Books
How to be an Antiracist by Call Number: ebookISBN: 0525509291Publication Date: 2019"The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it -- and then dismantle it." Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America -- but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. In this book, Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. How to Be an Antiracist is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society." --Publisher description.
"Punctures the myths of a post-racial America, examining what racism really is—and what we should do about it.” -- TIME
Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9781728209821Publication Date: 2020"When Layla Saad ran a free month-long Instagram challenge during the summer of 2018, she had no idea it would become an international cultural movement. Thousands of people from around the world were galvanized by the #meandwhitesupremacy challenge, examining and owning responsibility for the ways in which they uphold white supremacy. Over 80,000 people downloaded her guide to the movement, Me and White Supremacy Workbook in the space of just six months. And now, that guide is a published book. Me and White Supremacy leads readers through a journey of understanding their white privilege and participation in white supremacy, so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on black, indigenous and people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too. The book goes beyond the original workbook by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and includes expanded definitions, examples, and further resources." -- Publisher description
“A bracing, highly useful tool for any discussion of combating racism.”-- Kirkus Review
White Fragility: Why it's so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9780807047422Publication Date: 2018"Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo explores how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively."--Publisher description.
“A vital, necessary, and beautiful book, a bracing call to white folk everywhere to see their whiteness for what it is and to seize the opportunity to make things better now.” -- Michael Eric Dyson
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9781408870570Publication Date: 2017"Exploring everything from eradicated black history to the inextricable link between class and race, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is the essential handbook for anyone who wants to understand race relations in Britain today." -- Publisher description
""Eddo-Loge's powerful debut is based on a 2014 blog post of the same title about the frustrations of talking about race and racism. The post went viral and sparked deeper conversations further detailed in this book. She clearly outlines the history of oppression in her country by examining systemic racism, white privilege, feminism, immigration, race and class, social justice, and more. Of note is the review of intersectionality in feminism and the difficulties of understanding feminism without considering class and race as part of the struggle. This informative work challenges readers to study the patterns of racism and how it has unwittingly upheld societies." -- Library Journal
So You Want to Talk about Race by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, E184.A1 O454 2018ISBN: 9781580056779Publication Date: 2018"In this New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a hard-hitting but user-friendly examination of race in America. Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy--from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans--has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair--and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend? In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to "model minorities" in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life." -- Publisher description
"Oluo gives us--both white people and people of color--that language to engage in clear, constructive, and confident dialogue with each other about how to deal with racial prejudices and biases." -- National Book Review
Stamped from the Beginning by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level E185.61 .K358 2016ISBN: 9781568584638Publication Date: 2016"In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them—and in the process, gives us reason to hope." -- Publisher description
“As compelling as the juiciest biography.” -- The Los Angeles Times
The New Jim Crow by Call Number: OnlineISBN: 1595588191Publication Date: 2012"The New Jim Crow was initially published with a modest first printing and reasonable expectations for a hard-hitting book on a tough topic. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet, as legal star Michelle Alexander reveals, today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal." -- Publisher description
“Two years after Obama’s election, Alexander put the entire criminal justice system on trial, exposing racial discrimination from lawmaking to policing to the denial of voting rights to ex-prisoners. This bestseller struck the spark that would eventually light the fire of Black Lives Matter.” -- Ibram X. Kendi, The New York Times
The Condemnation of Blackness by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9780674035973Publication Date: 2010"The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, Khalil Gibran Muhammad reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies." -- Publisher description
"The role of social-science research in creating the myth of black criminality is the focus of this seminal work... It shows how progressive reformers, academics, and policy-makers subscribed to a 'statistical discourse' about black crime...one that shifted blame onto black people for their disproportionate incarceration and continues to sustain gross racial disparities in American law enforcement and criminal justice."
--Elizabeth Hinton, The Nation"
Writing Beyond Race by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9781136266041Publication Date: 2012What are the conditions needed for our nation to bridge cultural and racial divides? By "writing beyond race," noted cultural critic bell hooks models the constructive ways scholars, activists, and readers can challenge and change systems of domination. In the spirit of previous classics like Outlaw Culture and Reel to Real, this new collection of compelling essays interrogates contemporary cultural notions of race, gender, and class. From the films Precious and Crash to recent biographies of Malcolm X and Henrietta Lacks, hooks offers provocative insights into the way race is being talked about in this "post-racial" era." -- Publisher description
The Black Campus Movement by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9780230117815Publication Date: 2012This book provides the first national study of this intense and challenging struggle which disrupted and refashioned institutions in almost every state. It also illuminates the context for one of the most transformative educational movements in American history through a history of black higher education and black student activism before 1965.
“In an impressively woven tapestry of primary sources, archival research, and interviews, [Kendi] masterfully demonstrates just how profoundly Black students’ activism changed campus culture and politics, if not the very character of American higher education.” -- Yohuru Williams, former Fairfield U Dean of CAS and author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power and the Black Panthers in New Haven
The Burning House by Call Number: ebookISBN: 0300235623Publication Date: 2018"In this dramatic reexamination of the Jim Crow South, Anders Walker demonstrates that racial segregation fostered not simply terror and violence, but also diversity, one of our most celebrated ideals. He investigates how prominent intellectuals like Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, and Zora Neale Hurston found pluralism in Jim Crow, a legal system that created two worlds, each with its own institutions, traditions, even cultures. The intellectuals discussed in this book all agreed that black culture was resilient, creative, and profound, brutally honest in its assessment of American history. By contrast, James Baldwin likened white culture to a “burning house,” a frightening place that endorsed racism and violence to maintain dominance." -- Publisher description
The Warmth of Other Suns by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, E185.6 .W55 2011ISBN: 9780679763888Publication Date: 2011In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.
“An astonishing work. . . . Isabel Wilkerson delivers! . . . With the precision of a surgeon, Wilkerson illuminates the stories of bold, faceless African-Americans who transformed cities and industries with their hard work and determination to provide their children with better lives.” -- Essence
Killing the Black Body by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, HQ766.5.U5 R58 2017ISBN: 9780679758693Publication Date: 1997In 1997, this groundbreaking book made a powerful entrance into the national conversation on race. In a media landscape dominated by racially biased images of welfare queens and crack babies, Killing the Black Body exposed America's systemic abuse of Black women's bodies. From slave masters' economic stake in bonded women's fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s, these abuses pointed to the degradation of Black motherhood--and the exclusion of Black women's reproductive needs in mainstream feminist and civil rights agendas. Now, some two decades later, Killing the Black Body has not only exerted profound influence, but also remains as crucial as ever--a rallying cry for education, awareness, and action on extending reproductive justice to all women." -- Publisher description
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century by ISBN: 1281605662Publication Date: 2011This groundbreaking book by the acclaimed "Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of biological concept of race--revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases--continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era. Named one of the ten best black nonfiction books 2011 by AFRO.com, "Fatal Invention" offers a timely and "provocative analysis" ("Nature") of race, science, and politics by one of the nation's leading legal scholars and social critics." -- Publisher description
“A must-read for those looking for an enlightened discussion of race in the 21st century.” -- Library Journal
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, E184.A1 F54 2014ISBN: 9781781683132Publication Date: 2014"Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.
