Black History Month: Home

From Slave Ship to Harvard is the true story of an African American family in Maryland over six generations. The author has reconstructed a unique narrative of black struggle and achievement from paintings, photographs, books, diaries, court records, legal documents, and oral histories.

After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant information wanted advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide listeners back to devastating moments of family separation when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children.

A haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina, and her final escape and emancipation, Jacobs' narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published in 1861, is one of the most important books ever written documenting the traumas and horrors of slavery in the antebellum South.

In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom.

Langston Hughes was among the Harlem Renaissance authors who traveled widely during the 1920s. In the first volume of his autobiography, The Big Sea, covering the years through 1931, Hughes offers recollections of his childhood in Kansas, his high school years in Cleveland, his sojourn with his father in Mexico, and his initial reactions to New York City and Harlem.

Harriet Tubman's name is known world-wide and her exploits as a self-liberated Underground Railroad heroine are celebrated in children's literature, film, and history books, yet no major biography of Tubman has appeared since 1943. Jean M.

Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author's literary production and including her very latest works--the theatrical production Desdemona and her tenth and latest novel, Home.

In the last decade of the 20th century, during a time when African Americans were starting to take inventory of the gains of the civil rights movement and its effects on the lives of black professionals in the public sphere, the memoirs of several journalists were published, a number of which became national bestsellers.

Professor Clarence Taylor sheds some much-needed light on the rich intellectual and political tradition that lies in the black religious community. From the Pentecostalism of Bishop Smallwood Williams and the flamboyant leadership of the Reverend Al Sharpton, to the radical Presbyterianism of Milton Arthur Galamison and the controversial and mass-mobilization by Minister Louis Farrakhan, black religious leaders have figured prominently in the struggle for social equality in America.

The visionary author's masterpiece pulls us--along with her Black female hero--through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South.

Medgar Wiley Evers was an American civil rights activist in Mississippi, the state's field secretary for the NAACP, and a World War II veteran who had served in the United States Army.

The original essays in this comprehensive collection examine the lives and sports of famous and not-so-famous African American male and female athletes from the nineteenth century to today. Here are twenty insightful biographies that furnish perspectives on the changing status of these athletes and how these changes mirrored the transformation of sports, American society, and civil rights legislation.

A "gripping, sensitive" biography of the trailblazing singer who carved a path for African American artists including Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson (The Atlanta Voice).   Performing in a country rife with racism and segregation, the tenor Roland Hayes was the first African American man to reach international fame as a concert performer. He became one of the few artists in the world who could sell out Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall, and Covent Garden.

David Ruggles (1810-1849) was one of the most heroic--and has been one of the most often overlooked--figures of the early abolitionist movement in America. Graham Russell Gao Hodges provides the first biography of this African American activist, writer, publisher, and hydrotherapist who secured liberty for more than six hundred former bond people, the most famous of whom was Frederick Douglass.

For over two centuries, the topic of slave breeding has occupied a controversial place in the master narrative of American history. From nineteenth-century abolitionists to twentieth-century filmmakers and artists, Americans have debated whether slave owners deliberately and coercively manipulated the sexual practices and marital status of enslaved African Americans to reproduce new generations of slaves for profit. In this bold and provocative book, historian Gregory Smithers investigates how African Americans have narrated, remembered, and represented slave-breeding practices.

An updated edition of the classic study that took "an enormous step toward filling some of the voids in the literature of slavery" (The Washington Post Book World). One of the most important books published on slave society, Stolen Childhood focuses on the millions of children and youth enslaved in 19th-century America.

Paul Harvey illustrates how black Christian traditions provided theological, institutional, and personal strategies for cultural survival during bondage and into an era of partial freedom. At the same time, he covers the ongoing tug-of-war between themes of "respectability" versus practices derived from an African heritage; the adoption of Christianity by the majority; and the critique of the adoption of the "white man's religion" from the eighteenth century to the present.

This work describes the journalism careers of four black women within the context of the period in which they lived and worked. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Amy Jacques Garvey were among a group of approximately twenty black women journalists who wrote for newspapers, magazines and other media during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

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, place in the early reform movements for civil rights, women's suffrage, and Progressivism in the United States and abroad. Schechter's comprehensive treatment makes vivid the scope of Wells-Barnett's contributions and examines why the political philosophy and leadership of this extraordinary activist eventually became marginalized.

