Book picks similar to
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies by Leslie HarrisSven Beckert
history
non-fiction
education
black-history
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
Mikki Kendall - 2020
Mainstream feminists rarely talk about meeting basic needs as a feminist issue, argues Mikki Kendall, but food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. All too often, however, the focus is not on basic survival for the many, but on increasing privilege for the few. That feminists refuse to prioritize these issues has only exacerbated the age-old problem of both internecine discord and women who rebuff at carrying the title. Moreover, prominent white feminists broadly suffer from their own myopia with regard to how things like race, class, sexual orientation, and ability intersect with gender. How can we stand in solidarity as a movement, Kendall asks, when there is the distinct likelihood that some women are oppressing others?
Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism
John Henrik Clarke - 1992
Book by John Henrik Clarke
The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
Michael Denning - 1997
Disney cartoonists walked picket lines, and Billie Holiday sand ‘Strange Fruit’ at the left-wing cabaret, Café Society. Duke Ellington produced a radical musical, Jump for Joy, New York garment workers staged the legendary Broadway revue Pins and Needles, and Orson Welles and his Mercury players took their labor operas and anti-fascist Shakespeare to Hollywood and made Citizen Kane.A major reassessment of US cultural history, The Cultural Front is a vivid mural of this extraordinary upheaval which reshaped American culture in the twentieth century.
American Slavery: 1619-1877
Peter Kolchin - 1993
Now updated to address a decade of new scholarship, the book includes a new preface, afterword, and revised and expanded bibliographic essay. It remains the best book to introduce a subject of profound and lasting importance, one that lies at the center of American history.
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South
John W. Blassingame - 1976
Examines Black pre-Civil War culture and the slave family, detailing sexual attitudes, courtship practices and wedding ceremonies, childrearing, familial roles, language, and discipline.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader
Michael Eric Dyson - 2004
Whether writing on religion or sexuality or notions of whiteness, on Martin Luther King, Jr. or Tupac Shakur, Dyson's keen insight and rhetorical flair continue to surprise and challenge. This collection gathers the best of Dyson's growing body of work: his most incisive commentary, his most stirring passages, and his sharpest, most probing and broadminded critical analyses. From Michael Jordan to Derrida, Ralph Ellison to the diplomacy of Colin Powell, the mastery and ease with which Dyson tackles just about any subject is without parallel.
A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story
Elaine Brown - 1992
More than a journey through a turbulent time in American history, this is the story of a black woman's battle to define herself.
David Walker's Appeal
David Walker - 1829
Startling in its intensity, unrelenting in its attacks on slavery and white racism, it alarmed Southern slaveholders, inspired Northern abolitionists, and hastened the sectional conflicts that led to the Civil War. In this new edition of the Appeal, the distinguished historian Sean Wilentz draws on a generation of innovative research to throw fresh light on Walker's life and ideas--and their enduring importance.
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
James Forman Jr. - 2017
Critics have assailed the rise of mass incarceration, emphasizing its disproportionate impact on people of color. As James Forman, Jr., points out, however, the war on crime that began in the 1970s was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers. In Locking Up Our Own, he seeks to understand why.Forman shows us that the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office amid a surge in crime and drug addiction. Many prominent black officials, including Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry and federal prosecutor Eric Holder, feared that the gains of the civil rights movement were being undermined by lawlessness—and thus embraced tough-on-crime measures, including longer sentences and aggressive police tactics. In the face of skyrocketing murder rates and the proliferation of open-air drug markets, they believed they had no choice. But the policies they adopted would have devastating consequences for residents of poor black neighborhoods.A former D.C. public defender, Forman tells riveting stories of politicians, community activists, police officers, defendants, and crime victims. He writes with compassion about individuals trapped in terrible dilemmas—from the men and women he represented in court to officials struggling to respond to a public safety emergency. Locking Up Our Own enriches our understanding of why our society became so punitive and offers important lessons to anyone concerned about the future of race and the criminal justice system in this country.
