Search Results: Black Studies from I Cannot Live Without Books

The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction by Daniel Brook
THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES.
In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude. During Reconstruction, a movement arises as mixed-race elites make common cause with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness in a bid to achieve political and social equality for all.
In some areas, this coalition proved remarkably successful. Activists peacefully integrated the streetcars of Charleston and New Orleans for decades and, for a time,… Read More

All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn, The Conflicted Soul of the Northeast by Jason Sokol
The Northeastern United States -- home to abolitionism and a refuge for blacks fleeing the Jim Crow South -- has had a long and celebrated history of racial equality and political liberalism. After World War II, the region appeared poised to continue this legacy, electing black politicians and rallying behind black athletes and cultural leaders. However, as historian Jason Sokol reveals in All Eyes Are Upon Us, these achievements obscured the harsh reality of a region riven by segregation and deep-seated racism.
White fans from across Brooklyn -- Irish, Jewish, and Italian -- came out to support Jackie Robinson when he broke baseball's color barrier with the Dodgers in 1947, even as the city's blacks were shunted into segregated neighborhoods. The African-American politician Ed Brooke won a senate seat in Massachusetts in 1966, when the state was 97 percent white, yet his political… Read More

The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt by Jill Watts
In 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the help of key African American defectors from the Republican Party. At the time, most African Americans lived in poverty, denied basic citizenship rights, and terrorized by white violence. Indeed, as Roosevelt announced what would be his signature initiative, the black press wondered "Will the New Deal be a square deal for the Negro?" The Black Cabinet tells the story of the 'black Brain Trust" who joined the administration with an eye to squaring that deal, in an environment reluctant, often hostile, to change.
Economists, sociologists, lawyers, and journalists, the people who joined the Black Cabinet -- the black press's sobriquet -- had in common a desire to document and address the economic hardship and systemic inequalities African Americans faced, and to put the need for reform on the… Read More

The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America's Forgotten Black Pioneers & the Struggle for Equality by Anna-Lisa Cox
When black settlers Keziah and Charles Grier started clearing their frontier land in 1818, they couldn't know that they were part of the nation's earliest struggle for equality; they were just looking to build a better life. But within a dew years, the Griers would become early Underground Railroad conductors, joining with fellow pioneers and other allies to confront the growing tyranny of bondage and injustice.
The Bone and Sinew of the Land tells the Griers' story and the stories of many others like them: the lost history of the nation's first Great Migration. In building hundreds of settlements on the frontier, these black pioneers were making a stand for equality and freedom. Their new home, the Northwest Territory -- the wild region that would become present-day Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin -- was the first territory to ban slavery and have equal voting rights for… Read More

Buses Are a Comin': Memoir of a Freedom Rider by Charles Person with Richard Rooker
At eighteen, Charles Person was the youngest of the original Freedom Riders, key figures in the U.S. civil rights movement who left Washington, D.C., by bus in 1961, headed for New Orleans. This purposeful mix of black and white, male and female activists -- including future Congressman John Lewis, Congress of Racial Equality Director James Farmer, Reverend Benjamin Elton Cox, journalist, and pacifist James Peck, and CORE field secretary Genevieve Hughes -- set out to discover whether America would abide by a Supreme Court decision that ruled segregation unconstitutional in bus depots, waiting areas, restaurants, and restrooms nationwide.
Two buses proceeded through Virginia and North and South Carolina to Georgia, where they were greeted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and finally to Alabama. There the Freedom Riders found their answer: no. Southern states would continue to disregard federal law and use violence to… Read More

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, a powerful caste system influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, and stigma. Using riveting stories about people -- including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, and Wilkerson herself -- she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to… Read More

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619 - 2019, Edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
The story begins in 1619 -- a year before the Mayflower dropped anchor off Cape Cod -- when the White Lion disgorges "some 20 and odd Negroes" onto the shores of Virginia, inaugurating the African presence in what would become the United States. It takes us to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles, stunning achievements, and millions of ordinary lives passing through extraordinary history.
Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume "community" history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a brief period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal… Read More

How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks -- those that are honest about the past and those that are not -- that offer an inter-generational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history and memory.
It is the story of the Monticello plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former-plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 180,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting… Read More

