African American Studies category: 2787 books
Racism in the Nation's Service
Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America
Language: English
Release Date: April 22, 2013
Between the 1880s and 1910s, thousands of African Americans passed civil service exams and became employed in the executive offices of the federal government. However, by 1920, promotions to well-paying federal jobs had nearly vanished for black workers. Eric S. Yellin argues that the Wilson administration's...
From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse
African American Education in Mississippi, 1862-1875
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2012
In the years immediately following the Civil War--the formative years for an emerging society of freed African Americans in Mississippi--there was much debate over the general purpose of black schools and who would control them. From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse is the first comprehensive examination...
The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
Language: English
Release Date: August 16, 2011
Timely—as the 2012 presidential election nears—and controversial, here is the first book by a major African-American public intellectual on racial politics and the Obama presidency.
Renowned for his cool reason vis-à-vis the pitfalls and clichés of racial discourse, Randall Kennedy—Harvard...
From Black Power to Hip Hop
Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism
Language: English
Release Date: January 19, 2006
Despite legislation designed to eliminate unfair racial practices, the United States continues to struggle with a race problem. Some thinkers label this a "new" racism and call for new political responses to it. Using the experiences of African American women and men as a touchstone for...
Southscapes
Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature
Language: English
Release Date: November 21, 2011
In this innovative approach to southern literary cultures, Thadious Davis analyzes how black southern writers use their spatial location to articulate the vexed connections between society and environment, particularly under segregation and its legacies.
Basing her analysis on texts by Ernest...
White Guilt
How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era
Language: English
Release Date: October 13, 2009
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, whom many thought would be charged with murder by virtue of the DNA evidence against him, went free after his attorney portrayed him...
The Debt
What America Owes to Blacks
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2001
Both an unflinching indictment of past wrongs and an impassioned call to America to educate its citizens about the history of Africa and its people, The Debt says in no uncertain terms what white America owes blacks—and what blacks owe themselves.
In this powerful and controversial book,...
by Harry J. Elam
Language: English
Release Date: May 21, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: May 21, 2009
Pulitzer-prizewinning playwright August Wilson, author of Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and The Piano Lesson, among other dramatic works, is one of the most well respected American playwrights on the contemporary stage. The founder of the Black Horizon Theater Company, his self-defined dramatic...
The Construction of Whiteness
An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Race Formation and the Meaning of a White Identity
Language: English
Release Date: April 13, 2016
This volume collects interdisciplinary essays that examine the crucial intersection between whiteness as a privileged racial category and the various material practices (social, cultural, political, and economic) that undergird white ideological influence in America. In truth, the need to examine...
The End Is Just the Beginning
Lessons in Grieving for African Americans
Language: English
Release Date: December 18, 2007
A nationally revered minister and certified grief specialist shares words of comfort for Africans Americans in mourning.
Every culture has unique ways of coping with the devastating loss of a loved one, but in some households these important traditions have succumbed to the modern emphasis...
The Hip-Hop Generation
Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture
Language: English
Release Date: August 5, 2008
The Hip Hop Generation is an eloquent testament for black youth culture at the turn of the century. The only in-depth study of the first generation to grow up in post-segregation America, it combines culture and politics into a pivotal work in American studies. Bakari Kitwana, one of black America's...
Freedom's Ballot
African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration
Language: English
Release Date: April 28, 2014
In the spring of 1915, Chicagoans elected the city’s first black alderman, Oscar De Priest. In a city where African Americans made up less than five percent of the voting population, and in a nation that dismissed and denied black political participation, De Priest’s victory was astonishing. It...
by Patricia A. Schechter
Language: English
Release Date: January 14, 2003
Language: English
Release Date: January 14, 2003
Pioneering African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) is widely remembered for her courageous antilynching crusade in the 1890s; the full range of her struggles against injustice is not as well known. With this book, Patricia Schechter restores Wells-Barnett to her central, if embattled,...
Art for Equality
The NAACP's Cultural Campaign for Civil Rights
Language: English
Release Date: May 13, 2014
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the nation's oldest civil rights organization, having dedicated itself to the fight for racial equality since 1909. While the group helped achieve substantial victories in the courtroom, the struggle for civil rights extended...