Martin Luther King Jr.: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works allows the reader to explore not just the facets of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s career but the network of associates across the Civil Rights Movement that enabled him to move forward with his campaigns for racial justice. Drawing on wide-ranging scholarship, the volume allows the reader to understand King in the context of his times. It features a chronology, an introduction offers a brief account of his life, a comprehensive bibliography, and a dictionary section lists entries on people, places, and events related to him.

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"Johnson gives these women visibility and voice as they relate their lives, their crimes, and their efforts to remain connected to families and communities...powerful."
-- "Booklist"

"Johnson's "Inner Lives" provides both a serious intervention in the literature on prisons and a venue through which incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Black women can speak for themselves. It challenges readers to take action."--"Black Renaissance"

""Inner Lives" soars when the women are allowed to speak for themselves."
--"Book"

"Johnson illuminates how the race and gender of African American women affect how they are treated in the American criminal justice system."
--"The Women's Review of Books"

"Johnson provides a historical look at African American women in the U.S. criminal justice system from the colonial period to the present."
--"Law's Social Inquiry"

The rate of women entering prison has increased nearly 400 percent since 1980, with African American women constituting the largest percentage of this population. However, despite their extremely disproportional representation in correctional institutions, little attention has been paid to their experiences within the criminal justice system.

Inner Lives provides readers the rare opportunity to intimately connect with African American women prisoners. By presenting the women's stories in their own voices, Paula C. Johnson captures the reality of those who are in the system, and those who are working to help them. Johnson offers a nuanced and compelling portrait of this fastest-growing prison population by blending legal history, ethnography, sociology, andcriminology. These striking and vivid narratives are accompanied by equally compelling arguments by Johnson on how to reform our nation's laws and social policies, in order to eradicate existing inequalities. Her thorough and insightful analysis of the historical and legal background of contemporary criminal law doctrine, sentencing theories, and correctional policies sets the stage for understanding the current system.

This social history is not just an autobiography. The emphasis of this personal history to is to demonstrate that Social History develops as a consequence of interactions and relationships between human beings. Not one of us consciously sets out to change the world, but minuscule changes resulting from our presence, causes us, without being aware of it, to leave an imprint on all humanity. Reflection on these two facts can generate realization that every human being on earth can and does effect change in the human condition. Consequently, few of us realize how significant our life existence really is, until someone reminds us that our presence made a host of differences in their own lives. Once we become aware of this truth, we can record expositions such as this one. After 87 years of living, the mountaintops and the valleys of my life have become --only in hindsight --a tangible part of our country's Social History. All I have done here is what I hope many more of you can, and will do --record your own history, and enjoy the vision of how your interactions with people helped to shape you, your family, your community, your society and the world. What is Life all about? Are you important to all humanity? The answer to the second question---- OH YES YOU ARE That's what I've tried to show you here.

This phenomenological analysis of African American religious subjectivity suggests the tragic, understood as an ontological category, as the seminal hermeneutical lens through which one can deepen one's understanding of the experience and its theological implications. New insights garnered from this framework challenges many traditional theological assumptions leading to the decentralization of the resurrection as the key Christian symbol. Through the abstract African American longing, Johnson connects the resurrection and the cross in one dialectically constituted moment of a larger recalibration of Christian categories, which brings the "Second Coming" into new theological and philosophical prominence.

Between 1965 and 1972, African American students at upwards of a thousand historically black and white American colleges and universities organized, demanded, and protested for Black Studies, Black universities, new faces, new ideas--a relevant, diverse higher education. Black power inspired these black students, who were supported by white, Latino, Chicana, Asian American, and Native American students.The Black Campus Movement provides the first national study of this intense and challenging struggle which disrupted and refashioned institutions in almost every state. This book also illuminates the complex context for one of the most transformative educational movements in American history through a history of black higher education and black student activism before 1965.

In an era when black baseball players had limited playing prospects in the United States, they found a more hospitable and level playing field in Canada. The entries in this dictionary contain biographical sketches, career highlights and statistics for hundreds of players, as well as information about their teams and leagues.

A collection of the New Yorker's groundbreaking writing on race in America, including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more From the pages of the New Yorker comes a bold and telling portrait of Black life in America, with astonishing early work from Rebecca West's account of a lynching trial and James Baldwin's 'Letter from a Region in My Mind' (which later formed the basis of The Fire Next Time) to more recent writing by Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Zadie Smith, Hilton Als, Jamaica Kincaid, Malcolm Gladwell, Elizabeth Alexander, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Doreen St. Felix, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kelefa Sanneh, and more. Reaching back across the last century, The Matter of Black Lives includes a wide array of material from the New Yorker archives ranging across essays, reported pieces, profiles, criticism, and historical pieces. This book addresses everything from the arts to civil rights, matters of justice, and politics, and brings us up to the present day with accounts of what Jelani Cobb calls "The American Spring." The result is a startling, nuanced and, ultimately, indelible portrait of America's complex relationship with race.