That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions." -- Publisher description
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, R853.H8 W37 2008ISBN: 9780767915472Publication Date: 2008"From the era of slavery to the present day, the first full history of black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. Provides a provocative study of the history of medical experimentation on African Americans, from the colonial era to the present day, revealing the experimental exploitation and poor medical treatment suffered by blacks, often without any form of consent, and offering new details about the infamous Tuskegee experiment and other medical atrocities" -- Publisher description
The History of White People by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, E184.A1 P29 2010ISBN: 9780393049343Publication Date: 2010Telling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of "whiteness" for economic, scientific, and political ends. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes a huge gap in literature that has long focused on the non-white and forcefully reminds us that the concept of "race" is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed as it has been driven by a long and rich history of events." -- Publisher description
Where We Stand by Call Number: ebookISBN: 0203906349Publication Date: 2000" Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan Coop boards, Where We Stand is a successful black woman's reflection--personal, straight forward, and rigorously honest--on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them." --Publisher description
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9781608465651Publication Date: 2016In this collection of essays, interviews, and speeches, the renowned activist examines today's issues--from Black Lives Matter to prison abolition and more. Activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis has been a tireless fighter against oppression for decades. Now, the iconic author of Women, Race, and Class offers her latest insights into the struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine." -- Publisher description
"She has eyes in the back of our head. With her we can survive and resist." -- John Berger
A Burst of Light: and Other Essays by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9780486818993Publication Date: 2017Winner of the 1988 Before Columbus Foundation National Book Award, this path-breaking collection of essays is a clarion call to build communities that nurture our spirit. Lorde announces the need for a radical politics of intersectionality while struggling to maintain her own faith as she wages a battle against liver cancer. From reflections on her struggle with the disease to thoughts on lesbian sexuality and African-American identity in a straight white man's world, Lorde's voice remains enduringly relevant in today's political landscape.
"Lorde's words -- on race, cancer, intersectionality, parenthood, injustice -- burn with relevance 25 years after her death." -- O, The Oprah Magazine
The Fire Next Time by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, E185.61 .B195 1993ISBN: 9780679744726Publication Date: 1963"A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation, gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement—and still lights the way to understanding race in America today. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism." -- Publisher description
"Basically the finest essay I've ever read. . . . Baldwin refused to hold anyone's hand. He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince you. He wrote beyond you." --Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, E185.97.L5 A31ISBN: 9780345379757Publication Date: 1992"In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America." -- Publisher description
“The most important book I’ll ever read, it changed the way I thought, it changed the way I acted. It has given me courage I didn’t know I had inside me. I’m one of hundreds of thousands whose lives were changed for the better.” -- Spike Lee
Between the World and Me by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, E185.615 .C6335 2015ISBN: 9780812993547Publication Date: 2015Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
-- Publisher description
"Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” -- Rolling Stone
Assata: An Autobiography by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, E185.97 .S53 A3 1987ISBN: 1556520743Publication Date: 1987"This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou." -- Publisher description
Picking up her autobiography, first published in 1988, for the first time in nearly 20 years, I was struck by an odd sense that her brave and powerful account of the black power movement in the 1960s and 1970s feels almost more relevant than when I first read it. Her condemnation of the ‘one per cent’ (who control the wealth) and the criminal justice system resonates strongly with contemporary movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter.” -- Anna Hartnell, Times Higher Education
The Radical King by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, E185.97.K5 A5 2014ISBN: 9780807012826Publication Date: 2015"Every year, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is celebrated as one of the greatest orators in US history, an ambassador for nonviolence who became perhaps the most recognizable leader of the civil rights movement. But after more than forty years, few people appreciate how truly radical he was. Arranged thematically in four parts, The Radical King includes twenty-three selections, curated and introduced by Dr. Cornel West, that illustrate King’s revolutionary vision, underscoring his identification with the poor, his unapologetic opposition to the Vietnam War, and his crusade against global imperialism."
-- Publisher description
"Although much of America did not know the radical King—and too few know today—the FBI and US government did. They called him ‘the most dangerous man in America.’ . . . This book unearths a radical King that we can no longer sanitize.” -- Dr. Cornel West
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by Call Number: ebookISBN: 1299563384Publication Date: 1967In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering, asserting that humankind-for the first time-has the resources and technology to eradicate poverty." -- Publisher description
Black Feminist Thought by Call Number: ebookISBN: 1135960143Publication Date: 2002"In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought." -- Publisher description
"With the publication of Black Feminist Thought, black feminism has moved to a new level. Her work sets a standard for the discussion of black women's lives, experiences, and thought that demands rigorous attention to the complexity of these experiences and an exploration of a multiplicity of responses." -- Women's Review of Books
Ain't I a Woman by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, E185.86 .H73 1992ISBN: 089608129XPublication Date: 1999"A groundbreaking work of feminist history and theory analyzing the complex relations between various forms of oppression. Ain't I a Woman examines the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the historic devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism within the recent women's movement, and black women's involvement with feminism." -- Publisher description
"Since the publication of Ain’t I A Woman in 1981, bell hooks has become one of the United States’ most acute cultural critics. Writing from a clearly stated position as an African American woman, hooks’s early work helped re-map feminist theory in the United States with her consistent analysis of the interrelationships of race, gender and class in contemporary cultural life." -- Sally Keenan, Journal of American Studies
Thick by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9781620974360Publication Date: 2019"In these eight explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom--award-winning professor and author of Lower Ed--embraces her role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society"-- Publisher description.
