African American Life Series – serie

This is the first full biography of the pioneering black collector whose detective work laid the foundation for the study of black history and culture. Born in Puerto Rico in 1874, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg came to New York militantly active in Caribbean revolutionary struggles. He searched out the hidden records of the black experience and built a collection of books, manuscripts, and art that had few rivals. Today it forms the core of the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for research in Black Culture, one of the leading collections in the field.At the center of the Harlem Renaissance, Schomburg was a generous friend of many of the writers, artists, performers, collectors, scholars, and political figures who made Harlem the capital of Black America. A contributor to the major black journals of the period, he went on to head the Negro Collection at Fisk University and became curator of his own collection in the New York Public Library until his death in 1938.

Based on original materials gathered from extensive international travel, hundreds of interviews and empirical field research, thims text studies Pan-African organizations and their political activities inside black communities.

An analysis of Black politics since the late 1960s. In analyzing Black politics since the late 1960s, James Jennings focuses on both the behavioral aspects, such as individual and group characteristics of voting and nonvoting and elections, as well as more fundamental philosophical and cultural questions regarding Black politics. This study examines how the ""traditional"" face of Black politics and electoral activism interacts with a growing ""progressive"" face of Black politics. While traditional Black political activists seek access or political incorporation, another group aims for power sharing. The traditional approach is sometimes satisfied with merely replacing white politicians with Blacks, but the progressive constituency focuses on fundamentally changing the whole economic and political pie. Activists desirous of Black empowerment are pursuing a political and economic orientation that goes beyond programs based on access to American institutional arrangements and attempting to change or alter given political arrangements and social relations between Blacks and whites on the basis of changing the social structure and the distribution of wealth and power. Based on interviews with Black and Latino activists in several big cities as well as review of the literature and Black newspapers around the country, The Politics of Black Empowerment describes the characteristics of Black empowerment activism in America.

This text shows how strands of racial thinking and behaviour have become institutionalized and are crucial for maintaining the unequal distribution of wealth that is more pronounced in the US than any other advanced country. It proposes an understanding of racism as a divide-and-conquer mechanism.

This is the history of Detroit's African American community told by the men and women who lived it.

This work approaches Frances Harper as a feminist and as a writer. The author, Melba Boyd, reflects upon the impact of Harper's legacy on another artist/activist - herself.

Using the magic of movement, dance, and drama, and the devices of humor and metaphor, Osonye Tess Onwueme has created a post-feminist epic drama that transcends current feminist theories. An ideologically and politically powerful work, Tell It to Women offers a critical discourse on the western feminist movement from an African traditional perspective, focusing attention on the often silenced issues of intra-gender politics and class inequities.

Eric Walrond (1898-1966) was a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement and a seminal writer of Black diasporic life. This anthology brings together a broad sampling of his writings.

Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Contains two essays by Martin Luther King Jr. concerning the role of violence in the civil rights movement. During the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Robert Williams organized armed self-defense against the racist violence of the Ku Klux Klan. This is the story of his movement, first established in Monroe, N.C. As prologue, the issues raised by events in Monroe are weighted by Truman Nelson and Martin Luther King Jr. Illustrated.

Representing over 20 years research, this text presents the results of community-based anthropological studies in Arizona and Michigan in addition to work in urban prenatal clinics, contact with traditional healers, and experience as a behavioural scientist in paediatrics clinics.

At a time when the art of the African diaspora has aroused much general interest for its multicultural dimensions, Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara contributes strikingly rich insights as a participant/observer in the African-based religions of Brazil. She focuses on the symbolism and function of ritual objects and costumes used in the Brazilian candomble (miniature ""African"" environments or temples) of the Bahia region, which combine Yoruba, Bantu/Angola, Caboclo, Roman Catholic, and/or Kardecist/Spiritist elements. An initiate herself with more than twenty years of study, the author is considered an insider, and has witnessed how practitioners manipulate the ""sacred"" to encode, in art and ritual, vital knowledge about meaning, values, epistemologies, and history. She demonstrates how this manipulation provides Brazilian descendents of slaves with a sense of agency - with a link to their African heritage and a locus for resistance to the dominant Euro-Brazilian culture. Manipulating the Sacred will be of value to students of art history, religion, anthropology, African American studies, and Latin American studies, and to the growing English-speaking community of initiates of African-based religions.

Phenomena such as institutional racism have had a major impact on the development of African American self esteem and group identity. This study examines the historical basis for the widely misunderstood ideas of how African Americans think of themselves individually and as part of a group.

