National African American Read In at UCBA

A companion volume to the four-part PBS series chronicles the lives of Africans as slaves in America from the time of the Jamestown settlement through the end of the Civil War, while exploring African-Americans' modern-day struggles with racism.

A Harvard Law School professor examines the impact that Brown v. Board of Education has had on his family, citing the contributions of such individuals as Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Earl Warren while revealing how the reforms promised by the case were systematically undermined.

This groundbreaking study shows us how black women experienced freedom in the Reconstruction South; their heroic struggle to gain their rights, hold their families together, resist economic and sexual oppression, and maintain their sense of womanhood against all odds.

Daniel Aldridge presents a critical and analytical study of the many different leaders and organizations, with special attention to the largely unsung ones whom most student readers never hear about, whose efforts eventually overturned the South's legal and extralegal system of racial discrimination known as Jim Crow, radically transforming society in that blacks fully became part of the American nation.

Begin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America’s ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race. In these brilliant and stirring pages, Glaude finds hope and guidance in Baldwin as he mixes biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered Baldwin interviews—with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to reveal the painful cycle of Black resistance and white retrenchment.

Black Eden chronicles the history of Idlewild, a Michigan black community founded during the aftermath of the Civil War. As one of the nation's most popular black resorts, Idlewild functioned as a gathering place for African Americans, and more importantly as a touchstone of black identity and culture.

The Black Panther Party represents Black Panther Party members' coordinated responses over the last four decades to the failure of city, state, and federal bureaucrats to address the basic needs of their respective communities.

In 1967, this revolutionary work exposed the depths of systemic racism in this country and provided a radical political framework for reform: true and lasting social change would only be accomplished through unity among African-Americans and their independence from the preexisting order.

In Black Sexual Politics, one of America's most influential writers on race and gender explores how images of Black sexuality have been used to maintain the color line and how they threaten to spread a new brand of racism around the world today.

In Dark Days, Bright Nights, acclaimed scholar Peniel E. Joseph puts this pat assessment to the test, showing the 60s--particularly the tumultuous period after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act--to be the catalyst of a movement that culminated in the inauguration of Barack Obama. Joseph argues that the 1965 Voting Rights Act burst a dam holding back radical democratic impulses. T

This book takes a close look at the lives of African-Americans from diverse backgrounds as Obama's victory comes to play a personal role in each of their lives.

Education as Freedom: African American Educational Thought and Activism is a groundbreaking edited text that documents and reexamines African-American empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to knowledge-making, teaching, and learning and American education from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century, the most dynamic period of African-American educational thought and activism.

Through more than 180 alphabetically arranged entries, this encyclopedia surveys the world of Hip Hop literature and places it in its social and cultural contexts.

A provocative analysis of the new contours of Black nationalism and feminism in the context of the changing politics of race in America.

Following the high-profile deaths of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, both cities erupted in protest over the unjustified homicides of unarmed black males at the hands of police officers. Hands Up, Don't Shoot is a remarkably current, on-the-ground assessment of the powerful, protestor-driven movement around race, justice, and policing in America.

Harris takes the reader on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way. From chitlins and ham hocks to fried chicken and vegan soul, Harris celebrates the delicious and restorative foods of the African American experience and details how each came to form such an important part of African American culture, history, and identity.

This volume, equal parts alternative history of hip hop and critical theory of hip hop, challenges those scholars, critics, and fans of hip hop who lopsidedly over-focus on commercial rap, pop rap, and gangsta rap while failing to acknowledge that there are more than three dozen genres of rap music and many other socially and politically progressive forms of hip hop culture beyond DJing, MCing, rapping, beat-making, break-dancing, and graffiti-writing

Acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined James Baldwin's published and unpublished oeuvre, selecting passages from his books, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been. Weaving these texts together, Peck brilliantly imagines the book that Baldwin never wrote.

The 24 entries in this book provide extensive coverage of some of the most notable figures in African American literature, such as Alice Walker, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston.

An African American centenarian who saw W. E. B. Du Bois speak in 1924 and attended President Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009 shares wisdom from a life well lived during a crucial period in American history Ella Mae Cheeks Johnson was an inspirational, dynamic, and one-of-a-kind woman, whose ordinary life was nothing less than extraordinary throughout the course of her 106 years.

In Making Malcolm, Michael Eric Dyson probes the myths and meanings of Malcolm X for our time. From Spike Lee's film biography to Eugene Wolfenstein's psychobiographical study, from hip-hop culture to gender and racial politics, Dyson cuts a critical swathe through both the idolization and the vicious caricatures that have undermined appreciation of Malcolm's greatest accomplishments.

Drawing from his own experiences as an activist, organizer, educator, and public official, Mckesson exhorts all Americans to work to dismantle the legacy of racism and to imagine the best of what is possible.

This in-depth look at the civil rights movement goes to the places where pioneers of the movement marched, sat-in at lunch counters, gathered in churches; where they spoke, taught, and organized; where they were arrested, where they lost their lives, and where they triumphed.

Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative.

Through in-depth interviews with young, black voters, groundbreaking survey research, and conversations with a range of high profile Americans-from Colin Powell to Russell Simmons-Party Crashing explores the issues and people who have helped shape the politics of the post-Civil Rights Generation, and how this generation is reshaping America.

Examines the effect of a racially divided society on ninteenth century American writings, and discusses works by Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain.

A Shining Thread of Hope chronicles the lives of black women from indentured servitude in the early American colonies to the cruelty of antebellum plantations, from the reign of lynch law in the Jim Crow South to the triumphs of the Civil Rights era, and it illustrates how the story of black women in America is as much a tale of courage and hope as it is a history of struggle.  

Tells the stories and documents the contributions of African American women involved in the struggle for racial and gender equality through the civil rights and black power movements in the United States.

These autobiographies of Afro-American ex-slaves comprise the largest body of literature produced by slaves in human history. The book consists of three sections: selected reviews of slave narratives, dating from 1750 to 1861; essays examining how such narratives serve as historical material; and essays exploring the narratives as literary artifacts.

The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society. Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America--it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever.

In the speeches and articles collected in this book, the black activist, organizer, and freedom fighter Stokely Carmichael traces the dramatic changes in his own consciousness and that of black Americans that took place during the evolving movements of Civil Rights, Black Power, and Pan-Africanism.

Essays discuss the Ebonics controversy, teaching English to African American students, the influence of the African American oral tradition on language and culture, language education of blacks in other countries, and related topics.

In this book, Gail L. Thompson takes on the volatile topic of the role of race in education and explores the black-white achievement gap and the cultural divide that exists between some teachers and African American students.

For many progressives, racial identities are the engine of American history, and by extension, contemporary politics. As Toure Reed argues in this rigorously constructed book, the road to a more just society for African Americans and everyone else, the fate of poor and working-class African Americans is inextricably linked to that of other poor and working-class Americans.

In this examination of the American school system, a career education expert determines how a variety of federal, state, and local policies and initiatives have affected disadvantaged inner-city youth and broadened the achievement gap between black and white students.

Days of Grace, a collection of positive, uplifting stories of seemingly small acts of grace from across the sports world that have helped to bridge cultural and racial divides. Blake reveals how, through seemingly small acts of grace, we can confront hatred, bigotry, and injustice with virtue--and use it to propel ourselves to greater heights.

Ranging from riot-torn Cincinnati, Ohio, where the nation's racial and police issues have boiled over into the streets, to illuminating community concerns from coast to coast, Kathy Y. Wilson's big, bold perspectives on urban living, race, scandal, trends and humanity are razor-sharp and profound. Her observations on the state of cultural politics in her hometown and across America will unite and inspire readers everywhere.