“Reading Thick is like holding a mirror to your soul and to that of America. [S]earingly intimate and astute . . . at once painfully honest and gloriously affirming.” -- Dorothy Roberts
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Call Number: ebookISBN: 1453224068Publication Date: 2011"Walker's collection of early nonfiction serves as the manifesto of a young artist-and an illuminating self-portrait What is a womanist? Alice Walker sets out to define the concept in this anthology of early essays and other nonfiction pieces. As she outlines it, a womanist is a person who prefers to side with the oppressed: with women, with people of color, with the poor. As a writer, Walker has always taken such people as her primary subjects, and her search for paths toward self-possession and freedom always holds out hope for the transformative power of compassion and love. Whether she's tas taking on nuclear proliferation, the promise and problems of the civil rights movement, or her own creative process, Walker always brings to bear a fearless determination to tell the truth." -- Publisher description
Sister Outsider by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3562.O75 S5 1984ISBN: 0895941414Publication Date: 1984"In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde’s philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published." -- Publisher description
Women, Race, and Class by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, HT1521.D38 1983ISBN: 9780394713519Publication Date: 1983"A powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. From the widely revered and legendary political activist and scholar Angela Davis." -- Publisher description
This Bridge Called My Back by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS509.F44T5ISBN: 091317503XPublication Date: 1983Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, “the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.” -- Publisher description
"This Bridge Called My Back … dispels all doubt about the power of a single text to radically transform the terrain of our theory and practice. Twenty years after its publication, we can now see how it helped to untether the production of knowledge from its disciplinary anchors―and not only in the field of women’s studies. This Bridge has allowed us to define the promise of research on race, gender, class and sexuality as profoundly linked to collaboration and coalition-building. And perhaps most important, it has offered us strategies for transformative political practice that are as valid today as they were two decades ago.” -- Angela Davis
Sister Citizen by Call Number: ebookISBN: 0300165544Publication Date: 2011"Jezebel's sexual lasciviousness, Mammy's devotion, and Sapphire's outspoken anger--these are among the most persistent stereotypes that black women encounter in contemporary American life. Hurtful and dishonest, such representations force African American women to navigate a virtual crooked room that shames them and shapes their experiences as citizens. Many respond by assuming a mantle of strength that may convince others, and even themselves, that they do not need help. But as a result, the unique political issues of black women are often ignored and marginalized. In this groundbreaking book, Melissa V. Harris-Perry uses multiple methods of inquiry, including literary analysis, political theory, focus groups, surveys, and experimental research, to understand more deeply black women's political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images. Not a traditional political science work concerned with office-seeking, voting, or ideology, "Sister Citizen" instead explores how African American women understand themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing. " -- Publisher description
Pushout by Call Number: ebookISBN: 1620971208Publication Date: 2016"Fifteen-year-old Diamond stopped going to school the day she was expelled for lashing out at peers who constantly harassed and teased her for something everyone on the staff had missed: she was being trafficked for sex. After months on the run, she was arrested and sent to a detention center for violating a court order to attend school. Just 16 percent of female students, Black girls make up more than one-third of all girls with a school-related arrest. The first trade book to tell these untold stories, Pushout exposes a world of confined potential and supports the growing movement to address the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures. For four years Monique W. Morris, author of Black Stats, chronicled the experiences of black girls across the country whose intricate lives are misunderstood, highly judged--by teachers, administrators, and the justice system--and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish. Morris shows how, despite obstacles, stigmas, stereotypes, and despair, black girls still find ways to breathe remarkable dignity into their lives in classrooms, juvenile facilities, and beyond." -- Publisher description
All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave by Call Number: ebookISBN: 1558618996Publication Date: 2016"Originally published in 1982, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies is the first comprehensive collection of black feminist scholarship. Featuring contributions from Alice Walker and the Combahee River Collective, this book is vital to today's conversation on race and gender in America. With an afterword from Salon columnist Brittney Cooper. Coeditors Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith are authors and former women's studies professors. Brittney Cooper is an assistant professor of women and gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University and a co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective." -- Publisher description
Giovanni's Room by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3552.A45 G5ISBN: 0440328810Publication Date: 1956"Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart." -- Publisher description
"If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one." --Michael Ondaatje
No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9780822362227Publication Date: 2016"The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of study. Topics include "raw" sex, pornography, the carceral state, gentrification, gender nonconformity, social media, the relationship between black feminist studies and black trans studies, the black queer experience throughout the black diaspora, and queer music, film, dance, and theater." -- Publisher description
How We Fight for Our Lives by ISBN: 9781501132735Publication Date: 2019"Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir about a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves." -- Publisher description
"Urgent, immediate, matter of fact…The prose in Saeed Jones’s memoir How We Fight for Our Lives shines with a poet’s desire to give intellections the force of sense impressions.” -- The New Yorker
Black. Queer. Southern. Women by Call Number: ebookISBN: 1469641119Publication Date: 2018Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities." -- Publisher description
“Johnson lays the foundation for other scholars to engage a younger generation of black queer southern women. For scholars, students, and teachers in southern, African American, gender and sexuality, and oral and folklore studies, Johnson’s oral history will be indispensable for future interventions.” -- Journal of Southern History
Gay Resistance: The Hidden History by Call Number: ebookISBN: 0932323030Publication Date: 1997"Both newcomers and veterans, students and teachers, will benefit from this pithy booklet--a classic of the 1970s--which reviews the legacy of queer defiance and proposes bold strategies for achieving the rights of lesbians/gays/bisexuals and transgender people. The authors pinpoint the origins of homophobia and tell the story of those who fought back: from German organizers in the 1860s, to the homophile pioneers of the 1950s Mattachine Society; from the youth and drag queens of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, to the Gay Liberation Front and the eruption of lesbian feminism in the 1970s. The role of lesbians and gays of color is acknowledged and the work of groundbreaking lesbian writers is discussed." -- Publisher description
An Examination of Black LGBT Populations Across the United States by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, HQ73.3.U6 B38 2017ISBN: 9781137565211Publication Date: 2016"This book utilizes personal narratives and survey data from over 2,100 respondents to explore the diversity of experiences across Black LGBT communities within the United States. The authors document and celebrate many of the everyday strengths and strategies employed by this extraordinary population to navigate and negotiate their daily lives." -- Publisher description
Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, HQ76.27.A37 B688 2019ISBN: 9780226589794Publication Date: 2018"Evidence of Being opens on a grim scene: Washington DC's gay black community in the 1980s, ravaged by AIDS, the crack epidemic, and a series of unsolved murders, seemingly abandoned by the government and mainstream culture. Yet in this darkest of moments, a new vision of community and hope managed to emerge. Darius Bost's account of the media, poetry, and performance of this time and place reveals a stunning confluence of activism and the arts. In Washington and New York during the 1980s and '90s, gay black men banded together, using creative expression as a tool to challenge the widespread views that marked them as unworthy of grief. They created art that enriched and re-imagined their lives in the face of pain and neglect, while at the same time forging a path toward bold new modes of existence. At once a corrective to the predominantly white male accounts of the AIDS crisis and an openhearted depiction of the possibilities of black gay life, Evidence of Being above all insists on the primacy of community over loneliness, and hope over despair." -- Publisher description
Not Straight, Not White:Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis by Call Number: ebookISBN: 1469626845Publication Date: 2016"This compelling book recounts the history of black gay men from the 1950s to the 1990s, tracing how the major movements of the times—from civil rights to black power to gay liberation to AIDS activism—helped shape the cultural stigmas that surrounded race and homosexuality. In locating the rise of black gay identities in historical context, Kevin Mumford explores how activists, performers, and writers rebutted negative stereotypes and refused sexual objectification. Examining the lives of both famous and little-known black gay activists—from James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin to Joseph Beam and Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald—Mumford analyzes the ways in which movements for social change both inspired and marginalized black gay men." -- Publisher description
“Indispensable for those who reject the erasure of black queerness in American civil rights history." -- The Guardian
Chokehold: Policing Black Men by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9781620970348Publication Date: 2017"In this explosive new book, a former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread--all with the support of judges and politicians. In his no-holds-barred style, Butler, whose scholarship has been featured on 60 Minutes, uses new data to demonstrate that white men commit the majority of violent crime in the United States.Butler also frankly discusses the problem of black on black violence and how to keep communities safer--without relying as much on police. Chokehold powerfully demonstrates why current efforts to reform law enforcement will not create lasting change." -- Publisher description
“Insightful reading for all genders and generations. By engaging in courageous dialogue, Paul Butler illustrates how the system is broken on purpose, and why those who believe in justice can’t settle for shortsighted reform. With its well-researched, poignant answers to the most complicated questions of our day, Chokehold is a crucial read for those who want to stay woke and win.” -- Opal Tometi, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter
Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9781101871287Publication Date: 2017"Policing the Black Man explores and critiques the many ways the criminal justice system impacts the lives of African American boys and men at every stage of the criminal process, from arrest through sentencing. Essays range from an explication of the historical roots of racism in the criminal justice system to an examination of modern-day police killings of unarmed black men. The contributors discuss and explain racial profiling, the power and discretion of police and prosecutors, the role of implicit bias, the racial impact of police and prosecutorial decisions, the disproportionate imprisonment of black men, the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, and the Supreme Court’s failure to provide meaningful remedies for the injustices in the criminal justice system." -- Publisher Notes
