Black History

AUTHOR: Judson L. Jeffries

Description: Huey P. Newton's powerful legacy to the Black Panther movement and the civil rights struggle has long been obscured. Conservatives harp on Newton's drug use and on the circumstances of his death in a crack-related shooting. Liberals romanticize his black revolutionary rhetoric and idealize his message. In Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist, Judson L. Jeffries considers the entire arc of Newton's political role and influence on civil rights history and African American thought. Jeffries argues that, contrary to popular belief, Newton was one of the most important political thinkers in the struggle for civil rights. Huey P. Newton's political career spanned two decades. Like many freedom fighters, he was a complex figure. His international reputation was forged as much from his passionate defense of black liberation as from his highly publicized confrontations with police. His courage to address police brutality won him admirers in ghettos, on college campuses, and in select Hollywood circles. Newton gave Black Power a compelling urgency and played a pivotal role in the politics of black America during the 1960s and 1970s. Few would deny that Newton's life (1942-1989) was strewn with incidences of violence and that his police record was long. But Newton's struggles with police took place in a rich and troubled context that included urban unrest, police brutality, government repression, and an intense debate over civil rights tactics. Stripped of history and interpretation, the violence of Newton's life brought emphatic indictments of him. Newton's death attracted widespread media attention. However, pundits offered little on Newton as freedom fighter or as theoretician and activist. Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist dispels myths about Newton's life, but the book is primarily an in-depth examination of Newton's ideas. By exploring this charismatic leader, Jeffries's book makes a valuable contribution to the scant literature on Newton, while also exposing the core tenets and evolving philosophies of the Black Panther Party.

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AUTHOR: Michael V. Uschan

Description: This compelling volume describes physical landmarks in African American history and discusses the history associated with those places. The book is organized around thematic chapters that take readers on a virtual tour of landmarks associated with the theme while also describing the people and events that inspired the landmarks. Thematic chapters include: The Slavery Era, African Americans Resist Slavery, The Civil War, Education for Blacks, The Civil Rights Movement, and African American Achievers.

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AUTHOR: Nancy I. Sanders

Description: History books are replete with heroic stories of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams, but what of Allen, Russwurm, and Hawley? America's Black Founders celebrates the lesser known but significant lives and contributions of our nation's early African American leaders. Many know that the Revolutionary War's first martyr, Crispus Attucks, a dockworker of African descent, was killed at the Boston Massacre. But far fewer know that the final conflict of the war, the Battle of Yorktown, was hastened to a conclusion by James Armistead Lafayette, a slave and spy who reported the battle plans of General Cornwallis to George Washington. Author Nancy Sanders weaves the histories of dozens of men and women—soldiers, sailors, ministers, poets, merchants, doctors, and other community leaders—who have earned proper recognition among the founders of the United States of America. To get a better sense of what these individuals accomplished and the times in which they lived, readers will celebrate Constitution Day, cook colonial foods, publish a newspaper, petition their government, and more. This valuable resource also includes a time line of significant events, a list of historic sites to visit or explore online, and Web resources for further study.

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AUTHOR: Audrey Thomas McCluskey

Description: Emerging from the darkness of the slave era and Reconstruction, black activist women Lucy Craft Laney, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Nannie Helen Burroughs founded schools aimed at liberating African-American youth from disadvantaged futures in the segregated and decidedly unequal South. From the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, these individuals fought discrimination as members of a larger movement of black women who uplifted future generations through a focus on education, social service, and cultural transformation. Born free, but with the shadow of the slave past still implanted in their consciousness, Laney, Bethune, Brown, and Burroughs built off each other’s successes and learned from each other’s struggles as administrators, lecturers, and suffragists. Drawing from the women’s own letters and writings about educational methods and from remembrances of surviving students, Audrey Thomas McCluskey reveals the pivotal significance of this sisterhood’s legacy for later generations and for the institution of education itself.

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AUTHOR: Amiri Baraka

Description: For almost half a century, Amiri Baraka has ranked among the most important commentators on African American music and culture. In this brilliant assemblage of his writings on music, the first such collection in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends autobiography, history, musical analysis, and political commentary to recall the sounds, people, times, and places he's encountered. As in his earlier classics, Blues People and Black Music, Baraka offers essays on the famous--Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane--and on those whose names are known mainly by jazz aficionados--Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and Malachi Thompson. Baraka's literary style, with its deep roots in poetry, makes palpable his love and respect for his jazz musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm show us again how much Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and the others he lovingly considers mattered. He brings home to us how music itself matters, and how musicians carry and extend that knowledge from generation to generation, providing us, their listeners, with a sense of meaning and belonging.

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AUTHOR: Christine Acham

Description: After a decade-long hiatus, African Americans once again began appearing regularly on television in the 1960s. Bill Cosby costarred on I Spy, Sammy Davis Jr. briefly hosted a variety show, and in 1968 Diahann Carroll debuted in the title role of Julia, the first television series to star an African American since the cancellation of Amos ’n’ Andy. Over the next ten years, shows with African American casts became more common; some, like Sanford and Son and Good Times, were hits with both black and white audiences. Yet many within the black community criticize these programs as perpetuating demeaning stereotypes and hampering the political progress made by African Americans.In Revolution Televised, Christine Acham offers a more complex reading of this period in African American television history, finding within these programs opposition to dominant white constructions of African American identity. She explores the intersection of popular television and race as witnessed from the documentary coverage of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the personal politics of Flip Wilson and Soul Train’s Don Cornelius, and the ways in which notorious X-rated comic Redd Foxx reinvented himself for prime time. Reflecting on both the potential of television to effect social change as well as its limitations, Acham concludes with analyses of Richard Pryor’s politically charged and short-lived sketch comedy show and the success of outspoken comic Chris Rock. Revolution Televised deftly illustrates how black television artists operated within the constraints of the television industry to resist and ultimately shape the mass media’s portrayal of African American life.

