February New African American Studies books

• Race Man: The Collected Works of Julian Bond, 1960-2015
  
  Race Man: The Collected Works of Julian Bond, 1960-2015: E185.615 .B586 2020
  Author(s): Julian Bond
  San Francisco : City Lights Books 2020.
  
  An inspiring, historic collection of writings from one of America's most important civil rights leaders.
  
  
• The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics
  
  The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics: E185.615 .P473 2019
  Author(s): Davin L. Phoenix
  Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 2019.
  
  Anger is a powerful mobilizing force in American politics on both sides of the political aisle, but does it motivate all groups equally? This book offers a new conceptualization of anger as a political resource that mobilizes black and white Americans differentially to exacerbate political inequality. Drawing on survey data from the last forty years, experiments, and rhetoric analysis, Phoenix finds that - from Reagan to Trump - black Americans register significantly less anger than their white counterparts and that anger (in contrast to pride) has a weaker mobilizing effect on their political participation. The book examines both the causes of this and the consequences. Pointing to black Americans' tempered expectations of politics and the stigmas associated with black anger, it shows how race and lived experience moderate the emergence of emotions and their impact on behavior. The book makes multiple theoretical contributions and offers important practical insights for political strategy.
  
  
• A Black Women's History of the United States
  
  A Black Women's History of the United States: E185.86 .B475 2020
  Author(s): Daina Ramey Berry, Kali Nicole Gross
  Boston : Beacon Press [2020]
  
  A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are—and have always been—instrumental in shaping our country In centering Black women’s stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women’s unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today. A Black Women’s History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women’s lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women’s history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.
  
  
• Harriet Tubman (L2) (National Geographic Readers)
  
  Harriet Tubman (L2) (National Geographic Readers): E444.T82 K725 2020
  Author(s): National Geographic Kids, Barbara Kramer
  Washington, DC : National Geographic Kids 2020.
  
  Find out about the life of Harriet Tubman and how her brave actions working to "conduct" the Underground Railroad helped the Union Army in the Civil War lead more than 700 slaves to freedom. Learn about Harriet Tubman's life, achievements, and the challenges she faced along the way. The Level 2 text provides accessible, yet wide-ranging information for independent readers. National Geographic Kids Readers have been a hit in the competitive beginning reader category, and this book builds on that success with the same careful text, brilliant photographs, and fun approach to high-interest biographies of fascinating people such as Harriet Tubman, that has proved to be a winning formula with kids.
  
  
• The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence
  
  The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence: HV8148.C52 R35 2019
  Author(s): Laurence Ralph
  Chicago ; The University of Chicago Press 2019.
  
  Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.
  
  
• A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War
  
  A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War: HV875.64 .G73 2020
  Author(s): Kori A. Graves
  New York : New York University Press [2020]
  
  The origins of a transnational adoption strategy that secured the future for Korean-black children The Korean War left hundreds of thousands of children in dire circumstances, but the first large-scale transnational adoption efforts involved the children of American soldiers and Korean women. Korean laws and traditions stipulated that citizenship and status passed from father to child, which made the children of US soldiers legally stateless. Korean-black children faced additional hardships because of Korean beliefs about racial purity, and the segregation that structured African American soldiers’ lives in the military and throughout US society. The African American families who tried to adopt Korean-black children also faced and challenged discrimination in the child welfare agencies that arranged adoptions. Drawing on extensive research in black newspapers and magazines, interviews with African American soldiers, and case notes about African American adoptive families, A War Born Family demonstrates how the Cold War and the struggle for civil rights led child welfare agencies to reevaluate African American men and women as suitable adoptive parents, advancing the cause of Korean transnational adoption.
  
  
• One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
  
  One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy: JK1924 .A54 2018
  Author(s): Carol Anderson
  New York, NY : Bloomsbury Publishing 2018.
  
  Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction Named one of the Best Books of the Year by: Washington Post * Boston Globe * NPR* Bustle * BookRiot * New York Public Library From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, the startling--and timely--history of voter suppression in America, with a foreword by Senator Dick Durbin. In her New York Times bestseller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice. Focusing on the aftermath of Shelby, Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans.
  