"“Somewhere among the anger, mourning and malice that Policing the Black Man documents lies the pursuit of justice. This powerful book demands our fierce attention.” —Toni Morrison
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9781608466849Publication Date: 2016"What is the reality of policing in the United States? Do the police keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do recent police killings of young black people in the United States fit into the historical and global context of anti-blackness? This collection of reports and essays explores police violence against black, brown, indigenous and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures. It also makes a compelling and provocative argument against calling the police. Contributions cover a broad range of issues including the killing by police of black men and women, police violence against Latino and indigenous communities, law enforcement's treatment of pregnant people and those with mental illness, and the impact of racist police violence on parenting." -- Publisher description
"An urgently necessary book, one that deepens and complicates thinking around police violence without waiting for a fresh on-camera brutality to restart the national conversation." -- New City
From Enforcers to Guardians: A Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence by Call Number: ebookISBN: 1421436442Publication Date: 2020"Excessive police violence and its disproportionate targeting of minority communities has existed in the United States since police forces first formed in the colonial period. A personal tragedy for its victims, for the people who love them, and for their broader communities, excessive police violence is also a profound violation of human and civil rights. Most public discourse about excessive police violence focuses, understandably, on the horrors of civilian deaths. In From Enforcers to Guardians, Hannah L. F. Cooper and Mindy Thompson Fullilove approach the issue from a radically different angle: as a public health problem. By using a public health framing, this book challenges readers to recognize that the suffering created by excessive police violence extends far outside of death to include sexual, psychological, neglectful, and nonfatal physical violence as well. Arguing that excessive police violence has been deliberately used to marginalize working-class and minority communities, Cooper and Fullilove describe what we know about the history, distribution, and health impacts of police violence, from slave patrols in colonial times to war on drugs policing in the present-day United States." -- Publisher description
Blackhood Against the Police Power by Call Number: ebookISBN: 161186318XPublication Date: 2019"Both significant and timely, Blackhood Against the Police Power addresses the punishment of "race" and the disavowal of sexual violence central to the contemporary "post-racial" culture of politics. Here the author asserts that the post-racial presents an antiblack animus that should be read as desiring the end of blackness and the black liberation movement's singular ethical claims. The book redefines policing as a sociohistorical process of implementing antiblackness and, in so doing, redefines racism as an act of sexual violence that produces the punishment of race. It smartly critiques the way leading antiracist discourse is frequently complicit with antiblackness and recalls the original 1960s conception of black studies as a corrective to the deficiencies in today's critical discourse on race and sex. The book explores these lines of inquiry to pinpoint how the history of racial slavery wraps itself in a new discourse of disavowal. In this way, Blackhood Against the Police Power responds to a range of texts, policies, practices, and representations complicit with the police power--from the Fourth Amendment and the movements to curtail stop-and-frisk policing and mass incarceration to popular culture treatments of blackness to the leading academic discourses on race and sex politics." -- Publisher description
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, HV9950 .F655 2017ISBN: 9780374189976Publication Date: 2017"An original and consequential argument about race, crime, and the law today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics--and their impact on people of color--are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime." -- Publisher description
No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity by Call Number: ebookISBN: 1469627590Publication Date: 2016"In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic exploitation. Exposed to violence and rape, subjugated on chain gangs and as convict laborers, and forced to serve additional time as domestic workers before they were allowed their freedom, black women faced a pitiless system of violence, terror, and debasement. Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley uncovers imprisoned women's brutalization in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also illuminating the prisoners' acts of resistance and sabotage, challenging ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy and offering alternative conceptions of social and political life"-- Publisher description
City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469631196Publication Date: 2017"Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernández documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration"-- Publisher description
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Call Number: eBookISBN: 0520242017Publication Date: 2007"Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called “the biggest prison building project in the history of the world.” Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. " -- Publisher description
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780674919228Publication Date: 2020"More than two million men and women are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities, it also exposes them to shocking levels of violence and sexual assault and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America's prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them. Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author's own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art." -- Publisher description
The Bluest Eye by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level PS3563.O8749 B55 2007ISBN: 9780307278449Publication Date: 1970"Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing." -- Publisher description
"You can't go wrong by reading or re-reading the collected works of Toni Morrison. Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Sula, everything else -- they're transcendent, all of them. You'll be glad you read them."--Barack Obama
Homegoing by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3607.Y37 H66 2016ISBN: 9781101947135Publication Date: 2016"Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation." -- Publisher description
“Epic . . . a timely, riveting portrayal of the global African Diaspora—and the aftereffects that linger on to this day.” -- The Root
Native Son by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3545.R815 N28ISBN: 9780061148507Publication Date: 1940"Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America." -- Publisher description
“The most powerful American novel to appear since The Grapes of Wrath. . . so overwhelming is its central drive, so gripping its mounting intensity.” -- The New Yorker
Beloved by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3563.O8749 B4 2006ISBN: 9780525659273Publication Date: 1987"Toni Morrison’s magnificent Pulitzer Prize–winning work—first published in 1987—brought the wrenching experience of slavery into the literature of our time, enlarging our comprehension of America’s original sin. Set in post–Civil War Ohio, it is the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has withstood savagery and not gone mad. Sethe, who now lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing apparition who calls herself Beloved." -- Publisher description
The Sellout by Call Number: tacks Upper Level, PS3552.E19 S45 2016ISBN: 9781250083258Publication Date: 2016"A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant." -- Publisher description
“The Sellout isn't just one of the most hilarious American novels in years, it also might be the first truly great satirical novel of the century . . . [It] is a comic masterpiece, but it's much more than just that-it's one of the smartest and most honest reflections on race and identity in America in a very long time.” --Michael Schaub, NPR
Queenie by ISBN: 9781501196010Publication Date: 2019"Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth." -- Publisher description
“This book is equal parts millennial comedy and treatise on modern race relations, and a work of fiction that leaps from the page as all truth, no filler.” -- NPR
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3623.A7323 S56 2017ISBN: 9781501126062Publication Date: 2017-09-05"In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award–winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing journeys through Mississippi’s past and present, examining the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power—and limitations—of family bonds." -- Publisher description
“The heart of Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing is story—the yearning for a narrative to help us understand ourselves, the pain of the gaps we’ll never fill, the truths that are failed by words and must be translated through ritual and song...Ward’s writing throbs with life, grief, and love, and this book is the kind that makes you ache to return to it.” -- Buzzfeed
The Hate U Give by Call Number: Popular Reading Collection Main Level, PZ7.1.T4567 Hat 2017ISBN: 9780062498533Publication Date: 2017"Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life." -- Publisher description
The Street; The Narrows by Call Number: tacks Upper Level PS3531.E933 A6 2019ISBN: 9781598536010Publication Date: 2019Two of the renowned Ann Petry's novels are collected together in this 2019 Library of America publication. "The Street follows Lutie Johnson, a young, newly single mother, as she struggles to make a better life for her son, Bub. An intimate account of the aspirations and challenges of black, female, working-class life, much of it set on a single block in Harlem, the novel exposes structural inequalities in American society while telling a complex human story, as overpriced housing, lack of opportunity, sexual harassment, and racism conspire to limit Lutie's potential and to break her buoyant spirit. The Narrows (1953) is Petry's most ambitious and accomplished novel--a multi-layered, stylistically innovative exploration of themes of race, class, sexuality, gender, and power in postwar America. Centered around an adulterous interracial affair in a small Connecticut town. Also included in the volume are three of Petry's previously uncollected essays related to the novels and a newly researched chronology of the author's life, prepared with the assistance of her daughter Elisabeth Petry" -- Publisher description
Sweat by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9781559365321Publication Date: 2017"A topical reflection of the present and poignant outcome of America's economic decline. Filled with warm humour and tremendous heart, Sweat tells the story of a group of friends who have spent their lives sharing drinks, secrets and laughs while working together on the factory floor. But when layoffs and picket lines begin to chip away at their trust, the friends find themselves pitted against each other in a heart-wrenching fight to stay afloat. Sweat premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in October 2015, and later went on to transfer to Broadway in March 2017. It won the 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama." -- Publisher description
Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Call Number: ebookISBN: 1613128622Publication Date: 2017"Octavia E. Butler's bestselling literary science-fiction masterpiece, Kindred, now in graphic novel format. More than 35 years after its release, Kindred continues to draw in new readers with its deep exploration of the violence and loss of humanity caused by slavery in the United States, and its complex and lasting impact on the present day. Adapted by celebrated academics and comics artists Damian Duffy and John Jennings, this graphic novel powerfully renders Butler's mysterious and moving story, which spans racial and gender divides in the antebellum South through the 20th century." -- Publisher description
I Shall Not Be Moved by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3551.N464 I17 1990ISBN: 0394586182Publication Date: 1990In her first book of poetry since Why Don't You Sing? Maya Angelou, bestselling author of the classic autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, writes with lyric, passionate intensity that reaches out to touch the heart and mind. This memorable collection of poems exhibits Maya Angelou's unique gift for capturing the triumph and pain of being black and every man and woman's struggle to be free. Filled with bittersweet intimacies and ferocious courage, these poems are gems--many-faceted, bright with wisdom, radiant with life.