Because of the increasing influence of Hip hop music and culture on a generation raised during its dominance, it is important to address Hip hop and African American vernacular not merely as elements of folk and popular cultures but as rhetoric worthy of serious scrutiny. In Gettin' Our Groove On, author Kermit E. Campbell not only insists on this worthiness but also investigates the role that African American vernacular plays in giving a voice to the lived experiences of America's ghetto marginalized. Campbell's work shows the persistence and force of the vernacular tradition in the face of increasing criticism from the American mainstream. A broad area of research is covered with surprising depth as Campbell addresses issues of language and rhetoric within the historical context of African oral tradition and African American folklore, poetry, popular music, fiction, and film. The text presents gangsta/reality rap as a rhetorical tactic consistent with ghetto hustling culture, rather than just entertainment, and also explores the negation of black vernacular in the classroom that has resulted in misguided approaches to teaching literacy to black students. Itself infused with the Hip hop idiom and an engaging style free of academic jargon, Gettin' Our Groove On presents a thorough and provocative contribution to cultural and rhetorical studies.

A collection of four plays by contemporary playwright, screenwriter, and director Ron Milner. Much of Black literature from the 1940s through the 1960s deals with the search for identity and asks the question, Should Blacks define themselves in relationship to white people and white culture? In dramatizing the struggles and desires of the Black working class and lower middle class, renowned Detroit playwright Ron Milner responds to this question by letting Black culture - Black music in particular - be not only his subject but part of his form of expression and way of being in the world. The four Milner plays collected here - Checkmates, What the Wine-Sellers Buy, Jazz-Set, and Urban Transition - are characterized by their attention to African American social and psychological culture. Checkmates (1990) explores the relationships of two Black couples who are generations apart in age and attitudes - one new at the games and realities of love, the other experienced. What the Wine-Sellers Buy (1974), a coming-of-age tale set on Detroit streets in the 1950s, looks at the conflict between the lure of the streets and a mother's teachings. The highly innovative Jazz-Set is Milner's tribute to jazz - a play that works like a jazz composition, where the musicians and music are one and characters' life experiences and memories are ""played"" as music. Urban Transition (1995) picks up on themes introduced in What the Wine-Sellers Buy to examine how the drug subculture has made its way into current mainstream culture. Ron Milner is one of America's most prolific and foremost playwrights. His plays have become required texts in many of the emerging repertory theaters of the Black and progressive theater communities. Four Plays will be of interest to students of the theater, theater scholars, and those interested in African American and American literature.

Interdisciplinary in scope, this anthology redresses the undue neglect of Anglophone Caribbeans - almost 25 percent of the black population in Harlem in 1920 - and their pivotal role in the literary, cultural, and political events shaping the Harlem Renaissance. The poetry, fiction, drama, and essays included explore a variety of issues, such as the increasing emphasis on race and image building, the development of a black aesthetic, progressive politics, and the struggle to define the status of blacks in America. Both the literary and political works show the spirit of the New Negro, one emphasizing racial pride and aesthetic consciousness. Examined closely are the black and Carribean American figures involved in the black nationalism movement, socialist groups, and trade unions, including such prominent figures as Marcus Carvey and his two wives, Amy Ashwood and Amy Jacques Garvey, Hubert Harrison, W. A. Domingo, and Frank Crosswaith. Also explored are the developing communist movements as manifested in the writings of Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, Otto Huiswoud, and George Padmore. Essays review the crucial literary contributions of Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, and dramatist Eulalie Spence, as well as historians Arthur Schomburg and J. A. Rogers. This anthology of writers, with accompanying discussions about their works placed in the context of their own time, will be of interest to anyone examinino the Harlem Renaissance and the larger black and Caribbean contribution to cultural and political thinking.

The rise of the Conservative movement in the United States over the last two decades is evident in current public policy, including the passage of the Welfare Reform Act, the weakening of affirmative action, and the approval of educational vouchers for private schooling. At the same time, new rules on congressional redistricting prohibit legislators from constructing majority black congressional districts, and blacks continue to suffer disproportionate rates of incarceration and death-penalty sentencing. In this significant new study, the distinguished political scientist Ronald W. Walters argues that the Conservative movement during this period has had an inordinate impact on American governing institutions and that a strong, though very often unstated, racial hostility drives the public policies put forth by Conservative politicians. Walters traces the emergence of what he calls a new White Nationalism, showing how it fuels the Conservative movement, invades the public discourse, and generates policies that protect the interests of white voters at the expense of blacks and other nonwhites. Using historical and contemporary examples of White Nationalist policy, as well as empirical public opinion data, Walters demonstrates the degree to which this ideology exists among white voters and the negative impact of its policies on the black community. White Nationalism, Black Interests terms the current period a ""second Reconstruction,"" comparing the racial dynamics in the post-Civil Rights era to those of the first Reconstruction following the end of the Civil War. Walters's analysis of contemporary racial politics is uniquely valuable to scholars and lay readers alike and is sure to spark further public debate.