  
• Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools
  
  Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools: LC214.23.S23 Q56 2020
  Author(s): Rand Quinn
  Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press [2020]
  
  A compelling history of school desegregation and activism in San Francisco The picture of school desegregation in the United States is often painted with broad strokes of generalization and insulated anecdotes. Its true history, however, is remarkably wide ranging. Class Action tells the story of San Francisco’s long struggle over school desegregation in the wake of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. San Francisco’s story provides a critical chapter in the history of American school discrimination and the complicated racial politics that emerged. It was among the first large cities outside the South to face court-ordered desegregation following the Brown rulings, and it experienced the same demographic shifts that transformed other cities throughout the urban West. Rand Quinn argues that the district’s student assignment policies—including busing and other desegregative mechanisms—began as a remedy for state discrimination but transformed into a tool intended to create diversity. Drawing on extensive archival research—from court docket files to school district records—Quinn describes how this transformation was facilitated by the rise of school choice, persistent demand for neighborhood schools, evolving social and legal landscapes, and local community advocacy and activism. Class Action is the first book to present a comprehensive political history of post-Brown school desegregation in San Francisco. Quinn illuminates the evolving relationship between jurisprudence and community-based activism and brings a deeper understanding to the multiracial politics of urban education reform. He responds to recent calls by scholars to address the connections between ideas and policy change and ultimately provides a fascinating look at race and educational opportunity, school choice, and neighborhood schools in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education.
  
  
• In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America
  
  In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America: LC2741 .B38 2019
  Author(s): Kabria Baumgartner
  New York : New York University Press [2019]
  
  Uncovers the hidden role of girls and women in the desegregation of American education The story of school desegregation in the United States often begins in the mid-twentieth-century South. Drawing on archival sources and genealogical records, Kabria Baumgartner uncovers the story’s origins in the nineteenth-century Northeast and identifies a previously overlooked group of activists: African American girls and women. In their quest for education, African American girls and women faced numerous obstacles—from threats and harassment to violence. For them, education was a daring undertaking that put them in harm’s way. Yet bold and brave young women such as Sarah Harris, Sarah Parker Remond, Rosetta Morrison, Susan Paul, and Sarah Mapps Douglass persisted. In Pursuit of Knowledge argues that African American girls and women strategized, organized, wrote, and protested for equal school rights—not just for themselves, but for all. Their activism gave rise to a new vision of womanhood: the purposeful woman, who was learned, active, resilient, and forward-thinking. Moreover, these young women set in motion equal-school-rights victories at the local and state level, and laid the groundwork for further action to democratize schools in twentieth-century America. In this thought-provoking book, Baumgartner demonstrates that the confluence of race and gender has shaped the long history of school desegregation in the United States right up to the present.
  
  
• The Toni Morrison Book Club
  
  The Toni Morrison Book Club: LC6651 .B615 2020
  Author(s): Juda Bennett, Winnifred Brown-Glaude, Casssandra Jackson, Piper Kendrix Williams
  Madison, Wisconsin : The University of Wisconsin Press [2020]
  
  Four friends--black and white, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born--offer a radical vision for book clubs as sites of self-discovery and communal healing. The Toni Morrison Book Club insists that we make space to find ourselves in fiction and turn to Morrison as a spiritual guide to our most difficult thoughts and ideas about American literature and life.
  
  
• Glenn Ligon: A Brief History: Housing in New York
  
  Glenn Ligon: A Brief History: Housing in New York: N6537.L535 A35 2015
  Author(s): Glenn Ligon
  Long Island City, NY : MoMA PS1 [2015].
  
  
  
  
• A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood
  
  A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood: PN1995.9.N4 Q54 2020
  Author(s): Eithne Quinn
  New York : Columbia University Press [2020]
  