S O S by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3552.A583 A6 2014ISBN: 9780802123350Publication Date: 2015Throughout Baraka's career as a prolific writer (also published as LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. The environments and social values that inspired his poetics changed during the course of his life, a trajectory that can be traced in this retrospective spanning more than five decades of profoundly evolving subjects and techniques. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history.
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3503.R7244 A6 2005ISBN: 1931082871Publication Date: 2005Discover the most enduring works of legendary poet Gwendolyn Brooks--the first black author to win a Pulitzer Prize--in one collectible volume
"If you wanted a poem," wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, "you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing." From the life of Chicago's South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts.
The Tradition by Call Number: ebookISBN: 1619321955Publication Date: 2019Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex--a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues--is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 by Call Number: ebookISBN: 1942683006Publication Date: 2015Landmark volume containing all of Lucille Clifton's published work and 55 previously unpublished poems. Foreword by Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison.
On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3554.O884 O52 1999ISBN: 0393047229Publication Date: 1999From the opening sequence, probing the private griefs and dreams of a working class family, to the emblematic grace of the living legend Rosa Parks, these poems by the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Poet Laureate explore the intersection of individual fates with the grand arc of history.
Brutal Imagination by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3555.A35 B78 2001ISBN: 0399147187Publication Date: 2001Nominated for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry, Brutal Imagination is the work of a poet at the peak of his considerable powers. Its two central sections--which could be called song cycles--confront the same subject: the black man in America. The first, which carries the book's title, deals with the vision of the black man in white imagination. Narrated largely by the black kidnapper that Susan Smith invented to cover up the killing of her two sons, the cycle displays all of Mr. Eady's range: his deft wit, inventiveness, and skillfully targeted anger, and the way in which he combines the subtle with the charged, street idiom with elegant inversions, harsh images with the sweetly ordinary. The second cycle, "Running Man," presents poems Mr. Eady drew on for his libretto for the music-drama of the same name, which was a 1999 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Here, the focus is the black family and the barriers of color, class, and caste that tear it apart. As the Village Voice said, "It is a hymn to all the sons this country has stolen from her African- American families."
My House by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3557.I55M9 1983ISBN: 0688050212Publication Date: 1974Enter the world of Nikki Giovanni. Writing of mothers and their children, of childhood memories, of black leaders and black Africa, the poems in My House marked a new dimension in tone and philosophy for Nikki Giovanni when they first appeared at the beginning of her extraordinary career. Emotional and autobiographical, Nikki Giovanni personalizes the political--like no one else--and brings her house in all its complexity and glory to our own backyards. At once tough-minded and playful and with such famous classics as "My House" and "Winter Poem," this reissue of Nikki Giovanni's 1972 collection will once again intoxicate those who have always loved her poems--and those who are just getting to know her work.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3558.A8378 A6 2018ISBN: 9780143133186Publication Date: 2018In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered - the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3515.U274 A17 1994ISBN: 0679426310Publication Date: 1994A complete anthology of the poetry of Langston Hughes presents 860 poems that capture the rhythms, emotions, cultural significance, and political awareness of African-American life, from his earliest works to his final collection.
Directed by Desire by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3560 .O73 A17 2005ISBN: 1556592280Publication Date: 2005Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of the poetry of June Jordan, considered one of the most lyrically gifted poets of the late twentieth century. Directed by Desire gathers the finest work from Jordan's 10 volumes, as well as 70 new, never-before-published poems that she wrote while dying of breast cancer. Throughout over 600 pages readers will find intimate lyricism, elegance, fury, meditative solos, and dazzling vernacular riffs.
The Essential Etheridge Knight by Call Number: ebookISBN: 0822953781Publication Date: 1986Winner of the 1987 American Book Award The Essential Etheridge Knight is a selection of the best work by one of the country's most prominent and liveliest poets. It brings together poems from Knight's previously published books and a section of new poems.
Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems by Call Number: ebook & Stacks Upper Level, PS3561.O455 N46 1993ISBN: 0819512117Publication Date: 1993An award-winning poet's testimony of the war in Vietnam. Includes selections from seven of his previous collections in addition to twelve new poems.
Voyage of the Sable Venus by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3612.E98 A6 2015ISBN: 9781101875438Publication Date: 2015A stunning poetry debut: this meditation on the black female figure throughout time introduces us to a brave and penetrating new voice. Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems considering the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self.
Citizen: An American Lyric by Call Number: Reserves at Library Services Desk Main Level, PS3568.A572 A6 2014ISBN: 9781555976903Publication Date: 2014[Citizen: An American Lyric] recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV--everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named 'post-race' society.
Shake Loose My Skin by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3569.A468 S53 1999ISBN: 0807068500Publication Date: 1999Covering over thirty years of work, Shake Loose My Skin is a stunning testament to the literary, sensual, and political powers of the award-winning Sonia Sanchez. "This world is a better place because of Sonia Sanchez: more livable, more laughable, more manageable. I wish millions of people knew that some of the joy in their lives comes from the fact that Sonia Sanchez is writing poetry." -Maya Angelou
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3569 .H3324 F6 1997ISBN: 0684843269Publication Date: 1997This revolutionary, award-winning play by a lauded playwright and poet is a fearless portrayal of the experiences of women of color--"extraordinary and wonderful...that anyone can relate to" (The New York Times) and continues to move and resonate with readers today more than ever. From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange's words reveal what it is to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975 when it was praised by The New Yorker for "encompassing...every feeling and experience a woman has ever had," for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.