The African Cuban poet Nancy Morejon set out at a young age to explore the beauty and complexities of the life around and within her. Themes of social and political concern, loyalty, friendship and family, African identity, women's experiences, and hope for Cuba's future all found their way into her poems through bold metaphor and tender lyricism. This panoramic anthology, selected from ten volumes of Morejon's work and organized by theme, contains some poems that have already been acclaimed in several languages, others that are less known, and some never before published. Overall they present to Morejon's readership an enhanced, broader, and updated spectrum of her poetry in a Spanish-English edition. Although Morejon does not sympathize as much with intellectualized feminism as with ""street"" feminism (the kind that erupts with force as it confronts daily life), her poems illuminate issues in women's existence. Without intending to, she has revitalized contemporary Caribbean feminist literary discourse. One can find in her work the tensions between colonizer and colonized, dominator and dominated, and at the same time enjoy the sheer beauty of images depicting suffering, strength, and hope. Poet, essayist, critic, editor, journalist, and translator, Nancy Morejon was born in the Los Sitios district of Central Havana in 1944. Her first book, Mutismos, was published in 1962, and she has collaborated throughout her career with leading musicians, playwrights, and actors. She has recently extended her artistic talents into the plastic arts. Morejon now directs the Caribbean Studies Center at Casa de las Americas, Havana, epicenter of Cuban and Latin American intelligentsia.

No serious history of the development of the African American novel from the 1950s onward can be written without reference to John Oliver Killens. A two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and founding chairman of the legendary Harlem Writers Guild, Killens was regarded by many as a spiritual father who inspired a generation of African American novelists with his politically charged works. And yet today he rarely receives proper critical attention. Seeking to strengthen our understanding of this important literary figure, Keith Gilyard departs from standard critical frameworks to reveal Killens's novels as artful renderings of rich African American rhetorical forms and verbal traditions. Gilyard finds that many critics, adhering to ideals of art for art's sake or narrative conciseness, are ill-equipped to appreciate the many ways in which Killens's fiction succeeds. Rejecting the ""pure art"" position, Killens sought to articulate Black heroism particularly within a family or community context, offering a set of values he deemed liberatory. He focused on rendering noble and polemical characters, and his work represents a distinguished fusion of sociopolitical persuasion (rhetoric) and literary artifact (poetics). To help illuminate such novels as Youngblood (1954), And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), and The Cotillion (1971), Gilyard examines Killens's work as an essayist and cultural organizer, highlighting his activism. His life and literary production can be partly characterized, Gilyard suggests, by the African American jeremiad - a major rhetorical form in the Black intellectual tradition expressing faith that America's destiny is to become an authentic, pluralistic democracy.

Renowned playwright Osonye Tess Onwueme's powerful new drama illuminates the effect of national and global oil politics on the lives of impoverished rural Nigerians. What Mama Said is set in the metaphorical state of Sufferland, whose people are starving and routinely exploited and terrorized by corrupt government officials and multinational oil companies - that is, until a voice erupts and moves the wounded women and youths to rise up and demand justice. Onwueme's powerful characters and vibrant, emotionally charged scenes bring to life a turbulent movement for change and challenge to tradition. Aggrieved youths and militant women - whose husbands and sons work in the refineries or have been slaughtered in the violent struggle - take center stage to ""drum"" their pain in this drama about revolution. Determined to finally confront the multinational forces that have long humiliated them, Sufferland villagers burn down pipelines and kidnap an oil company director. Tensions peak, and activist leaders are put on trial before a global jury that can no longer ignore the situation. What Mama Said is a moving portrayal of the battle for human rights, dignity, compensation, and the right of a nation's people to control the resources of their own land.

This study analyses the relationship between two powerful forces - church organizations and urban politics - within New York City and Detroit from the late 19th through the 20th century.

This is the final collection of poems from Murray Jackson. A highly respected educator, political figure and philanthropist, Jackson offers work rich in the history and hope of Detroit's Black urban - and urbane - tradition.

Having more in common than their deaths on the same day in 1997, the late Cheddi Jagan of Guyana and Michael Manley of Jamaica both represented a radical perspective in modern Caribbean politics. Jagan and Manley each had a bold and creative ability to connect labor and politics and made it their priority to minimize poverty and inequality and to enhance the welfare of the Caribbean's disadvantaged and dispossessed. Caribbean Labor and Politics looks closely at the legacies of Jagan and Manley and their ramifications for the political and economic struggles of the Caribbean region and the world. This edited volume brings together a variety of studies on the lives, works, and intellectual and practical contributions of these two stalwart political leaders. The chapters focus primarily on Jagan's and Manley's years as heads of state of their respective countries and also encapsulate their pre-political years - mainly their growing-up experiences and their organizational work in the labor movement. The core contributions of these men are characterized in terms of their pivotal struggles toward the realization of what we term the ""working-class project.

