"Slavery is terrible for men, but it is far more terrible for women," Harriet Jacobs states plainly in this riveting account of her life as a slave, and then sets out to recount, in chilling detail, the particular horrors for women caught in that terrible snare. Published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Incidents was the first account of slavery to explore the sexual abuse female slaves endured... in Jacobs' case, a catalog of harassment she suffered while working in the home of a doctor known to have sold children he'd fathered with slave women. Long believed to have been written by a white author as a fictional novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl rings with a ghastly truth that still has the power to haunt modern readers.

The two volumes edited by Dr Wilson, Director of the John Memorial Foundation, make an important body of Johnson's writings more readily available to scholars in African-American studies. Volume II comprises literary essays, political essays, and song lyrics. The critical introduction places Johnson in relation to other black artists, the development of African-American literature and early integrationist movements.

Historical, sociological, and ecological analyses reveal that the health of a people is broadly determined by the strength, resilience, and vitality of their culture. The destructive effects of oppression and exploitation on health linger and are difficult to transcend when systemic attacks on the institutional stability of a people persist. Normative cultural destabilization produces added and abnormal challenges to the health status of African Americans. The pursuit of health becomes both a goal and a tool of liberation. Better health builds and releases mental, physical, and spiritual energy that can be directed toward achieving empowerment and development. The process of self-consciously pursuing better health attacks the fundamental mechanisms of cultural exploitation and oppression by serving to dismantle colonial-like relationships of dependency.

Despite being far from the norm, interracial relationships are more popular than ever. ""Racing Romance"" sheds special light on the bonds between whites and Asian Americans, an important topic that has not garnered well-deserved attention until now. Incorporating life-history narratives and interviews with those currently or previously involved with an interracial partner, Kumiko Nemoto addresses the contradictions and tensions - a result of race, class, and gender - that Asian Americans and whites experience. Similar to black/white relationships, stereotypes have long played crucial roles in Asian American/white encounters. Partners grapple with media representations of Asian women as submissive or hypersexual and Asian men are often portrayed as weak laborers or powerful martial artists. ""Racing Romance"" reveals how allegedly progressive interracial relationships remain firmly shaped by the logic of patriarchy and gender inherent to the ideal of marriage, family, and nation in America, even as this ideal is juxtaposed with discourses of multiculturalism and color blindness.

A discussion of the contributions made by African Americans to public and private black schools in the USA in the 19th and 20th centuries. It suggests that cultural capital from African American communities may be important for closing the gap in the funding of black schools in the 21st century.

This examination of the causes, severity, and implications of racially stereotyped media coverage of Congress incorporates original analysis of congressional media coverage and interviews with congressional press staff. The news media often portray African-American members as being primarily interested in race, overly concerned with local matters, and wielding little legislative influence. By contrast, the images African-American members attempt to project of themselves are more complex and comprehensive than the images the media communicate. The authors offer a psychological explanation for this phenomenon, the Distribution Effect, in which those who are numerically rare in an occupation tend to be lumped together rather than treated as individuals. Their findings suggest that it is the media, rather than members of Congress, who are responsible for the racialized images that appear regularly in the press. This results in an advantage for white incumbents trying to attract votes but presents an obstacle to be overcome for African-American politicians.

This study will appeal to political science, media studies, and racial studies scholars. It incorporates content analysis of the newest forum of communication, congressional Internet web sites, to disclose how white and African-American representatives in fact have similar media priorities.

