This book presents a comprehensive history of lynching and mob violence in North and South Carolina, focusing on seven specific case studies from the region. Lynching marked the violent outer boundaries of race and class relations in the American South between Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Everyday interactions could easily escalate into mob violence, and did so thousands of times. Bruce Baker examines this important aspect of American history by taking seven lynchings in North Carolina and South Carolina and studying them in detail. He succeeds in getting behind the superficial accounts and explanations provided at the time to explain the deeper causes and wider contexts of these events.Many studies of lynching begin only after Reconstruction had ended and African Americans found themselves with little political power. However, this book provides the most thorough study yet written of the Ku Klux Klan's most violent episode - the killing of thirteen black militia members in Union, South Carolina, in 1871 - to argue that this act of mob violence set the conditions in important ways for the entire lynching era. Enmities born in Reconstruction lingered afterwards and lay behind an 1887 lynching in York County, South Carolina. As lynching became an unsurprising part of life in the South, African Americans even found that they could use it themselves, in once case to punish a child's killer and in another to settle a church's factional squabbles. In addition, a variety of forces opposing lynching was rising and by the 1930s their efforts would begin to make a difference.

The police don't show up on Easy Rawlins's doorstep until the third girl dies. It's Los Angeles, 1956, and it takes more than one murdered black girl before the cops get interested. Now they need Easy. As he says: "I was worth a precinct full of detectives when the cops needed the word in the ghetto." But Easy turns them down. He's married now, a father -- and his detective days are over. Then a white college coed dies the same brutal death, and the cops put the heat on Easy: If he doesn't help, his best friend is headed for jail. So Easy's back, walking the midnight streets of Watts and the darker, twisted avenues of a cunning killer's mind....

Mothering is a central issue for feminist theory, and motherhood is also a persistent presence in the work of Toni Morrison. Examining Morrison's novels, essays, speeches, and interviews, Andrea O'Reilly illustrates how Morrison builds upon black women's experiences of and perspectives on motherhood to develop a view of black motherhood that is, in terms of both maternal identity and role, radically different from motherhood as practiced and prescribed in the dominant culture. Motherhood, in Morrison's view, is fundamentally and profoundly an act of resistance, essential and integral to black women's fight against racism (and sexism) and their ability to achieve well-being for themselves and their culture. The power of motherhood and the empowerment of mothering are what make possible the better world we seek for ourselves and for our children. This, argues O'Reilly, is Morrison's maternal theory--a politics of the heart.

This book not only documents the valuable contributions of African American thinkers, inventors, and entrepreneurs past and present, but also puts these achievements into context of the obstacles these innovators faced because of their race. Successful entrepreneurs and inventors share valuable characteristics like self-confidence, perseverance, and the ability to conceptualize unrealized solutions or opportunities. However, another personality trait has been required for African Americans wishing to become business owners, creative thinkers, or patent holders: a willingness to overcome the additional barriers placed before them because of their race, especially in the era before civil rights. The Entrepreneurial Spirit of African American Inventors provides historical accounts of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship among black Americans, from the 19th century to the present day. The author examines how these individuals stimulated industry, business activity, and research, helping shape the world as we know it and setting the precedent for the minority business tradition in the United States. This book also sheds light on fascinating advances made in metallurgy, medicine, architecture, and other fields that supply further examples of scientific inquiry and business acumen among African Americans. Presents a chronology of patents issued to African Americans from the period of slavery to the present Includes illustrations of patents and trademarks as well as advertising copy and photographs of African American entrepreneurs and patentees Provides a bibliography of significant materials from the fields of invention, intellectual property, entrepreneurship, and business A helpful index offers access to the entries by inventor, invention, patents, trademarks, periodicals, and field/profession An appendix holds a comprehensive roster of African American patentees listing the inventor's name, U.S. patent title and number, and date of issue

Tyler Perry has made over half a billion dollars through the development of storylines about black women, black communities and black religion. Yet, a text that responds to his efforts from the perspective of these groups does not exist.

It is well established that the race and gender of elected representatives influence the ways in which they legislate, but surprisingly little research exists on how race and gender interact to affect who is elected and how they behave once in office. How do race and gender affect who gets elected, as well as who is represented? What issues do elected representatives prioritize? Does diversity in representation make a difference? Race, Gender, and Political Representation takes up the call to think about representation in the United States as intersectional, and it measures the extent to which political representation is simultaneously gendered and raced. Specifically, the book examines how race and gender interact to affect the election, behavior, and impact of all individuals. By putting women of color at the center of their analysis and re-evaluating traditional, "single-axis" approaches to studying the politics of race or gender, the authors demonstrate what an intersectional approach to identity politics can reveal. Drawing on original data on the presence, policy leadership, and policy impact of Black women and men, Latinas and Latinos, and White women and men in state legislative office in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, each chapter shows how the politics of race, gender, and representation are far more complex than recurring "Year of the Woman" frameworks suggest. An array of race-gender similarities and differences are evident in the experiences, activities, and accomplishments of these state legislators. Yet one thing is clear: the representation of those marginalized by multiple, intersecting systems of power and inequality is intricately bound to the representation of women of color.