  Hollywood is often thought of—and certainly by Hollywood itself—as a progressive haven. However, in the decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the film industry grew deeply conservative when it came to conflicts over racial justice. Amid black self-assertion and white backlash, many of the most heated struggles in film were fought over employment. In A Piece of the Action, Eithne Quinn reveals how Hollywood catalyzed wider racial politics, through representation on screen as well as in battles over jobs and resources behind the scenes. Based on extensive archival research and detailed discussions of films like In the Heat of the Night, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Super Fly, Claudine, and Blue Collar, this volume considers how issues of race and labor played out on the screen during the tumultuous early years of affirmative action. Quinn charts how black actors leveraged their performance capital to force meaningful changes to employment and film content. She examines the emergence of Sidney Poitier and other African Americans as A-list stars; the careers of black filmmakers such as Melvin Van Peebles and Ossie Davis; and attempts by the federal government and black advocacy groups to integrate cinema. Quinn also highlights the limits of Hollywood’s liberalism, showing how predominantly white filmmakers, executives, and unions hid the persistence of racism behind feel-good stories and public-relations avowals of tolerance. A rigorous analysis of the deeply rooted patterns of racial exclusion in American cinema, A Piece of the Action sheds light on why conservative and corporate responses to antiracist and labor activism remain pervasive in today’s Hollywood.
  
  
• Kinship Across the Black Atlantic: Writing Diasporic Relations
  
  Kinship Across the Black Atlantic: Writing Diasporic Relations: PS153.N5 A27 2019
  Author(s): Gigi Adair
  Liverpool : Liverpool University Press 2019.
  
  This book considers the meaning of kinship across black Atlantic diasporas in the Caribbean, Western Europe and North America via readings of six contemporary novels. It draws upon and combines insights from postcolonial studies, queer theory and black Atlantic diaspora studies in novel ways to examine the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the legacy of anthropological discourses of kinship, interrogate the connections between kinship and historiography, and imagine new forms of diasporic relationality and subjectivity. The novels considered here offer sustained meditations on the meaning of kinship and its role in diasporic cultures and communities; they represent diasporic kinship in the context and crosscurrents of both historical and contemporary forces, such as slavery, colonialism, migration, political struggles and artistic creation. They show how displacement and migration require and generate new forms and understandings of kinship, and how kinship may be used as an instrument of both political oppression and resistance. Finally, they demonstrate the importance of literature in imagining possibilities for alternative forms of relationality and in finding a language to express the meaning of those relations. This book thus suggests that an analysis of discourses and practices of kinship is essential to understanding diasporic modernity at the turn of the twenty-first century.
  
  
• Dear Martin
  
  Dear Martin: PS3619.T663 D43 2017
  Author(s): Nic Stone
  New York : Crown [2017]
  
  "Powerful, wrenching.” –JOHN GREEN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Turtles All the Way Down "Raw and gripping." –JASON REYNOLDS, New York Times bestselling coauthor of All American Boys "A must-read!” –ANGIE THOMAS, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Hate U Give Raw, captivating, and undeniably real, Nic Stone joins industry giants Jason Reynolds and Walter Dean Myers as she boldly tackles American race relations in this stunning New York Times bestselling debut, a William C. Morris Award Finalist. Justyce McAllister is a good kid, an honor student, and always there to help a friend—but none of that matters to the police officer who just put him in handcuffs. Despite leaving his rough neighborhood behind, he can't escape the scorn of his former peers or the ridicule of his new classmates. Justyce looks to the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for answers. But do they hold up anymore? He starts a journal to Dr. King to find out. Then comes the day Justyce goes driving with his best friend, Manny, windows rolled down, music turned up—way up, sparking the fury of a white off-duty cop beside them. Words fly. Shots are fired. Justyce and Manny are caught in the crosshairs. In the media fallout, it's Justyce who is under attack. "Vivid and powerful." -Booklist, Starred Review "A visceral portrait of a young man reckoning with the ugly, persistent violence of social injustice." -Publishers Weekly
  
  
• In West Mills
  
  In West Mills: PS3623.I66425 I5 2019
  Author(s): De'Shawn Charles Winslow
  New York : Bloomsbury Publishing 2019.
  