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EDITORS: Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin

Description: Women were at the forefront of the civil rights struggle, but their indvidiual stories were rarely heard. Only recently have historians begun to recognize the central role women played in the battle for racial equality. In Sisters in the Struggle, we hear about the unsung heroes of the civil rights movements such as Ella Baker, who helped found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who took on segregation in the Democratic party (and won), and Septima Clark, who created a network of "Citizenship Schools" to teach poor Black men and women to read and write and help them to register to vote. We learn of Black women's activism in the Black Panther Party where they fought the police, as well as the entrenched male leadership, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where the behind-the-scenes work of women kept the organization afloat when it was under siege. It also includes first-person testimonials from the women who made headlines with their courageous resistance to segregation--Rosa Parks, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Dorothy Height. This collection represents the coming of age of African-American women's history and presents new stories that point the way to future study.

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AUTHOR: Maxine Leeds Craig

Description: Black is Beautiful The words were the exuberant rallying cry of a generation of black women who threw away their straightening combs and adopted a proud new style they called the Afro. The Afro, as worn most famously by Angela Davis, became a veritable icon of the Sixties. Although the new beauty standards seemed to arise overnight, they actually had deep roots within black communities. Tracing her story to 1891, when a black newspaper launched a contest to find the most beautiful woman of the race, Maxine Leeds Craig documents how black women have negotiated the intersection of race, class, politics, and personal appearance in their lives. Craig takes the reader from beauty parlors in the 1940s to late night political meetings in the 1960s to demonstrate the powerful influence of social movements on the experience of daily life. With sources ranging from oral histories of Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activists and men and women who stood on the sidelines to black popular magazines and the black movement press, Ain't I a Beauty Queen? will fascinate those interested in beauty culture, gender, class, and the dynamics of race and social movements.

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EDITOR: Yolanda Williams Page

Description: Icons of African American Literature: The Black Literary World examines 24 of the most popular and culturally significant topics within African American literature's long and immensely fascinating history. Each piece provide substantial, in-depth information--much more than a typical encyclopedia entry--while remaining accessible and appealing to general and younger readers. Arranged alphabetically, the entries cover such writers as Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and August Wilson; major works, such as Invisible Man, Native Son, and Their Eyes Were Watching God; and a range of cultural topics, including the black arts movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and the jazz aesthetic. Written by expert contributors, the essays discuss the enduring significance of these topics in American history and popular culture. Each entry also provides sidebars that highlight interesting information and suggestions for further reading.

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EDITORS: Noel S. Anderson and Haroon Kharem

Description: Before the founding of the United States, enslaved Africans advocated literacy as a method of emancipation. During the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, blacks were at the forefront of the debates on the establishment of public schools in the South. In fact, a wealth of ideas about the role of education in American freedom and progress emerged from African American civic, political, and religious communities and was informed by the complexity of the Black experience in America. Education as Freedom: African American Educational Thought and Activism is a groundbreaking edited text that documents and reexamines African-American empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to knowledge-making, teaching, and learning and American education from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century, the most dynamic period of African-American educational thought and activism. African-American thought and activism regarding education burgeoned from traditional academic disciplines, such as philosophy and art, mathematics and the natural sciences, and history and psychology; from the Black church as well as from grassroot political, social, cultural, and educational activism, with the desire to assess the stake of African Americans in modernity.

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Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Peer reviewed.‎

Full text coverage: Winter 1998 (Vol. 83, no. 1) - Summer 2010 (Vol. 95, no. 3/4), some exceptions

Description: Founded in 1916 as The Journal of Negro History by Dr. Carter G. Woodson, The Journal of African American History (JAAH) is the leading scholarly publication in the field of African American history. Published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), JAAH publishes original scholarly articles and book reviews on all aspects of the African American experience. JAAH embraces ASALH’s mission of promoting, researching, preserving, interpreting, and disseminating “information about Black life, history, and culture to the global community.” Numerous articles published in JAAH have been widely cited and circulated, won awards, and/or broadly reprinted. While each issue covers various dimensions of the African American historical experience, JAAH also publishes special issues, symposia, and roundtable forums on cutting edge themes and topics within the field.

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Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Publisher: Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History

Peer reviewed.‎

Full text coverage: Jul-Sep 1997 (Vol. 60, no. 3) - Summer 2010 (Vol. 73, no. 2)

Description: The Black History Bulletin is dedicated to enhancing teaching and learning in the areas of history. Its aim is to publish, generate, and disseminate peer-reviewed information about African Americans in U. S. history, the African Diaspora generally, and the peoples of Africa. Its purpose is to inform the knowledge base for the professional praxis of secondary educators through articles that are grounded in theory, yet supported by practice. The Black History Bulletin welcomes articles on all aspects of Black history, especially those written with a focus on: (1) middle school U.S. history; (2) high school U.S. history; (3) teacher preparation U.S. history methods.

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