Book picks similar to
The Willie Lynch Letter And the Making of A Slave by Willie Lynch


history
african-american-nonfiction
social-science
civil-rights

Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers


Bobby Seale - 2016
    Newton.   The words are Seale’s, with contributions by other former party members; the photographs, including many icons of the 1960s, are by Stephen Shames, who also interviewed many other members of the party—including Kathleen Cleaver, Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Ericka Huggins, Emory Douglas, and William “Billy X” Jennings—and supplements his own photography with Panther ephemera and graphic art.   Shames, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, first encountered and photographed Seale in April 1967 at an anti–Vietnam War rally. Seale became a mentor to Shames, and Shames, in turn, the most trusted photographer to the party, remained by Seale’s side through his campaign for mayor of Oakland in 1973. Power to the People is a testament to their warm association: At its heart are Shames’s memorable images, accompanied by Seale’s colorful in-depth commentary culled from many hours of conversation.   Admired, reviled, emulated, misunderstood, the Black Panther Party was one of the most creative and influential responses to racism and inequality in American history. They advocated armed self-defense to counter police brutality, and initiated a program of patrolling the police with shotguns—and law books.   Published on the 50th anniversary of the party’s founding, Power to the People is the in-depth chronicle of the only radical political party in America to make a difference in the struggle for civil rights—the Black Panther Party.

A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland


DaMaris B. Hill - 2019
    Wells to Sandra Bland and Black Lives Matter, black women freedom fighters have braved violence, scorn, despair, and isolation in order to lodge their protests. In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, DaMaris Hill honors their experiences with at times harrowing, at times hopeful responses to her heroes, illustrated with black-and-white photographs throughout.For black American women, the experience of being bound has taken many forms: from the bondage of slavery to the Reconstruction-era criminalization of women; from the brutal constraints of Jim Crow to our own era’s prison industrial complex, where between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated women increased by 700%.* For those women who lived and died resisting the dehumanization of confinement--physical, social, intellectual--the threat of being bound was real, constant, and lethal.In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, Hill presents bitter, unflinching history that artfully captures the personas of these captivating, bound yet unbridled African-American women. Hill's passionate odes to Zora Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Grace Jones, Eartha Kitt, and others also celebrate the modern-day inheritors of their load and light, binding history, author, and reader in an essential legacy of struggle.*(The Sentencing Project)

George Washington: First Guardian Of American Liberty


Michael Crawley - 2016
    But where did he get his military experience? Why was picked to take command of the army? Why was he the only American president ever to be elected unanimously (twice!), and did he really chop down that cherry tree as a kid?In this book entitled George Washington: First Guardian of American Liberty by author Michael Crawley, you'll follow the course of George Washington's life, from his birth at Ferry Farm in Virginia in 1732, to his death at his Mount Vernon estate in 1799. You'll learn how his early fame as a hero of the French and Indian War, and his illustrious marriage to a wealthy widow, led to this farm boy becoming one of the most important men in Virginia, a delegate at the Continental Congress where the Founders of America gathered to decide the nation's fate. The first guardian of American liberty looks serene in his portraits, but he didn't always rise above the fray. Washington fought for what he believed in, and his political convictions shocked contemporaries like Thomas Jefferson. Do you know what kind of country George Washington wanted America to be?

The Making of a Country Lawyer: An Autobiography


Gerry Spence - 1996
    The author, who has defended Karen Silkwood and Randy Weaver among others, recounts his life growing up in Wyoming and the tragic event that caused him become an attorney.

Message to the Blackman in America


Elijah Muhammad - 1965
    2, 1965.

The Useful Idiot: How Donald Trump Killed the Republican Party with Racism, the Rest of Us with Coronavirus, And Why We Aren’t Done With Him Yet


S.V. Date - 2021
    

Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner


Nina Munk - 2004
    The news was crazy, incredible. The biggest merger ever, it was, according to the media, an "awesome megadeal" and "a fusion of guts and glory." It was "the deal of the century" and "a mega-marriage of earth and cyberspace." An Internet upstart, AOL was buying the world's most powerful media and entertainment company. "A company that isn't old enough to buy beer," marveled the Wall Street Journal, "has essentially swallowed an ancien régime media conglomerate that took most of a century to construct."Two years later, after the smoke had cleared, $200 billion of shareholder value had vanished into cyberspace. On the trail of possible fraud, the SEC and the Justice Department started investigating AOL Time Warner's accounting practices. Meanwhile, a civil war had broken out inside the company, complete with backstabbing and personal betrayals. Before long, almost every major player was out of the company, discredited, and humiliated. Jerry Levin, Time Warner's "resident genius," lost his job, lost his reputation, and, in the view of some people, simply "lost it." Steve Case, the visionary leader of AOL, was forced out of the company he had created. Gone too was the telegenic wonder-boy Bob Pittman, and his gang of fast-talking salesmen. As for Ted Turner, he resigned from his post as vice-chairman of AOL Time Warner in early 2003, bitter, wiser, and $8.5 billion poorer.Fools Rush In is the definitive account of one of the greatest fiascos in the history of corporate America. In a narrative fraught with drama, Nina Munk reveals the overweening ambition and moral posturing that brought down the Deal of the Century. With painstaking reporting and the remarkable eye for detail she's known for, Munk lays out, step by step, the anatomy of a debacle. Irreverent, witty, and iconoclastic, she sees through it all brilliantly."As in all great Greek tragedies, you knew the plot before it played out," one perceptive insider told Munk on the subject of the AOL Time Warner deal; "you knew who'd be sacrificed at the altar." Here's what we discover in Fools Rush In: In their single-minded quest for power, Steve Case and Jerry Levin were at each other's throats even before the deal was announced. Bob Pittman was regarded as a "windup CEO" by Case, and viewed as a hustler by just about everyone at Time Warner. Ted Turner underestimated Jerry Levin's ruthlessness badly. And Levin himself, convinced he was creating a great legacy comparable to that of Time Inc.'s founder, Henry Luce, refused to acknowledge the obvious: that, with a remarkable sense of timing, Steve Case had used grossly inflated Internet paper to buy Time Warner.

