Documentaries
Websites
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Understanding RaceRACE is a project of American Anthropological Association. Funded by the Ford Foundation & National Science Foundation.
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Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in AmericaSearching through America's past for the last 25 years, collector James Allen uncovered an extraordinary visual legacy: photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout America. Please be aware before entering the site that much of the material is very disturbing. Click link to enter site.
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The Color LineA lesson on the countless colonial laws enacted to create division and inequality based on race. This helps students understand the origins of racism in the United States and who benefits.
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Digital Public Library of AmericaFind primary source material from libraries, archives, and museums from across the United States.
Institutional Racism: History & Context
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At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
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In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that ultimately changed the world. The author gives us the never-before-told history of how the civil rights movement began; how it was in part started in protest against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men who used economic intimidation, sexual violence, and terror to derail the freedom movement; and how those forces persisted unpunished throughout the Jim Crow era when white men assaulted black women to enforce rules of racial and economic hierarchy.
ISBN: 9780307269065Publication Date: 2010-09-07 -
Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
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Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is arguably the most important written document of the civil rights protest era and a widely read modern literary classic. Personally addressed to eight white Birmingham clergymen who sought to avoid violence by publicly discouraging King's civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, the nationally published "Letter" captured the essence of the struggle for racial equality and provided a blistering critique of the gradualist approach to racial justice. It soon became part of American folklore, and the image of King penning his epistle from a prison cell remains among the most moving of the era. Yet as S. Jonathan Bass explains in the first comprehensive history of King's "Letter," this image and the piece's literary appeal conceal a much more complex tale.
ISBN: 0807128007Publication Date: 2001-12-01 -
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
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In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine. Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle." Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine. She is the author of several books, includingWomen, Race, and Class andAre Prisons Obsolete? She is the subject of the acclaimed documentaryFree Angela andAll Political Prisoners and is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. One of America's most provocative public intellectuals, Dr. Cornel West has been a champion for racial justice since childhood. His writing, speaking, and teaching weave together the traditions of the black Baptist Church, progressive politics, and jazz.The New York Times has praised his "ferocious moral vision." His many books includeRace Matters,Democracy Matters, and his new autobiography,Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. Frank Barat is a human rights activist and author. He was the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine and is now the president of the Palestine Legal Action Network. His books includeGaza in Crisis andCorporate Complicity in Israel's Occupation.
ISBN: 1608465640Publication Date: 2016-02-09 -
Ghosts of Jim Crow
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When America inaugurated its first African American president, in 2009, many wondered if the country had finally become a "post-racial" society. Was this the dawning of a new era, in which America, a nation nearly severed in half by slavery, and whose racial fault lines are arguably among its most enduring traits, would at last move beyond race with the election of Barack Hussein Obama? In Ghosts of Jim Crow, F. Michael Higginbotham convincingly argues that America remains far away from that imagined utopia. Indeed, the shadows of Jim Crow era laws and attitudes continue to perpetuate insidious, systemic prejudice and racism in the 21st century. Higginbotham's extensive research demonstrates how laws and actions have been used to maintain a racial paradigm of hierarchy and separation-both historically, in the era of lynch mobs and segregation, and today-legally, economically, educationally and socially. Using history as a roadmap, Higginbotham arrives at a provocative solution for ridding the nation of Jim Crow's ghost, suggesting that legal and political reform can successfully create a post-racial America, but only if it inspires whites and blacks to significantly alter behaviors and attitudes of race-based superiority and victimization. He argues that America will never achieve its full potential unless it truly enters a post-racial era, and believes that time is of the essence as competition increases globally. Instructor's Guide
ISBN: 9780814737477Publication Date: 2013-03-18 -
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
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Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution--the nation’s original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America’s later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable.Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. Thus the United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation with global influence.
ISBN: 9780465002962Publication Date: 2014-09-09 -
Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers
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In the 1950s and 1960s Southern segregationists frequently argued that the Civil Rights movement in the South was the work of ``outside agitators'' rather than local blacks. Southern blacks were said to be satisfied with the social, political, and economic status quo. Ironically, even recent books and films (e.g., Mississippi Burning) more sympathetic in their portrayals nonetheless have perpetuated the image of Southern blacks as passive people, with the principal impetus for change coming from Northern civil rights organizations and the federal government. Journalist Nossiter and historian Dittmer offer useful correctives of this image in their books on the Civil Rights movement and its participants in that most Southern of Southern states, Mississippi. More narrow in focus, Nossiter's book examines the assassination of Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in 1963, as well as changes in Mississippi politics and culture that made possible the conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for that crime 30 years later.