On the morning of November 3, 1979, a group of black and white demonstrators were preparing to march against the Ku Klux Klan through the streets of Greensboro, North Carolina, when a caravan of Klansmen and Nazis opened fire on them. Eighty-eight seconds later, five demonstrators lay dead and ten others were wounded. Four TV stations recorded their deaths by Klan gunfire. Yet, after two criminal trials, not a single gunman spent a day in prison. Despite this outrage, the survivors won an unprecedented civil-court victory in 1985 when a North Carolina jury held the Greensboro police jointly liable with the KKK for wrongful death.
In passionate first-person accounts, Through Survivors' Eyes tells the story of six remarkable people who set out to change the world. The survivors came of age as the "protest generation," joining the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. They marched for civil rights, against war, for textile and healthcare workers, and for black power and women's liberation. As the mass mobilizations waned in the mid-1970s, they searched for a way to continue their activism, studied Marxism, and became communists.
Nelson Johnson, who grew up on a farm in eastern North Carolina in a family proud of its African American heritage, settled in Greensboro in the 1960s and became a leader of the Black Liberation Movement and a decade later the founder of the Faith Community Church. Willena Cannon, the daughter of black sharecroppers, witnessed a KKK murder as a child and was spurred to a life of activism. Her son, Kwame Cannon, was only ten when he saw the Greensboro killings. Marty Nathan, who grew up the daughter of a Midwestern union organizer and came to the South to attend medical school, lost her husband to the Klan/Nazi gunfire. Paul Bermanzohn, the son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, was permanently injured during the shootings. Sally Bermanzohn, a child of the New York suburbs who came south to join the Civil Rights Movement, watched in horror as her friends were killed and her husband was wounded.
Through Survivors' Eyes is the story of people who abandoned conventional lives to become civil rights activists and then revolutionaries. It is about blacks and whites who united against Klan/Nazi terror, and then had to overcome unbearable hardship, and persist in seeking justice. It is also a story of one divided southern community, from the protests of black college students of the late 1960s to the convening this January of a Truth and Community Reconciliation Project (on the South African model) intended to reassess the Massacre.

"...Smith examines the expression of the centuries-old framework of white supremacy in contemporary white attitudes, individual white racist actions, institutional patterns of societal racism, and black responses to racism. He provides an outright refutation of the notion, omnipresent in scholarly and journalistic writing over the last decade, of a 'declining significance of race' in the United States". -- Joe R. Feagin, Graduate Research Professor, University of Florida

This is the first book to assess in a systematic and theoretically informed way the course and status of racism in the post-civil rights era. It convincingly demonstrates that racism continues to exist in contemporary American society twenty-five years after the civil rights revolution.

Smith clarifies the concept of racism through a historical analysis of the doctrine and practice of white supremacy. Then drawing on a variety of data -- surveys, court cases, the academic literature, government and privately collected statistical reports and studies, and personal experiences -- Smith traces the present-day manifestations of racism ideologically, attitudinally, behaviorally, and institutionally. The final chapter presents a detailed critique of the literature on the black underclass and of William Julius Wilson's thesis on the declining significance of racism in explaining the underclass.

One out of every seven working age African Americans has an impairment that affects functioning in activities of daily living. These statistics suggest that most African Americans are touched by disability. This book examines the psychosocial aspects of disability and chronic illness using a culturally congruent framework. Chapters address prevalance, health and rehabilitation utilization patterns, the role of culture, empirical research, and strategies for improving mental health and functional outcomes. This book will be useful to professionals who work with people with disabilities, policymakers, and consumers, as well as faculty and students in rehabilitation, health, and African American courses.

The two volumes edited by Dr Wilson, Director of the John Memorial Foundation, make an important body of Johnson's writings more readily available to scholars in African-American studies. Volume I comprises editorials from "The New York Age" organized thematically, and a critical introduction discusses Johnson's role in the history of the black press.

Drawing on 15 years of research in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Suriname, and the Netherlands, Sansone explores the very different ways that race and ethnicity are constructed in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. He compares Latin American conceptions of race to US and European notions of race that are defined by clearly identifiable black-white ethnicities. Sansone argues that understanding more complex, ambiguous notions of culture and identity will expand international discourse on race and move it away from American definitions that inadequately describe racial difference. He also explores the effects of globalization on constructions of race.