Telling Our Stories investigates the continuities and divergences in selected Black autobiographies from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The selected autobiographies of slaves, creative writers, and political activists are discussed both as texts produced by individuals who are in turn products of specific societies at specific periods and as interconnected books. The book pays particular attention to the various societies that produce the autobiographies directly to identify influences of environmental and cultural differences on the texts. To foreground the network these autobiographies form, on the other hand, the study adopts cross-cultural and postcolonial reading approaches to examine the continuities and divergences in them.

The Constitution of the United States, writes Bryan Fair, was a series of compromises between white male propertyholders: Southern planters and Northern merchants. At the heart of their deals was a clear race-conscious intent to place the interests of whites above those of blacks.

In this provocative and important book, Fair, the eighth of ten children born to a single mother on public assistance in an Ohio ghetto, combines two histories--America's and his own- -to offer a compelling defense of affirmative action. How can it be, Fair asks, that, after hundreds of years of racial apartheid during which whites were granted 100% quotas to almost all professions, we have now convinced ourselves that, after a few decades of remedial affirmative action, the playing field is now level? Centuries of racial caste, he argues, cannot be swept aside in a few short years.

Fair ambitiously surveys the most common arguments for and against affirmative action. He argues that we must distinguish between America in the pre-Civil Rights Movement era--when the law of the land was explicitly anti-black--and today's affirmative action policies--which are decidedly not anti- white. He concludes that the only just and effective way in which to account for America's racial past and to negotiate current racial quagmires is to embrace a remedial affirmative action that relies neither on quotas nor fiery rhetoric, but one which takes race into account alongside other pertinent factors.

Championing the model of diversity on which the United States was purportedly founded, Fair serves up a personal and persuasive account of why race-conscious policies are the most effective way to end de facto segregation and eliminate racial caste.

Table of Contents

A Note to the Reader
Acknowledgments
Preface: Telling Stories
Recasting Remedies as Diseases
Color-Blind Justice
The Design of This Book
Pt. 1. A Personal Narrative
Not White Enough
Dee
Black Columbus
Racial Poverty
Man-Child
Colored Matters
Coded Schools
Busing
Going Home
Equal Opportunity
The Character of Color
Diversity as One Factor
The Deception of Color Blindness
Pt. 2. White Privilege and Black Despair: The Origins of Racial Caste in America
The Declaration of Inferiority
Marginal Americans
Inventing American Slavery
The Road to Constitutional Caste
Losing Second-Class Citizenship
Reconstruction and Sacrifice
Separate and Unequal
The Color Line
Critiquing Color Blindness
Pt. 3. The Constitutionality of Remedial Affirmative Action
The Origins of Remedial Affirmative Action
The Court of Last Resort
The Invention of Reverse Discrimination
The Politics of Affirmative Action: Myth or Reality?
Racial Realism
Eliminating Caste
Afterword
Notes
Index

It can hurt to hear someone tell it like it is. But sometimes you need to get the truth, straight up. And the truth is that it's not about you--it's about God. Maybe you have relied on your own strength for far too long. You haven't been able to count on other people, so you just do your own thing. But God has bigger plans for you. God wants to use you to change the world. Rebecca Osaigbovo, conference speaker and author of Chosen Vessels, shows how black women can stand up to Satan's lies and face tough problems, not in your own strength but by finding God's strength in the midst of your weaknesses. She says this to women who want to be the keys to change in their homes, churches and communities: "If you want things to be different, then stop going your own way and follow God's lead. Lean not on your own understanding, and he'll make your paths straight."

"Distinguished African Americans in Aviation and Space Science" offers brief, readable entries that describe the lives and careers of 80 men and 20 women who defied poverty and prejudice to excel in the fields of aviation and space exploration. Each essay begins with birth and death dates, educational institutions attended and degrees earned, positions held, and awards won. A short summary of the individual's contribution to aviation or space science is followed by a biographical narrative divided into three sections: Early Years, Higher Education, and Career Highlights. Often based on the authors' correspondence with the subjects themselves, or with family members, this illustrated volume provides the fullest and most accessible biographical information available for many of these figures.

