This book analyses Black Consciousness poetry and theatre from the 1970s through to the present. South Africa's literature, like its history, has been beset by disagreement and contradiction, and has been consistently difficult to pin down as one, united entity. Much existing criticism on South Africa's national literature has attempted to overcome these divisions by discussing material written from a variety of different subject positions together. This book argues that Black Consciousness desired a new South Africa where African and European cultures were valued equally, and writers could represent both as they wished. Thus, a body of literature was created that addressed a range of audiences and imagined the South African nation in different ways. This book explores Black Consciousness in order to demonstrate how South African writers have responded in various ways to the changing history and politics of their country.

In this work, Carl Anthony shares his perspectives as an African-American child in post-World War II Philadelphia; a student and civil rights activist in 1960s Harlem; a traveling student of West African architecture; and an architect, planner, and environmental justice advocate in Berkeley. He contextualizes this within American urbanism and human origins, making profoundly personal both African American and American urban histories as well as planetary origins and environmental issues, to not only bring a new worldview to people of color, but to set forth a truly inclusive vision of our shared planetary future. The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race connects the logics behind slavery, community disinvestment, and environmental exploitation to address the most pressing issues of our time in a cohesive and foundational manner. Most books dealing with these topics and periods silo issues apart from one another, but this book contextualizes the connections between social movements and issues, providing tremendous insight into successful movement building. Anthony's rich narrative describes both being at the mercy of racism, urban disinvestment, and environmental injustice as well as fighting against these forces with a variety of strategies. Because this work is both a personal memoir and an exposition of ideas, it will appeal to those who appreciate thoughtful and unique writing on issues of race, including individuals exploring their own African American identity, as well as progressive audiences of organizations and community leaders and professionals interested in democratizing power and advancing equitable policies for low-income communities and historically disenfranchised communities.

White, Red, and Black examines and compares the three races who lived in Virginia during the seventeenth century. Each is described according to its origin and cultural background, its population in America, its settlement locations, and its relations with the other two races. Extensive notes amply document the author's conclusions and provide a helpful summary of other scholarship on the subject. Craven's lectures present an accurate and fully documented picture of the seventeenth-century Virginian. They correct many assumptions long held by historians, and they open the way to a greater understanding of the beginning years of our nation.

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.

By examining the minister who helped inspire the founding of the Harlem Unitarian Church Reverend Ethelred Brown, Floyd-Thomas offers a provocative examination of the religious and intellectual roots of Black humanist thought.

In Necessary Spaces: Exploring the Richness of African American Childhood in the South, Saundra Murray Nettles takes the reader on a journey into neighbourhood networks of learning at different times and places. Using autobiographical accounts, Nettles discusses the informal instructional practices of community "coaches" from the perspective of African American adults who look back on their childhood learning experiences in homes, libraries, city blocks, schools, churches, places of business, and nature. These eyewitness accounts reveal ""necessary spaces," the metaphor Nettles uses to describe seven recurring experiences that converge with contemporary notions of optimal black child development: connection, exploration, design, empowerment, resistance, renewal, and practice. Nettles weaves the personal stories with social scientific theory and research and practical accounts of community-based initiatives to illuminate how local communities contributed human, built, and natural resources to support children's achievement in schools. The inquiry offers a timely and accessible perspective on how community involvement for children can be developed utilising the grassroots efforts of parents, children, and other neighbourhood residents; expertise from personnel in schools, informal institutions (such as libraries and museums); and other sectors interested in disparities in education, health, and the quality of physical settings. Grounded in the environmental memories of African American childhood, Necessary Spaces offers a culturally relevant view of civic participation and sustainable community development at the local level. Educational researchers and policy makers, pre-service and in-service teachers, and people who plan for and work with children and youth in neighbourhoods will find this book an engaging look at possibilities for the social organisation of educational resources. Qualitative researchers will find a model for writing personal scholarly essays that use the personal to inform larger issues of policy and practice. In Necessary Spaces, local citizens in neighbourhoods across the United States will find stories that resonate with their own experiences, stimulate their recollections, and inform and inspire their continuing efforts to create brighter futures for children and communities.

As higher educational learning enters a new age, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are seeking innovative ways to establish strategies to compete with other academic institutions. As establishments that have played a pivotal role in transforming the landscape of higher education, HBCUs are facing rapid transformation and various obstacles leading to questions regarding to the cost, quality, and sustainability of these institutions. Examining Student Retention and Engagement Strategies at Historically Black Colleges and Universities is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the role of HBCUs in today's higher education and the various research methods addressing student retention rates, success levels, and engagement. While highlighting topics such as enrollment management, student engagement, and online learning, this publication explores successful engagement strategies that promote educational quality and equality, as well as the methods of social integration and involvement for students. This book is ideally designed for researchers, academicians, scholars, educational administrators, policymakers, graduate students, and curriculum designers.

This book is a study of black masculinity in the twenty-first century. Through a series of critical and interdisciplinary essays, this work examines the image of the black male in American society as a Toby Waller stereotype. Toby Waller is the fictional, yet symbolic character from Alex Haley's highly acclaimed book and mini-series, Roots. It is a richly detailed, fictional story about slavery and one enslaved African man's struggle to regain freedom. The parallel of the life of enslaved Toby Waller is similar to present day black males. Both are individuals who are often stripped of their cultural identity and exist within an institutional and systemic framework that devalues black male life. This dichotomy is the historical platform to discuss how those in the annals of white America demarcate which embodiment merits inclusion into societal acceptance.

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

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 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.

"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.

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.

This book is an innovative comparative study of persons of African origin and descent in two urban environments of the early modern Atlantic world. The author follows these men and women as they struggle with slavery, negotiations of manumission, and efforts to adapt to a life in freedom, ultimately illustrating how their choices and actions placed them at the foreground of the development of Atlantic urban slavery and emancipation.

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.

Throughout the book, you will

find that no topics are off-limits, as

Walker discusses racism, pop culture,

religious dependence, controversial

sports figures, the "n-word,"

hip hop, women's issues, and other

topics that have been swept under

the rug for so long. With such debatable

issues featured, Walker offers

in-depth interviews with persons of

high credential and/or experience

to contribute to the book's legitimacy

through a "Conversation For

Clarity." Several persons include

Darryl Hunt, Terrie M. Williams,

Dr. Peter Salovey, Nikki Giovanni,

and others that will prove influential

to this book's credibility.

Reminiscent of a Familiar Face will

illustrate to the present generation,

and those past, of the necessary

resilience that one must possess

in order to transition from merely

talking about solutions to actually

contributing to the change they

want to see.