  "A bighearted novel about family, migration, and the unbearable difficulties of love. Here's a cast of characters you won't soon forget." Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie "Winslow's impressive debut novel introduces readers to both a flawed, fascinating character in fiction and a wonderful new voice in literature." Real Simple, Best Books of 2019 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Named a Most Anticipated Novel by TIME MAGAZINE * USA TODAY * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY * NYLON * SOUTHERN LIVING * THE LOS ANGELES TIMES * ESSENCE * THE MILLIONS * REAL SIMPLE* HUFFINGTON POST * BUZZFEED Azalea "Knot" Centre is determined to live life as she pleases. Let the people of West Mills say what they will; the neighbors' gossip won't keep Knot from what she loves best: cheap moonshine, nineteenth-century literature, and the company of men. And yet, Knot is starting to learn that her freedom comes at a high price. Alone in her one-room shack, ostracized from her relatives and cut off from her hometown, Knot turns to her neighbor, Otis Lee Loving, in search of some semblance of family and home. Otis Lee is eager to help. A lifelong fixer, Otis Lee is determined to steer his friends and family away from decisions that will cause them heartache and ridicule. After his failed attempt as a teenager to help his older sister, Otis Lee discovers a possible path to redemption in the chaos Knot brings to his doorstep. But while he's busy trying to fix Knot's life, Otis Lee finds himself powerless to repair the many troubles within his own family, as the long-buried secrets of his troubled past begin to come to light. Set in an African American community in rural North Carolina from 1941 to 1987, In West Mills is a magnificent, big-hearted small-town story about family, friendship, storytelling, and the redemptive power of love.
  
  
• Hoops
  
  Hoops: PZ7.M992 H66 2012
  Author(s): Walter Dean Myers
  New York : Ember 2012, ©1981.
  
  Seventeen-year-old Lonnie Jackson sees the city-wide basketball Tournament of Champions as a possible escape from Harlem but fears the pressures that have sidelined his coach, Cal.
  
  
• Carrie Mae Weems: The Usual Suspects
  
  Carrie Mae Weems: The Usual Suspects: TR647.W446 U78 2018
  Author(s): Carrie Mae Weems
  Baton Rouge, LA : Louisana State University Press; Louisana State University Museum of Art and Louisiana State University School of Art [2018].
  
  This exhibition catalogue features recent works by artist Carrie Mae Weems included in LSU Museum of Art’s exhibition, Carrie Mae Weems: The Usual Suspects. The exhibition focuses on the humanity denied in recent killings of black men, women, and children by police. She directs our attention to the constructed nature of racial identity—specifically, representations that associate black bodies with criminality. Through a formal language of blurred images, color blocks, stated facts, and meditative narration, Weems directs our attention toward the repeated pattern of judicial inaction. In addition to full color plates of photographic and video works included in the exhibition, the catalogue features an introductory essay by Curator Courtney Taylor and transcripts by Carrie Mae Weems from video and photographic works included in the exhibition.
  
  
• Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop
  
  Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop: TR820.5.K36 E35 2020
  Author(s): Sarah Eckhardt
  Richmond : Duke University Press; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts 2020.
  
  Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop accompanies the exhibition of the photography of Virginia artist Louis Draper and other members of the Kamoinge Workshop to be presented by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in January, 2020.
  
  
• Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America
  
  Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America: TX945.3 .C46 2020
  Author(s): Marcia Chatelain
  New York, NY : Liveright Publishing Corporation a division of W W Norton & Company [2020]
  
  From civil rights to Ferguson, Franchise reveals the untold history of how fast food became one of the greatest generators of black wealth in America. Often blamed for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black Americans, fast food restaurants like McDonald’s have long symbolized capitalism’s villainous effects on our nation’s most vulnerable communities. But how did fast food restaurants so thoroughly saturate black neighborhoods in the first place? In Franchise, acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain uncovers a surprising history of cooperation among fast food companies, black capitalists, and civil rights leaders, who—in the troubled years after King’s assassination—believed they found an economic answer to the problem of racial inequality. With the discourse of social welfare all but evaporated, federal programs under presidents Johnson and Nixon promoted a new vision for racial justice: that the franchising of fast food restaurants, by black citizens in their own neighborhoods, could finally improve the quality of black life. Synthesizing years of research, Franchise tells a troubling success story of an industry that blossomed the very moment a freedom movement began to whither.
  
  

Other new African American Studies books

• What you gonna do when the world's on fire? / : E185.615 .W264 2020
• Njideka Akunyili Crosby : predecessors : the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati / : ND1099.N53 A4 2019
• Waves / : PN1997.2 .W38 2020