My Boys and Girls Are in There: The 1937 New London School Explosion
Ron Rozelle - 2012
The resulting explosion leveled the four-year-old structure and resulted in a death toll of more than three hundred—most of them children. To this day, it is the worst school disaster in the history of the United States. The tragedy and its aftermath were the first big stories covered by Walter Cronkite, then a young wire service reporter stationed in Dallas. He would later say that no war story he ever covered—during World War II or Vietnam—was as heart-wrenching.In the weeks following the tragedy, a fact-finding committee sought to determine who was to blame. It soon became apparent that the New London school district had, along with almost all local businesses and residents, tapped into pipelines carrying unrefined gas from the plentiful oil fields of the area. It was technically illegal, but natural gas was in abundance in the “Oil Patch.” The jerry-rigged conduits leaked the odorless “green” gas that would destroy the school.A long-term effect of the disaster was the shared guilt experienced—for the rest of their lives—by most of the survivors. There is, perhaps, no better example than Bill Thompson, who was in his fifth grade English class and “in the mood to flirt” with Billie Sue Hall, who was sitting two seats away. Thompson asked another girl to trade seats with him. She agreed—and was killed in the explosion, while Thompson and Hall both survived and lived long lives, never quite coming to terms with their good fortune.My Boys and Girls Are in There: The 1937 New London School Explosion is a meticulous, candid account by veteran educator and experienced author Ron Rozelle. Unfolding with the narrative pace of a novel, the story woven by Rozelle—beginning with the title—combines the anguished words of eyewitnesses with telling details from the historical and legal record. Released to coincide with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New London School disaster, My Boys and Girls Are in There paints an intensely human portrait of this horrific event.
Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man
Emmanuel Acho - 2020
“There is a fix,” Acho says. “But in order to access it, we’re going to have to have some uncomfortable conversations.”In Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, Acho takes on all the questions, large and small, insensitive and taboo, many white Americans are afraid to ask—yet which all Americans need the answers to, now more than ever. With the same open-hearted generosity that has made his video series a phenomenon, Acho explains the vital core of such fraught concepts as white privilege, cultural appropriation, and “reverse racism.”In his own words, he provides a space of compassion and understanding in a discussion that can lack both. He asks only for the reader’s curiosity—but along the way, he will galvanize all of us to join the antiracist fight.
Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire
Akala - 2018
In this unique book he takes his own experiences and widens them out to look at the social, historical and political factors that have left us where we are today.Covering everything from the police, education and identity to politics, sexual objectification and the far right,
Natives
speaks directly to British denial and squeamishness when it comes to confronting issues of race and class that are at the heart of the legacy of Britain's racialised empire.
WE ALL FALL DOWN: THE TRUE STORY OF THE 9/11 SURFER
Pasquale Buzzelli - 2012
He spoke to his pregnant wife on the telephone before he began his evacuation after the South Tower fell. Sensing something ominous, Pasquale crouched down and huddled into a corner of the stairwell as the 110-story tower came crashing down around him. He survived the tower collapse and woke up in the open air hours later on The Pile, a stack of debris seven stories high. The firemen who rescued Pasquale shared his remarkable story of survival with the media, as did others who cared for him that day. His story became a myth, an urban legend, and an enigma that gave rise to much speculation. Here he tells his story in captivating detail of falling and "surfing' the collapse of the North Tower.Visit www.911surfer.com for more details.
Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
Imani Perry - 2018
Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now. In 2018, Hansberry will get the recognition she deserves with the PBS American Masters documentary "Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart" and Imani Perry's multi-dimensional, illuminating biography, Looking for Lorraine.After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry used her prominence in myriad ways: challenging President Kennedy and his brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights, supporting African anti-colonial leaders, and confronting the romantic racism of the Beat poets and Village hipsters. Though she married a man, she identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being outed, joined one of the nation's first lesbian organizations. Hansberry associated with many activists, writers, and musicians, including Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. Looking for Lorraine is a powerful insight into Hansberry's extraordinary life—a life that was tragically cut far too short.
True Gentlemen: The Broken Pledge of America's Fraternities
John Hechinger - 2017
Once a mainstay of campus life, fraternities are now subject to withering criticism for reinforcing white male privilege and undermining the lasting social and economic value of a college education.No fraternity embodies this problem more than Sigma Alpha Epsilon, a national organization with more than 15,000 undergraduate brothers spread over 230 chapters nationwide. While SAE enrollment is still strong, it has been pilloried for what John Hechinger calls "the unholy trinity of fraternity life": racism, deadly drinking, and misogyny. Hazing rituals have killed ten undergraduates in its chapters since 2005, and, in 2015, a video of a racist chant breaking out among its Oklahoma University members went viral. That same year, SAE was singled out by a documentary on campus rape, The Hunting Ground. Yet despite these problems and others, SAE remains a large institution with strong ties to Wall Street and significant political reach.In True Gentlemen, Hechinger embarks on a deep investigation of SAE and fraternity culture generally, exposing the vast gulf between its founding ideals and the realities of its impact on colleges and the world at large. He shows how national fraternities are reacting to a slowly dawning new reality, and asks what the rest of us should do about it. Should we ban them outright, or will they only be driven underground? Can an institution this broken be saved? With rare access and skillful storytelling, Hechinger draws a fascinating and necessary portrait of an institution in deep need of reform, and makes a case for how it can happen.