`Essential' Marlon James, Man Booker Prize-Winner 2015 'One of the most important books of 2017' Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant 'A wake-up call to a country in denial' Observer In 2014, award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote on her blog about her frustration with the way that discussions of race and racism in Britain were being led by those who weren't affected by it. Her words hit a nerve. The post went viral and comments flooded in from others desperate to speak up about their own experiences. Galvanised, she decided to dig into the source of these feelings. Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge has written a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary examination of what it is to be a person of colour in Britain today.

Prince of Peace: A Memoir of an African-American Attorney, Who Came of Age in Birmingham During the Civil Rights Movement

African-American Males and the US Justice System of Marginalization provides an overview of the economic and social status of African-American males in America, which continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate. Weatherspoon posits that in every American institutional system, from birth to death, the journey of African-American males to achieve racial justice and equity in this country is ignored, marginalized, and exploited. The American justice system, in particular, has permitted and in some cases sanctioned the marginalization of African-American males as full citizens. Weatherspoon examines the idea that African-American males are disproportionately represented in every aspect of the criminal justice system, and that the marginalization of African-American males in America has a long and treacherous history that continues to negatively impact their economic, political, and social status.

Speculative fiction often shows the complicated and rather fraught history of medicine as it relates to black women. Through prominent writers like Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Nalo Hopkinson, Jones highlights how personal experiences of illness and disease frequently reflect larger societal sicknesses in connection to race and gender.

Koreans first began to immigrate to Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. Drawn to the Windy City in search of a better life for themselves and their families, Korean Americans quickly began to establish what has become a thriving community that remains active and distinct. For the past 100 years, the Korean American community has contributed greatly to the growth and development of the Chicago metropolitan area-politically, culturally, and socially. In this book Korean Americans in Chicago celebrate these contributions with over 200 photographs that detail the various aspects of life within the community.

In this transnational account of black protest, Nicholas Grant examines how African Americans engaged with, supported, and were inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement. Bringing black activism into conversation with the foreign policy of both the U.S. and South African governments, this study questions the dominant perception that U.S.-centered anticommunism decimated black international activism. Instead, by tracing the considerable amount of time, money, and effort the state invested into responding to black international criticism, Grant outlines the extent to which the U.S. and South African governments were forced to reshape and occasionally reconsider their racial policies in the Cold War world. This study shows how African Americans and black South Africans navigated transnationally organized state repression in ways that challenged white supremacy on both sides of the Atlantic. The political and cultural ties that they forged during the 1940s and 1950s are testament to the insistence of black activists in both countries that the struggle against apartheid and Jim Crow were intimately interconnected.

Gathering some of the most important Wright scholarship in the world, along with perspectives from emerging Wright critics, "Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century," ""explores new themes and theoretical orientations. Essays center on modernism, racism and spatial dimensions, the transnational and political Wright, Wright and class, Wright and the American 1950s and 1960s, and some of the first analyses of Wright's recently published "A Father""'""s Law" (2008). This dynamic collection combines literary and cultural theory with methods of archival research to provide an expanded vision of Wright's impact on thinking in the twenty-first century.

On September 3, 1984 in Sharpeville, South Africa, a peaceful demonstration about rent erupted into a bloody battle between white police and black residents. The Apartheid government arrested, tried, and sentenced to death six people for allegedly killing a town councillor. After an unprecedented international campaign, the prisoners were ultimately granted clemency and released.

In the Shadow of Sharpeville explores the case in comprehensive, personal detail. Among the "Sharpeville Six" was Francis Mokhesi, whose sister, Joyce Mokhesi-Parker and coauthor, Peter Parker, here scrutinize the crime and its investigation by the police, the prosecution's case, and the response of the defense. They argue convincingly that the convictions were obtained because of the inventiveness of the judge and the selective attention paid to the evidence. The authors further examine the corrupting effect of the system on its victims, using Francis Mokhesi's letters from death row to show how an individual responds to the pain and fear of impending execution.

In the Shadow of Sharpevill reveals the obduracy of a regime which refused to understand how indefensible its behavior had become and which still believed that a state could declare war on its people and win.

James Campbell provides an in-depth survey of crime, punishment and justice in African American history. Presenting cutting-edge scholarship on issues of criminal justice in African American history in an accessible way for students, he makes connections between black experiences of criminal justice and violence from the slave era to the present.