Published in 1900, this is Hopkins's best-known novel, and her only fiction to be published in book form in her lifetime. Like her magazine fiction, it employs the conventions of the sentimental novel with the goal of effecting social change. A uniquely detailed examination of black life, and a richly textured piece of fiction, it is one of the most important works produced by an Afro-American before the First World War.

Death was sleeping all around us. I could feel her in the high cries of uncomfortable babies and the low moans of old men as they fight the pain and discomfort of dysentery. This would be a trip through hell, and perhaps some unfortunate souls on this boat would make not make it out alive as is often the case on the Congo River. Perhaps, we all knew that some of us wouldn't all arrive at our destination and that we would meet our Lord, our Maker, here on this black river of death and hope. Death and hope. Can it be one and the same? With this river, the answer is yes. People lived and died under the power of this powerful river every single day. It was now my turn to make this journey on its surface. Despite my deepest fears, I feel the warm breeze of God's grace lingering around me in the air. Yes, hope is a powerful element in each of our hearts and that is what everyone here now clings onto tightly and with both fists, even if it means kissing death right on the lips.

"The Meaning of the Beginning" is a mosaic of timeless wisdom hidden in nature and encapsulated in the folklores of the Igbo of sub-Saharan Africa. This book is a philosophical jab, a moral punch line, and a social commentary on the human condition. Curious minds, teachers and students of Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology and Religious studies will find this collection useful. In "The Meaning of the Beginning," the author has produced a work that is outstanding both in the simplicity of its language and presentation and depth of its philosophical insight ... In the short "as it is" commentaries, there are rich and deep philosophical reflections of a moral or religious nature which qualify this work as a serious effort at another type of African Philosophy. Monsignor Theophilus Okere, Ph-D This is a beautiful piece of work, a combination of simple tales with uncommon lofty ideals in a flowing and very readable language, picturesquely descriptive of the images desired to evoke, in a manner matching Chinua Achebe's. Rev Dr. Emmanuel Odirachukwunma Udechukwu

In this powerful new study Mary Ellison demonstrates the unique role of black music as an articulation of black aspirations and fears, and as a reaction to a range of social, economic, and political realities. She reveals black music as a soundtrack for life in all its complexity. Through a very close examination of lyrics, musical style, and form in black music throughout history, Ellison brings to light a genre of music varied in its intentions and impact; a catalyst for activism and a stimulus for changing attitudes. The book is organized around topical issues and explores such themes as black power, revolution, socialism, black feminism, and world peace. One of the few books on music and social change to deal specifically with black music, this volume begins by tracing all black music to its African roots. In subsequent chapters, the author illustrates how these roots are evident in the lyrics of black music written in the United States, the West Indies, and West Africa. The book is organized around topical issues and explores such themes as black power, revolution, socialism, black feminism, and world peace. Students and scholars of popular culture, black studies, sociology, and political science will find Lyrical Protest a source of stimulating ideas.

"Invisible Wings" is the only reference book on Blacks in aviation. More than 1,600 entries give the bibliography the scope and length that will enable scholars, researchers, and students to delve into this little studied aspect of the Black experience. This annotated bibliography includes citations on pilots, flight attendants, air traffic controllers, mechanics, doctors, engineers, scientists, astronauts, and others whose achievements in aeronautics, commerical and military, are unrecognized. The first four chapters highlight the major figures, and the next five chapters annotate books and articles on airlines, Chicago, discrimination, history, and women. The work covers three quarters of the twentieth century from 1916 to 1993, with one of the earliest articles describing the world's first Black pilot, Eugene J. Bullard, and one of the most recent covering the first African American in space, Guion S. Bluford.

In searching for a definitive concept of black theatre, Euba delves deeply into the Yoruba culture and gods, specifically the attributes and ritual of Esu-Elegbara. The resulting vision goes beyond the standard interpretations to place Esu, the fate god, squarely at the center of Yoruba ritual and drama, and by extension, at the center of the black writer's concept of character, actor, and audience as victims of fate and satire. The first section of the book explores the essence of man in the black world of survival. The second, and main section, seeks to develop a concept of drama in black theatre (in African and the New World experience) from the point of view of Esu-Elegbara. The text is highlighted by various illustrations. Three tables outline the Agents of Satire: Imprecator; Imprecator/Satirist; and Satirist/Agent. A bibliography, notes, and an index will help the scholar who wishes to further explore this rich and complex subject. The book is a sophisticated study that will be of great interest to students seeking to understand African influences on black culture today. Potential markets for the book include university-level black history, literature, or culture studies. A broader market might be found among theatre practitioners and students of modern drama.