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Loewen (emeritus, sociology, U. of Vermont) exposes the history and persistence of "sundown towns," so-named for the signs often found at their corporate limits warning African Americans and other minorities not to be found in the town after dusk. He historically situates the rise of the sundown town movement in the years following the Civil War; describes the mechanisms of violence, threats, law, and policy that were used to force minorities out...
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1210L
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Born into slavery in 1818, Frederick Douglass escaped to freedom and became a passionate advocate for abolition and social change and the foremost spokesperson for the nation's enslaved African American population in the years preceding the Civil War. My Bondage and My Freedom is Douglass's masterful recounting of his remarkable life and a fiery condemnation of a political and social system that would reduce people to property and keep an entire race...
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Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published...
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This sports book, memoir, and manifesto from a Super Bowl Champion elucidates racism in the United States.
Michael Bennett is a Super Bowl Champion, a three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, a fearless activist, a feminist, a grassroots philanthropist, an organizer, and a change maker. He’s also one of the most scathingly humorous athletes on the planet, and he wants to make you uncomfortable.
Bennett adds his unmistakable voice
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"In 1955 the murderers of Emmett Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted of their crime, undoubtedly because they were white. Forty years later, O.J. Simpson, who many thought would be charged with murder by virtue of the DNA evidence against him, went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. Clearly, a sea change had taken place in American culture, but how had it happened? In this work, distinguished race relations scholar...
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"In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...
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Benjamin draws on her own experiences as well as research to show how we can build a more just world--one small, and viral, step at a time.
"Long before the pandemic, Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. The twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Here she explores how we can transform society...
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American Founders reveals men and women of African descent as key protagonists in the story of American democracy. It chronicles how black people developed and defended New World settlements, undermined slavery, and championed freedom throughout the hemisphere from the sixteenth thorough the twentieth centuries. While conventional history tends to reduce the roles of African Americans to antebellum slavery and the civil rights movement, in reality...
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"Frederick Douglass was born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore and became an extraordinary champion of liberty and equality. Throughout his long life, Douglass was also a man of profound religious conviction. ... With an eye toward explaining how Douglass's religious beliefs shaped his influential public career, Dilbeck retells the story of Douglass's life."--
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Born into slavery, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (ca. 1824-1907) rose to a position of respect as a talented dressmaker and designer to the political elite of Washington, D.C., and a confidante of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. In this unusual memoir, Keckley offers a rare, behind-the-scenes view of the formal and informal networks that African Americans established among themselves, as well as an insider's perspective of the men who made Civil War politics...
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How do you hold on to hope after more than twenty years of imprisonment? For Alice Marie Johnson the answer lies with God. For years, Alice lived a normal life without a criminal record -- she was a manager at FedEx, a wife, and a mother. But after an emotionally and financially tumultuous period in her life left her with few options, she turned to crime as a way to pay off her mounting debts. Convicted in 1996 for her nonviolent involvement in a...
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"When Darnell Moore was fourteen, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they thought he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death. Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer, a leading Black Lives Matter activist, and an advocate for justice and liberation. In No...
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"'This collection of short meditations, written from a prison cell, captures the past two decades of police violence that gave rise to Black Lives Matter while digging deeply into the history of the United States. This is the book we need right now to find our bearings in the chaos'--Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States; 'Mumia's writings are a wake-up call. He is a voice from our prophetic tradition,...
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"There are many controversies and chronic misconceptions surrounding the idea of emancipation in the nineteenth-century United States. Much recent scholarship has sought to address these misconceptions ... Reidy further enriches and complicates our understanding of emancipation in the context of the Civil War. Drawing us back to testimonies of participants and contemporary witnesses of the era and synthesizing the perspectives of subsequent observers,...
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In her first book, “The Presidency in Black and White”, journalist April Ryan examined race in America through her experience as a White House reporter. In this book, she shifts the conversation from the White House to every home in America. “At Mama's Knee” looks at race and race relations through the lessons that mothers transmit to their children. As a single African American mother in Baltimore, Ryan has struggled with each gut wrenching,...
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Reluctant Reformers explores the centrality of racism to American politics through the origins, internal dynamics, and leadership of the major democratic and social justice movements between the early nineteenth century and the end of World War II. It focuses in particular on the abolitionists, the Populist Party, the Progressive reformers, and the women's suffrage, labor, and socialist and communist movements.
Despite their achievements, virtually...
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White Like Her: My Family's Story of Race and Racial Passing is the story of Gail Lukasik's mother's "passing," Gail's struggle with the shame of her mother's choice, and her subsequent journey of self-discovery and redemption.
In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother's decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother's...
In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother's decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother's...
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English
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Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors examines the origins and significance of several longstanding antiblack stories and the caricatures and stereotypes that support them. Here readers will find representations of the lazy, childlike Sambo, the watermelon-obsessed pickaninny, the buffoonish minstrel, the subhuman savage, the loyal and contented mammy and Tom, and the menacing, razor-toting coon and brute. Malcolm X and James Baldwin both refused...
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