A Short History of South Africa


Gail Nattrass - 2017
    On the other hand, post-Apartheid dreams of progress and reform have, in part, collapsed into a morass of corruption, unemployment and criminal violence.A Short History of South Africa is a brief, general account of the history of this most complicated and fascinating country – from the first evidence of hominid existence to the wars of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries that led to the establishment of modern South Africa, the horrors of Apartheid and the optimism following its collapse, as well as the prospects and challenges for the future.This readable and thorough account, illustrated with maps and photographs, is the culmination of a lifetime of researching and teaching the broad spectrum of South African history.Nattrass’s passion for her subject shines through, whether she is elucidating the reader on early humans in the cradle of humankind, or describing the tumultuous twentieth-century processes that shaped the democracy that is South Africa today.

The Story of French


Jean-Benoît Nadeau - 2002
    After this, Latin was purged from the courts of France by Francois 1st, giving root to French speakers' 21st century obsession with language protection. The obsession progressed as Cardinal Richelieu established the French Academy, a group entrusted with the responsibility of keeping the language pure and eloquent. As French circled the globe, the international cast of characters included Montaigne, Catherine the Great, Frederic II of Prussia, the guides of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Jules Verne, and others. Let Nadeau and Barlow guide you through the story of a language used to write some of the world's great masterpieces of literature, construct some of the most important documents of diplomacy, bedevil millions with its vagaries of pronunciation and beguile everyone with its beauty.

The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America


Tamara Winfrey Harris - 2015
    In the '60s, the Matriarch, the willfully unmarried baby machine leeching off the state, joined them. These stereotypes persist to this day through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, and hit song lyrics. Emancipation may have happened more than 150 years ago, but America still won't let a sister be free from this coven of caricatures.Tamara Winfrey Harris delves into marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more, taking sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a black woman in America. "We have facets like diamonds," she writes. "The trouble is the people who refuse to see us sparkling."

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable


Ebenezer Cobham Brewer - 1870
    Celebrating the 125th anniversary of its original publication, this expanded and updated edition of a classic reference features a new, simplified organization.

The Salt Fields: A Novella


Stacy D. Flood - 2021
    In the cramped car, Minister finds himself in close quarters with three passengers also joining the exodus from the South—people seeking a new life, whose motives, declared or otherwise, will change Minister's life with devastating consequences.

Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities


Craig Steven Wilder - 2013
    But Brown's troubling past was far from unique. In Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder, a rising star in the profession of history, lays bare uncomfortable truths about race, slavery, and the American academy.Many of America's revered colleges and universities—from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to Rutgers, Williams College, and UNC—were soaked in the sweat, the tears, and sometimes the blood of people of color. The earliest academies proclaimed their mission to Christianize the savages of North America, and played a key role in white conquest. Later, the slave economy and higher education grew up together, each nurturing the other. Slavery funded colleges, built campuses, and paid the wages of professors. Enslaved Americans waited on faculty and students; academic leaders aggressively courted the support of slave owners and slave traders. Significantly, as Wilder shows, our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained them.Ebony and Ivy is a powerful and propulsive study and the first of its kind, revealing a history of oppression behind the institutions usually considered the cradle of liberal politics.

Nigger


Dick Gregory - 1964
    I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night..."

The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832


Alan Taylor - 2013
    Over many nights, hundreds of slaves paddled out to the warships seeking protection for their families from the ravages of slavery. The runaways pressured the British admirals into becoming liberators. As guides, pilots, sailors, and marines, the former slaves used their intimate knowledge of the countryside to transform the war. They enabled the British to escalate their onshore attacks and to capture and burn Washington, D.C. Tidewater masters had long dreaded their slaves as "an internal enemy." By mobilizing that enemy, the war ignited the deepest fears of Chesapeake slaveholders. It also alienated Virginians from a national government that had neglected their defense. Instead they turned south, their interests aligning more and more with their section.In 1820 Thomas Jefferson observed of sectionalism: "Like a firebell in the night [it] awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the union." The notes of alarm in Jefferson's comment speak of the fear aroused by the recent crisis over slavery in his home state. His vision of a cataclysm to come proved prescient. Jefferson's startling observation registered a turn in the nation’s course, a pivot from the national purpose of the founding toward the threat of disunion. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.

Olympic Pride, American Prejudice: The Untold Story of 18 African Americans Who Defied Jim Crow and Adolf Hitler to Compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics


Deborah Riley Draper - 2018
    After all, they were representing a country that considered them second-class citizens and would compete in a country amidst a strong undercurrent of Aryan superiority and anti-Semitism.Jesse Owens is the most recognized of the group for winning four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics. Other winners include Jackie Robinson’s brother Mack who won silver for the 200-meter race, and Cornelius Johnson, who led an American sweep in the high jump.As a companion piece to the brilliant documentary Olympic Pride, American Prejudice this book draws on over forty hours of interviews and extensive research the filmmakers obtained which did not make the final film cut. It explores key elements of the story and provides fuller context on the prospect of an Olympic boycott, the relationships between the president of the International Olympic Committee and the Nazis, the different perspectives of Jewish athletes, the NAACP and black newspapers, and details about the actual lives of the eighteen Olympians from family members’ testimonials.Capturing a powerful and untold piece of history, The Black Auxiliary is also a celebration of the courage, commitment, and accomplishments of these talented athletes.

Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South


Adrienne Berard - 2016
    Board of Education struck down America's "separate but equal" doctrine, one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawyer fought for desegregation in one of the greatest legal battles never toldOn September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese American and considered by the school to be "colored"; the school was for whites. This event would lead to the first US Supreme Court case to challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation in Southern public schools, an astonishing thirty years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.Unearthing one of the greatest stories never told, journalist Adrienne Berard recounts how three unlikely heroes sought to shape a new South. A poor immigrant from southern China, Jeu Gong Lum came to America with the hope of a better future for his family. Unassuming yet boldly determined, his daughter Martha would inhabit that future and become the face of the fight to integrate schools. Earl Brewer, their lawyer and staunch ally, was once a millionaire and governor of Mississippi. When he took the family's case, Brewer was both bankrupt and a political pariah--a man with nothing left to lose.By confronting the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Lum family fought for the right to educate Chinese Americans in the white schools of the Jim Crow South. Using their groundbreaking lawsuit as a compass, Berard depicts the complicated condition of racial otherness in rural Southern society.In a sweeping narrative that is both epic and intimate, Water Tossing Boulders evokes a time and place previously defined by black and white, a time and place that, until now, has never been viewed through the eyes of a forgotten third race. In vivid prose, the Mississippi Delta, an empire of cotton and a bastion of slavery, is reimagined to reveal the experiences of a lost immigrant community. Through extensive research in historical documents and family correspondence, Berard illuminates a vital, forgotten chapter of America's past and uncovers the powerful journey of an oppressed people in their struggle for equality.

Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word


Randall Kennedy - 2002
    Paradoxically, among many black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word, of course, is nigger, and in this candid, lucidly argued book the distinguished legal scholar Randall Kennedy traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and explores the controversies that rage around it.Should blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should the law treat it as a provocation that reduces the culpability of those who respond to it violently? Should it cost a person his job, or a book like Huckleberry Finn its place on library shelves? With a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial, Kennedy takes on not just a word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture with bracing courage and intelligence.

Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves


China Galland - 2007
    So when China Galland returned to research her family history there, it should not have surprised her to learn of unmarked cemeteries for slaves. "My daddy never let anybody plow this end of the field," a local matron told a startled Galland during a visit to her antebellum mansion. "The slaves are buried there." Galland's subsequent effort to help restore just one of these cemeteries—Love Cemetery—unearths a quintessential American story of prejudice, land theft, and environmental destruction, uncovering racial wounds that are slow to heal.Galland gathers an interracial group of local religious leaders and laypeople to work on restoring Love Cemetery, securing community access to it, and rededicating it to the memories of those buried there. In her attempt to help reconsecrate Love Cemetery, Galland unearths the ghosts of slavery that still haunt us today. Research into county historical records and interviews with local residents uncover two versions of history—one black, one white. Galland unpacks these tangled narratives to reveal a history of shame—of slavery and lynching, Jim Crow laws and land takings (the theft of land from African-Americans), and ongoing exploitation of the land surrounding the cemetery by oil and gas drilling. With dread she even discovers how her own ancestors benefited from the racial imbalance.She also encounters some remarkable, inspiring characters in local history. Surprisingly, the original deed for the cemetery's land was granted not by a white plantation owner, but by Della Love Walker, the niece of the famous African-American cowboy Deadwood Dick. Through another member of the Love Cemetery committee, Galland discovers a connection to Marshall's native son, James L. Farmer, a founder of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and organizer of the 1961 Freedom Riders. In researching local history, Galland also learns of the Colored Farmers' Alliance, a statewide group formed in the 19th century that took up issues ranging from low wages paid to cotton pickers to emigration to Liberia.By telling this one story of ultimate interracial and intergenerational cooperation, Galland provides a model of the kind of communal remembering and reconciliation that can begin to heal the deep racial scars of an entire nation.

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation


Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor - 2016
    The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new generation of activists.In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.

Yours to Keep


B. Love - 2018
    His loyalty to his family is what put him behind bars, so it only seems fair that his older brother gets him a job working security for his boss – Oxford Pierce – owner of one of the wealthiest tobacco companies in America. Lexie Pierce has never been swayed by her father’s wealth. If anything, being heir to Oxford Pierce’s tobacco throne has given Lexie a hunger for independence outside of her father’s name and fame. All of her life she’s had one dream… one goal… and the will to achieve it on her own – until her father makes her an offer she can’t refuse. When Aali joins Lexie’s security team, he immediately finds himself enraptured by her. There are just two problems – Lexie is promised to another man, and even if she wasn’t… Oxford has absolutely forbid Aali to even lust after his daughter mentally. Unintentionally, Lexie uses her feminine influence just as Eve did in the garden of Eden. And just like Adam… Aali is forced to choose between obeying Oxford or satisfying his desire for Lexie. Will he take of her forbidden fruit and eat… or will he have the strength to resist a temptation that has never looked so sweet?

The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.


Peniel E. Joseph - 2020
    represent contrasting ideals: self-defense vs. nonviolence, black power vs. civil rights, the sword vs. the shield. The struggle for black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. While nonviolent direct action is remembered as an unassailable part of American democracy, the movement's militancy is either vilified or erased outright. In The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph upends these misconceptions and reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives. This is a strikingly revisionist biography, not only of Malcolm and Martin, but also of the movement and era they came to define.