Françoise N. Hamlin – författare

From enslaved people who joined Washington’s Continental Army and Buffalo Soldiers in the Indian Wars to the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II and black servicemen and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, African Americans have been an integral part of the country’s armed forces - even while the nation questioned, challenged, and denied their rights, and oftentimes their humanity.These Truly Are the Brave collects poems, stories, plays, songs, essays, pamphlets, newspaper articles, speeches, oral histories, letters, and political commentaries, richly contextualizing them within their specific historical moments. This volume offers perspectives onwar, national loyalty, and freedom from a sweeping range of writers that includes Phillis Wheatley, James Weldon Johnson, Natasha Trethewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, Michael S. Harper, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many more. Some selectionshere present African Americans embracing wartime service as a way to express citizenship; other selections show black people remaining steadfast in quiet civilian work. Wrestling with their disputed place in American democracy, the courageous writers in this anthology expose and reexamine the foundations of U.S. citizenship.

From enslaved people who joined Washington's Continental Army to Buffalo Soldiers in the Indian Wars, from the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II to black men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, African Americans have been an integral part of the country's armed forces?even while the nation questioned, challenged, and denied their rights, and oftentimes their humanity.These Truly Are the Brave collects three centuries of poems, stories, plays, songs, essays, pamphlets, newspaper articles, speeches, oral histories, letters, and political commentaries, richly contextualizing them within their specific historical moments. This anthology offers perspectives on war, national loyalty, and freedom from a sweeping range of writers including Phillis Wheatley, James Weldon Johnson, Natasha Trethewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, Vievee Francis, Michael S. Harper, Ann Petry, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many more. Some selections reveal African Americans embracing wartime service as a way to express citizenship; others show black people remaining steadfast in quiet civilian work. Courageously wrestling with their disputed place in American democracy, these writers expose and reexamine the foundations of U.S. citizenship

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grass-roots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multi-level responses to these assertions of Black Humanity.Rights and Lives critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. McKinney and Hamlin invite the contributors to take up what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other. They grapple with how our understanding of the postwar moment shapes our analysis of #BLM and wherein lie the discontinuities, in order to glean lessons for future moments of insurgency.

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grass-roots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multi-level responses to these assertions of Black Humanity.Rights and Lives critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. McKinney and Hamlin invite the contributors to take up what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other. They grapple with how our understanding of the postwar moment shapes our analysis of #BLM and wherein lie the discontinuities, in order to glean lessons for future moments of insurgency.

Weaving national narratives from stories of the daily lives and familiar places of local residents, Francoise Hamlin chronicles the slow struggle for black freedom through the history of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Hamlin paints a full picture of the town over fifty years, recognizing the accomplishments of its diverse African American community and strong NAACP branch, and examining the extreme brutality of entrenched power there. The Clarksdale story defies triumphant narratives of dramatic change, and presents instead a layered, contentious, untidy, and often disappointingly unresolved civil rights movement.Following the black freedom struggle in Clarksdale from World War II through the first decade of the twenty-first century allows Hamlin to tell multiple, interwoven stories about the town's people, their choices, and the extent of political change. She shows how members of civil rights organizations - especially local leaders Vera Pigee and Aaron Henry - worked to challenge Jim Crow through fights against inequality, police brutality, segregation, and, later, economic injustice. With Clarksdale still at a crossroads today, Hamlin explores how to evaluate success when poverty and inequality persist.

From 1955 to 1975, Vera Pigee (1924–2007) put her life and livelihood on the line with grassroots efforts for social change in Mississippi, principally through her years of leadership in Coahoma County’s NAACP. Known as the "Lady of Hats," coined by NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, Pigee was a businesswoman, mother, and leader. Her book, The Struggle of Struggles, offers a detailed view of the daily grind of organizing for years to open the state’s closed society. Fearless, forthright, and fashionable, Pigee also suffered for her efforts at the hands of white supremacists and those unwilling to accept strong women in leadership. She wrote herself into the histories, confronted misinformation, and self-published one of the first autobiographies from the era. Women like her worked, often without accolade or recognition, in their communities all over the country, but did not document their efforts in this way.The Struggle of Struggles, originally published in 1975, spotlights the gendered and generational tensions within the civil rights movement. It outlines the complexity, frustrations, and snubs, as well as the joy and triumphs that Pigee experienced and witnessed in the quest for a fairer and more equitable nation. This new edition begins with a detailed introductory essay by historian Françoise N. Hamlin, who interviewed Pigee and her daughter in the few years preceding their passing, as well as their coworkers and current activists. In addition to the insightful Introduction, Hamlin has also provided annotations to the original text for clarity and explanation, along with a timeline to guide a new generation of readers.