ISBN: 0201608448Publication Date: 1994-01-01 -
The New Jim Crow
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In a bold and innovative argument, a rising legal star shows readers how the mass incarceration of a disproportionate number of black men amounts to a devastating system of racial control. This is a terrifying reality that exists in the UK as much as in the US. Despite the triumphant dismantling of the Jim Crow laws, the system that once forced African-Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still haunts and the criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men and deprives an entire segment of the population of their basic rights.
ISBN: 9781595586438Publication Date: 2012-01-16 -
Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790-1860
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Between the Revolution and Civil War, African-American writing became a prominent feature of both black protest culture and American public life. Although denied a political voice in national affairs, black authors produced a wide range of literature to project their views into the public sphere. The editors examine the important and previously overlooked pamphleteering tradition and offer new insights into how and why the printed word became so important to black activists during this critical period.
ISBN: 0415924448Publication Date: 2000-10-25 -
Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America
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Eduardo Bonilla-Silva s acclaimed Racism without Racists documents how, beneath our contemporary conversation about race, lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for and ultimately justify racial inequalities. This provocative book explodes the belief that America is now a color-blind society. The fourth edition adds a chapter on what Bonilla-Silva calls "the new racism," which provides the essential foundation to explore issues of race and ethnicity in more depth. This edition also updates Bonilla-Silva s assessment of race in America after President Barack Obama s re-election. Obama s presidency, Bonilla-Silva argues, does not represent a sea change in race relations, but rather embodies disturbing racial trends of the past. In this fourth edition, Racism without Racists will continue to challenge readers and stimulate discussion about the state of race in America today."
ISBN: 9781442220546Publication Date: 2013-07-29 -
Residential Apartheid: The American Legacy
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After some 25 years of federal civil rights legislation, fair housing goals have yet to be achieved for a large segment of America's population as housing & economic barriers continue to be the main cause of racially segregated neighborhoods. Today's housing & economic conditions in many of the nation's urban ghettos & barrios rival the conditions that contributed to the riots of the 1960s.
ISBN: 0934934436Publication Date: 1994-03-01
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Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
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National Book Award-winning author Jonathan Kozol presents his shocking account of the American educational system in this stunning New York Times bestseller, which has sold more than 250,000 hardcover copies.
ISBN: 0060974990Publication Date: 1992-06-12 -
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
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Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, SISTER OUTSIDER celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope.
ISBN: 0895941422Publication Date: 1984-06-01
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The Souls of Black Folk
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One of the most influential and widely read texts in all of African American letters and history,The Souls of Black Folkcombines some of the most enduring reflections on black identity, the meaning of emancipation,and Afican American culture. This new edition reprints the original 1903 edition of W.E.B. Du Bois's classic work with the fullest set of annotations of any version yet published, together with two related essays, and numerous letters Du Bois received and wrote concerning his widely read text. The introductory essay combines the sensibilities of a historian and a philosopher to capture the contoursof Du Bois's life and writings along with the early-twentieth-century reception to the book. Photographs, a chronology, questions for consideration, a bibliography, and an index are also included.
ISBN: 0312091141Publication Date: 1997-02-15 -
Systemic Racism
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Joe Feagin develops a theory of systemic racism to interpret the racialised character and development of society. Focusing on white-on-black oppression, he asks what distinctive social worlds have been created by racial oppression over nearly four centuries, and what this has meant for the people of the US.
ISBN: 0415952786Publication Date: 2006-01-24 -
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man
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"This is a book of stories," writes Henry Louis Gates, "and all might be described as 'narratives of ascent.'" As some remarkable men talk about their lives, many perspectives on race and gender emerge. For the notion of the unitary black man, Gates argues, is as imaginary as the creature that the poet Wallace Stevens conjured in his poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."
ISBN: 0679457135Publication Date: 1997-01-21 -
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic story of America's Great Migration
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One of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. nbsp; With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an "unrecognized immigration" within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.
ISBN: 9780679444329Publication Date: 2010-09-07 -
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
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In this "penetrating new analysis" () Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, "Katznelson's incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history."
ISBN: 0393052133Publication Date: 2005-08-22 -
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations about Race
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Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see black youth seated together in the cafeteria. Of course, it's not just the black kids sitting together-the white, Latino, Asian Pacific, and, in some regions, American Indian youth are clustered in their own groups, too. The same phenomenon can be observed in college dining halls, faculty lounges, and corporate cafeterias. What is going on here? Is this self-segregation a problem we should try to fix, or a coping strategy we should support? How can we get past our reluctance to talk about racial issues to even discuss it? And what about all the other questions we and our children have about race? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, asserts that we do not know how to talk about our racial differences: Whites are afraid of using the wrong words and being perceived as "racist" while parents of color are afraid of exposing their children to painful racial realities too soon. Using real-life examples and the latest research, Tatum presents strong evidence that straight talk about our racial identities-whatever they may be-is essential if we are serious about facilitating communication across racial and ethnic divides. We have waited far too long to begin our conversations about race. This remarkable book, infused with great wisdom and humanity, has already helped hundreds of thousands of readers figure out where to start.
