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"African Americans - history"
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The new Black history : revisiting the second Reconstruction
\"The New Black History anthology presents cutting-edge scholarship on key issues that define African American politics, life, and culture, especially during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. The volume includes articles by both established scholars and a rising generation of young scholars and demonstrates a profound analysis of black American history since 1954. The New Black History fills a gap in existing literature on post-World War II African-American History by providing an in-depth historical narrative that also offers critical interpretation of key issues, persons, and events that have come to define the field in recent years\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Cutting Along the Color Line
Today, black-owned barber shops play a central role in African American public life. The intimacy of commercial grooming encourages both confidentiality and camaraderie, which make the barber shop an important gathering place for African American men to talk freely. But for many years preceding and even after the Civil War, black barbers endured a measure of social stigma for perpetuating inequality: though the profession offered economic mobility to black entrepreneurs, black barbers were obliged by custom to serve an exclusively white clientele. Quincy T. Mills traces the lineage from these nineteenth-century barbers to the bustling enterprises of today, demonstrating that the livelihood offered by the service economy was crucial to the development of a black commercial sphere and the barber shop as a democratic social space.Cutting Along the Color Linechronicles the cultural history of black barber shops as businesses and civic institutions. Through several generations of barbers, Mills examines the transition from slavery to freedom in the nineteenth century, the early twentieth-century expansion of black consumerism, and the challenges of professionalization, licensing laws, and competition from white barbers. He finds that the profession played a significant though complicated role in twentieth-century racial politics: while the services of shaving and grooming were instrumental in the creation of socially acceptable black masculinity, barbering permitted the financial independence to maintain public spaces that fostered civil rights politics. This sweeping, engaging history of an iconic cultural establishment shows that black entrepreneurship was intimately linked to the struggle for equality.
eBook
Workers on arrival : black labor in the making of America
\"From the ongoing issues of poverty, health, housing and employment to the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations, the black working class stands at the center of perceptions of social and racial conflict today. Journalists and public policy analysts often discuss the black poor as \"consumers\" rather than \"producers,\" as \"takers\" rather than \"givers,\" and as \"liabilities\" instead of \"assets.\" In his engrossing new history, Workers on Arrival, Joe William Trotter, Jr. refutes these perceptions by charting the black working class's vast contributions to the making of America. Covering the last four hundred years since Africans were first brought to Virginia in 1619, Trotter traces black workers' complicated journey from the transatlantic slave trade through the American Century to the demise of the industrial order in the 21st century. At the center of this compelling, fast-paced narrative are the actual experiences of these African American men and women. A dynamic and vital history of remarkable contributions despite repeated setbacks, Workers on Arrival expands our understanding of America's economic and industrial growth, its cities, ideas, and institutions, and the real challenges confronting black urban communities today\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
They Left Great Marks on Me
Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans' bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress.
In this evocative and deeply moving history Kidada Williams examines African Americans' testimonies about racial violence. By using both oral and print culture to testify about violence, victims and witnesses hoped they would be able to graphically disseminate enough knowledge about its occurrence and inspire Americans to take action to end it. In the process of testifying, these people created a vernacular history of the violence they endured and witnessed, as well as the identities that grew from the experience of violence. This history fostered an oppositional consciousness to racial violence that inspired African Americans to form and support campaigns to end violence. The resulting crusades against racial violence became one of the political training grounds for the civil rights movement.
eBook
African American history and culture
\"Resilience and triumph in the face of a tragic past has marked the trajectory of African Americans over time. Marginalized and relegated to slave status, early African Americans encountered endless obstacles in trying to secure freedom and basic human rights. The remarkable achievements of African Americans and the struggles - past and present - with which they have been confronted, are the subjects of this engrossing series. From heart-breaking to awe-inspiring, the accounts described within these pages leave the reader with new insight and appreciation for this extraordinary culture - and the individuals whose accomplishments and sacrifices have made it what it is today. Explores life in Africa prior to the emergence of the slave trade ; Covers current as well as historical events ; Includes striking photographs of notable events and individuals\"--Publisher's website.
Book
The Practice of Citizenship
In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does.In The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 \"Afric-American Picture Gallery\" appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine, and the physician, abolitionist, and essayist James McCune Smith. He places texts such as the proceedings of black state conventions alongside considerations of canonical figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass.Reading black print culture as a space where citizenship was both theorized and practiced, Spires reveals the degree to which concepts of black citizenship emerged through a highly creative and diverse community of letters, not easily reducible to representative figures or genres. From petitions to Congress to Frances Harper's parlor fiction, black writers framed citizenship both explicitly and implicitly, the book demonstrates, not simply as a response to white supremacy but as a matter of course in the shaping of their own communities and in meeting their own political, social, and cultural needs.
eBook
A nation within a nation
John Ernest offers a comprehensive survey of the broad-ranging and influential African American organizations and networks formed in the North in the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War. He examines fraternal organizations, churches, conventions, mutual aid benefit and literary societies, educational organizations, newspapers, and magazines. Ernest argues these organizations demonstrate how African Americans self-definition was not solely determined by slavery as they tried to create organizations in the hope of creating a community.
eBook
History of African Americans : exploring diverse roots
\"Over the centuries Black peoples in America have nurtured distinctive attitudes, beliefs, characters, folkways, and manners. They have shared common circumstances and conditions that have distinguished them in America beyond reference to the continent of their ancestral origins or their physical appearance. Yet African Americans have never been singular in experience or outlook. They have ever been diverse peoples. Time, temperament, talents, opportunities, place, and interpersonal relations, among myriad elements of life, have invariably set Blacks apart from one another as individuals and as groups, even as pronounced racial distinction and discrimination have invariably set Blacks as a group apart from others in America. African American history is thus not singular or simple; it has many facets and layers; it spreads across time and place and personalities.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Teaching Black History to White People
Leonard Moore has been teaching Black history for twenty-five
years, mostly to white people. Drawing on decades of experience in
the classroom and on college campuses throughout the South, as well
as on his own personal history, Moore illustrates how an
understanding of Black history is necessary for everyone.
With Teaching Black History to White People , which is
\"part memoir, part Black history, part pedagogy, and part how-to
guide,\" Moore delivers an accessible and engaging primer on the
Black experience in America. He poses provocative questions, such
as \"Why is the teaching of Black history so controversial?\" and
\"What came first: slavery or racism?\" These questions don't have
easy answers, and Moore insists that embracing discomfort is
necessary for engaging in open and honest conversations about race.
Moore includes a syllabus and other tools for actionable steps that
white people can take to move beyond performative justice and
toward racial reparations, healing, and reconciliation.
eBook