Life on Mars by Call Number: Stacks Upper Level, PS3569.M5955 L54 2011ISBN: 9781555975845Publication Date: 2011With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.
Films
- Whose Streets? An Unflinching Look at the Ferguson Uprising (2018)
Told by the activists and leaders who live and breathe this movement for justice, WHOSE STREETS? is an unflinching look at the Ferguson uprising. When unarmed teenager Michael Brown is killed by police and left lying in the street for hours, it marks a breaking point for the residents of St. Louis, Missouri. Grief, long-standing racial tensions and renewed anger bring residents together to hold vigil and protest this latest tragedy. Empowered parents, artists, and teachers from around the country come together as freedom fighters.
Available to stream on Kanopy - Profiled: The Mothers of Murdered Black and Latino Youth (2016)
2018 Paul Robeson Award winner at the Newark Black Film Festival, this timely documentary knits the stories of mothers of black and Latin youth murdered by the NYPD into a powerful indictment of racial profiling and police brutality, and places them within a historical context of the roots of racism in the U.S. Some of the victims--Eric Garner, Michael Brown--are now familiar the world over. Others, like Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray, are remembered mostly by family and friends in their New York neighborhoods.
Ranging from the routine harassment of minority students in an affluent Brooklyn community to the killings and protests in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri, PROFILED bears witness to the racist violence that remains an everyday reality for black and Latin people in this country.
Available to stream on Kanopy - White Like Me Race, Racism & White Privilege in America (2013)
White Like Me, based on the work of acclaimed anti-racist educator and author Tim Wise, explores race and racism in the US through the lens of whiteness and white privilege. In a stunning reassessment of the American ideal of meritocracy and claims that we've entered a post-racial society, Wise offers a fascinating look back at the race-based white entitlement programs that built the American middle class, and argues that our failure as a society to come to terms with this legacy of white privilege continues to perpetuate racial inequality and race-driven political resentments today.
Available to stream on Kanopy - The Talk: Race in America (2017)
This film documents the increasingly common conversation taking place in homes across the country between parents of color and their children, especially sons, about how to behave if they are ever stopped by the police.
Available to stream on Academic Video Online - I Am Not Your Negro: James Baldwin and Race in America (2016)
In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, Remember This House. The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and successive assassinations of three of his close friends--Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin's death in 1987, he left behind only thirty completed pages of his manuscript.
Now, in his incendiary new documentary, master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin's original words and flood of rich archival material. I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter.
Available to stream on Kanopy and Media Collection Upper Level, E185.61 .I363 - Race: The Power of an Illusion (2003)
The division of the world’s peoples into distinct groups labeled by colors has become so widely accepted that many would dismiss as farfetched any suggestion of its falsity. Yet geneticists have discovered that 85% of all genetic variants can be found within any local population, regardless of whether it’s a population of Poles, Hmong, or Fulani. This three-part series debunks the misconception that “race” is a physiologically accurate way to categorize human beings, looking through the lenses of science, history, and social institutions at how and why the myth developed. 3-part series, 56 minutes each.
Available to stream on Films On Demand - Black Is...Black Ain't: An Exploration of Black Identity (1995)
The final film by filmmaker Marlon Riggs, BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T, jumps into the middle of explosive debates over Black identity. White Americans have always stereotyped African Americans. But the rigid definitions of "Blackness" that African Americans impose on each other, Riggs claims, have also been devastating. Is there an essential Black identity? Is there a litmus test defining the real Black man and true Black woman? While BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T, rejoices in Black diversity, many speakers bare their pain at having been silenced or excluded because they were perceived as "not Black enough" or conversely "too Black." The film marshals a powerful critique of sexism, patriarchy, homophobia, colorism and cultural nationalism in the Black family, church and other Black institutions. Winner of the Filmmakers Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival. Official Selection at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Available to stream on Kanopy - Broken on All Sides (2012)
Presenting a historical narrative not often heard about prisons and crime, this documentary investigates the complex issues of discretion within the system, racial targeting, and the largest spike in the number of people incarcerated in our nation's history. Through interviews with people caught up in or involved with the system, this documentary answers and provokes questions on an issue walled-off from the public's scrutiny. Broken on All Sides dissects the War on Drugs and "tough on crime" movement, illustrating how the emerging Occupy movement offers hope for change, and explores possible reforms and solutions to ending mass incarceration.
Available to stream on Kanopy - How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It) (2005)
Melvin Van Peebles will always be known as the man who not only changed the face of black cinema, but independent cinema forever, when he made his groundbreaking (and taboo breaking) film "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song." But's he's always been a lot more than that, as a playwright, actor, author, stage performer, musician and who knows what else he's done in his 80 years. And he's likely not through yet. Taking the title from a never published essay by Van Peebles, the film follows his unpredictable life and career, both supported by his motto: if opportunity fails to knock, then build your own damn door and get on with it. The film includes decades of archival footage and interviews with a wide range of people, including Spike Lee, the late Gil Scott-Heron, Elvis Mitchell, the late pioneering filmmaker St. Clair Bourne and Van Peebles' own sons, Mario and Max.
Available to stream on Kanopy - The Central Park Five (2012)
In 1989, five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem were arrested and later convicted of raping a white woman in New York City's Central Park. The Central Park Five tells the story of that horrific crime, the rush to judgment by the police, a media clamoring for sensational stories and an outraged public, and the five lives upended by this miscarriage of justice.
- The Watermelon Woman (1996)
A video store clerk and fledgling filmmaker, Cheryl becomes obsessed with the "most beautiful mammy," a character she sees in a 1930s movie. Determined to find out who the actress she knows only as the "Watermelon Woman" was and make her the subject of a documentary, she starts researching and is bowled over to discover that not only was Fae Richards (Lisa Marie Bronson) a fellow Philadelphian but also a lesbian. The project is not without drama as Cheryl's singular focus causes friction between her and her friend Tamara (Valarie Walker) and as she begins to see parallels between Fae's problematic relationship with a white director and her own budding romance with white Diana (fellow filmmaker Guinevere Turner). Winner of Best Feature Film at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Available to stream on Kanopy - Born in Flames (1983)
The movie that rocked the foundations of the early Indie film world, this provocative, thrilling and still-relevant classic is a comic fantasy of female rebellion set in America ten years after the Second American Revolution. When Adelaide Norris, the black radical founder of the Woman's Army, is mysteriously killed, a diverse coalition of women - across all lines of race, class, and sexual preference - emerges to blow the System apart.
Available to stream on Kanopy - The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)
Jimmie Fails dreams of reclaiming the Victorian home his grandfather built in the heart of San Francisco. Joined on his quest by his best friend Mont, Jimmie searches for belonging in a rapidly changing city that seems to have left them behind. As he struggles to reconnect with his family and reconstruct the community he longs for, his hopes blind him to the reality of his situation. A wistful odyssey populated by skaters, squatters, street preachers, playwrights, and the other locals on the margins, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a poignant and sweeping story of friendship, community, and the true meaning of home. Joe Talbot's directorial debut is a deep and resonant meditation on the stories we tell ourselves to find our place in the world.
Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival, and BFI London Film Festival.
Available to stream on Kanopy - Personal Problems (1980)
"A video-shot story conceived as a “meta-soap opera,” “Personal Problems,” is now presented as a work of cinema — proving, among other things, that cinema retains the ability to accommodate the noncategorical. Made with then-new video technology, the two-part work’s story line, involving the married couple Johnnie Mae Brown and Charles Brown and their respective infidelities, is only loosely followed. Instead, “Personal Problems” sits itself down at sidewalk cafes, in nightclub corners, at apartments where parties are celebrated and memorial gatherings attended." -- New York Times Review
"The movie's panoramic cityscapes teem with the gritty details of emotional life: romance and chores, hope and despair and loss, bitter resentments and rowdy reckonings with mortality." - Richard Brody, New Yorker
Available to stream on Kanopy - Do the Right Thing (1989)
Set on one block of Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy Do or Die neighborhood, at the height of summer, this 1989 masterpiece by Spike Lee confirmed him as a writer and filmmaker of peerless vision and passionate social engagement. Over the course of a single day, the easygoing interactions of a cast of unforgettable characters—Da Mayor, Mother Sister, Mister Señor Love Daddy, Tina, Sweet Dick Willie, Buggin Out, Radio Raheem, Sal, Pino, Vito, and Lee’s Mookie among them—give way to heated confrontations as tensions rise along racial fault lines, ultimately exploding into violence. Punctuated by the anthemic refrain of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” Do the Right Thing is a landmark in American cinema, as politically and emotionally charged and as relevant now as when it first hit the big screen.
Media Collection Upper Level, PN1997 .D6 L443 - Fruitvale Station (2013)
Based on the events leading to the death of Oscar Grant, a young man who was killed in 2009 by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle at the Fruitvale district station of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in Oakland.
Fruitvale Station debuted under its original title Fruitvale at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for U.S. dramatic film. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival where it won the award for Best First Film.
Media Collection Upper Level PN1997.F78 C663 - Moonlight (2016)
Oscar-winner for Best Picture, MOONLIGHT is a moving and transcendent look at three defining chapters in the life of Chiron, a young man growing up in Miami. His epic journey to adulthood, as a shy outsider dealing with difficult circumstances, is guided by support, empathy and love from the most unexpected places.
"If you think art should challenge us, then you will embrace writer-director Barry Jenkins' exquisitely crafted drama "Moonlight." It's a true American masterpiece and one of the best films of the decade." - Tirdad Derakhshani, Philadelphia Inquirer
Media Collection Upper Level PN1997.M66 J453 or available to stream on Kanopy - Daughters of the Dust (1991)
At the dawn of the 20th century, a multi-generational family in the Gullah community on the Sea Islands off of South Carolina - former West African slaves who adopted many of their ancestors' Yoruba traditions - struggle to maintain their cultural heritage and folklore while contemplating a migration to the mainland, even further from their roots. The first wide release by a black female filmmaker, Daughters of the Dust was met with wild critical acclaim and rapturous audience response when it initially opened in 1991. Casting a long legacy, Daughters of the Dust still resonates today, most recently as a major in influence on Beyonce's video album Lemonade. Winner of the Cinematography Award and nominated for the Grand Jury Prize in the Dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Chosen for preservation by the National Film Preservation Board, USA.
Available to stream via Kanopy and Media Collection Upper Level, PN1997 .D28 D283
- Locks (2008)
A young man with dreadlocks makes the difficult choice to shave them in support of his young sister's illness. (7 min.)
Available to stream on Kanopy - A Different Tree (2013)
When Pearl Washington must complete her family tree assignment for school, she is forced to face the pain of having a fatherless childhood. She feels ashamed and alienated, because unlike the other children in her class, half of her family tree is completely empty. Pearl's father has never taken part in her life, because he has another family, two sons and a wife. Unlike her other classmates, whose lives at face value can sometimes represent the ideal childhood, with pets, large houses, siblings, and both parents--Pearl must learn to be independent and alone. (15 min.)
Available to stream on Kanopy - South Arcadia St. (2014)
A day at school turns volatile when a traumatized student and a new inner-city teacher inadvertently go head to head.
Nominated for Best Short at the San Francisco Black Film Festival and the HollyShorts Film Festival. (9 min.)
Available to stream on Kanopy - Ice Breakers (2019)
Josh Crooks is a promising teen hockey star in a sport where Black players like him are chronically underrepresented. Ice Breakers reveals the buried history of a pioneering Black hockey league in Atlantic Canada, as Crooks discovers that his unshakable passion is tied to a rich and remarkable heritage. (15 min.)
Available to stream via the National Film Board of Canada - Black Sheep (2018)
Everything changed for Cornelius Walker on 27 November 2000 when Damilola Taylor was killed. Damilola was 11, the same age as Cornelius. He lived five minutes away. He had the same skin colour. Cornelius’s mother, scared for her son’s safety, moved their family out of London. Cornelius suddenly found himself living on a white estate run by racists. But rather than fight them, Cornelius decided to become more like the people who hated him. They became his family and kept him safe. And in return, Cornelius became submerged in a culture of violence and hatred. But as the violence and racism against other black people continued, Cornelius struggled to marry his real identity with the one he had acquired. (27 min.)
Available to stream on Vimeo - Born With It (2013)
On his first day of school in a small Japanese town, a half Japanese half black boy tries to prove to his new classmates that his dark skin is not a disease. (17 min.)
Available to stream on Vimeo
Other Antiractist Reading Lists
- Anti-Racist Reading List from Ibram X. Kendi- Chicago Public Library
- An Antiracist Reading List- New York Times
- Do the work: an anti-racist reading list- The Guardian
- An Essential Anti-Racist Reading List- Vogue
- Several Antiracist Books Are Selling Out. Here's What Else Black Booksellers and Publishers Say You Should Read- TIME
Other Library Resources
Library Research Guides, Course Guides, & Blog Posts
Library Databases
- The Nation ArchiveContains all issues of The Nation, beginning with its first in 1865 to the present. Articles, editorials, letters, reviews, poems, and puzzles are included. The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, covering progressive political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator,an abolitionist newspaper that closed in 1865.
- African American Newspapers Series 1, 1827-1998A full-text collection of newspapers published by or for African Americans.
The Fairfield Slavery Project
About the Project:
The Vincent J. Rosivach Register of Slaves in Fairfield, Connecticut (1639-1820) is a comprehensive database of enslaved individuals in colonial and post-colonial Fairfield. This database is searchable, and will be able to track projection of slave families as well as movement across households and other important information related to the slave, their family, and their history. While there are some distinct contrasts between Northern and Southern slavery, one of the key similarities is the lack of proper record-keeping of these enslaved individuals’ identities. Our database compiles information including birth, death, and distribution of slaves in colonial and post-colonial Fairfield into a single site to help formulate a once-broken narrative. In several cases, we were able to piece together entire families of slaves, identifying a lineage previously scattered across countless documents.
This database was Dr. Rosivach’s passion project, and a culmination of almost 30 years of work. When he passed away in April of 2018, the research team continued to work to complete the project. Thanks to the support from the Vincent J. Rosivach Collaborative Research Fund, the mentorship of Dr. Giovanni Ruffini, and the support of so many other faculty and staff at Fairfield University, this goal was achieved. The database serves as a living representation of Dr. Rosivach’s work, and we are so proud to have made a contribution.