The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers


Will Durant - 1926
    Few write for the non-specialist as well as Will Durant, and this book is a splendid example of his eminently readable scholarship. Durant’s insight and wit never cease to dazzle; The Story of Philosophy is a key book for anyone who wishes to survey the history and development of philosophical ideas in the Western world.

The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things


Barry Glassner - 1999
    He exposes the people and organizations that manipulate our perceptions and profit from our anxieties: politicians who win elections by heightening concerns about crime and drug use even as both are declining; advocacy groups that raise money by exaggerating the prevalence of particular diseases; TV news-magazines that monger a new scare every week to garner ratings.

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States


Eduardo Bonilla-Silva - 2003
    Bonilla-Silva documented how beneath the rhetorical maze of contemporary racial discourse lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for and ultimately justify racial inequities.In the new edition Bonilla-Silva has added a chapter dealing with the future of racial stratification in America that goes beyond the white / black dichotomy. He argues that the U.S. is developing a more complex and apparently "plural" racial order that will mimic Latin American patterns of racial stratification. Another new chapter addresses a variety of questions from readers of the first edition. And he has updated the book throughout with new information, data, and references where appropriate. The book ends with a new Postscript, "What is to be Done (For Real?)". As in the highly acclaimed first edition, Bonilla-Silva continues to challenge color-blind thinking.

I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street


Matt Taibbi - 2017
    On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in what has been described as an illegal chokehold during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of Garner's life were captured on video and seen by millions. His agonized last words, "I can't breathe," became a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. A grand jury ultimately declined to indict the officer who wrestled Garner to the pavement. Matt Taibbi's deeply reported retelling of these events liberates Eric Garner from the abstractions of newspaper accounts and lets us see the man in full—with all his flaws and contradictions intact. A husband and father with a complicated personal history, Garner was neither villain nor victim, but a fiercely proud individual determined to do the best he could for his family, bedeviled by bad luck, and ultimately subdued by forces beyond his control. In America, no miscarriage of justice exists in isolation, of course, and in I Can't Breathe Taibbi also examines the conditions that made this tragedy possible. Featuring vivid vignettes of life on the street and inside our Kafkaesque court system, Taibbi's kaleidoscopic account illuminates issues around policing, mass incarceration, the underground economy, and racial disparity in law enforcement. No one emerges unsullied, from the conservative district attorney who half-heartedly prosecutes the case to the progressive mayor caught between the demands of outraged activists and the foot-dragging of recalcitrant police officials. A masterly narrative of urban America and a scathing indictment of the perverse incentives built into our penal system, I Can't Breathe drills down into the particulars of one case to confront us with the human cost of our broken approach to dispensing criminal justice.

A Lesson Before Dying


Ernest J. Gaines - 1993
    Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shoot out in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and Jefferson's godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell and impart his learning and his pride to Jefferson before his death. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting and defying the expected. Ernest J. Gaines brings to this novel the same rich sense of place, the same deep understanding of the human psyche, and the same compassion for a people and their struggle that have informed his previous, highly praised works of fiction.

Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project


Robert P. Moses - 2001
    Begun in 1982, the Algebra Project is transforming math education in twenty-five cities. Founded on the belief that math-science literacy is a prerequisite for full citizenship in society, the Project works with entire communities-parents, teachers, and especially students-to create a culture of literacy around algebra, a crucial stepping-stone to college math and opportunity.Telling the story of this remarkable program, Robert Moses draws on lessons from the 1960s Southern voter registration he famously helped organize: 'Everyone said sharecroppers didn't want to vote. It wasn't until we got them demanding to vote that we got attention. Today, when kids are falling wholesale through the cracks, people say they don't want to learn. We have to get the kids themselves to demand what everyone says they don't want.'We see the Algebra Project organizing community by community. Older kids serve as coaches for younger students and build a self-sustained tradition of leadership. Teachers use innovative techniques. And we see the remarkable success stories of schools like the predominately poor Hart School in Bessemer, Alabama, which outscored the city's middle-class flagship school in just three years.Radical Equations provides a model for anyone looking for a community-based solution to the problems of our disadvantaged schools.

From the Browder File Vol II: Survival Strategies for Africans in America: 13 Steps to Freedom


Anthony T. Browder - 1996
    We Africans in America have been socially engineered to reject our past, and far too many of us live in a state of suspended animation.

How to Be an Antiracist


Ibram X. Kendi - 2019
    Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America--but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. In this book, Kendi weaves together an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. How to Be an Antiracist is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society.