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 by Deborah Riley Draper and Travis Thrasher
THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES.
Set against the turbulent backdrop of a segregated United States, sixteen black men and two black women are torn between boycotting the Olympic Games in Nazi Germany or participating. If they go, they would represent a country that considers them second-class citizens and would compete amid a strong undercurrent of Aryan superiority that regards them as inferior. Yet, if they did not compete, would they ever have a chance to prove people wrong on a global stage? To be better than anyone would expect?
Twenty-two-year-old Mack Robinson stands in the shadows for a moment, unseen from the crowd of the 1936 Olympic Games. Off the track, waiting to be called for the final race, he can't help thinking of Jessee Owens, the one they're all talking… Read More

Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America by Karen Cook Bell
Running from Bondage tells the compelling stories of enslaved women, which they fled or attempted to flee bondage during and after the Revolutionary War. Karen Cook Bell's enlightening and original contribution to the study of slave resistance in eighteenth-century America explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there were in fact two wars being waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role. Running from Bondage broadens and complicates how we study and teach this momentous event, one that emphasizes the chances taken by these "Black founding mothers" and the important contributions they made to the cause… Read More

Say Their Names: How Black Lives Came to Matter in America by Curtis Bunn, Michael H. Cottman, Patrice Gaines, Nick Charles, and Keith Harriston
For many, the weeks of protests in the summer of 2020 began with the horrific nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds when police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on camera, and it ended with the sweeping federal, state, and intrapersonal changes that followed. It is a simple story, wherein white America finally witnessed enough brutality to move its shared consciousness. The only problem is that this narrative isn't true. George Floyd was not the first Black man to be killed by police -- he wasn't even the first to inspire nationwide protests -- yet his death came at a time when America was already at a tipping point.
In Say Their Names, five seasoned journalists probe this critical shift. With a piercing examination of how white supremacy has been propagated throughout history, from the convict leasing program to longstanding predatory medical… Read More

A Shot in the Moonlight: How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South by Ben Montgomery
After moonrise on the cold night of January 21, 1897, a mob of twenty-five white men gathered in a patch of woods near Big Road in southwestern Simpson County, Kentucky. Half carried rifles and shotguns, and a few had pistols tucked in their pants. Their target was George Dinning, a freed slave who'd farmed peacefully in the area for fourteen years, and who had been wrongfully accused of stealing livestock from a neighboring farm. When the mob began firing through the doors and windows of Dinning's home, he fired back in self-defense, shooting and killing the son of a wealthy Kentucky family.
So began one of the strangest legal episodes in American history -- one that ended with Dinning becoming the first Black man in the South to beat a lynch mob in court.
Drawing on a trove of never-before-published material, bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery… Read More

South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War by Alice L. Baumgartner
The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico.
In South to Freedom historian Alice Baumgartner tells the story of Mexico's rise as an antislavery republic and a promised land for enslaved people in North America. In 1837, shortly after Texas rebelled against Mexican rule, Mexico's Congress formally abolished slavery, and enslaved people began to head south. Some were helped by free blacks, ship captains, Mexicans, Germans, gamblers, preachers, mail riders, and other "lurking scoundrels." Most, however, escaped by their own ingenuity with stolen rifles, forged slave passes, and in one instance a wig made from horsehair and pitch. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop… Read More

Tulsa, 1921: Reporting a Massacre by Randy Krehbiel
In 1921 Tulsa's Greenwood District, known then as the nation's "Black Wall Street," was one of the most prosperous African American communities in the United States. But on May 31 of that year a white mob, inflamed by rumors that a young black man had attempted to rape a white teenage girl, invaded Greenwood. By the end of the following day, thousands of homes and businesses lay in ashes, and perhaps as many as three hundred people were dead.
Tulsa, 1921 shines new light into the shadows that have long been cast over this extraordinary instance of racial violence. With the clarity and descriptive power of a veteran journalist, author Randy Krehbiel digs deep into the events and their aftermath and investigates decades-old questions about the local culture at the root of what one writer has called a white-led pogrom: How did a feud between the editors of Oklahoma's black-owned newspapers influence events? Why were law enforcement officials in Tulsa… Read More

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur
The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states, claiming the authority to maintain domestic peace, enacted laws that discouraged settlement by free African Americans and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states' insistence on local control with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they battled in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party… Read More

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones
Popular accounts of the suffrage crusade often begin in Seneca Falls in 1848 and end with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most Black women. To secure their rights, Black women needed a movement of their own.
In Vanguard, prizewinning historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women who were the vanguard of women's rights: the pioneering lecturer Maria Stewart, abolitionist and suffrage advocate Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, community organizer… Read More

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to previously untapped data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
With stunning detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois… Read More