African American

In Their Path: A Grandmother's 519-Mile Underground Railroad Walk

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In April 2002, Joan Southgate stepped off from the small town of Ripley, Ohio, with a simple goal: She wanted to highlight the courage and resourcefulness of the American slave and conductor families who risked so much for freedom. She called her effort In Their Path! and set out to increase awareness of a moment in history when people came together across color, creed and class to do freedom's work. Her journey has taken her 519 miles across Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Canada. From schoolchildren to community groups, bank president to truck driver, her inspiring story and message of unity has resonated over the miles. Her walk has ended, but her mission -- to help heal the wounds of slavery and celebrate examples of interracial harmony -- continues.

Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic

Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic

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In Insignificant Things Matthew Francis Rarey traces the history of the African-associated amulets that enslaved and other marginalized people carried as tools of survival in the Black Atlantic world from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Often considered visually benign by white Europeans, these amulet pouches, commonly known as "mandingas," were used across Africa, Brazil, and Portugal and contained myriad objects, from herbs and Islamic prayers to shells and coins. Drawing on Arabic-language narratives from the West African Sahel, the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travel and merchant accounts of the West African Coast, and early nineteenth-century Brazilian police records, Rarey shows how mandingas functioned as portable archives of their makers' experiences of enslavement, displacement, and diaspora. He presents them as examples of the visual culture of enslavement and critical to conceptualizing Black Atlantic art history. Ultimately, Rarey looks to the archives of transatlantic slavery, which were meant to erase Black life, for objects like the mandingas that were created to protect it.
Jule (USED)
Jule (USED)

Jule: A Novel

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A first edition with VG dust jacket of one of Henderson's only two novels. George Wylie Henderson was born in 1904 in Warriorstand, Alabama, an unincorporated area of Macon County. He attended the limited and segregated rural school. He went to Tuskegee Institute, where he learned printing as a trade. Henderson moved to New York in the Great Migration and supported himself as a printer for the New York Daily News, also becoming associated with writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Henderson lived in New York City until his death.
Creative Age Press, Inc, NY, 1946. VG/VG

Just Listen For A Change: A guide for today's inner city youth to help them understand their fight against systemic racism and oppression

Just Listen For A Change: A guide for today's inner city youth to help them understand their fight against systemic racism and oppression

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Lonely Crusade (USED)

Lonely Crusade

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A classic of African-American fiction, Chester Himes's tale of a young black man who becomes a union organizer during WWII examines major problems in American life: racism, anti-Semitism, labor strife, and corruption.

"Mr. Himes undertakes to consider the everpresent subconscious terror of the black man, the political morality of American Communists, the psychology of union politics, Uncle Tomism, and the relationship between Jews and Blacks. The value of this book lies in its effort to understand the psychology of oppressed and oppressor and their relationship to each other."--James Baldwin

"A better story about a young black man who become a union organizer at a west coast airplane factory during World War II. The tragedy of this particular man is a psychological one, a growing despair over being black which hamstrings him in every human relationship."--The New Yorker

"Mr. Himes can write with power and effectiveness."--New York Times

1st edition; dust jacket in protective cover; price clipped; head of spine chipped; corners bumped; dark orange cloth; embossed design on cover; gilt design and lettering on spine; binding good; text clean. G/G

LOOKING FOR LORRAINE: THE RADI

LOOKING FOR LORRAINE: THE RADI

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Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction

Winner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award

A New York Times Notable Book of 2018

A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet least understood, Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century.

Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work--until now. In 2018, Hansberry will get the recognition she deserves with the PBS American Masters documentary "Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart" and Imani Perry's multi-dimensional, illuminating biography, Looking for Lorraine.

After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry used her prominence in myriad ways: challenging President Kennedy and his brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights, supporting African anti-colonial leaders, and confronting the romantic racism of the Beat poets and Village hipsters. Though she married a man, she identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being outed, joined one of the nation's first lesbian organizations. Hansberry associated with many activists, writers, and musicians, including Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. Looking for Lorraine is a powerful insight into Hansberry's extraordinary life--a life that was tragically cut far too short.

A Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Book for Nonfiction

A 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize Finalist

ME AND WHITE SUPREMACY: A GUID

ME AND WHITE SUPREMACY: A GUID

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Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor with Me and White Supremacy

Author Layla F. Saad wrote Me and White Supremacy to encourage people who hold white privilege to examine their (often unconscious) racist thoughts and behaviors through a unique, 28-day reflection process complete with journaling prompts. This guided journal, which includes the book's original weekly prompts and lots of space for note-taking and free-writing, is the perfect place to begin your antiracism journey. You will unpack:

  • Week One: White Privilege; White Fragility; Tone Policing; White Silence; White Superiority; White Exceptionalism
  • Week Two: Color Blindness; Anti-Blackness against Black Women, Black Men, and Black Children; Racist Stereotypes; Cultural Appropriation
  • Week Three: White Apathy; White Centering; Tokenism; White Saviorism; Optical Allyship; Being Called Out/Called In
  • Week Four: Friends; Family; Values; Losing Privilege; Your Commitments.
  • Awareness leads to action, and action leads to change. Create the change the world needs by creating change within yourself

    Mediocre

    Mediocre

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    From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race, an "illuminating" (New York Times Book Review) history of white male identity.

    What happens to a country that tells generation after generation of white men that they deserve power? What happens when success is defined by status over women and people of color, instead of by actual accomplishments?

    Through the last 150 years of American history -- from the post-reconstruction South and the mythic stories of cowboys in the West, to the present-day controversy over NFL protests and the backlash against the rise of women in politics -- Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of white male supremacy on women, people of color, and white men themselves. Mediocre investigates the real costs of this phenomenon in order to imagine a new white male identity, one free from racism and sexism.

    As provocative as it is essential, this book will upend everything you thought you knew about American identity and offers a bold new vision of American greatness.

    My Grandmother's Hands : Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

    My Grandmother's Hands : Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

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    A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

    "My Grandmother's Hands will change the direction of the movement for racial justice."-- Robin DiAngelo, New York Times bestselling author of White Fragility

    In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology.

    The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Menakem argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn't just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans--our police.

    My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not only about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.

  • Paves the way for a new, body-centered understanding of white supremacy--how it is literally in our blood and our nervous system.

  • Offers a step-by-step healing process based on the latest neuroscience and somatic healing methods, in addition to incisive social commentary.

  • Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP, is a leading voice in today's conversation on racialized trauma and the creator of Cultural Somatics, which utilizes the body and its natural resilience as mechanisms for growth. As a therapist and the founder of Justice Leadership Solutions, a leadership consulting firm, Resmaa dedicates his expertise to coaching leaders through civil unrest, organizational change, and community building
    My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives

    My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives

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    "Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an eminent Dean of American journalism, a vital voice whose work chronicled the civil rights movement and so much of what has transpired since then. My People is the definitive collection of her reportage and commentary. Spanning datelines in the American South, South Africa and points scattered in between, her work constitutes a history of our time as rendered by the pen of a singular and indispensable black woman journalist."-Jelani Cobb

    From the legendary Emmy Award-winning journalist, a collection of ground-breaking reportage from across five decades which vividly chronicles the experience of Black life in America today.

    At just nineteen years old, Charlayne Hunter-Gault made national news after she had mounted a successful legal challenge that culminated in her admission to the University of Georgia in January 1961--making her one of the first two Black students to integrate the institution. As an adult, Charlayne switched from being the subject of news to covering it, becoming one of its most recognized and acclaimed interpreters.

    Over more than five decades, this dedicated reporter charted a course through some of the world's most respected journalistic institutions, including The New Yorker, NBC, and the New York Times, where she was often the only Black woman in the newsroom. Throughout her storied career, Charlayne has chronicled the lives of Black people in America--shining a light on their experiences and giving a glimpse into their community as never before. Though she has covered numerous topics and events, observed as a whole, her work reveals the evolving issues at the forefront of Black Americans lives and how many of the same issues continue to persist today.

    My People showcases Charlayne's lifelong commitment to reporting on Black people in their totality, "in ways that are recognizable to themselves." Spanning from the Civil Rights Movement through the election and inauguration of America's first Black president and beyond, this invaluable collection shows the breadth and nuance of the Black experience through trials, tragedies, and triumphs of everyday lives.