ISBN: 0465083617Publication Date: 2003-01-17
Video:
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Eyes on the Prize-America's Civil Rights Movement 1954-1985 14 part documentary about the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.
Memoirs:
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The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr
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Celebrated Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson is the director and editor of the Martin Luther King Papers Project; with thousands of King's essays, notes, letters, speeches, and sermons at his disposal, Carson has organized King's writings into a posthumous autobiography. In an early student essay, King prophetically penned: "We cannot have an enlightened democracy with one great group living in ignorance.... We cannot have a nation orderly and sound with one group so ground down and thwarted that it is almost forced into unsocial attitudes and crime." Such statements, made throughout King's career, are skillfully woven together into a coherent narrative of the quest for social justice. The autobiography delves, for example, into the philosophical training King received at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University, where he consolidated the teachings of Afro-American theologian Benjamin Mays with the philosophies of Locke, Rousseau, Gandhi, and Thoreau. Through King's voice, the reader intimately shares in his trials and triumphs, including the Montgomery Boycott, the 1963 "I Have a Dream Speech," the Selma March, and the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. In one of his last speeches, King reminded his audience that "in the final analysis, God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives." Carson's skillful editing has created an original argument in King's favor that draws directly from the source, illuminating the circumstances of King's life without deifying his person. --Eugene Holley Jr.
ISBN: 0446524123Publication Date: 1998-11-01 -
Between the World and Me
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In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men--bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates's attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son--and readers--the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
ISBN: 9780812993547Publication Date: 2015-07-14 -
Black Like Me
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The 5,000,000 copy bestseller of life in the black ghettos of America - written by a white man! This shocking book is a first hand account of the story of a man who underwent a series of medical treatments to change his skin colour temporarily to black. His purpose was to try and find out what it was like to be a black man in America.
ISBN: 0451192036Publication Date: 1996-11-01 -
Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow
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Although historians frequently use memoirs as source material, too often they confine such usage to the anecdotal, and there is little methodological literature regarding the genre’s possibilities and limitations. This study articulates an approach to using memoirs as instruments of historical understanding. Jennifer Jensen Wallach applies these principles to a body of memoirs about life in the American South during Jim Crow segregation, including works by Zora Neale Hurston, Willie Morris, Lillian Smith, Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Alexander Percy, and Richard Wright. Wallach argues that the field of autobiography studies, which is currently dominated by literary critics, needs a new theoretical framework that allows historians, too, to benefit from the interpretation of life writing. Her most provocative claim is that, due to the aesthetic power of literary language, skilled creative writers are uniquely positioned to capture the complexities of another time and another place. Through techniques such as metaphor and irony, memoirists collectively give their readers an empathetic understanding of life during the era of segregation. Although these reminiscences bear certain similarities, it becomes clear that the South as it was remembered by each is hardly the same place.
ISBN: 9780820335025Publication Date: 2010-04-01 -
The Fire Next Time
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A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.
ISBN: 067974472XPublication Date: 1992-12-01 -
If They Came in the Morning: Voices of Resistance
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The trial of Angela Davis is remembered as one of America’s most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Davis herself. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Angela, and including contributions from numerous radicals and commentators such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis’s incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United States and the figure embodied in Davis’s arrest and imprisonment—the political prisoner.
Since the book was written, the carceral system in the US has grown from strength to strength, with more of its black population behind bars than ever before. The scathing analysis of the role of prison and the policing of black populations offered by Davis and her comrades in this astonishing volume remains as relevant today as the day it was published.
Literature
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Americanah [ebook]
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One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year From the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, a dazzling new novel: a story of love and race centered around a young man and woman from Nigeria who face difficult choices and challenges in the countries they come to call home.
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Invisible Man
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Invisible Manis a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.  A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.  The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.  The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot'sThe Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.
ISBN: 0679600159Publication Date: 1992-09-05 -
Betsey Brown
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This is a unique and vividly told novel about a girl named Betsey Brown, an African American seventh-grader growing up in St. Louis, Missouri. While rendering a complete portrait of this girl, author Ntozake Shange also profiles her friends, her family, her home, her school, and her world. This world, though a work of fiction, is based closely and carefully on actual history, specifically on the nationwide school desegregation events of the Civil Rights movement in America''s recent past.
ISBN: 0312134347Publication Date: 1995-08-15 -
The Ways of White Folks
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In these acrid and poignant stories, Hughes depicted black people colliding--sometimes humorously, more often tragically--with whites in the 1920s and '30s.
ISBN: 0679728171Publication Date: 1990-09-12