African Americans' long campaign for "the right to fight" forced Harry Truman to issue his 1948 executive order calling for equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. In War! What Is It Good For?, Kimberley Phillips examines how blacks' participation in the nation's wars after Truman's order and their protracted struggles for equal citizenship galvanized a vibrant antiwar activism that reshaped their struggles for freedom.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

For all of the continuity of African-American history, including the long history of struggle, the years between 1945 and 1970 represented a new moment. It was a time of new possibilities and new vision, a time when black Americans were determined to be the architects of an inclusive Americathat championed human rights for all.

Economic inequalities have been perhaps the most enduring problem facing African Americans since the civil rights movement, despite the attention they have received from activists. Although the civil rights movement dealt successfully with injustices like disenfranchisement and segregated public accommodations, economic disparities between blacks and whites remain sharp, and the wealth gap between the two groups has widened in the twenty-first century.

The Black Revolution on Campus is the definitive account of an extraordinary but forgotten chapter of the black freedom struggle. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black students organized hundreds of protests that sparked a period of crackdown, negotiation, and reform that profoundly transformed college life.

More than 5,000 North Carolina slaves escaped from their white owners to serve in the Union army during the Civil War. In Freedom for Themselves Richard Reid explores the stories of black soldiers from four regiments raised in North Carolina. Constructing a multidimensional portrait of the soldiers and their families, he provides a new understanding of the spectrum of black experience during and aftger the war.

The forty-year Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which took place in and around Tuskegee, Alabama, from the 1930s through the 1970s, has become a profound metaphor for medical racism, government malfeasance, and physician arrogance. Susan M. Reverby's Examining Tuskegee is a comprehensive analysis of the notorious study of untreated syphilis among African American men, who were told by U.S.

In African American Pioneers of Sociology,Pierre Saint-Arnaud examines the lasting contributions that African Americans have made to the field of sociology.

This study uses an abundance of primary sources to restore African American female participants in the Civil War to history by documenting their presence, contributions and experience.  Free and enslaved African American women took part in this process in a variety of ways, including black female charity and benevolence.

The forces that shaped the institution of slavery in the American South endured, albeit in altered form, long after slavery was abolished. Toiling in sweltering Virginia tobacco factories or in the kitchens of white families in Chicago, black women felt a stultifying combination of racial discrimination and sexual prejudice.

Blacks and Whites. Men and Women. Historically, each group has held very different types of jobs. The divide between these jobs was stark--clean or dirty, steady or inconsistent, skilled or unskilled. In such a rigidly segregated occupational landscape, race and gender radically limited labor opportunities, relegating Black women to the least desirable jobs. Opportunity Denied is the first comprehensive look at changes in race, gender, and women's work across time, comparing the labor force experiences of Black women to White women, Black men and White men.

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..

This collection chronicles the tumultuous history of landowning African American farmers from the end of the Civil War to today. Each essay provides a case study of people in one place at a particular time and the factors that affected their ability to acquire, secure, and protect their land. The contributors walk readers through a century and a half of African American agricultural history, from the strivings of black farm owners in the immediate post-emancipation period to the efforts of contemporary black farm owners to receive justice through the courts for decades of discrimination by the U.S Department of Agriculture.

This volume of essays examines the forced dispossession caused by the Middle Passage. The book analyzes the texts, religious rites, economic exchanges, dance, and music it elicited, both on the transatlantic journey and on the American continent. The totality of this collection establishes a broad topographical and temporal context for the Passage that extends from the interior of Africa across the Atlantic and to the interior of the Americas, and from the beginning of the Passage to the present day.

During the Great Depression, black intellectuals, labor organizers, and artists formed the National Negro Congress (NNC) to demand a "second emancipation" in America. Over the next decade, the NNC and its offshoot, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, sought to coordinate and catalyze local antiracist activism into a national movement to undermine the Jim Crow system of racial and economic exploitation.

They were black and white, young and old, men and women. In the spring and summer of 1961, they put their lives on the line, riding buses through the American South to challenge segregation in interstate transport. Their story is one of the most celebrated episodes of the civil rights movement, yet a full-length history has never been written until now. In these pages, acclaimed historian Raymond Arsenault provides a gripping account of six pivotal months that jolted the consciousness of America.

