Former slaves themselves--an important but long-neglected source of information about the institution of slavery in the United States. Who could better describe what slavery was like than the people who experienced it? And describe it they did, in thousands of remarkable interviews sponsored by the Federal Writers' Project during the 1930s. More than 170 interviews were conducted in North Carolina. Belinda Hurmence pored over each of the North Carolina narratives, compiling and editing 21 of the first-person accounts for this collection. Belinda Hurmence was born in Oklahoma, raised in Texas, ... View More...
Historians, economists, psychologists, novelists, dramatists, and moviemakers alike have perpetuated myths and legends about the planter aristocracy of the antebellum South. Presenting this remarkable set of diaries which span the critical period between 1841 and 1864, Carol Bleser allows one prominent planter and slaveholder to speak as himself and for himself. James Henry Hammond, resembling a character in a Faulkner novel, was a poor boy who married into wealth and then fought to make his South Carolina plantations and slaveholdings among the largest in the South. An articulate intellectual... View More...
In this groundbreaking book, co-editors Pedro Noguera and Jean Yonemura Wing, and their collaborators investigated the dynamics of race and achievement at Berkeley High School-a large public high school that the New York Times called "the most integrated high school in America." Berkeley's diverse student population clearly illustrates the "achievement gap" phenomenon in our schools. Unfinished Business brings to light the hidden inequities of schools-where cultural attitudes, academic tracking, curricular access, and after-school activities serve as sorting mechanisms that set students on pat... View More...
A unique and exquisitely wrought story of one multiracial woman's journey to discover and embrace herself in a family that sought to deny her black heritage, Sil Lai Abrams shares her story in Black Lotus: A Woman's Search for Racial Identity--an account that will undoubtedly ignite conversation on race, racial identity, and the human experience. Author and activist Sil Lai Abrams was born to a Chinese immigrant mother and a white American father. Out of her family, Sil Lai was the only one with a tousle of wild curls and brown skin. When she asked about her darker complexion, she was given va... View More...
Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system f... View More...
From the New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, an unflinching, critical new look at the Second Amendment--and how it has been engineered to deny the rights of African Americans since its inception. A Kirkus Reviews 8 Nonfiction Books to Read This SummerIn The Second, historian and award-winning, bestselling author of White Rage Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a "pro-gun" nor an "anti-gun" boo... View More...
Explores the paradoxes of the life of Edmund Perry, a lonely, vulnerable Black honor student at Phillips Exeter Academy, who preached Black nationalism and who was shot and killed on a Manhattan street by a policeman. View More...
"A story of surviving and thriving with passion, compassion, wit, and style."--Maya Angelou "In America, we have a tradition of black writers whose autobiographies and memoirs come to define an era. . . . Buck may be this generation's story."--NPR A coming-of-age story about navigating the wilds of urban America and the shrapnel of a self-destructing family, Buck shares the story of a generation through one original and riveting voice. MK Asante was born in Zimbabwe to American parents: his mother a dancer, his father a revered professor. But as a teenager, MK was alone on the streets of Nort... View More...
An unprecedented account of one of the bloodiest and most significant racial clashes in American historyIn May 1866, just a year after the Civil War ended, Memphis erupted in a three-day spasm of racial violence that saw whites rampage through the city's black neighborhoods. By the time the fires consuming black churches and schools were put out, forty-six freed people had been murdered. Congress, furious at this and other evidence of white resistance in the conquered South, launched what is now called Radical Reconstruction, policies to ensure the freedom of the region's four million blacks--... View More...
A slave determined to gain freedom, a widow battling poverty and despair, a man of God grappling with spiritual and worldly troubles, and a former Confederate soldier seeking a new life. They lived in the South during 1865 -- a year that saw war, disunion, and slavery give way to peace, reconstruction, and emancipation.Between January and December 1865, these four people witnessed, from very different vantage points, the death of the Old South and the birth of the New South. Civil War historian Stephen V. Ash reconstructs their daily lives, their fears and hopes, and their frustrations and tri... View More...
"Uju Asika has written a necessary book for our times."--Chika Unigwe, author of On Black Sisters' StreetYou can't avoid it, because it's everywhere. In the looks Black kids get in certain spaces, the manner in which some people speak to them, the stuff that goes over their heads. Stuff that makes them cry even when they don't know why. How do you bring up your kids to be kind and happy when there is so much out there trying to break them down?Bringing Up Race is an important book, for all families whatever their race or ethnicity. It's for everyone who wants to instil a sense of open-minded i... View More...
Explores the slave-holding dynasty of Elias Ball, a South Carolina plantation owner, the history of slave uprisings, and the memories of the descendants of those slaves. View More...
Former Village Voice columnist Edward Ball takes readers on an unprecedented journey into his family's slave-owning past, telling the story of black and white families who lived side by side for five generations--and a tale of everyday Americans confronting their vexed inheritance together. Photos. View More...
Former Village Voice columnist Edward Ball takes readers on an unprecedented journey into his family's slave-owning past, telling the story of black and white families who lived side by side for five generations--and a tale of everyday Americans confronting their vexed inheritance together. Photos. View More...
Former Village Voice columnist Edward Ball takes readers on an unprecedented journey into his family's slave-owning past, telling the story of black and white families who lived side by side for five generations--and a tale of everyday Americans confronting their vexed inheritance together. Photos. View More...