This book takes a look at the innovations of contemporary performers of modern gospel music and their roots in the African American Christian church.In ""When the Church Becomes Your Party"", author Deborah Smith Pollard assesses contemporary gospel music as the genre enters the twenty-first century. She argues that although the flashy clothing, informal language, and elaborate stage presentation found in some of the newest gospel music might not be what some worshippers expect, this new aesthetic rests on the same Christian principles as more traditional forms and actually extends its message to a wider and younger audience.In this volume Pollard looks at contemporary gospel music with the insider's perspective she has acquired as a regular participant in praise and worship services in the Detroit area and through her work as a successful gospel concert producer (""The Motor City Praisefest"" and the ""McDonald's GospelFest"") and host of a popular Sunday morning gospel show on Detroit's FM 98 ""WJLB"".Among the topics she considers in ""When the Church Becomes Your Party"" are praise and worship music, gospel musical stage plays, the changing dress code of gospel performance, women gospel announcers, and holy hip hop. She draws on Detroit's thriving gospel scene as well as her knowledge of the national gospel music industry to identify important trends in each area and trace the cultural transformations that brought them about. In addition, Pollard includes interviews with contemporary gospel artists, allowing them to explain why they rap, make particular choices in attire, or participate in gospel radio, praise and worship, or gospel musical plays.While other studies address some of the subtopics included in this volume, ""When the Church Becomes Your Party"" offers a comprehensive picture of the history and future of contemporary gospel music. Scholars of music and African American cultural studies will enjoy this intriguing volume.

This illuminating autobiography traces Scarborough's path out of slavery in Macon, Georgia, to a prolific scholarly career that culminated with his presidency of Wilberforce University. Despite the racism he met as he struggled to establish a place in higher education for African Americans, Scarborough was an exemplary scholar, particularly in the field of classical studies. He was the first African American member of the Modern Language Association, a forty-four-year member of the American Philological Association, and a true champion of higher education Scarborough advocated the reading, writing, and teaching of liberal arts at a time when illiteracy was rampant due to slavery's legacy, white supremacists were dismissing the intellectual capability of blacks, and Booker T. Washington was urging African Americans to focus on industrial skills and training. The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough is a valuable historical record of the life and work of a pioneer who helped formalize the intellectual tradition of the black scholar, Michele Valerie Ronnick contextualizes Scarborough's narrative through extensive notes and by exploring a wide variety of sources such as census records, church registries, period newspapers, and military and university recards. This book is indispensable to anyone interested in the history of intellectual endeavor in America, Africana studies and classical studies, in particular, as well as those familiar with the associations and institutions that welcomed and valued Scarborough.

This illuminating autobiography traces Scarborough?s path out of slavery in Macon, Georgia, to a prolific scholarly career that culminated with his presidency of Wilberforce University. Despite the racism he met as he struggled to establish a place in higher education for African Americans, Scarborough was an exemplary scholar, particularly in the field of classical studies. He was the first African American member of the Modern Language Association, a forty-four-year member of the American Philological Association, and a true champion of higher education. Scarborough advocated the reading, writing, and teaching of liberal arts at a time when illiteracy was rampant due to slavery?s legacy, white supremacists were dismissing the intellectual capability of blacks, and Booker T. Washington was urging African Americans to focus on industrial skills and training.The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough is a valuable historical record of the life and work of a pioneer who helped formalize the intellectual tradition of the black scholar. Michele Valerie Ronnick contextualizes Scarborough?s narrative through extensive notes and by exploring a wide variety of sources such as census records, church registries, period newspapers, and military and university records. This book is indispensable to anyone interested in the history of intellectual endeavor in America, Africana studies and classical studies, in particular, as well as those familiar with the associations and institutions that welcomed and valued Scarborough.

Dreaming Suburbia is a cultural and historical interpretation of the political economy of postwar American suburbanization. Questions of race, class, and gender are explored through novels, film, television and social criticism where suburbia features as a central theme. Although suburbanization had important implications for cities and for the geo-politics of race, critical considerations of race and urban culture often receive insufficient attention in cultural studies of suburbia. This book puts these questions back in the frame by focusing on Detroit, Dearborn and Ford history, and the local suburbs of Inkster and Garden City. Covering such topics as the political and cultural economy of suburban sprawl, the interdependence of city and suburb, and local acts of violence and crises during the 1967 riots, the text examines the making of a physical place, its cultural effects and social exclusions. The perspectives of cultural history, American studies, social science, and urban studies give Dreaming Suburbia an interdisciplinary appeal.

This little red book brings together many of the longtime Detroit mayor's most unforgettable lines in a format meant to recall the famous little red book of quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. It was first published in 1991 by Droog Press, a small Detroit-based press founded by a longtime reporter and editor at the Detroit Free Press. This new edition features quotations that did not make it into the original book and a chronology outlining Coleman Young's life and career. Both insightful and entertaining, this is an essential reference for anyone interested in politics, black politics in particular, and political humor.