory University. His story is at once devastating and inspiring, at once an indictment and an elegy. Makes Me Wanna Holler became an instant classic when it was first published in 1994 and it continues to bear witness to the great troubles--and the great hopes--of our nation. With a new afterword by the author

Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880


W.E.B. Du Bois - 1935
    The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time.

The Black Panthers Speak


Philip S. Foner - 1970
    With cartoons, flyers, and articles by Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver, this collection endures as an essential part of civil-rights history.

Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements


Charlene Carruthers - 2018
    Her debut book upends mainstream ideas about race, class and gender and sets forth a radically inclusive path to collective liberation. Her inclusive story about Black struggle draws on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions including the Haitian Revolution, U.S. Civil Rights, and Black and LGBTQ Feminist Movements. Bold and honest, Unapologetic is an inside look from an on-the-ground activist and movement leader about how to move people from the margins to the center of political strategy and practice.

Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South


Deborah Gray White - 1985
    This new edition of Ar'n't I a Woman? reviews and updates the scholarship on slave women and the slave family, exploring new ways of understanding the intersection of race and gender and comparing the myths that stereotyped female slaves with the realities of their lives. Above all, this groundbreaking study shows us how black women experienced freedom in the Reconstruction South — their heroic struggle to gain their rights, hold their families together, resist economic and sexual oppression, and maintain their sense of womanhood against all odds.

Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race From 4500 B.C. To 2000 A.D.


Chancellor Williams - 1971
    A widely read classic exposition of the history of Africans on the continent—and the people of African descent in the United States and in the diaspora—this well researched analysis details the development of civiliza

Race, Class, & Gender: An Anthology


Margaret L. Andersen - 1992
    The author's selection of very accessible articles show how race, class, and gender shape people's experiences, and help students to see the issues in an analytic, as well as descriptive way. The book also provides conceptual grounding in understanding race, class, and gender; has a strong historical and sociological perspective; and is further strengthened by conceptual introductions by the authors.Students will find the readings engaging and accessible, but may gain the most from the introduction sections that highlight key points and relate the essential concepts. Included in the collection of readings are narratives aimed at building empathy, and articles on important social issues such as prison, affirmative action, poverty, immigration, and racism, among other topics.IncludesWhy race, class, and gender still matter by M.L. Andersen and P.H. CollinsMissing people and others, joining together to expand the circle by A. MadridSystems of power and inequality by M.L. Andersen and P.H. CollinsRace and racism, Racism without "racists" by E. Bonilla-SilvaClass and inequality, Growing gulf between rich and the rest of us by H. SklarGender and sexism, Sex and gender through the prism of difference by M.B. Zinn, P. Hondahneu-Sotelo, and M. MessnerEthnicity and nationality, Is this a white country, or what? by L. RubinSexuality and heterosexism, "You talkin' to me?" by J. KilbourneStructure of social institutions by M.L. Andersen and P.H. CollinsWork and economic transformation, Race, class, gender, and women's works by T. Amott and J. MatthaeiFamilies, Our mothers' grief, racial-ethnic women and the maintenance of families by B.T. DillMedia and culture, Racist stereotyping in the English language by R.B. MooreHealth and social welfare, Can education eliminate race, class, and gender inequality? by R.A. Mickelson and S.S. SmithState institutions and violence, First Americans, American Indians by C.M. SnippSocial change and sites of change by M.L. Andersen and P.H. CollinsSites of change, Starbucks paradox by K. FellnerProcesses of change, How the new working class transform urban America by R.D.G. Kelley

Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt


Jack Olsen - 2000
    As a UCLA student, though, he had led the Los Angeles Chapter of the Black Panther Party, and became a target of the FBI. Here is the spellbinding saga of Pratt, his heroic lawyers, Johnnie Cochran and Stuart Hanlon, and the Reverend James McCloskey, who overcame all the odds to bring the truth to light and free Geronimo.

The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers


Bridgett M. Davis - 2019
    The upper middle class splendor in which she and her siblings so happily lived was made possible by her mother's business in the Numbers, the informal lottery that powered African American communities across the United States. A poignant and revealing examination of how one family lifted itself out of poverty and into a completely different life, for good and bad, The World According to Fannie Davis introduces us to an unforgettable matriarch, and her daughter, whose ways of understanding still resonate today.Offering a daughter's perspective on her larger-than-life mother, Bridgett Davis traces her family's story as part of the Great Migration, showing how her mother and father arrived in Detroit from Tennessee carrying with them not just their own hopes but also those of their families. A child gifted with extraordinary powers of perception and understanding, Davis breaks the code of secrecy around her mother's business and in so doing reveals both her mothers' extraordinary sacrifices as well as her seemingly endless generosity. We come to understand just how keenly Fannie Davis believed in the power of money, and family, to make the world right.Moving, suspenseful and emotionally rewarding, The World According to Fannie Davis will change the way you understand the lengths a mother will go to provide for her family, and the way those sacrifices resonate over time, offering not just a moving portrait of one American family, but also a new way of understanding Detroit.

Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement


Fergus M. Bordewich - 2005
    But the beginnings of slavery's denouement can be traced to a courageous band of ordinary Americans, black and white, slave and free, who joined forces to create what would come to be known as the Underground Railroad, a movement that occupies as romantic a place in the nation's imagination as the Lewis and Clark expedition. The true story of the Underground Railroad is much more morally complex and politically divisive than even the myths suggest. Against a backdrop of the country's westward expansion arose a fierce clash of values that was nothing less than a war for the country's soul. Not since the American Revolution had the country engaged in an act of such vast and profound civil disobedience that not only challenged prevailing mores but also subverted federal law.Bound for Canaan tells the stories of men and women like David Ruggles, who invented the black underground in New York City; bold Quakers like Isaac Hopper and Levi Coffin, who risked their lives to build the Underground Railroad; and the inimitable Harriet Tubman. Interweaving thrilling personal stories with the politics of slavery and abolition, Bound for Canaan shows how the Underground Railroad gave birth to this country's first racially integrated, religiously inspired movement for social change.

Black Women in White America: A Documentary History


Gerda Lerner - 1972
    Here are stories of women who built a school "on a garbage dump"; of the little-known but vitally important networks of women's organizations dedicated to self-help and the struggle for human dignity; of the victims of the Ku Klux Klan, beatings and lynchings. The documents, many of them previously unpublished and long hidden in archives across the country, fill in important chapters in the history of America. "Dr. Lerner gives us material which can change images that whites have had of blacks, and possibly even those which we, as blacks, have of ourselves." -Maya Angelou, 'Life'