Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Summary
While many historically significant or interesting plays by white playwrights are easily found in anthologies, few by early African American writers are equally accessible. Indeed, until the 1970s, almost none of these early plays could be located outside of a library.
“The Roots of African American Drama” fills this gap. Five of the thirteen scripts included here have never been in print, and only three others are presently available anywhere....
Author
Series
Summary
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, NC. As prologue, the issues raised by events in Monroe are weighted by Truman Nelson and Martin Luther King Jr.
Author
Series
Summary
Representing more than twenty years of anthropological research, Walkin' over Medicine, originally published by Westview Press in 1993, presents the results of Loudell F. Snow's community-based studies in Arizona and Michigan, work in two urban prenatal clinics, conversations and correspondence with traditional healers, and experience as a behavioral scientist in a pediatrics clinic. Snow also visited numerous pharmacies, grocery stores, and specialty...
Author
Series
Summary
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....
Author
Series
Summary
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...
Author
Series
Summary
Beginning in the 1890s, the social gospel movement and its secular counterpart, the Progressive movement, set the stage for powerful church and city governance connections. What followed during the next 100 years was the emergence of religious bodies as an important instrument for influencing City Hall on moral and social issues. Churches and Urban Government compares the governing styles of Detroit and New York City from 1895 to 1994 and looks at...
Author
Series
Summary
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 long-time 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...
Author
Series
Summary
In “Your Average Nigga”, Vershawn Ashanti Young disputes the belief that speaking Standard English and giving up Black English Vernacular helps black students succeed academically. Young argues that this assumption not only exaggerates the differences between two compatible varieties of English but forces black males to choose between an education and their masculinity, by choosing to act either white or black. As one would expect from a scholar...
Author
Series
Summary
“Race and Remembrance” tells the remarkable life story of Arthur L. Johnson, a Detroit civil rights and community leader, educator, and administrator whose career spans much of the last century. In his own words, Johnson takes readers through the arc of his distinguished career, which includes his work with the Detroit branch of the NAACP, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, and Wayne State University.
A Georgia native, Johnson graduated from...
Author
Series
Summary
“The Golden Underground” offers a blend of the mythic and the religious as award-winning poet Anthony Butts records his search for meaning and understanding in everyday life. In this profound volume, Butts observes the relationships around him, including those of families and larger communities, to give a fittingly down-to-earth interpretation of the golden rule. The Golden Underground continues Butts' tradition of presenting spiritual ideas to...
Author
Series
Summary
In “If We Must Die: From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls”, author Aimé J. Ellis argues that throughout slavery, the Jim Crow era, and more recently in the proliferation of the prison industrial complex, the violent threat of death has functioned as a coercive disciplinary practice of social control over black men. In this provocative volume, Ellis delves into a variety of literary and cultural texts to consider unlawful and extralegal violence...
Author
Series
Summary
In “Keepin' It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric”, Vorris L. Nunley investigates the role of the hush harbor (a safe place for free expression among African American speakers) as a productive space of rhetorical tradition and knowledge generation. Nunley identifies the barbershop as an important hush harbor for black males in particular and traces the powerful cultural trope and its hidden tradition of African American...
Author
Series
Summary
Born in the rural American south, James Boggs lived nearly his entire adult life in Detroit and worked as a factory worker for twenty-eight years while immersing himself in the political struggles of the industrial urban north. During and after the years he spent in the auto industry, Boggs wrote two books, co-authored two others, and penned dozens of essays, pamphlets, reviews, manifestos, and newspaper columns to become known as a pioneering revolutionary...
Author
Series
Summary
“Bearing Witness to African American Literature: Validating and Valorizing Its Authority, Authenticity, and Agency” collects twenty-three of Bernard W. Bell's lectures and essays that were first presented between 1968 and 2008. From his role in the culture wars as a graduate student activist in the Black Studies Movement to his work in the transcultural Globalization Movement as an international scholar and Fulbright cultural ambassador in Spain,...
16) The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship
Author
Series
Summary
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,...
Author
Series
Summary
"There is no equal justice for Black people today; there never has been. To our everlasting shame, the quality of justice in America has always been and is now directly related to the color of one's skin as well as to the size of one's pocketbook." This quote comes from George W. Crockett Jr.'s essay, "A Black Judge Speaks" (Judicature, 1970). The stories of Black lawyers and judges are rarely told. By sharing Crockett's life of principled courage,...
18) Nothing special
Author
Series
Summary
"Six-year-old Jax can't wait to leave Detroit and spend a week with his grandparents in coastal Virginia, where he's sure he'll be spoiled with the kinds of special things he enjoys at home: toys, movies, and hamburgers. As he dreams of the adventures he'll have, his PopPop has other ideas. He fills their days with timeless summer fun-crabbing, shucking corn, and counting fireflies. Illustrated entirely of repurposed textiles, Nothing Special celebrates...
Author
Series
Summary
A classic in the black literary tradition, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” is both a comment on the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy.
Dan Freeman, the "spook who sat by the door," is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage program. Upon mastering agency tactics, however, he drops out to train young Chicago blacks as "Freedom Fighters" in this explosive,...