The Register uses primary source property documents, church records, newspaper advertisements, military records, and museum archives to compile a list of slaves and the households they were a part of. In doing this, we attempt to identify this often-overlooked history by providing real record of birth, death, marriage, family, and service as best available and appropriate as possible. That doesn't mean this is an exhaustive list; there are so many more places the team has not yet looked. The research continues. Have a lead? email us at fairfieldslaveryproject@gmail.com.
Visit the database here: digitalhumanities.fairfield.edu/slavery
The Fairfield Slavery Project from Fairfield University on Vimeo.
Other Resources
- Talking About Race- National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian Institute
- The Antiracist Research & Policy Center
- The Michigan League for Public Policy's 21-Day Racial Equity Challenge
- Anti-Racism Resources for all ages
- Recommended resources from Campus Ministry (via Instagram)
- Campaign Zero, a police reform campaign proposed by activists associated with Black Lives Matter. The plan consists of ten proposals, all of which are aimed at reducing police violence.
- Three Pulitzer Prize winners discuss powerful stories of slavery, race, and resistance. Pulitzer Prize winners Nikole Hannah-Jones, W. Caleb McDaniel, and Jeffrey C. Stewart discuss their award-winning work: stories that help to explain the long reach of slavery and racism in America. Via Oxford University Press on YouTube
Digital Scholarship Opportunities
- Anti-Slavery Manuscripts, by the Boston Public Library. Help turn the Boston Public Library's collection of handwritten correspondence between anti-slavery activists in the 19th century into texts that can be more easily read and researched by students, teachers, historians, and big data applications.
-
By the People- Mary Church Terrell: Advocate for African Americans and Women, by the Library of Congress. Help transcribe the diaries and correspondence of Mary Church Terrell, the founding president of the National Association of Colored Women and, in 1909, a founder of the NAACP who spent her life fighting for the causes of universal suffrage, and the freedom and equality of men and women of all colors in the eyes of the law.
-
Freedmen's Bureau Records, by the Smithsonian Institute. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, or Freedmen’s Burseu, was founded in 1865 to assist freedmen, women, and children after the war. The Bureau built schools, helped settle disputes, and regulated contracts between freedpeople and white employers. Help transcribe records of the Bureau to make the records searchable for researchers.
Juneteenth
Even though President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it took over 2 years for the executive order to reach the far depths of the Confederacy. It wasn't until June 19th, 1865 that the last remaining enslaved learned of their freedom, when Union soldiers reached Galveston, Texas. The following year and ever since, the day has been commemorated with celebration, prayer, and reflection.
When we look back on Juneteenth 2020, we must remember the added weight with which the day was commemorated, with demonstrations worldwide that protest police brutality, systemic racism, and the ignorant who don't understand what we mean when we say Black Lives Matter. Dr. Jocelyn Boryczka, (Associate Vice Provost for Scholarly, Creative, and Community Engagement and Professor of Politics), provides context for Juneteenth in this moment with her essay, "Re-membering", which she shared with the Fairfield University community on June 19th, 2020. Her essay is reproduced below along with links to the resources that she cited in the essay, as well as other resources that she recommends.
"Re-membering"
Jocelyn M. Boryczka, PhD
Associate Vice Provost for Scholarly, Creative, and Community Engagement
Professor of Politics
Remembering. Taking a moment to reflect on past experiences - riding your bike without training wheels for the first time, traveling to a new place, celebrating holidays with family - form our memories. Our personal memories join together, accruing over time to become histories and a collective national consciousness. These shape who we are and how we move in the world whether or not we fully recognize it.
Today, we celebrate Juneteenth, a holiday recognized by most states, including Connecticut, and the District of Columbia, that marks the day in 1865 when Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas to announce the end of the Civil War and slavery, two and a half years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Black Texans began celebrating this day in 1866 and others across the nation have joined in. Parades, dances, and backyard cookouts allow for rejuvenation and restoration.
This Juneteenth, in light of the Black Lives Matter movement reignited by George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officers, calls us to attend to a much harder, painful part of remembering. Dismembering requires the pulling apart and dissection of how and what we understand to be our body politic. White people in this country are called to recognize their privilege and power acquired through systematic oppression of black Americans, and brown Americans and indigenous peoples. This call resonates in cities across the globe as white, black, and brown people join on the streets in mutual recognition of what, Charles Mills specifies as the racial contract built on the oppression of non-white, non-European peoples from the United States and United Kingdom to Tanzania and Taiwan. Race and racism, simply put, structure how our world operates. Remembering this dismembers - pulls apart - how many white people understand themselves and the communities in which they live.
Forgetting is a form of privilege that pulls communities apart. A black man riding on a packed Metro North train with the only empty seat beside him, poet Claudia Rankin reminds us, can never forget that he is a black man. It is carved into every fiber of his being. Forgetting your race is a privilege of white people. Dismantling this white privilege entails white people remembering the systemic power that they exercise now and have done so throughout history. It entails dismembering a particular version of the world by remembering the over 400-year history of slavery recently captured in the 1619 Project founded by Nikole Hannah-Jones and archived in the Smithsonian’s “Remembering Slavery Project,” and Fairfield University’s own Fairfield Slavery Project.
Dismembering as remembering involves a vulnerability inherent to practices such as radical hospitality. This vulnerability requires individuals to reach beyond who they understand themselves to be by putting their ancestry and history - their experiences and memories - into a much more complex national and global consciousness onto the face of which racism is etched as a defining feature. This shift illuminates the shared vulnerability of human life where we can begin to find each other anew, on a plane of welcoming and being welcomed where equity, diversity, and inclusivity may truly emerge.
Remembering is the first step in re-membering as we move from pulling apart to a coming together, even a reconnecting of the body politic torn asunder by racism from Ferguson and Charlottesville to Minneapolis and Atlanta. Galveston, Texas, the birthplace of Juneteenth in 1865, grants us a site for recalling the history of slavery and a celebration of freedom. We re-member - at a time when nearly 120,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 - our deep human need for relationship and community in the face of isolation and physical distancing. To re-member our communities, we will need to practice sankofa, a Ghanian word that means looking back to move forward. At this juncture, peoples build coalitions across races, religions, borders, and generations, the very coalitions enacting the fact that Black Lives Matter.
Resources Cited
The Racial Contract by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9780801471353Publication Date: 2014"The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. Holding up a mirror to mainstream philosophy, this provocative book explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the "separate but equal" system of segregation in the twentieth-century United States. This work challenges the assumption that mainstream theory is itself raceless. Just as feminist theory has revealed orthodox political philosophy's invisible white male bias, Mills's explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings." -- Publisher description- Citizen by Call Number: Reserves at Library Services Desk Main Level, PS3568.A572 A6 2014ISBN: 9781555976903Publication Date: 2014"Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV--everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named 'post-race' society." -- Publisher description.
Learn More About the History of Juneteenth
- Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture for Founding Director Lonnie Bunch III’s guided tour "Celebrating Juneteenth": https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/celebrating-juneteenth
- Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “What is Juneteenth?”: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/what-is-juneteenth/
- Learn about earlier African American Emancipation celebrations: https://www.processhistory.org/juneteenth-king/