On Harbour Hill, in the picturesque seaside town of Cobh, Co. Cork, Ireland, where four roads converged together, Jim Hayes's journey of dreams began.Hayes begins by tracing his experiences as boy growing up in Ireland in the late 1940s, where he fished for mackerel at Lynch's Quay, witnessed one of the last human flights to freedom from post war-torn Europe, and played ball in the street. But after his father made the announcement that the family would emigrate to America in the early 1950s, Hayes details how his life abruptly changed as he attempted to acclimate to a new culture and wondered if he would ever see Harbour Hill again. Years later, his dream of returning home to work and live would come true as he disembarked from the tender in Cobh, began his career, and married the love of his life. As he details his continuing journey from Ireland to America to Germany and back again, it soon becomes evident that Hayes embraced life with a determination to never let anything stand in the way attaining his dreams.The Road from Harbour Hill relays the fascinating life story of a man who learned valuable lessons, realized love, and achieved much success through his immersion in three distinct cultures on both sides of the Atlantic.

This volume of essays examines the forced dispossession caused by the Middle Passage. The book analyzes the texts, religious rites, economic exchanges, dance, and music it elicited, both on the transatlantic journey and on the American continent. The totality of this collection establishes a broad topographical and temporal context for the Passage that extends from the interior of Africa across the Atlantic and to the interior of the Americas, and from the beginning of the Passage to the present day. A collective narrative of itinerant cultural consciousness as represented in histories, myths, and arts, these contributions conceptualize the meaning of the Middle Passage for African American and American history, literature, and life.

An excellent resource on the changing population distribution of antebellum Black Americans, this book covers census data by region and state. Two-thirds of the book consists of tables and graphs providing dimensional representations of black populations, both free and slave, in pre-Civil War America. The book opens with a discussion of the limitations of the census data, then goes on to provide an overview of the progress of manumission, abolition, and restrictions on black migration. The book also examines the 1840 census controversy. It will be a particularly useful resource for scholars concerned with changes in the black population.

The debate over race in this country has of late converged on the contentious issue of affirmative action. Although the Supreme Court once supported the concept of racial affirmative action, in recent years a majority of the Court has consistently opposed various affirmative action programs.

The Law of Affirmative Action provides a comprehensive chronicle of the evolution of the Supreme Court's involvement with the racial affirmative action issue over the last quarter century. Starting with the 1974 "DeFunis v. Odegaard" decision and the 1978" Bakke" decision, which marked the beginnings of the Court's entanglement with affirmative action, Girardeau Spann examines every major Supreme Court affirmative action decision, showing how the controversy the Court initially left unresolved in DeFunis has persisted through the Court's 1998-99 term.

Including nearly thirty principal cases, covering equal protection, voting rights, Title VII, and education, The Law of Affirmative Action is the only work to treat the Court decisions on racial affirmative action so closely, tracing the votes of each justice who has participated in the decisions. Indispensable for students and scholars, this timely volume elucidates reasons for the 180 degree turn in opinion on an issue so central to the debate on race in America today.

Of the many captivity stories or 'slave narratives' that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is widely considered to be the most important. The author, known for his eloquence, brings the same mastery of the English language to his memoir. His book describes the events of his life and is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States.

After World War II, writers and literary critics - black and white - engaged in heated debates centred on the literary and imaginative problem of representing African-Americans in American literature. As the Cold War unfolded, many of these debates began to appear in journals, conferences and other events, including those directly sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other organisations funded by U.S. and British intelligence agencies. Ralph Ellison, who would eventually join the American Congress for Cultural Freedom, was one of the most famous and frequently published critics on the 'Negro Problem' in literature during this period. Using never before published materials from Ralph Ellison's papers at the Library of Congress, Purcell contextualises his thinking on the Negro Problem - in particular its bearing on American literary history, Modernism and broader American geo-politics - within the shadow of the CCF's influence. Therefore, not only does the book explore how the Cold War's ideological battles influenced these debates, it illuminates the important role 'race' and more specifically African-American writers and intellectuals played in the cultural Cold War.