A revealing, comprehensive, and detailed account focusing on the people and personalities behind the Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott in 1955-1956, which became the catalyst for a national civil rights movement. * More than 15 original documents, interviews, letters to the editor, newspaper clippings, editorials, sidebars, and commentaries from eyewitnesses to this history help connect the reader to a bygone era

For the 380,000 African American soldiers who fought in World War I, Woodrow Wilson's charge to make the world "safe for democracy" carried life-or-death meaning. Chad L.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan signed into law a federal holiday to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, the holiday was first formally observed by the federal government. In response to the growing number of musical celebrations surrounding the holiday, Anthony McDonald published in 1996 the first edition of The Catalog of Music Written in Honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.

African American Performance and Theater History is an anthology of critical writings that explores the intersections of race, theater, and performance in America. Assembled by two esteemed scholars in black theater, Harry J. Elam, Jr. and David Krasner, and composed of essays fromacknowledged authorities in the field, this anthology is organized into four sections representative of the ways black theater, drama, and performance interact and enact continual social, cultural, and political dialogues.

"This readable and informative account . . . raises issues about the political and social intent of all children's literature. Essential." --Choice During the New Negro Renaissance, African American children's literature became a crucial medium through which a disparate community forged bonds of cultural, economic, and aesthetic solidarity.

As African American women left the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture.

The definitive biography of musical legend Bessie Smith: "A landmark in the writing of jazz history . . . First-rate" (The Washington Post).   Known as the "Empress of the Blues," Bessie Smith was a successful vaudeville entertainer who became the highest paid African American performer of the Roaring Twenties.

This study is about how four representative African American poets in the 1960s, Langston Hughes, Umbra's David Henderson, and the Black Arts Movement's Sonia Sanchez, and Amiri Baraka engage, in the tradition of African griots, in poetic dialogues with aesthetics, music, politics, and Black History, and in so doing narrate, using jazz as meta-language, genealogies, etymologies, cultural legacies, and Black (hi)stories.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Black gospel music grew from obscure nineteenth-century beginnings to become the leading style of sacred music in black American communities after World War II. Jerma A. Jackson traces the music's unique history, profiling the careers of several singers--particularly Sister Rosetta Tharpe--and demonstrating the important role women played in popularizing gospel.

In A City Called Heaven, gospel announcer and music historian Robert Marovich shines a light on the humble origins of a majestic genre and its indispensable bond to the city where it found its voice: Chicago.   Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through the Great Migration that brought it to Chicago.

Rita Dove (b. 1952) was elected Poet Laureate--the first ever African-American to hold the position--in 1993, in recognition of work that combines racially sensitive observation with searing and immediate personal experience. She is best known for her substantial body of poetry, although she has also been recognized for her many accomplishments in drama and fiction, written in both German and English.

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.

Edward A Bouchet was the first African-American to receive the doctorate in any field of knowledge in the United States and that area was physics. He was granted the degree in 1876 from Yale University making him at that time one of the few persons to hold the physics doctorate from an American university. Bouchet played a significant role in the education of African-Americans during the last quarter of the 19th century through his teaching and mentoring activities at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Explores modern African-American Islamic thought within the context of Islamic history, giving special attention to questions of universality versus particularity.

Presenting an innovative approach to performance studies and literary history, Soyica Colbert argues for the centrality of black performance traditions to African American literature, including preaching, dancing, blues and gospel, and theatre itself, showing how these performance traditions create the 'performative ground' of African American literary texts.

Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry "The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years."--Publishers Weekly "All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it."--Publishers Weekly "If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it."--NPR "The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us.

The Muse in Bronzeville, a dynamic reappraisal of a neglected period in African American cultural history, is the first comprehensive critical study of the creative awakening that occurred on Chicago's South Side from the early 1930s to the cold war. Coming of age during the hard Depression years and in the wake of the Great Migration, this generation of Black creative artists produced works of literature, music, and visual art fully comparable in distinction and scope to the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance.

Transforming Scriptures is the first sustained treatment of African American women writers' intellectual, even theological, engagements with the book Northrop Frye referred to as the "great code" of Western civilization. Katherine Clay Bassard looks at poetry, novels, speeches, sermons, and prayers by Maria W. Stewart, Frances Harper, Hannah Crafts, Harriet E. Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Sherley Anne Williams and discusses how such texts respond as a collective "literary witness" to the use of the Bible for purposes of social domination.

Despite its extraordinary popularity and worldwide influence, the world of rap and hip hop is under constant attack. Impressions and interpretations of its meaning and power are perpetually being challenged.